Tag Archives: plot

Plotted genre fiction follows certain conventions. If you don’t understand the conventions, you’ll flounder around and get nowhere, or at best produce novels that nobody but your friends will want to read. While working on my first novel, an aphorism … Continue reading →

When you’re working on a large creative project — a novel, let’s say — it’s hard to find someone with whom to bounce ideas back and forth. When you find yourself stuck, laying out all of the factors in the … Continue reading →

In plotted fiction, it’s essential to get the lead character into some kind of predicament. And the predicament has to be serious. If there’s no predicament, you don’t have a plot at all, just a collection of random incidents. If … Continue reading →