Writing Craft: Master List of Story Development Skills
Learn what skills to study with my master list of Story Development skills. What craft skills do we need to understand and be able to apply to develop a story and characters?
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Story Development through Travel and Inspiration — Guest: Kelly Maher
Writers find inspiration everywhere. That’s one reason why travel can be very inspiring to us. Yet inspiration doesn’t always work out like we planned, and we might need to watch out for inspiration leading us astray.
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Calling All Scrivener-Using Over Achievers!
Many of my most popular posts share tools I’ve developed to help writers. By request, here’s a Scrivener template for my Master Beat Sheet, which combines the Save the Cat Beat Sheet and my Story Engineering Beat Sheet.
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Transition Techniques: Meanwhile, in Our Subplot…
Last time, we discussed how to identify and fix episodic writing to make our stories stronger with the “But” and “Therefore” rule. However, there’s another option for transitioning from scene to scene: the “meanwhile.”
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What Should Our Story’s Climax Include?
It’s tricky to tie up all the threads in our story’s Climax and even harder to give guidelines for how to write it, but let’s try to identify some story aspects we might want to include.
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How Do Story Beats Work in Our Genre?
It’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about how to take the major beats of a beat sheet and apply them to our story’s genre.
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Antagonists: The End-All-Be-All of Our Story — Guest: Kristen Lamb
Over the past couple of weeks, Kristen Lamb has been kind enough to let me share her insights on antagonists: what they are, why they help define our story, how to strengthen them, etc. Today, we’re exploring how antagonists create our story from beginning to end.
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Creating a Strong Moral Premise for Our Story — Guest: Jeff Lyons
A character’s arc involves change, but what exactly is changing? Today, Jeff Lyons shares how to ensure we’re not saddling our protagonist with generic character flaws to overcome, but rather we’re creating well-rounded characters with personal motivations for their struggles.
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Story Structure: What’s the Purpose…for Readers?
Ever wonder how many writing “rules” have a reason beyond “because I said so”? Story structure exists not just because it makes our story stronger, but also because the story beats help communicate with readers–and understanding how can help us write and revise our story.
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Story Structure: What Should We Do for Trilogies?
If we’ve thought of writing a trilogy, we might have struggled with questions about how we should structure our stories over three books. Or how we should break up the plot and character arcs. Today, let’s try to answer those questions!
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