LM requested a post on “speeding up a novel planning process re: structure, etc.” This one is probably going to be another series, because I have a lot to chew on here, including backwards planning and gardening/explorer planning vs. the more commonly advised three-act-structure planning. First off,
Read more →One of my best friends is in need of some writing advice. She says: “I have vague ideas, or scenes, or a few lines of dialogue about a given idea, which I try to make notes of as they come. But I don’t know how or have
Read more →A lot of writers stall at the very beginning of story construction – at the idea stage – because they have never thought about the difference between situations, incidents/events, and actual plot, much less how to move from any one of these to any of the others.
Read more →If you’ve read the last couple of blog posts about my current WIP, you may have noticed that the end of the story started off as “Kayla confronts the Archmage. Kayla wins. Everybody celebrates.” This is actually more specific than the end of my first-stage outline normally
Read more →Last week, I talked about getting my plot outline up to a sketchy 1200 words. Usually, my plot outlines start off fairly specific (“Kayla is in the library with Harkawn, reviewing past Dark Lord grimoires. She is annoyed – what good is summoning a horde of mosquitoes?
Read more →I’ve spent the past month or so fiddling with the synopsis for the sequel to The Dark Lord’s Daughter (which I still don’t have a publication date for, but it will probably be at least a year and a half). Writing a new book is always a
Read more →“Developing an idea” is one of those writing phrases that doesn’t have a precise definition. Ideas change and expand and twist throughout the entire writing process. The ways a writer goes about encouraging or discouraging these developments differ, depending on where in the process they are. Pre-writing
Read more →First, some housekeeping. December 23 is the last day to register for my online worldbuilding workshop at Odyssey, if you are interested. I will be taking next week off for the holidays, so no more blog posts until the new year. Now the question: I’m having a
Read more →The ideas I was talking about in the last post are seldom ready-to-write when they arrive. Even the ones that look ready to go often turn out not to be when one gets right down to it. I’ve talked before about the pre-writing story development, so this
Read more →I got in a discussion the other day with a writer friend who’s having difficulty moving forward with her story. I’m having similar problems, so we sat down to compare notes. “So what’s the plot?” I said, because I’m a plotty kind of writer. “Well, there’s this
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