I got quite a few requests in the last Open Mic, and I’m going to start working through them, beginning with this: Note the problem is not character story lacking, but putting together a single coherent plot that doesn’t consist of a character’s entire life story. I
Read more →Sooner or later, every writer seems to have trouble with plot, even writers for whom plot “comes naturally.” Part of the problem, I think, is that over the past twenty or thirty years, story structure has become thoroughly confused with plot. (I blame this largely on the
Read more →Borrowing One of the shortcuts a writer can use for any of the Big Three story elements (plot, characters, setting/backstory) is to borrow them from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” covers a lot of ground; the caveat is that if one is going to borrow from anything that
Read more →Like setup and foreshadowing (see last week’s post), payoff and consequences aren’t quite the same thing. If you look up the definitions, the writing-relevant one for “payoff” is “a final outcome or conclusion,” while the one for “consequences” is “the result or effect of an action or
Read more →I recently read a story in which the writer had two villains whose respective plotlines had very different endings. One villain was heading for an action climax with a dramatic set-piece battle scene; the other was heading for an emotional confrontation ending in the revelation of all
Read more →I recently read a book that I found deeply frustrating because nearly all of the action-adventure part of the plot happened offstage. The viewpoint – who was consistently presented as the protagonist – only found out about the action later, when someone came back bloody and beaten
Read more →Every story has a central problem that the protagonist needs to deal with. Sometimes, the protagonist deals with it successfully; sometimes they fail. The problem may be something the protagonist doesn’t have but wants, something they need to do, something they need to realize, something they need
Read more →A lot of writers stall at the very beginning of story construction – at the idea stage – because they have never thought about the difference between situations, incidents/events, and actual plot, much less how to move from any one of these to any of the others.
Read more →“Plot-noodling” is a term I came up with to describe a … thing … that I and some of my writer friends do when one of us is stuck; it involves the writer sitting down with one or (rarely) two other people, who ask the writer a
Read more →I’ve talked a bit about the difference between plot and structure, and some of the ways structure is currently being misused (in my opinion). But structure is still a massively useful concept, and that usefulness is the reason behind the huge focus so many how-to-write books and
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