Welcome to Novel Knitting

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!

Just registered this new domain, and I’m eager to get started filling it up with information. What sort of information are you likely to find here?

If you are familiar with my other websites — Novelsmithing and Story Alchemy — you’ll know that I teach beginning authors, and struggling experienced ones, how to get a handle on their work. Novel Knitting is no different, but possibly a little more advanced and detailed. It is about stitching your novel together so that it appears to the reader as an intricately imagined, consistent whole. The novel’s knitting is what creates the fabric of interest and meaning. To accomplish this, we’ll investigate how words relate, how sentence construction and word choice can resonate, not only locally but also with remote corners of the larger work.

In Novelsmithing, Chapter 8, I addressed the novel as a weaving, particularly addressing overall story structure (plot) as a time-history of the underlying central conflict. This overall structure of a novel remains the best description of it, although some of the more intricate details of its construction can be better understood by use of the knitting metaphor.

Novel Knitting shouldn’t be your first consideration when planning a new novel. But once you have a rough draft and are contemplating its cohesiveness, these considerations will become paramount.

I realize that the first question that comes into the mind of the visitor to this website is: What does David Sheppard know about knitting? And the answer to that question is that he is working on it.