Start in the middle. Get all the important characters on the page in the first chapter. Reveal what the protagonist wants. Reveal the protagonist’s vulnerabilities. Establish what’s at stake. There are a whole lot of books on the craft of fiction out there, and it can feel like every one of them makes the case for one thing your book must do … Read More
What Writers Get Wrong about Plot
The plot is the obvious part of a novel–the part we can generally recall when we put the book down after having read it–it’s not the part that actually makes a novel work.