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Deals, Decoys, and Dirty Tricks for your Characters
Your hero’s trapped by his enemies, no way to run or fight—unless he can take what those goons really want and use it against them. Your villain needs to slip past the police lines to work his sinister...
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The Prologue Checklist
“What’s past is prologue.” –William Shakespeare, The Tempest It’s only natural—you’ve got a powerful story to write, so you open with a prologue. It’s your chance to show off a clever idea, it...
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The Two Laws of Backstory (and why Superman breaks both)
It’s one of the hardest moments in writing—knowing that even though you’ve picked a perfect character or an ideal plot complication, you have to write in so much more to justify it. But with so many...
View ArticleDialog, Plot, and a bit of Spock — Layers brought to life
Dialogue might be the most powerful tool a writer has. It’s absolutely the easiest one to lead in any direction you want, and yet… Just by keeping track of what pieces the story’s built from and what...
View ArticleWorth Fighting For – choosing stakes for characters
When I’m first putting my sense of a story together, there’s one question that can turn the different pieces into a whole, sometimes faster than any other choice I make. And that is: what does a...
View ArticleThe Plot-Device Machine – Movement
I’m about to share with you my all-purpose tool for the all-purpose question that my characters (and I’d bet yours) are constantly asking. That question is, “How do I get out of this one?” (The Unified...
View ArticleThe Plot-Device Machine – Knowledge
“You can run but you can’t hide.” It’s simple truth, that getting distance from a problem may be no match for how “Knowledge is power.” And that’s only one side to how “who knows what” defines the...
View ArticleThe Plot-Device Machine – Strength
Welcome to the whole story… or at least a chance to step back from looking at single aspects of writing, like the last two Plot-Device posts did. Now that we’ve explored how characters’ movement and...
View ArticleThe Plot-Device Machine – Motive
A story is its people. We all know that, and that’s why Motive is different from the other Plot Device points. We’ve seen how Movement and especially Knowledge can organize the plot around the...
View ArticleWriting a Character Arc – Through Other Characters
If the heart of a story is the conflicts it puts a character through, and especially the choices he has to make… could there be a pattern underlying that to guide a plot into deeper insights and keep...
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