Four books in progress and the main crutch is Derek Murphy’s twenty-four chapter structure holding them all together. Without structure, novels are just so many words. Structure is vital. But is has to be the right structure.
…
It’s said that writers fall into two types: the plotter versus the ‘pantser,’ more politely described as a ‘discovery writer.’
The discovery writer likes to ‘fly by the seat of their pants’ (hence ‘pantser’) and write without an outline for their plot. ‘Free-writers’ is the more recognised name for them. Plotters meticulously plan the whole thing in advance and effectively write to their own brief.
…
Do you sit in front of the TV or a book and admire the character arcs, pacing and plotting? Just me, then. This is the stock-in-trade for the jobbing author and essential craft skills I have to master for the current challenge.
…
What I call Tolkein’s Legacy of the Rings doesn’t kick-start the fantasy genre. It originates in the roots of story telling. …
‘Starting the story in the middle’: that’s the Latin term in medias res. The Greek playwrights understood it well. Don’t start with a boatload of exposition, get into the action and explain things as you go. Horace named it but writers have been using it since writing began.
…
Another way to think about plot is Joe Nassise’s Seven Elements of Story Structure. Last seen at [2022’s] Plot Forest Summit, best selling author and coach Nasisse has his version hooked up like an express train. …
Storyboard artist Emma Coats compiled a list on Twitter of Pixar’s twenty-two rules of storytelling. It’s not a new list (2012?) but it does contain some timeless wisdom. So here’s a shameless lift of that list:
…
There’s a piece of writing advice which goes ‘do the worst thing to your protagonist you can think of.’
Taken literally, you end up in murder, torture, kidnapping, earthquake, fire and flood. Not exactly genre-appropriate if you’re writing The Ladies’ Sewing Circle Diaries. Or a rom-com. …
The notion of final-third frenzy comes from a Reedsy webinar The Top Suspense Novel Pitfalls. Taking the broad category of suspense novels as more complex forms of fiction, there’s a lot can go wrong in engineering the plot and structure. …
I set out to write one book and found myself planning a series. I’m defining a series as a number of stories linked by shared characters or settings. Simple, enough? Wrong.
There are different types of series. Oh, goody. Planning a series just got more difficult. …