Tag Archives: plot

Cliches and some things to do with them

July 12, 2010 – 11:08 am

Sooner or later, most writers go through a period of worrying that their work is full of clichés. Some folks take this to ridiculous extremes; one person I ran into was worried about their heroine’s hair color, because it just seemed clichéd to have her be blonde, brunette, or redhead, but the writer couldn’t think [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , , | Comments (8)

Changing things

July 4, 2010 – 6:00 am

Several questions come up a lot about plotting - how can you be sure it makes sense, how can you be sure it’s not clichéd, how do you develop it, how do you get it to work out. Most of the answers have to do with looking at things from a different angle from the [...]

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Planning Longer Plots

February 18, 2010 – 3:18 pm

There are three basic ways to handle plotting a story, whether it’s a short story, a stand-alone novel, or an epic twenty-volume series:  1) You can do it intuitively as you write, 2) You can plan it out in advance, or 3) You can write a bunch of stuff and then arrange it into a [...]

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Onward and onward

February 14, 2010 – 11:28 am

I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which aren’t really a multi-volume story so much as [...]

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The Big Three

September 21, 2009 – 8:21 am

Years ago, when I was an unpublished wannabe, I was at a local SF convention trying to learn the True Secret of Writing from the professional writers in attendence. One of them (I think it may have been Gordy Dickson) threw out a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead for all [...]

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The skeleton in the closet

September 2, 2009 – 10:13 am

There are a couple of ways of looking at plot, ranging from the bird’s-eye view at a macro level to the order of scenes, and events and incidents within scenes. The one most people run across first - and one of the most useful ways of looking at it for many writers - is the [...]

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