Libby

Once again thank you to all of you for giving your thoughts on this. I feel immediately guilty as I have close to no experience and not much to offer by way of my own conclusions.

I agree with those of you who say that the shape of your various elements (character arcs, plot lines etc.) needs revision between drafts, and it reminds me that the…[Read more]

I think most writers are also great readers and have acquired an instinctive grasp of story structure. That doesn’t mean a bit of conscious knowledge won’t help. But sometimes you have to trust your unconscious.

I’m another one whose eyes glaze over at charts, grids, questionnaires and all the rest of it, and find the idea of forcing a story into a set framework very inhibiting. I’d come to suspect that lack of a coherent framework in my writing was one reason I’ve never got on the road to publication, but when I applied the 7 Cs to my last effort it…[Read more]

Ooh what an interesting conversation!

I think it’s quite hard (impossible for me) to tailor a novel according to a detailed framework and I will often start with only the inciting incident, the external problem the MC has to fight/solve and the antagonist forces, whether they’re people or circumstances, then let the story develop a first draft…[Read more]