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 →“Beginning: The point in time or space when something starts.” – Oxford languages. From that deceptively simple definition stems a lot of writerly misunderstanding. At a rough and very unscientific estimate, around 90% of the writing advice on beginnings talks about what belongs in the first few
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 →For a lot of stories, the choice of viewpoint character seems obvious, either because the writer starts with a character and develops the plot later, or because they start with a plotline in which one particular character is at the center of the action. I said “seems
Read more →Ultimately, plots are driven by the characters. Even when the main character is shipwrecked on a desert island and supposedly forced by this outside circumstance to struggle against nature, the character could simply give up and starve to death. Most writers don’t choose characters who would do
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