Main Points · Step one: start with a climactic ending, pick the emotional impact you want to create, then plot backward. · Step two: when you get stuck, go to the beginning and plot forward keeping your ending in mind. · Step three: when you get stuck, choose a middle and plot sideways (backward and forward from that point), trying to connect your beginning, middle, and ending sections. · Step four: if you get stuck, pick other significant scenes in…
Main Points • Families are often left out of fiction to keep things simple, make characters sympathetic, force growth, and justify personalities. • Leaving families out often curtails profound depth and interesting conflicts. • Families provide longing, bitter-sweet love, isolation, tragedy, endearment, connectedness, responsibility, shared history/culture, meaningful side conflicts, can turn the mundane into the interesting (especially in fantastical settings), and are too often missing. • Going beyond the familiar tropes of orphaned heroes or immediately killed off family can…
Main Points • Great villains: • Are proactive; • Are sympathetic or have self-justified views, or unique motivations; • Often come from wildly different cultures; • Have as profound character arcs as the heroes and overcome their own internal/external conflicts; • Have extremist ideologies or push positive/negative values to the extreme; • Have wildly different perspectives and worldviews; • Have immense mystique and presence; • Powerfully mirror the hero’s journey/arc or are the negative fulfillment of the hero’s flaw •…
Main Points • Comparing your work to others can be inspirational and disheartening. • There’s a gap between our tastes and our work (initially); we need to keeping striving until our work matches our tastes (Ira Glass). • Compare apples to apples–similar experience and capacity (the number of people working on a single book). • By comparing, we can learn what we have to fix, what’s out there, learn by immersion, and find inspiration. • Comparing can bring false hope:…
Main Points • Nier: Automata is a masterpiece of storytelling–or it’s just effective at emotionally bullying people into thinking it’s great. • Perspective changing (from other characters or rapid switching) effectively makes us care about people. • Sympathetic villains provide a greater emotional response. • Every major and important character needs an arc. • Switching up ‘gameplay’ (or the types of chapters we’re using) keeps readers engaged. • Powerful themes stay powerfully. Everything should explore different facets of the themes….
Main Points • Writing toward the market or your passion is a concern every author should think about. • We should try to combine marketability, passion, and production wherever possible. • One option is to write the first time for passion and revision for marketability. • Without passion, I can’t write so marketability can’t be my primary focus. • Write treasure books that you’re afraid you’ll mess up. In the end, you can only grow from writing! Introduction Passion vs…