1. Decide which genre your character will be in. Is it fantasy, action, comedy, etc.? 2. Answer the following questions: What is this character’s purpose in the story? Why is this character needed in the story? 3. Decide what purpose your character serves. Are you creating a main character or a supporter? The object of affection or a despised […]
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By Lisa Lepki 1. Make a time line of your life Sit down with a piece of paper and draw out a diagram of your life. It will help you pick out the pivotal moments. If you were writing an autobiography, you would need to write about the entirety of your life, but a memoir is
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There are lots of plot structures out there. The 3-act structure, the brilliant Blake-Snyder Beat Sheet, and on and on. My current favorite is a four-act story structure from Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering, a book I highly recommend. Though when it comes to the finale, I prefer Blake-Snyder’s five-point finale described in his book Save the Cat (also fabulous for writers). Here’s an analysis
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DANIEL POTTER · If you stare awhile at the string of characters that a sentence comprises, the squiggles lose all meaning. That humans somehow manage to agree on the use of these symbols well enough to communicate at all can seem miraculous. But what about when we don’t quite agree—when it seems a writer has added a superfluous,
Why Is the Oxford Comma a Heated Debate in 2017? Read More »