Where Normal Need Not Apply
A Black Moment is an event in our story that steals the protagonist’s hope for a solution. However, some stories don’t make sense with a typical catastrophe for a Black Moment. How can we give them a Black Moment that will work?
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Because our themes live in the subtext, it’s easy to create unintended themes that undermine our intended theme. That risk increases if we’re trying to create success themes but our story has a bittersweet ending.
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As part of last week’s giveaway, I added several suggestions to the Writing Craft Master Lists, but before I announce the winner, let’s share our favorite writing resources.
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We’ve been working to ensure my mega-lists of writing craft skills for story development, line editing, and copy editing are as complete as possible. Today, we’re diving into a deeper explanation of theme development.
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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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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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One of the most common pieces of writing advice is to Show, Don’t Tell. In many cases, that’s good advice, but as with most advice, that “rule” is imperfect and incomplete.
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To make NaNo work for us, we need to figure out our goals for the experience—and there’s no wrong answer. However, if our goal is to create a coherent story, we should try to understand story structure.
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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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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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