A bare-bones plot formula by a master of suspense If you’re looking for the simplest method of plotting a page-turning novel then I think I’ve found it. It’s thriller author Dean Koontz’s Classic Story Structure, as outlined in his book How to...
How to choose your narrative tense When writing a story you need to decide on the grammatical tense you are going to use – i.e. whether it will be told in past tense, present tense or future tense. The tense is indicated by the form of the verbs. For example, here’s a...
How to write scenes with power and purpose Once you have the basic structure of the story you can begin writing it. The basic building block of structure is the scene. A scene is a section of a story made up of a character (or characters) performing an action that...
Characters arise from premise and plot Your story plot begins with a main character (the protagonist) who faces a problem and must take action to resolve it (as described in the premise). This means that the protagonist is not just some random interesting person to...
Create the structure for your story In the previous article in this series, I outlined how to construct a premise for your story. Your premise gives you the initial setup, the main conflict, and the action that starts the adventure. That’s enough to get you through...
Story structure and planning begins with the premise This is the first of a series of posts on how to plan and structure your work of fiction. When we think of planning we usually start thinking about plot structure. However, there’s something that happens...
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