The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a subplot as “a secondary sequence of actions in a dramatic or narrative work,” which is true enough, but not always much help when you’re having difficulty figuring out which parts of your manuscript are subplots and which aren’t.
Read more →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 →
