Braided novels are a specific subset of multiple-viewpoint structure. In a braided novel, there are two or more protagonist characters who each have their own “A” plot-problem, which usually occur over the same time period and which come together in the same (or parallel) climax. The stories
Read more →What is a “B” plot? Like most writing jargon, it depends on who you ask. On the most fundamental level, the A plot is the main storyline, the central problem that, once solved, means the story is over. The dragon is dead/tamed; the war is over; the
Read more →Last week, I talked about some things to do with novellas (besides self-publishing them). Most of them involved ways of making them longer, essentially turning a novella into a novel. I’m going to do a post on the three things I came up with, starting with the
Read more →Some years back, I had a writer friend who’d switched from being a journalist to writing fiction. She told me once that for her, the hardest part of writing fiction was learning not to automatically apply the basic journalism tenet: “Tell them what you’re gonna tell them,
Read more →Why do novels have chapters, and how do you figure out where to start or end them? Well, not all novels do have chapters ( see most of Terry Pratchett’s books and John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless for example). Most do, though, and have since the
Read more →So I had half my playing around with structure post done for this week, and then Kevin said this: “Pat, do you think a preset structure likely makes a story more predictable, or are structure and predictability unrelated?” There are a couple of things to consider here.
Read more →Story structure is one of those perennial topics in writing advice, and I haven’t talked about it for a while. So it’s probably time to revisit. I have two dressers in my bedroom. One was clearly made before the advent of mass production; the other was made
Read more →Back when I still had a day job, I was a financial analyst. It is therefore really unsurprising that I enjoy looking at writing systems that are very structured and involve analyzing stories to pick out what works or doesn’t work. There are, however, a couple of
Read more →Back in high school, I took a semester of journalism. The teacher focused hard on the “5 W’s and an H”—Who, What, When, Where, Why and How—and also on the structure of a news story (most important stuff in the first paragraph, steady increase in interesting-but-less-important details
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
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