plotting – Confabulator Cafe

If they don’t stumble, trip them

Ted Boone - August 23, 2012

I’ve tried lots of structural things to keep the reader moving through the story. The first and easiest place to start is with mechanics. Things like cliffhanger chapter endings, ominous foreshadowing, alternating storylines, out-of-order plot sequencing. I’ve read lots of good books that use similar techniques, and to great effect. For my own writing, I’ve […]

Character vs. Plot: The Chicken or the Egg?

R.L. Naquin - March 21, 2012

The simple answer to whether plot or character is more important is that it depends on what genre you’re talking about. If you write literary fiction, character is king. The plot is secondary. But I don’t write literary fiction. In genre fiction, specifically urban fantasy for me, both are of equal importance. A great plot […]

Jack Shephard vs the plot monster

Kevin Wohler - March 20, 2012

As I mentioned in a previous post (“Lying on the couch: A conversation with myself“), I usually talk to my main characters quite a bit before beginning the writing process. It’s not easy for me to put aside character building in favor of story building. The main character has always been my stepping off point […]

Pants are optional. Plans are not.

Ted Boone - January 26, 2012

I’ve tried lots and lots of different things in the pursuit of cultivating story ideas. As an avid NaNoWriMo participant, many of my manuscripts have been an exercise in pantsing, where the story develops while my fingers are typing it. However, I’ve found over the years that a pure pantsing technique doesn’t work that well […]