Borrowing One of the shortcuts a writer can use for any of the Big Three story elements (plot, characters, setting/backstory) is to borrow them from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” covers a lot of ground; the caveat is that if one is going to borrow from anything that
Read more →Like setup and foreshadowing (see last week’s post), payoff and consequences aren’t quite the same thing. If you look up the definitions, the writing-relevant one for “payoff” is “a final outcome or conclusion,” while the one for “consequences” is “the result or effect of an action or
Read more →I recently read a story in which the writer had two villains whose respective plotlines had very different endings. One villain was heading for an action climax with a dramatic set-piece battle scene; the other was heading for an emotional confrontation ending in the revelation of all
Read more →I recently read a book that I found deeply frustrating because nearly all of the action-adventure part of the plot happened offstage. The viewpoint – who was consistently presented as the protagonist – only found out about the action later, when someone came back bloody and beaten
Read more →Every story has a central problem that the protagonist needs to deal with. Sometimes, the protagonist deals with it successfully; sometimes they fail. The problem may be something the protagonist doesn’t have but wants, something they need to do, something they need to realize, something they need
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 →“Plot-noodling” is a term I came up with to describe a … thing … that I and some of my writer friends do when one of us is stuck; it involves the writer sitting down with one or (rarely) two other people, who ask the writer a
Read more →I’ve talked a bit about the difference between plot and structure, and some of the ways structure is currently being misused (in my opinion). But structure is still a massively useful concept, and that usefulness is the reason behind the huge focus so many how-to-write books and
Read more →Structure and plot are getting confused with each other more and more lately. It isn’t surprising. As I’ve pointed out before, writing terminology has never been truly standardized. Many terms, like “viewpoint” get used for more than one thing, and “plot” and “structure” are frequently treated as
Read more →An idiot plot was first defined by James Blish as “a plot that only hangs together because all of the main characters act like idiots.” I’d add “…when they’re not supposed to be idiots,” because there are plenty of stories about characters who are supposed to be
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