Like any good story, the writing life is a tale of deceptive depth. At first glance, it offers up a shiny, artsy, fun cover. Become a Writer! its title beckons, and its first chapters lure us in by fulfilling all these initial promises. But the deeper we get, the further we go, the more we realize […]
July 20, 2020 by 47 Comments Novel Endings4 Questions to Prevent Plot Holes
How peachy would the writing life be if we didn’t have to prevent plot holes. Just imagine—you could write anything you wanted to, and every single thing would make sense. No need to worry about the fact that your two awesome scenes actually don’t make sense side by side. They get to be in the […]
March 3, 2013 by 26 Comments PodcastScene Structure Exceptions: Incidents and Happenings
After our recent series about scene structure, it might seem that everything in a book must be tied down hard and fast within that framework. But what about when something in your story doesn’t seem to fit into the goal/conflict/disaster paradigm of the scene? What if something happens (and needs to happen) that doesn’t create conflict and doesn’t end […]
February 3, 2013 by 11 Comments PodcastStructuring Your Story’s Scenes, Pt. 9: Options for Dilemmas in a Scene Sequel
If the first part of your sequel*—the reaction—appeals to your readers’ emotions, the second part is all about the intellect. Once your characters’ first-blush emotional responses to the previous scene’s disaster has passed, they will have to get down to the all-important business of thinking about what they’re going to do next. The previous disaster has […]
September 2, 2012 by 12 Comments CharactersMost Common Writing Mistakes: Characters Who Lack Purpose
Raise your hand if you love to be bored. What’s this, you say? You don’t like wandering around the house, puttering aimlessly at half a dozen jobs, flipping through TV channels and finding zero of interest, or poking around the Internet and smacking your head against the keyboard with the sheer futility of it all? If […]
August 12, 2012 by 107 Comments Plotting Your Novel6 Ways to Pull Off Dual Timelines in Your Novel
Some stories are so complicated they require not just one, but dual timelines to tell everything. Often, this is the result of an intricate and integral backstory, such as we might find in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood or Ann Brashares’s My Name Is Memory, which switch back and forth from a “present-day” […]
January 8, 2012 by 43 Comments Most Common Writing MistakesMost Common Writing Mistakes: Too Much Explanation
Readers have needs. Authors are supposed to fulfill those needs. One of those needs is knowing what’s going on in a story, so naturally the author’s response is to explain what’s going on. So far, so good, right? Well, that depends. Explanations, in whatever form (narrative, dialogue, or action), are essential to any story. But […]
November 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment PodcastAction and Reaction in Scene Structure: The Two Pistons Powering Your Story
Your story is a precision machine. If you were to take the shiny cover off this machine, what you would find inside would be an intricate mass of nuts, bolts, gears—and an engineer only knows what else. At the heart of it all, you’d find two huge pistons running the show. One of those pistons […]
