The Climax is the pièce de résistance of your gourmet meal of a novel. When you wheel out the Climax and lift the serving dish’s gleaming silver lid, this is the bit that gets all the oohs and aahs. The Climax should have readers on the edge of their seats. They should be breathless, tense, […]
September 23, 2024 by 5 Comments Novel EndingsThe Third Act (Secrets of Story Structure, Pt. 9 of 12)
The Third Act is what readers, writers, and characters have all been waiting for. This final section of the story is the point. It’s what you’ve been building up to all this time. If the First and Second Acts were engaging and aesthetic labyrinths, the Third Act is where X marks the spot. You’ve found […]
May 20, 2024 by 16 Comments Novel EndingsTroubleshooting Your Story’s Ending
Hello, everyone, today we’re going to be talking about how to troubleshoot your story’s ending. Today’s post (which is a transcript of the video linked below) is in response to a couple of questions I received about endings. One is from Ayesha Ali: How about some posts about crafting endings. I just reached the end […]
December 13, 2021 by 41 Comments PodcastThe Two Halves of the Climactic Moment
The Climactic Moment is the story in microcosm. The Climactic Moment is where the protagonist’s final relationship to the plot goal is determined by definitive success or failure, as is the character’s relationship to the thematic Lie and Truth. Although the events of the Climactic Moment might not be the “biggest” of the story, they […]
August 9, 2021 by 76 Comments Novel Endings3 Things to Know About the Ending of a Story
There are three parts of a story that are difficult to write: the beginning, the middle, and the ending. (I was going to start the article by referencing the ending of a story as one of the hardest parts, but then I realized… it’s all hard. Ahem.) Each has its own special set of challenges, […]
March 16, 2020 by 62 Comments Point of View5 Questions About How to Balance Multiple POVs in Your Story
The opportunities and pitfalls offered by multiple POVs are both the joy and the bane of the writer’s life. On the one hand, using multiple points of view to tell a story seems like it makes the job so much easier. No limits—woohoo! But on the other hand, once you start trying to juggle multiple […]
June 17, 2019 by 77 Comments Plotting Your Novel5 Ways to Earn Your Audience’s Loyalty
Part 22 of The Do’s and Don’ts of Storytelling According to Marvel There’s little in this cosmos that writers want more than our readers’ love and respect. We want them to buy our stories, love our stories, tell their friends about our stories, buy more stories, support us in style for the rest of our lives, […]
August 28, 2017 by 30 Comments Characters7 Ways to Write Thematically-Pertinent Antagonists
Thematically-pertinent antagonists are the lynchpin that holds together any successful story. You can write delicious protagonists, snappy dialogue, riveting conflict, and deep themes—and still, your story can fail simply because the antagonist was taken for granted as a leering, two-dimensional bad guy. We’ve talked before about how (somewhat non-intuitively) the character who provides the entire foundation for […]
June 24, 2016 by 74 Comments Plotting Your NovelHow (Not) to Write Satisfying Action Scenes
Part 2 of The Do’s and Don’ts of Storytelling According to Marvel Imagine this. You sit down to write the biggest action scenes in your entire story. They’re gonna be epic. Giants will collide. Empires will topple. The conflict will be definitively decided once and for all–and readers will be glued to the page. This is, no doubt, exactly what the folks […]
December 7, 2015 by 53 Comments Most Common Writing MistakesMost Common Writing Mistakes, Pt. 46: Anticlimactic Endings
Here’s how to write books readers will love–and yet still end up hating you for. It’s easy. All you have to do is divebomb out of your brilliance and into anticlimactic endings. On some level, anticlimactic endings are pretty self-explanatory. They’re endings with no bang in the end. They’re endings that evoke a yawn from readers instead […]
