The Way to Find Where Your Story Starts Stop Backing Off and Dive In! Let me paint you a familiar scene: You’re writing the first chapter of your novel, and the temptation to lay out all the things is overwhelming. You know, the backstory, the history, maybe a tour of the protagonist’s charming little town? […]
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This is absolutely not a book I could have written! I am so thoroughly a plotter that even when I bought an expensive course on how to pants through a story, I still couldn’t do it. This, despite two serious attempts to work my way through the course material. Plotting is calcified into my bones,
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How to Brainstorm Your Fiction 6 Steps, No Rules. Just unique, original stories. I attended the When Words Collide conference on the weekend, and was a speaker on a number of panels, including one on brainstorming. I was taken aback by the turnout for that panel, and the trend of the questions from the audience
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Most story ideas, even the coolest of them, are just ideas. Here’s an idea I grabbed off a random plot generator I found online: An action thriller set in New York in the 1980s about a dying cop with a secret, trying to do a heist. Now there’s some intriguing ideas in this one. More
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One Key To Keeping Your Genre Fiction Plots Tight and Your Reader Flipping Pages Hack through Every Plotting Structure, including The Hero’s Journey You can go crazy trying to find and use the ideal plotting structure. Three act structure. Four act structure. Save the Cat. Story Physics. Story Grid. Even the venerable Hero’s Journey. Every guru says
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