Having lots of viewpoint characters is usually one major reason for a proliferation of subplots. Each viewpoint character is the protagonist of his/her own story, and that story inevitably has its own subplots. So if you normally find that your stories have two subplots, and your novel
Read more →Kin asked: Any thoughts on how to manage a proliferation of sub-plots and POV’s? Lots. Which is why I’m making this a post rather than a quick answer to a comment. The first thing you need to look at is why you have all those viewpoint characters
Read more →Storyboarding is a structure analysis technique that comes out of the film industry, where it’s been used since the very early days to give writers, directors, and producers a sort of visual outline of a film. A true storyboard is a series of drawings, each of which
Read more →Last week, I got a series of questions from a student who was working on a worldbuilding project. Several of them caught my attention, most notably the one that asked when it is “appropriate” to use magic that has no strict set of rules in a story,
Read more →One of the current fundamental tenets for writing fiction is that in order to be a “good book,” the central character in the story has to change as a result of the events in it. If one attempts to question this “requirement,” one is informed that if
Read more →This is the last post on software stuff, I promise. I’d planned to start by saying that all anyone really needs is a basic text editor, but then I ran across Writemonkey. It is the most basic text editor I’ve seen since 1982 – the only thing
Read more →Continuing on: 3) Organizing notes and research This category overlaps a bit with both the analysis and development categories, because a lot of the notes you want to organize are things that could/should come up during the development stage, and a lot of the aspects you might
Read more →After a bunch of writing and due consideration, I changed my mind about what I’m doing in this post. I’m going to start with two posts on the basic features you see in writing software, and then look at a couple of specific programs. Because I was
Read more →Every so often, I go on a binge of trying out new and different writing tools (usually when I am feeling stuck, out of a totally unreasonable conviction that somewhere out there is a gadget or a program that will make some aspect of writing easier, more
Read more →Analysis paralysis stems from the same fear that’s at the root of choice paralysis: the fear that the writer will make a “wrong” choice and the work will be less – less good, less deserving, less saleable, less whatever – than it could/should be. And it’s based
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