plotting & planning
all our free writing craft resources on crafting your story’s structure!
How to Plan a Magical Revision
You finished your first draft! That is a huge accomplishment. Do you know how many people in the world wish they could say that? Do you know how many unfinished [...]
How to Draft a Killer Story Climax
The climax moment of your story is everything. It's Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy making up (+ making out). It's Katniss and Peeta agreeing to eat the poison berries. It's Jon [...]
How To Structure Scenes
Scenes are the building blocks of stories. A scene has its own beginning, middle and end. The best scenes contain plot problems that push your protagonist to make a character-revealing decision [...]
How to Worldbuild Cultures
Start with cultural values + environment. One of the reasons we read fantasy and science fiction is to experience new cultures and world views. We crave interesting governments, bizarre [...]
How to Pick the Perfect Protagonist
Stories are about change—specifically, they are about how characters change. Characters are the heart and soul of any story, which means that we should [...]
The ‘Show/Tell’ Spectrum
We’ve all heard the adage, “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s everywhere, a warning to writers that this is a [...]
Can you be ambitious and anti-hustle?
Growing up, I was taught that being ambitious meant hustling. In my mind, hustling became synonymous to [...]
