plotting

The Magic Cookie Method of Writing Motivation

When writing starts to drag, the problem often isn’t laziness or lack of discipline — it’s that you’ve lost sight of what you’re writing toward. In this post, I explore the “magic cookie” method: finding the one scene, moment, or beat in your story that excites you enough to pull you through the difficult middle. Because sometimes the best cure for procrastination is knowing there’s something wonderful waiting a few chapters ahead.

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How To Formalize And Speed Up Your Plotting And Outlining, So You’re Finishing Novels At Top Speed – Part Three

In the Part 1 of this post we covered the brainstorming part of plotting, where you capture everything you know, then fill in the blanks, amalgamate, then drop all that information into your favourite story structure. In Part 2, we looked at making a scene out of the beats, and time saving hacks for organizing

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How To Formalize And Speed Up Your Plotting And Outlining, So You’re Finishing Novels At Top Speed – Part Two

In the last part of this post we covered the brainstorming part of plotting, where you capture everything you know, then fill in the blanks, amalgamate, then drop all that information into your favourite story structure. This post, we sort that amorphous blob of information into a well-developed story outline that will speed your writing

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How To Formalize And Speed Up Your Plotting And Outlining, So You’re Finishing Novels At Top Speed

Back in July, Rob asked me in comments: The place I currently get hung up when it comes to being more prolific is the plotting/planning stage. I can write fairly quickly and cleanly, but it takes me a while to plot out a new book, especially if it’s the first in a new series. All

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Weekly Log – July 17, 2018 – Building up Steam

Last week’s log: MONDAY 0 TUESDAY 6,704 WEDNESDAY 9,363 THURSDAY 8,516 FRIDAY 9,014 SATURDAY 0 For a total of 33,597 words. I finished the book on Friday and immediately rolled into plotting on Saturday.  Today (your yesterday if you read this the day it posts) I’m wrapping up the last of the plot and will slide into writing

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