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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 »
Previously, we’ve taken apart Act I and Act II to see how they tick. Now it’s time to watch the film bring its three throughlines to an effective finish. When we left off, Dr. Horrible had decided to break his no-murder code to finish off … read more »
The principles we discuss at Mythcreants are actively at work in countless popular stories. That means if you’re still getting a feel for abstract concepts like tension or karma, you now have an excuse to watch your favorite movie and call it homework. Dissecting stories … 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 »
Plot twists are tricky business for us storytellers. They need to be foreshadowed so they aren’t jarring, but they also need to be subtle so they don’t feel telegraphed. Then you have to consider differences in your audience. Trope-savvy readers can spot even the subtlest … 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 »
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 »
There’s a moment in every climax where the hero goes from losing to winning, or from winning to losing in the case of tragedies. It’s when Luke turns off his targeting computer or when Eowyn declares that she is no man. It’s got that special … read more »
One of the phrases that’s been popularized in online storytelling discussions in recent years is the “sexy lamp test.”* This test is applied to a female character to judge whether the storyteller has given her an adequate presence in the story. A character fails the … read more »