Category: plot
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What Ryan George/ ScreenRant’s “Pitch Meeting” catchphrases can teach us about plot
If you’re not familiar with Ryan George’s “Pitch Meeting” YouTube channel, you can thank me later. Basically, George has a series of videos picking apart popular films. The concept is that George plays two characters, “Writer Guy” and “Producer Guy.” In each video, Writer Guy is pitching the film to Producer Guy, who has lots…
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The danger of writing magic
I recently wrote about why writing and reading fantasy is so, well, magical. There are lots of opportunities and benefits that come with writing in the fantasy genre and adding magic to your story, but there is also a temptation to avoid. DON’T MAKE IT ALL ABOUT A MAGIC SHOW When we include sorcery or…
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Respecting your readers means respecting the characters they care about
(Cue Aretha, right? It’s all about that R-E-S-P-E-C-T!) It is easy enough to SAY that as fiction writers, we need to respect and acknowledge the attachments readers will form to our characters. It’s easy enough to SAY that we should acknowledge the reality that readers will like or admire this character but dislike that one.…
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One good reason your word count might go up while revising
Like almost all writers, I follow the #WritingCommunity hashtag on Twitter, and someone posted an interesting question recently. He said that he noticed that his word count has been going up while editing/revising his draft. Was this okay? He was concerned because he’d always heard that word count should go down while revising. Generally speaking,…
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Let’s talk about theme
One of my favorite things–and one of the most important things to me–in fiction is theme. If the themes a story explores don’t interest me, I’m not interested. The book might be a classic work of literature, beautifully written, and I might read it on that account, and appreciate it on that account, and be…
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The challenges we need
Fiction can fall flat for all kinds of reason. One major factor in such a failure can be that we’re getting plot wrong, as the writer, because we aren’t giving our characters the challenges they NEED to grow and develop. As human beings, I think that acknowledging that we grow only through challenge–that is discomfort,…
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“Clue! The Movie,” a JFK documentary, and multiple possible endings
I just watched a cool documentary about the JFK assassination called “Frame 313” (a reference to the infamous Zapruder film.) What I liked about it is that it presents the evidence for and against 5 plausible theories to explain the Kennedy assassination. Was it Oswald acting alone? Was there CIA involvement? Was it a mob…
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Write what you WANT to know
It’s common advice to writers to “write what you know,” and that’s for a reason. What you know is where you have to start. It’s what you have. It’s a springboard to launch into plot and to make characters’ reactions to plot developments ring true. It can make writing therapeutic, among other things. But is…
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Character drives plot (the big lesson from my first novel)
My very first novel was only read by a handful of close friends. I never self-published it because it was awful. It just didn’t work. I titled it Life’s Little Jokes. I reread it more or less recently, and I realized WHY it doesn’t work. It’s a complete melodrama, but that’s not why it doesn’t…
Creative Writing with the Crimson League 