You started 2014 with the best intentions to write / finish your novel, memoir, screenplay. Now you're faltering with serious doubts that all this time and effort is going to "pay off" (add your own personal pay off here). Rather than write, which makes you feel good about yourself and life at large when you do, you beat yourself up instead with words and a tone you'd never sling at anyone other than yourself.Forget all that. Instead, dig out that old story you threw in the bottom drawer …
Forever Grateful to Writers Digest
I came to writing late in life after a career of helping kids with speech, language and learning disabilities much like I had grappled with. Sinking into the imaginative, non-verbal world of words felt safe, though not always natural. I struggled with plot. After deconstructing stories and discovering many of the hidden elements of plot, I began sharing with writing friends what I was learning.My first big "break", though I wasn't thinking about breaking into anythingother than I was simply …
Character Consistency
I've been gushing about character transformation since the moment I first grasp the ultimate gift awaiting the protagonist and reader and the writer at the Climax based on lessons learned and conflict and tension endured.The antagonist's world in the middle is not simply to throw road blocks to knock the protagonist from her path to what she thinks she wants. A deeper and more lasting point of the conflict and challenges in the middle are the lessons, skills, abilities, knowledge, beliefs buried …
An Essential Element of Scene: Excitement (or Conflict, Tension, Suspense and/or Curiosity)
To engage your reader, especially in today's world filled with distractions, you must keep your story exciting. Excitement is created through dramatic action where a positive outcome for the protagonist is constantly threatened.Without gorgeous writing, exciting action and/or compelling characters (preferably all three), a reader's mind wanders. A reader with a wandering mind detaches from the story, puts down the book and later, if she does pick the story up again, she'll not recognize where …
An Essential Element of Scene: Excitement (or Conflict, Tension, Suspense and/or Curiosity)Read More
HoHum Story Concept? Energize through Thematic Significance
Last week's homework for our 16-week Plot from Beginning to End video chat workshop -- Chapter 14: Find Your Thematic Bubble in Plot Whisperer Workbook: Step-by-Step Exercises to Help You Create Compelling Stories -- came at the exact right time. With only a couple more sessions left and all the concept, plot and character elements plotted out on Plot Planners and Scene Trackers filling in for the 7 essential elements grounding the writers, this exercise seemed to allow the writers the clarity …
HoHum Story Concept? Energize through Thematic SignificanceRead More
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