If you are like me, you are juggling several writing projects in various stages. I have many chores that I have in a to-do list as well. I use Microsoft’s My Day. I use it because I can access the…
Scenes are the building blocks of novels. That makes them important. You pantsers can ignore this blog. I’m talking about plotting a story out. I use a form that I created to do this work. The form has a name,…
This blog is about the dreaded writer’s block. We all suffer from it. Of course we don’t suffer all at the same time, but we do suffer from it. You’ll be writing and without warning. There. Are. No. More. Words.…
Act three is also called synthesis. It has three beats. This part fuses the first two acts. Things finally get fixed here. It starts about eighty percent of the way in the story. There is a breakthrough. The hero finally…
We are examining the beat sheet in detail. This is the second part of our dive into the second act. The second act is where we find the bulk of the story. We’re at the point of a plot twist.…
Welcome to the next part of our deep dive into the beat sheet. We’ve looked at the beats that make up the first act. Now it’s time for the second act. This is where things get real for the main…
The next beat is to state the theme. This needs to be subtle. Don’t have anyone in the story say it aloud, so to speak. Show it. Don’t tell the reader. No one in life says my life is about…
When you are starting a story, you need to know approximately where things should happen. It helps you to maintain the pacing of your story. There is a great tool for this process — the beat sheet. I use a…
If you are like me, you are juggling a lot of ideas, written drafts, brainstorming, and other writing tasks. You may feel as though there isn’t enough time to deal with it all. It is easy to manage your tasks…
Characters can be fun to create. You want your heroes to be heroic and your villains to be villainous. Right? Of course. In the real world, though, no one is all good or all bad. Humans are a mixture of…