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Over the years, we’ve received many questions about how to plot multiple books. The answer is surprisingly simple: story structure is the same no matter the scale. However, reader expectations about story continuity do change a little when the story is broken into different books, … read more »
You’ve added lots of conflict to your story, but readers are still telling you it’s boring. What gives? Unfortunately, a number of different things can cause this problem. To help you troubleshoot, let’s go over some common reasons that tension might be missing. Read more »
Conflict is, as we never get tired of saying, critical to stories. It’s what creates stakes, tension, and satisfaction, what keeps us turning the page to see what happens next. But have you ever felt like you were reading the same conflict over and over … read more »
One of the things we all crave as authors is to write the kind of story that readers can’t put down. Just one more chapter, they say, and then they end up staying up way too late, reading past their lunch hour and into the … read more »
Here at Mythcreants, we talk a lot about overpowered characters and the consequences they can have for your story. If you’ve read our previous articles, then you already understand the issue, but how you can you spot it? After all, few storytellers set out to … read more »
Even in the lightest, most upbeat of stories, heroes shouldn’t succeed every time. Failure is really important, both for keeping the plot unpredictable and for maintaining tension. If the protagonist never fails, then it’s likely to be a dull story indeed. However, failure also carries … read more »
Even though a character arc works much like any other plot arc, when subjective character feelings and motivation are added to the mix, storytellers often have trouble. To help you evaluate and improve such issues, let’s go over the four basic requirements of a character … read more »
Stories need problems to solve and heroes to solve them, which sounds simple enough at first. But then you realize that in most settings, there are authorities whose job is to stop these problems. They might be police officers, teachers at a magic school, or … read more »
Minions are a mainstay of speculative fiction, to the point that they are sometimes as well-known as their named overlords. What would Saruman be without his Uruk-hai, or the Dominion without its Jem’Hadar? And yet, minions are often plagued with problems. They’re too easy to … read more »
Many stories put their main characters through an uncomfortable period of disempowerment so the audience can watch them overcome it. But when creating these sequences, storytellers can struggle with character agency. After all, if the character is making choices that affect the plot, doesn’t that … read more »