by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
What is a prologue? When should you use one? Should you forget about a prologue and simply start at Chapter 1? All too often we pick up a published book and read the prologue, then wonder why it was there at all. It doesn’t seem to do anything that Chapter One...
by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
For several years before I left teaching to write full time (over a decade ago now), I was a specialist reading teacher. I dealt mainly with two categories of kids: Those who were struggling to read at all (I had to turn them into readers) and Those who could read,...
by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
If your book is suffering from the dreaded ‘sagging middle’ syndrome, it’s likely that you either don’t have a subplot or you haven’t paid enough attention to your subplots. (In shorter books, such as those for juvenile readers, you can...