by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
Work With Your Natural Instincts! What’s the best way to plot? Quick answer: the best way to plot is whatever works best for you. After all, we’re all different. Interview any group of a dozen writers and you’ll find they all have different times of...
by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
Beginning writers often tend to think of a book as a series of chapters. It’s actually more useful to regard it as a series of linked scenes. Why? Because it makes it a lot easier to control the pace of your story. ‘Pace’ may be described as the...
by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
Plotting a book can seem an overwhelming task when you’re just starting out, but it does get easier when you understand various plotting strategies. Here are 3 quick tips that could be all you need to get you started: One: You’ll find it useful to analyse...
by Marg McAlister | Plotting, Writing Fiction
Episodic Writing The rejection letter says: “Your story, on the surface, appears to be well-told and has appealing characters. However, the writing is episodic; the story lacks direction.” You frown. Huh? The story lacks direction? How could it? Your main...
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...
