You want to write a novel, memoir, screenplay. Martha Alderson, the Plot Whisperer, can help you.
Plot took me years to pin down. When the proverbial “ah-ha” moment struck, I started teaching what I was learning about plot to writer friends. The visual templates, the Scene Tracker and the Plot Planner I created to support my own writing, became teaching tools. Rather than simply lecture about the concepts I was discovering as I deconstructed classic and award-winning novels, memoirs, and screenplays, I could show how plot and character emotional development and thematic significance and tension and pacing ebb and flow throughout stories.
Friends quickly spilled into sold-out plot workshops for the University of California at Santa Cruz. With writers clamoring for a book, I formed Illusion Press (an idea, at the time, that felt incredibly illusionary) and published Blockbuster Plots Pure and Simple: Take the Panic Out of Plot. Twelve years later, Writers Digest published a revised and expanded edition as Writing Blockbuster Plots: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Plot, Structure, and Scene.
Over the years I’ve taught plot to thousands of writers and analyzed hundreds of stories, memoirs, and screenplays for the universal elements of plot, structure, character, theme, and scene. At the same time, I gained insight into writers’ inner worlds of creativity. From this exploration and insight, I produced plot workshop DVDs that are now online video plot and revision and personal transformation courses, founded the Plot Whisperer blog where I wind down after plot consultations, and wrote eight plot and writing books for writers, while continuing writing my own fiction.
In my best-selling The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master, I introduced the idea of the Universal Story—a concept of birth, growth, death and renewal that exists at the core of every narrative (and life itself).
I continue to write and teach.
Visit my shop for books, ebooks, and
on-line video courses.
I started as the Plot Whisperer to help writers embrace the freedom of structure. My passion expands to helping writers and all creative people understand how the dramatic action in our lives changes us in significant ways and always points to transformation.
Follow Me!