The last few years have been quite the ride for me. Professionally, I was able to claim the title of full-time writer after Outlining Your Novel went live in 2011. It held the #1 spot in the Writing Skills category in Amazon’s Kindle Store for a full year (and remains in the Top 10 even now!). That one still boggles me. I never expected the book to take off like it did, and I owe a tremendous thank you to all of you for your help in making it a success.

On a personal level, this experience led me to many new breakthroughs in my own writing life and my understanding of fiction. To begin with, it made me realize how hungry writers are for solid guidance in figuring out the writing methods and processes that work for crafting good stories in a way that is both intuitive and knowledgeable.

Second, it taught me a thing or two as well! I thought I had outlining all figured out, but I learned so much from putting together the book (and its subsequent workshop). And finally, it led me to what has so far been the single greatest series of discoveries and epiphanies in my understanding of storycraft. These “whammy moments” (as I like to call them) all boil down to one idea: story structure.

I can’t even begin to describe how excited I continue to be by the whole idea of structure.

Once you understand the common elements in all good stories, you feel as if the veil has been lifted from your eyes. You always saw the stories; you even understood them to some extent. But suddenly you’re seeing story from a whole new dimension  It’s like an X-ray machine. Where once you only saw the surface skin and hair, now you get to see the muscles and bones and beating heart that make this whole thing work.

Like most authors, I do my share of struggling with recalcitrant first drafts. Even with a solid outline, some stories just don’t want to cooperate. So I spill my quart of blood and pound of flesh, working my heart out to make it better. So many of us think that’s the only way. But it’s not!

This is where structure comes into play.

Once you understand how to structure your stories, scenes, and even sentences, you have what is, in essence, a checklist for your writing. You can check off each little piece of the mechanics and leave your heart and soul and imagination free to create your worlds of magic and wonder.

The novel I’m working on right now, a historical fantasy called Storming, has been the easiest and most fun book I’ve ever written, and I credit this almost entirely to the fact that it was the first of my books that benefited, from its very inception, from my knowledge of structure.

This is why I’m so excited to announce that my next book will be Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story.

This book will follow up Outlining Your Novel by exploring structure from the top down: story to scene to sentence. We’ve talked about many of these subjects in earlier blog posts, and I’ve had a blast digging even deeper, fleshing things out, and providing a guide to the sometimes bewildering but always insanely rewarding world of story structure.

At this point, the book is scheduled for release early this fall. I’ll have more info and a solid release date soon. Stay tuned, and thanks for sharing this crazy writing life with me!