‘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.
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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:
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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. …
It is a truth universally acknowledged, there is no story without conflict. Unlike the opening of Pride and Prejudice, this one happens to be true. Go ahead, argue with me.
Conflict is the crux of storytelling and plotting. Every novel thrives on conflict. Therefore writing conflict is pivotal to crafting a compelling story. Without conflict, there is no drama. Without drama, there is no story. …