Whether you like to work out the elements of your story on the page or are a pre-plotter, everyone benefits from a bit of periodic organization. See how many of the key scenes you can identify in the story you're imagining, writing, or perfecting:1) Set-up: The set-up you create in the Beginning makes the journey the protagonist undertakes in the Middle feel inevitable. 2) Inciting Incident: A moment, conflict, dilemma, loss, fear, etc. that forces the protagonist to take immediate action.3) End …
5 Benefits of Writing a Truly Awful, Lousy 1st Draft
1) Rather than stop and start over again and again, when you allow yourself to write a truly awful, lousy first draft from beginning to end, you actually finish a draft all the way through.2) Until you write the end, you do not have a clear grasp of what comes earlier.3) You accomplish what you set out to do.4) Once you have a skeleton in place, a writer is able to stand back and "see" her story in an entirely new light5) One of the greatest benefits of writing a truly awful, lousy 1st draft is …
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Tracking Conflict, Tension, and Suspense
The Plot Planner I create for writers during an On-going Plot Phone Consultations (and encourage all writers to create for on their own for their individual writing project) is simply a line that divides scenes into "above the line" scenes and "below the line scenes."Characters grow and change based on the Dramatic Action they experience during the story. If the action is simply action with no conflict, tension, or suspense, the story does not move and the character does not grow.In today's …
A Sophisticated Form of Writer’s Procrastination
Two On-going Plot Phone Consultations in a row, with two separate writers, each of whom suffers from a sophisticated form of procrastination.Both writers, one fiction, one non-fiction, have had the dream of writing / finishing their books for a long time now. Both writers, after years of thinking and planning and researching their projects have both settled down and committed to the process. (Or, so they think.) By signing up for my services they crossed from the ordinary world of stopping and …
WRITERS TRAVEL TWO JOURNEYS
The act of writing is not a linear movement from the Beginning, through the Middle and to the End. The act of writing is circuitous and indirect as a reflection of the writer’s own personal strengths and flaws, loves and fears. The writer’s life spirals up and plummets down as characters break through the surface of the imagined world and dive into the murky depths. The journey the protagonist undertakes mirrors that of the writer’s. A Plot Planner is a visual picture of the plot as a reflection …
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