Plotting

The Secret Weapon: Multiple Projects at OnceMost productivity advice says focus. One project. One goal. Eliminate distractions. Pour everything int...

In 1982, a film lost its studio nearly $20 million. Critics called it too slow. Audiences stayed away. The movie was Blade Runner. Four decades la...

Most writing advice says to surprise your reader. Mystery fiction flips that on its head -- the best mysteries are the ones where the reader could ...

Chapter 28. The protagonist is cornered -- enemies on three sides, allies unconscious, no weapons left. Then she remembers a healing spell. A heali...

In 1996, A Game of Thrones launched with five POV characters. By the fifth book, that number had ballooned past twenty. George R.R. Martin has spen...

"The wound was in the shoulder—no wait, the leg." Arthur Conan Doyle never noticed. A hundred and thirty years later, every single book about Sherl...

Three hours. That's how long it took for a fully charged smartphone to die in a manuscript that had already gone through four drafts. The author d...

In a 2011 survey of published novelists by Writer's Digest, 73% of respondents who used outlines reported that their manuscripts required fewer str...

Most writing advice tells writers to plan more before drafting. Here is the counter-intuitive truth: planning too much is almost as dangerous as no...

Most writers stall at the exact same place. They've got their one-sentence summary -- tight, punchy, the story in a nutshell. Then someone says "ex...

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Einstein was talking about physics, but the principle cuts straight to the h...

Every year, over 300,000 people sign up for NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month -- determined to write an entire novel in November. Fewer tha...

Why Does the Snowflake Method Work?"I used to be a seat-of-the-pants writer," physicist-turned-novelist Randy Ingermanson once admitted. "Then I wr...

"There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story." Frank Herbert said that, and he was talking about Dune -- a novel that use...