Hidden Architecture: Using Structure to Reinforce Story
Novelist Wendelin Van Draanen offers advice on how to choose the best story structure for your novels and provides compelling examples from her award-winning books.
Moves and Counter-Moves: Letting Your Antagonist Drive the Plot
So if you're having a hard time coming up with what your protagonist does in the middle of your story, it may help you to figure out what your antagonist is doing.
5 Tips for Incorporating Real-World Politics into a Futuristic Narrative
Many authors seek to incorporate contemporary themes and issues into novels that are set in the future. Here, Jay Schiffman offers five ideas to get your started if you're interested in incorporating real-world politics into a futuristic narrative.
21 Ways to Pivot Your Plot
You can write a great character sketch, a moving love scene, a thrilling chase, even a heart-clutching murder—but a good story needs more than those elements. It needs plot movement—articulated by pivot points.
The 3 Questions That Will Solve Every “Plot Problem” You’ll Ever Have
Whether you're an outliner or an organic writer—a plotter or a pantser—the solution to almost every plot problem can be found by answering three simple questions.
8 Practical Tips to Avoid Too Much Plot in Your Novel
How do you stop over-plotting your novel? It isn’t easy, and it isn’t pleasant, but the reward for plot discipline can be a lean, compelling narrative that attracts literary agents. Try these tips.
What is a Denouement?
The role of the denouement in literature is easy to comprehend and, once you understand it's definition, you'll be to spot it quite easily in most novels. Here the definition and an example.
How to Map Out Your Hero’s Adventure in Your Manuscript
BY ELIZABETH SIMS How do the most successful authors of our time construct their stories? The Hero's Adventure. So what is the Hero’s Adventure? You know it already, and you may even have elements of it in the story you’re working on. But I suspect you haven’t yet methodically and thoroughly appropriated it for yourself. Here's what you need to know.
How to Build Subplots From Multiple Viewpoints
Subplots and multiple points of view make novels longer and more work, but rewards for that effort are there for writer and reader alike—that is, if they are successful. Here's how to pull it off.
How to Improve Your Writing: Subplots and Subtext
Subplots and subtext are two different sub sandwiches on the story menu, and as the chef, you need to grill them up strategically.
How to Prevent Predictable Plots
Here are tips on how to become more alert to the signals of those groaningly predictable plots and how to avoid them in your stories and novels.
7 Ways to Add Great Subplots to Your Novel
BY ELIZABETH SIMS Whether you’re planning the fabric of a new story or looking to thread depth into one that’s falling flat, try these 7 methods to a tightly woven plot.