(Writing Scenes With Your Senses.)

And yet, I also discovered something surprising. Once I gave myself permission to be bold, I was able to draw on my multi-genre writing experience to create a memoir that was uniquely mine.

When starting a memoir, there’s documenting, and then there’s The Truth—which, depending on point of view, distance from the events, and a hundred other variables, can be squishy and subjective. Writing Wayfinding meant hours and hours of fact-checking. But once you’ve done that hard work and drafted your story (or stories), you eventually get to the fun part: polishing the vignettes.

Still, even after polishing, one big question remains: How do you know if the structure is right?

My Accidental Memoirist Story

A few years ago, I set out to write a poetry collection—a chapbook about my father. I had already published several poems on this topic in literary magazines, and I wanted to go deeper. Our relationship had been complicated, and I needed space to explore. I planned to build a 48-page chapbook from four or five foundational poems.

Here’s the thing about great writing plans: They often fall apart once the words start flowing. That’s exactly what happened. After a couple of weeks, I realized what I was writing wasn’t poetry. It wasn’t a chapbook. And it wasn’t even entirely about my father.

The poetic form felt too constricting for what I wanted to say. Within weeks, I had already surpassed the limits of a chapbook. I was excavating, discovering, questioning. Writing Wayfinding became a journey of its own.

Here’s the thing. At first, I played it safe. I “reported the news.” The draft of the book was good—but not great. I hadn’t been vulnerable enough. I hadn’t fully shared the questioning, the pain, or the insights I uncovered.

Then I got an editor. That’s when the real work began—and how I ended up with a nonlinear-hybrid-quest/journey-epistolary memoir. Could it fit neatly into one category? Sure. But the point is this: You, the writer, get to choose the format and structure. If you can’t find a structure that works, invent your own. Be bold. Why should fiction writers have all the fun?

Why Structure Matters

There’s another side to this: the reader. Books don’t live in a vacuum. If you’ve come this far in your memoir journey, you’re likely hoping for others to read it. You want them to engage, connect, and feel. The foundation for that intimacy begins with structure. I’ve created a framework to help you get started and remove some of the guesswork.

Memoir has no single magic formula. Structure isn’t just about order—it’s about meaning. Your story may need a linear backbone, a braided weave, or something entirely different. Experiment until the structure reflects both your truth and the experience you want your reader to have.

Memoir Structure Types

• Chronological/Linear: Start-to-finish, such as childhood to adulthood. I began Wayfinding this way, but later found that other structures better captured the fractured nature of my journey and better served the story.
• Nonlinear/Fragmented: Moves around in time and space, often circling a central theme. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
• Braided/Threads: Weaves two or more storylines together. H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald.
• Themed/Topical: Built around a single theme (e.g., addiction, trauma, travel). Wayfinding ultimately took this form, organized by forms such as letters, themes like redemption, and geography. It is a complex structure, and it took trial and error to get it right.
• Hybrid: Mixes forms—essays, lists, poems, fragments. Wayfinding incorporates essays, prose poems, and letters.
• Epistolary: Told through letters, texts, diary entries, emails, etc. Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker.
• Quest/Journey: Centers on a physical, emotional, or metaphorical journey. Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
• Circular/Returning: Begins and ends in the same place (geographically or emotionally). Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

5 Tips to Help You Find Your Memoir’s Structure

1. Identify your memoir’s core theme(s).
If you’re unsure, ask for input. Common themes include trauma, relationships, resilience, and personal growth. Your theme often suggests a structure: A lifelong journey may suit chronology, while a series of linked events may work better in a nonlinear or themed format.

2. Define your memoir’s scope or timeframe.
Does your story cover decades or a short period? Solito by Javier Zamora focuses tightly on his two-month migration journey, while Becoming by Michelle Obama spans a lifetime.

3. Shape your story arc.
Like fiction, memoirs need emotional arcs. You might start a chronological memoir in the middle of a dramatic moment, or group stories by geography or theme instead of adhering to strict chronological order.

4. Be brave and explore possibilities.
Most memoirs default to a linear structure: “I was born, I lived, now I’m older.” I thought that would work for Wayfinding, too. But early readers challenged me. Eventually, I dismantled the book and rebuilt it in a nonlinear, thematic way—closer to how I experienced the events themselves. Masterful examples of nonlinear memoirs include Inheritance by Dani Shapiro and Mean by Myriam Gurba.

5. Leverage your storytelling tools.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. For some of the toughest material in Wayfinding, I shifted from narrative to epistolary—writing letters to characters and even an apology letter to my own body. At first, rewriting finished sections felt strange, but it turned out to be exactly what the book needed.

Your memoir deserves a structure that carries its deepest truth. Be bold. Experiment. Let the form not only serve your story but also foster meaningful engagement and connection with your reader.

Check out Renee Gilmore’s Wayfinding here:

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(How to Keep Your Story Moving.)

Yet despite—or perhaps because of—their deep or bizarre characteristics, the unhinged and weird women from the contemporary literary fiction scene are mirrors to modern womanhood. They often double as catalysts for surreal plot lines and symbols of the struggles of femininity. Take, for instance, Monika Kim’s serial murderer in The Eyes are the Best Part, who cannibalizes men’s eyeballs in both a gory body horror plot and an indictment on the fetishizing male gaze. Or Ainslie Hogarth’s narrator Abby in Motherthing, whose descent into madness leads to a Shakesperean murder sequence but is also, symbolically, an allegory for the ways in which we relate to motherhood, from fertility struggles to inter-generational trauma.

But in a landscape where the “weird girl” or “unhinged woman” is trendy and proliferating, writers need to differentiate themselves, and their characters, to add something new to the literary niche. Recently, several novelists have used innovative narrative structures to stylistically differentiate their unhinged female characters. These strategies include the use of metafiction, intertextuality, embedded narratives (a story within a story), and shifting points of view, all of which dynamize unhinged women narratives and offer new angles and subtexts through which we understand the trope.

Take, for instance, Alana Saab’s Please Stop Trying to Leave Me, in which the author moves deftly between metafictional short stories, essay-type narrative nonfiction, and fever dream style hallucinations to evoke Norma’s “Oblivion” (her depression and derealization). Saab’s constant shifts in genre, and her frequent shifts in perspective, complicate the very essence of the unhinged woman narrative by asking, perhaps, the most important question: Who is actually the unhinged one here? Is it the struggling fiction writer who produces the short story sections of the book, or is it the version of Norma who suffers through each therapy session? Or, in a metafictional nod, is it “Alana Saab,” the author of a book which is mentioned in one of the stories? By destabilizing genre and perspective, Saab’s “unhinged woman” narrative also becomes a question about who tells which stories, and whose stories we understand as “fictional” or not.

Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing deploys a similar shift in perspective, especially as Abby descends further into madness as she is haunted by her dead mother-in-law, Laura. As Abby’s grip on reality loosens, she begins to refer to herself in the third person, using [brackets and italics] to denote those scenes which she experiences as an omniscient onlooker. To further emphasize this dramatic shift in perspective, Hogarth writes these scenes as one might write a screenplay, with characters denoted clearly (Abby: or Laura:) followed by their line of dialogue. These punctuation choices pronounce the jarring change in perspective; Saab uses a similar detached, screenplay-esque perspective to narrate the therapy scenes in Please Stop Trying to Leave Me. This stylistic detachment represents possible derealization—the fracturing of the “unhinged” woman narrator from herself, as she moves from the first-person perspective to an uncanny omniscient purview.

Such shifts in perspective can add more gravity to certain scenes, as can the use of literary intertextuality, in which the author nods to another piece of literature or art, whether implicitly or explicitly. Meredith Hambrock uses intertextuality throughout her recent novel She’s a Lamb!, a book about ruthless and obsessive ambition in which Jessamyn, a young actress blinded by her desire to play the lead role, begins to conflate reality with a musical theatre performance. Hambrock uses intertextual allusion throughout the novel by writing an unhinged narrator who is herself fixated on another fictional woman: Maria from The Sound of Music. A sense of irony arises when the reader, but not Jessamyn, becomes aware of just how dissonant the narrator is from her image of the ideal female figure in the caretaker Maria. Additional irony emerges throughout She’s a Lamb! through an unstated but evident literary parallel—that of the book’s allusions to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Like Macbeth, Jessamyn’s initial crime leads to a succession of rapid and manic murders which become her own undoing.

Something similar happens in R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, in which Macbeth also emerges as a subtext: While June enjoys literary fame after she steals and appropriates Athena’s unfinished manuscript, she sees the ghost of Athena in the audience at a major public book event—just as Macbeth is haunted by the ghost of Banquo at a dinner party. Like Macbeth, June’s unhinged narrative is catalyzed by the appearance of a ghostly figure who returns for vengeance and destabilizes the sanity of the protagonist. Evoking other works of literature or art—as in, for instance, The Sound of Music or Macbeth—can call attention to a body of work which engages with similar themes as the contemporary novel; intertextuality, however, can also differentiate contemporary literary fiction from its predecessors by highlighting how timeless themes emerge in the contemporary world

In my own work, I’m interested in the use of stories-within-stories and how we can use multiple points of view, including omniscient narrators scattered amongst first-person speakers. In my debut novel The Gilded Butterfly Effect, the main character Stella tells a story-within-a-story as a means to describe to her new friend Penny, and the reader, her traumatic experience with a fraternity brother the prior year. Her embedded story therefore becomes omniscient in the midst of her usual first-person narrative, giving readers a broad remit of the scene and its several characters. Her story-within-the-story serves several purposes. First, it gives her the chance to claim the story for herself and tell it however she wishes—rather than as dictated by a third-party or a fraternity brother. It also allows her to omit certain key information from Penny, enabling dramatic irony—the reader now knows more about the true story than Penny does. These point of view shifts create miscommunications and misunderstandings amongst characters, which lead to discordance, and eventually contribute to their undoing.

As writers, I think we tend to restrict ourselves when it comes to points of view—but embedding stories within broader narratives can fracture and complicate the plot in important ways. Such fracturing, whether through an embedded story, a change in perspective, or an intertextual nod, can deepen the work’s overall sense of irony and gravity, and heighten the stakes for characters. These literary techniques in turn complicate the “unhinged woman” trope in several ways. Intertextual allusion can locate contemporary fictional women within a broad literary history, recalling the unhinged demises of similar but different characters. Embedded stories can give characters agency and can heighten the readers’ awareness, whilst ironically confusing the perspectives of other characters. By shifting perspective, a book can ask more than “what” might happen to an unhinged female character—it might interrogate who, exactly, she really is at all. In a crowded literary world, in which fictional women seem to be getting increasingly unhinged, stylistic and structural choices can differentiate characters and plot lines, and can keep an “unhinged woman” from falling into the trappings of an overused trope.

Check out Heather Colley’s The Gilded Butterfly Effect here:

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(The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir.)

The situation of her now classic tale “Fierce Attachments,” Gornick comments, is about her life with her mother in the Bronx in the 1950s, alternating with walks taken in Manhattan in the 1980s. But the story itself, what she hoped to reveal through her storytelling, was that “she could not leave her mother, because she had become her mother.” 

When I set out to tell my story about my mother, called The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother, I wanted to explore my fierce attachment to my mother, which differed from Gornick’s attachment to hers.  I had not become my mother. My mother was crippled by history, raised to be a mother and wife until tragedy hit and she was left with eventually four daughters to raise on her own without a livelihood.

Since she had come of age in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, when women were raised to be wives and mothers and sex objects to a man, after my father died, my mother felt her only alternative was to go on quest to find a new husband and be taken care of again. Enormous social change began in the 70s and 80s. My mother was essentially buffeted by history. She did not have the skills or training to lead a fully independent life. I was driven to be independent since I saw and witnessed the fallout.

Often a question drives a memoir, for the memoirist, a need to sort out or understand something; a quest for truth. The quest that drove me to write my memoir about my mother was to find out who she was before she gave birth to me, and why so much of my inner life was wrapped up in hers? Plus, she had led an interesting and important life I felt compelled to tell: one of an individual shaped by circumstances beyond her control. How would exploring or reconstructing her past shed light on my question?

Writing a memoir, or setting out to write a memoir, is a messy enterprise. How do you sort out what aspects to tell to bring forth a life? And how do you shape them into a story? The situation, how I would tell the story, was, I discovered almost organically, was that I would write my mother’s life from the end to the beginning, or in reverse chronology, from my initial grief at her passing, to the last chapter, the year she was born, touching on the pivotal decades of her life that shaped her.  Finding the shape to organize the story was essential. What I did not yet know, until I finished my book—there should always be a surprise for the writer—was that since my mother suffered from Alzheimer’s the last 10 years of her life, by writing her story backwards, I was essentially bringing her alive again.

Click to continue.

In writing memoir, the writer must find the best way to tell the truth. If a memoir is a house, its structure is its scaffolding. There is a shape to it, a structure, and it is made of rooms, furnishings, and the recreation of individuals breathing life into the tale. If the rooms form the chapters, the furnishings of the story are the vivid details, sensations, and imagery that evoke place and a time and bring the story to life. Finding the rhythm that brings forth the shadows and shades of memory can be, as I’ve said, a messy and emotional enterprise for the writer, rocking the house, with fears of betrayal, and questions of whether that “disinterested reader” will be interested in the personal tale.

But the story is not worth telling if the wagers aren’t high. The memoirist has her eyes on what she sees, tastes, smells, touches, whether she is recalling recollections from the past or the present. She has to bring forth the unsayable to capture a truthful and full-dimensional life. The tension and pacing come from the situations enacted, the experience told. Memory is the furnace, the engine for the memorist. Authenticity is crucial as is deep introspection.  Personal writing is a journey of self-discovery with the intention that, as Gornick remarks, a “disinterested reader” will want to come along for the ride.

Gornick says: “Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or in literary journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.”

How does the memorist achieve this? While the memoirist strives to capture the most authentic experience of living through periods of time, a story emerges. The memoirist knows she must keep the narrative moving; hence, she must decide which aspects of a life to tell that will keep the reader hooked. All of life cannot be told. It is the juxtaposition of events, how they form their own mysterious chronology, whether the book is told from the beginning to the end, or the end to the beginning, that creates the tension in the story. The emotional stakes for the writer who digs deeply are the reader’s gain.

Check out Jill Bialosky’s The End Is the Beginning here:

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Trust me: The more we dig, the more sense it’s going to make.

Whether you’re watching The Sound of Music or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: a group of people come together, and as they interact, their emotions grow—until they boil over.

At which point, there is singing or there is fighting.

That emotional peak is like the crest of a wave.

Your pulse rises. Your senses are engaged.

Like all waves, it must recede, and the story dips down into the trough. That cooling off period is like a pressure release valve. The characters need it, but so do you.

Because there’s another wave coming.

That’s what waves do—they rise and fall, much like a story should. And in a really good story, those crests and troughs are going to get bigger as you go along, building to a climax: a soul-stirring song or a fight to determine someone’s fate.

Good fights and good songs are cool, sure, but they’re not there because they’re cool. They advance the story. They make you a promise. Most of all, they make the characters more accessible and draw you closer to them. On a technical level, these genres are great for establishing their authority. But on an emotional level, putting characters in a place of emotional or physical vulnerability makes it easier to identify with them—and to root for them.

It’s in recognizing these things that you can become a better storyteller.

World-Building

In the 1999 film The Matrix, humans have been enslaved by machines and stuck into a virtual reality designed to keep them docile. A group of rebels led by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) recruit Neo (Keanu Reeves), who they believe is the chosen one meant to free them.

Neo’s training begins, via virtual downloads, because the war will be fought on a digital landscape; in the realm of the mind rather than the physical body. After 10 hours of this training, Neo proclaims, “I know kung fu.”

Morpheus responds: “Show me.”

And they’re whisked into a virtual program, which Morpheus explains was designed to teach the rebel fighters that they’re only limited by their minds—some rules of physics can be bent, while others can be broken.

Then they fight!

Neo is bursting with excitement at his newfound prowess. Morpheus defends himself in a confident, almost detached manner. Neo grows frustrated, unable to land a single punch.

Morpheus chides him. “You’re faster than this. Don’t think you are. Know you are.”

Neo takes a breath. He drops into a place of stillness. They engage again. This time, Neo is faster, more focused, and the fight ends as he nearly strikes Morpheus, his fist hovering a fraction of an inch from his mentor’s face.

What did we learn here?

The whole sequence lasts a little under five minutes, but we got some great world-building on the rules of the virtual world—dictated and simultaneously expressed through combat. We got a sense of both characters. We watched them emotionally develop, as Neo comes into his confidence, and Morpheus recognizes Neo’s aptitude. We got to cheer for Neo as he took another step toward the ultimate goal of saving humanity (something we all have a vested interest in, even in a fictional setting).

It’s the zenith of that old writing adage: “Show, don’t tell.” Neo telling Morpheus he knows kung fu is meaningless. He had to show him—and us.

Plus, we got a really cool sequence designed by the legendary fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, because what’s the point if we’re not having fun?

After that, we take a breath. More world-building. More character stuff.

Until the next action sequence comes, which is slightly bigger, each acting as a plateau that drives the narrative to the next foundational level.

Character

West Side Story. A spin on Romeo & Juliet, set in the 1950s and featuring two rival New York City gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, both grappling for turf on the Upper West Side. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll refer to Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version (there are clips of this song and the aforementioned fight scene on YouTube, if you want to follow along).

Ansel Elgort plays Tony, a Jet on parole, trying to live a more virtuous life. He meets and falls in love with María (Rachel Zegler), who is engaged to a Shark.

Things are not destined to end well.

Pretty early into the story we get “Jet Song,” which introduces us to, you guessed it, the Jets. The number starts with the gang discussing Tony: members are worried that Tony is out, but their leader Riff (Mike Faist) insists Tony is still one of them—through the power of song.

Riff learns about the Jets: their culture, their values, their hierarchy. It’s clear they consider themselves a family, and Tony leaving is a threat to their strength and identity. When we see the familial bond these characters have, we can better understand why they fight so hard for each other. We can all identify with the power of family—whether it’s the kind we’re born with, or in this case, the chosen kind.

And they don’t just tell us they’re a powerful unit by means of the lyrics—they show us through choreographed action. The gang dances in tandem through the streets, wandering into traffic as cars screech to a halt. People see them and recoil or run in fear.

The entire performance lasts less than three minutes, but in that brief time we got world-building, a musical dissertation on the stakes, and an introduction to one of the movie’s major factions. It established the gang’s bond, their tough-guy bona fides (as tough as a group of theater kids can be), and their technical proficiency as singers.

Structure

These are great scenes, but I doubt anyone would rank them as the best in their respective films. A good storytelling wave isn’t a horizontal line. It climbs, reaching its height at the climax.

Do you put the biggest and the best fight at the beginning of The Matrix? Nope! It comes at the end. Neo versus nigh-invincible computer programs in the form of black-suited agents.

“Jet Song” is a fine piece of singing, but it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of María singing over Tony’s dead body (that’s not a spoiler, the first production was in 1957, and anyway, I already said the story was a spin on Romeo & Juliet).

It’s important to think about this prioritization of impact when structuring your own narratives.

If you break it down, Spielberg’s West Side Story has 22 numbers, each one offering a crest, with a trough of character development and scene-setting and breath-catching in between. The Matrix has approximately seven major action set pieces (that’s if you consider set pieces within the last act as separate [the helicopter rescue, the subway fight], which, I do).

More than that, every song and every action sequence has to be relevant and transformational to the story.

Cool, but functional.

Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story, said that anyone can write a “bad song,” but even worse is writing a “wrong song,” one that doesn’t have any purpose or meaning.

And dancing is a little like fighting, right? Moulin Rouge! The Musical choreographer Sonya Tayeh said she watches shows “without music and [edits] accordingly, making sure every breath, every inch of movement is driving the story.”

You ever see a plot diagram? You can find one pretty easily online. It looks like a mountain, with the beginning, then a straight slope up, consisting of rising action, until you get to the peak—the climax. The slope down is the falling action, until you get to the end.

To my mind, the lines in the classic plot diagram are far too straight.

I believe a good storytelling line has little crests and troughs in them throughout—which tend to be much more apparent in genre stories, because of the expectations they set through the promises they make to the viewer: that some form of peril is imminent.

Pacing

Pacing is so important, and it’s everywhere. If you take a quick turn to Broadway, you realize how technical the format is. The ebb and flow of action and information is built into the foundational structure of many shows, so much so there are terms for them.

Most musicals have a big Opening Number, clearly establishing the world, the characters, and the show you’re about to see. In “Alexander Hamilton,” the first track in Hamilton, the whole cast comes out to tell you about the life of the play’s subject, and Aaron Burr literally tells you he’s going to shoot the guy (again, not a spoiler, because, history).

There’s the I Want song, where the protagonist literally tells us … what they want. In “The Wizard and I,” which Elphaba belts early in Wicked, she dreams about meeting the Wizard (of Oz) so she can find the love and acceptance and beauty she’s always craved.

And then there’s the 11 O’Clock Number, which comes toward the end of the show, and is meant to be a showstopper—a reward for an audience that stayed up late, but also, the culmination of the emotional journey. See: “Memory,” from Cats. I’m not entirely sure what the show is about, but it’s a really dope song.

I’m not saying all stories need to sound the same or follow the exact same format.

But I am saying that some things work because they work.

Head and Heart

We covered world-building, character, and structure. Just as important is the way these stories make a promise by creating a heightened sense of reality, and through this, establishing authority.

This is something Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk talks about. That once you establish authority, “the reader will trust you, believe you, and you can do anything with the plot.”

There are two ways to do this, he says. The “heart” method, through honesty and frankness, and the “head” method, by demonstrating knowledge or proficiency.

Both kung fu movies and musicals are excellent for establishing a high level of technical prowess. It’s easy for us to trust people who are good at things and then to accept the reality their skill sets create, where everyone is a martial arts master or a Broadway-caliber singer.

And there’s an amplified emotional intensity in both of these genres that is captivating and undeniable. The characters are drawn closer—into hitting or kissing range—and we learn more about their true selves in these high-stakes scenarios.

What they want, who they love, what they’ll fight for, and who they’ll die for.

It’s this emotional or physical peril that gives us the opportunity to cheer for them.

Whether it’s Elphaba’s singing “The Wizard and I” or Neo battling for the fate of humanity, these are the moments that truly highlight the stakes, when our allegiance to these characters becomes strongest.

The Bigger Picture

We don’t need to explicitly focus on kung fu movies or musicals to understand the point here.

In fact, I don’t want you to.

I start with those because it’s a little bit funny and will get you to pay attention, but it underscores something really important: You should be reading and watching stories outside your chosen format so you can better see the invisible strands of storytelling common across all genres.

Pull the camera back a little and instead of kung fu, just think about action movies in general. Look at Mad Max: Fury Road. For as propulsive as it is, there is a sense of rising and falling action that gives the juggernaut a heartbeat. There are still moments in which director George Miller allows the audience to catch their breath, but only for a moment—and even that intentionally shortened space amplifies the feeling of perpetual motion.

Crests and troughs. They’re everywhere.

You’ve got dancing in Saturday Night Fever.

You’ve got gunfights in John Wick.

You’ve got boxing in Rocky and football in Friday Night Lights.

I could go on. But I don’t think I need to. Because at this point, I bet you can see it.

Moving forward, those crests and troughs—what they accomplish, what they offer you as a creator—ought to stand out just a little bit more, and you should be better equipped to utilize them in your own stories.

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Same with any structure, if you think about it. Put up a brick wall without mortar and see how that works out. Lumber won’t stick to itself. Nails, rivets, bolts, screws, caulk—the right connectors at the places make the whole thing sound.

Fiction is a structured art form; therefore it too needs bonding elements. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call it connective tissue: the small, subtle things, the adroit stuff top authors do to make their stories feel seamless. Where are the characters? What are they thinking? What are they doing?

Here is a passage that could use some help:

They argued with no resolution. At work, Omar heard a sudden sound.

Here’s a simple transition, embedded directly in the third-person narrative:

After the argument with Frances, Omar went home and ordered a pizza, though he didn’t enjoy it much. The next day at work, he was running the macros on the new database when a sharp crack interrupted his concentration. A gunshot?

With this adjustment, we follow Omar from one piece of action to another, from one place to another in time and space, even from one mood to the next.

When a work of fiction feels choppy, it’s often because the author has skipped from one place or character to another without enough help for the reader. And when a story feels labored or sludgy, it’s because the author has put in too much connective tissue: It’s overtold. This is one of those elements of fiction that are subtle and unquantifiable, and best understood by examples.

Let’s start with the simplest sorts of connective tissue and move through to more intricate ones. (Spoilers from real novels and stories ahead.)

1. Dateline

The dateline is the most basic connective tissue. At the top of a chapter or section, you can use any combination of place, time, even including a character name:

June 30, Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Wednesday, 2.45 p.m.
Chief of Staff Victor Jung’s office, Washington, D.C., 11:00 a.m.
An open boat on Hudson Bay

2. Chapter Break

When you’re unsure how to go on, but you feel you need a change of direction, an easy answer is a chapter break. Readers will expect a jump in time or place, so you don’t have to do much extra writing to get them there. A professional secret of authors is to break a chapter when you’ve finished writing a heart-clutching moment. This is a much more natural way to create a chapter end, instead of trying to manufacture a strong moment out of nothing. Don’t worry about dropping in a micro-chapter here and there; your chapters don’t need to be of similar lengths.

3. Section break

If you’ve come to a place where you want an abrupt change, but you don’t feel it’s significant enough to end the chapter and start another, skip a line or two, omit the indent, then get going on whatever’s next. A section break is ideal for signaling an emotional shift.

This from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day:

Such as, for instance, the matter of Miss Kenton’s days off.

~

By the time she first arrived at Darlington Hall right up until perhaps a month or so before that incident in my pantry, Miss Kenton’s days off had followed a predictable pattern.

The reader is intended to feel that little break. We are to sense, perhaps, a shift in the thoughts of the narrator, Stevens the butler. I fancy Stevens is taking a moment to heave a weighty sigh before commencing to explain this greatly troubling situation with Miss Kenton.

For the sake of interest in formatting, you can center a neutral symbol or figure, such as a diamond or scroll, in your section break. This makes it a little easier for readers to apprehend that it’s intentional (and not a typo). Publishers sometimes opt for this, and if you’re self-publishing, you can do it too.

4. POV Change

Another way to do a simple, clear transition without much fuss is do a point-of-view change. Thrillers are great for this; think of cinematic jump cuts all over the place:

Lt. Stone is racing through traffic, dodging elderly pedestrians and baby buggies.

The bad guys are hustling their hostage out the back door of the warehouse.

Back to Lt. Stone, now stuck behind a moving van … He sees a hot dog vendor’s cart and gets an idea …

By keeping the scenes close in time, as in the above example, it’s easy for the reader to be comfortable with what’s going on.

5. Spewed Opinion

An excellent way to buffer a couple of scenes while keeping track of your characters is to have one of them spew an opinion:

Geoffrey thought if he heard “Rhinestone Cowboy” in that elevator one more time, he’d have a stroke.

Doesn’t have to be the slightest bit momentous. If Geoffrey must ride in that elevator, let him keep it a little bit amusing for us. We’re there with him!

6. Soliloquy

Shakespeare is the most famous writer of soliloquies, though they’re found throughout literature. The Bard’s tragic character Hamlet steps to the footlights to speak his innermost thoughts aloud to himself, though of course the purpose is to inform the audience. Each of Hamlet’s seven soliloquies—jammed with the prince’s swirling thoughts and feelings—develop the character by letting us inside his head to watch the progression of his ideas from chaotic to organized. The soliloquies are tremendously successful connective tissue, bridging action while letting us in on Hamlet’s sadness, exultation, calculation, and wit.

How to do it:

When you need to move from one piece of action to the next—especially if you want to slow the pace—let a character struggle internally with the choices before them. Give them room to develop their thoughts; don’t be in too big of a hurry to get to the next scene, which will almost certainly be richer for what you’ve just crafted.

7. Stream of Consciousness

The distinguished contemporary writer George Saunders often lets his narrators connect the elements of his darkly comic short stories with streams of consciousness. This technique, while similar to the soliloquy, amps soliloquy into more complex territory.

E.g.: The eponymous narrator of the Saunders short story “Al Roosten” gives us perfect connectivity between the events of the story, about a loser who lives almost entirely inside his head. As Al judges others and rages against them, he tells a story of petty revenge:

He could say he’d accidentally kicked the wallet under there. Which was sort of true. He hadn’t thought about it, really. He’d just felt like kicking it and then he had. He was impulsive like that. That was one of the good things about him. It was how he’d bought the shop. Failing shop. He gave the keys a kick.

Through the character’s own eyes, we perceive that he is utterly lacking in honesty and courage; therefore, happiness will forever be out of his reach.

How to do it:

Let your narrator imagine the thoughts and feelings of others, and let those imaginings drive (to one extent or another) her or his decisions. You’ll always be able to move a story smoothly with this technique. I might add that the novelist Henry James, himself an important piece of connective tissue between the literary realists and the modernists of the turn of the 20th century, used this approach to superb effect.

A key is to let your narrator’s thoughts wander, but keep the topics to anything that:

• Reveals the inner workings of the character (e.g. via judgments and opinions), or
• Describes action.

8. One-Sentence Cornucopia

Take a close look at this single sentence from the O. Henry award-winning short story “Defeat” by Kay Boyle:

That was the morning of the thirteenth, and they rode all day in the heat, two what-might-have-been peasants cycling slowly hour after hour across the hushed, summery, sunny land.

We get a wealth of connective tissue in this sentence: what day it is, what the weather is, how many characters we’re seeing, what they’re doing, what the mood is.

The sentence occurs between a scene of the soldiers disguising themselves and the next scene, of them reaching their proximate goal, a place where they can find safety and food. And we’re solidly with them.

How to do it:

Challenge yourself every so often to pack several paragraphs’ worth of material into a single sentence. Such a sentence can serve beautifully to link two distinct events.

9. Short Flashback

Short flashbacks can succeed as connective tissue when used judiciously. Long flashbacks are different; they essentially serve to deliver substantive backstory. But short ones can add interest, help you control the pace, and keep a little suspense going.

E.g.: You end a chapter at a moment of profound impact, say a romantic proposal of marriage. The suitor takes a knee, opens the gem box, and pops the question. End of chapter!

Next chapter opens with the guy out hunting a day later [with a proper game license and legal firearm, of course]. We see him stalk and successfully shoot an elk. He rejoices inwardly that he and his bride will eat well this winter. As he packs the field-dressed quarters to his cabin, he thinks back to the moment he asked for her hand, and we see her happy reaction through his eyes.

The elk hunt serves as both a transition and a bridge forward (progression of the lives of the two lovers). Because of the break in continuity, we get a little suspense, and savvy readers will know and expect that the payoff will come soon. And it does: She said yes! It’s fine to craft something like this once in a while. If you make a constant pattern of it, though, your readers will get bored. As you gain experience as a writer, these things will sort themselves out.

10. Mad Dog

A mad dog, for our purposes discussing connective tissue, is a story element that is tiny but reaches way beyond itself to pull together situations, themes, moods, fates.

Zora Neale Hurston uses an actual mad dog in her influential novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

A series of intense moments occur late in the book. One comes when the character nicknamed Tea Cake saves the main character Janie from drowning in a post-hurricane flood. What’s the flood for? Hurston wanted to give Tea Cake a heroic moment. But she needed more; she needed Tea Cake to die, and she needed much more besides. It would have been easy to make Tea Cake drown in the flood while saving Janie, but also a bit cheap, easy. Moreover, Hurston wanted to give the two characters a chance to have some discussion about their past and future before the next cataclysm.

The author decided to craft a delayed, dreadful death for Tea Cake: He’s bitten by a rabid dog during his rescue of Janie. It takes weeks for the disease to manifest. When the crazed, dying Tea Cake attacks Janie, she shoots him dead to save herself, then finds herself in jail. The story continues its energetic, compelling journey through the relations between the sexes, servitude and subjugation, loyalty, vengeance, forgiveness, and more.

Tea Cake’s encounter with the mad dog is entirely by chance, and the moment of the bite seems almost insignificant. Yet it becomes a multiplier of story, creating bridges, transitions, and pinch points all along the way.

How to invent your own mad dog:

• Make a list of the biggest moments you’re going to need as you think about wrapping up your story. Make at least one of them bigger.
• Looking at those moments, what sort of tiny cataclysm suggests itself? You want something that will have impact and reach far beyond the moment.
• Progressive diseases are good. Also consider a character who returns from exile with a grudge, a prank that goes a wee bit wrong, a child who misunderstands an urgent directive …

*****

Something to remember about connective tissue is this: You’re intimately familiar with your own project. You know it better than anyone; you breathe and sleep it. For you to keep track of your characters and timeline, well, that’s easy. Therefore, sometimes we neglect connective tissue, because, hey, it’s already obvious, isn’t it? We saw Tiffany steal that minivan in Chapter 4. Why do I need to remind the reader in Chapter 12 that Tiffany is still driving it, still on the way to Florida?

Just bear in mind that readers like to be refreshed, occasionally, on where everybody is, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how they’re feeling. They need these things a little bit more than you do, as the author. The more you bring conscious choice to this element of fiction, the better you’ll get at it, and the easier it will come to you.

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When I began to employ this new-found (to me) plot structure in my own writing, I quickly confronted a question: How does a writer help the reader to navigate from the exposition to the rising action? At best, that’s a bit of a leap to go from setting up a story to cranking up the conflict. I would later understand that this missing component of the plot pyramid was something commonly referred to as an inciting incident. In short, the inciting incident is the event that triggers the shift from the exposition to the rising action. If the exposition shows us a normal day in the life of the character, then the inciting incident serves as that catalyst for when that normal day shifts into a world full of conflict or a series of obstacles the protagonist must now confront. While some people consider the inciting incident to be a part of the exposition, others view it as a missing ingredient from the plot diagram. Either way, few, if any, writers would disagree that it is a necessary component to writing a good story.

After writing 30 books, many of them in which I had to strongly consider this particular point, I have come to understand that there are five key things that have guided me and that I feel other writers should consider when it comes to using the concept of the inciting incident in their own works.

1. Don’t rush to it.

As writers, we often have a strong idea of what we want to happen in a story. We also understand that our readers might not be particularly patient when it comes to getting to the good parts of the book. As a result, we use techniques like in medias res or the use of carefully crafted, engaging first sentences that push the plot farther along. All of these things are wonderful techniques; however, the plots, especially for longer works, tend to eventually come back around to the idea of setting up the core conflict of the story at some point, thereby requiring some kind of inciting incident. Knowing that you have that element to look forward to when you begin writing, you might feel tempted to zoom past the other exposition in the story to get to that moment. I whole-heartedly understand where that notion originates, but the exposition allows us to understand and appreciate the characters enough to care about what they are going through. As a result, you can pace yourself as you work to get to that point of the story. We don’t want to unnecessarily drag our feet, but we definitely don’t want to run toward the inciting incident so quickly that we can’t appreciate how we arrived there.

2. Don’t rush past it.

Just as you had to patiently navigate yourself toward the inciting incident, you will also want to avoid running past it. The inciting incident is a pivotal part in the story. The weight you are about to place on the shoulders of your protagonist should be understood and appreciated by the reader. Full empathy for the character comes when the reader is acutely aware of the stakes involved in your story, from where the stakes arose, and what choices the character will have to face to move forward. In the aforementioned movie, Friday, the inciting incident occurs when the protagonist is offhandedly dragged by his best friend into efforts to pay an ice cream truck-owning weed dealer back a certain sum of money. Prior to the dealer’s arrival, our protagonist, Craig, was having a regular day (or as regular a day as he could have, given that he’d been fired on his day off). The notion that Craig has been dragged into the hijinks of his best friend, Smokey, immediately kicks off the struggles that will propel his character through the rest of the movie. Still, in that moment of discovering the obstacles that lay ahead, the character is given a moment to allow this alteration to his daily plans to sink in. One might also view this breathing space as the opportunity for the character to completely digest his situation and get a glimpse at the obstacles that lie ahead. We as viewers or readers get to share this moment, and that shared recognition of the inciting incident is what allows us to root for the character even more enthusiastically going forward.

3. Use your exposition wisely to set up your story for the inciting incident.

Just because we are aware of the need for the inciting incident doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend the time carefully crafting how we arrive at this point. Carefully crafting your exposition is akin to not only driving there (which is essentially the focus of my first point), but also doing this in style. It goes without saying that pacing and style are not necessarily synonymous, but they do impact each other. How you layer in the exposition can affect the impact of the inciting incident when it does arise. One of my favorite short stories to teach my students, Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “Baxter’s Procrustes,” is an excellent example of this. The story is about a group of literary aficionados calling themselves the Bodleian Club and a mishap that happens with one of its members. The story is narrated by one of its members, Jones, who gives a detailed background of the club and its value so that when we encounter the inciting incident, we can appreciate the magnitude of the dilemma that will follow. “Baxter’s Procrustes” might have one of the longest sections of exposition I have come across in a short story in quite some time, as it is meticulous about establishing the mood and tone of the story. In fact, a casual reader might not even recognize the exact moment in which the inciting incident occurs—or whom the protagonist really is, for that matter. The inciting incident is far more impactful, not just because of the pacing, but the manner in which the exposition was developed while reaching the inciting incident.

In my second novel, 30 Love, I used this technique to establish the events of the novel. The inciting incident of that book is when Dizzy asks Lailah, his best friend of 30 years, to marry him, based upon an off-handed agreement they’d made 10 years earlier. In building up to this turning point, I establish the nature of their friendship and how they have interacted with each other over the years through the telling of how they celebrate their joint birthdays (since they were born on the same day to parents who were best friends, as well). By using the exposition more efficiently, the inciting incident carries much more emotional resonance when it occurs, especially since Lailah’s response is not a foregone conclusion. Inciting incidents are more likely to hook the reader when readers are invested in the characters, so make the most of your exposition.

Order a copy of Ran Walker’s 30 Love today. 

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4. Recognize what that moment means for your character.

Now that we have arrived at the inciting moment, how does this moment affect your character? This is not merely a question of what the character should do; it must also take into account how the character’s personality is equipped to deal with this turning point. Some characters will willingly accept the charge and move forward. Others might piddle around trying to make sense of how to proceed. Whatever reaction the character has to this inciting incident should be explored and understood, as it will usually factor into how the character elects to approach the obstacles of the rising action. It is always good to know what makes your character’s reaction unique in that moment, given what you have developed about them in the exposition of the story. For example, in Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of an Hour,” we meet a woman who has just learned her husband has passed away in a train wreck. Her grief quickly turns way to relief, as she has a chance to really consider what his death will mean to her regaining her freedom to be something other than his wife. Without giving away the story’s conclusion, it is worth pointing out that the protagonist’s reaction to this inciting incident is a big part of the story’s plot. As you write your inciting incident, it would be helpful to keep in mind how your character will respond to this.

5. Always understand what your inciting incident is, even if you choose not to show it in the actual story.

There are numerous stories, whether due to their length or the style of structure they employ, that simply do not illustrate the inciting incident directly to the reader. Instead, the inciting incident is implied and understood upon a closer reading of the text. A good example of this is Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a classic tale in which a Confederate sympathizer is put to death. What he did, however, is never directly stated in the text, only implied, yet those very actions have created the situation in which he finds himself. Of course, this reading of the story only comes from considering the totality of the plot (including those things that occur “offstage”). For readers who seek an inciting incident within the text, they might turn to the snapping of the rope as this turning point, but using the definition I stated earlier, the point at which Peyton Farquhar’s life takes a turn away from the normal is when he decides to help the Confederate cause by taking the information shared to him by an undercover federal scout and do something bold and punishable by death if he’s caught (which, spoiler alert, he is). As I consider my own microfiction, I realize that having an understanding of where the inciting incident is will help me to write tighter stories. Many of my stories occur after the inciting incident would have, theoretically, occurred. This is by design, as much of microfiction is about implication. Still, in the absence of showing it, my stories are much stronger because I still recognize that it’s there, just like an implied “you” or implied “that.” Whether or not you choose to actually have the inciting incident as a part of your story in a direct way, you should still have an understanding of what caused the change in your text and set in motion the conflict that will anchor your story. This harkens back to the theory of the iceberg, where most of your story is underwater and never actually seen by the reader, yet it is incredibly important to the writer, especially in terms of how they choose to craft the portion of the story that is seen by the reader.

Final Thoughts

My wife is fond of telling me that it’s important to know your why when it comes to doing things. Understanding the purpose and the function of an inciting incident is essentially having a complete grasp of your character’s why. Why is this situation important to your character? Why does your character choose to react to this situation in this particular way? Why does the character feel compelled to follow this trail of conflicts in the quest for a resolution? There is a certain logic that arises when you are acting from an understanding of the why, and this understanding and appreciation of inciting incidents will help you to deliver the stories you long to tell in a way that has a greater chance of satisfying your readers that much more.

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The post This Changes Everything appeared first on Writer's Digest.

She teaches writing and is a member of the steering committee of New Directions, a writing program for scholars and psychotherapists offered by the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. At Politics and Prose, she co-leads sold out workshops helping writers find the imagery–and language–that is uniquely theirs.

The mother and stepmother of three foodies, she has been married for 38 years to her rye bread co-conspirator, John Melngailis, a retired professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. The couple live, cook, and entertain in Chevy Chase, MD. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

In this post, Michaele explains how she discovered the structure of her memoir, what she rediscovered during the writing process, and more.

Name: Michaele Weissman
Literary agent: Eleanor Jackson, DCL
Book title: The Rye Bread Marriage
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release date: August 15, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Memoir/culinary history
Previous titles: God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee; Deadly Consequences (with Deborah Prothrow Stith); A History of Women in America (with Carol Hymowitz)
Elevator pitch for the book: The Rye Bread Marriage is a memoir that explores the roots of my husband’s obsession with Latvian rye bread; while telling the story of his dramatic wartime childhood; and plumbing the complexities of our marriage with this question in mind: How do partners who are opposites, live together without wringing each other’s necks?

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What prompted you to write this book?

The Rye Bread Marriage found me, as books sometimes do. The title popped into my head one morning as I woke. I didn’t know what it meant. That, after many false starts, I would write a literary memoir exploring the meaning of rye bread and the meaning of marriage, while recounting my husband’s story and my own, was beyond anything I could have imagined when I began.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

John and I traveled to Latvia (with side trips to Estonia and Lithuania) in 2010 and 2012, but it wasn’t till 2013 that I produced a partial, very boring first draft. Only slowly did it dawn on me that I was writing a memoir not a journalistic food narrative.

I wrote many drafts between 2014 and 2018—some of what I wrote (in my opinion) was beautiful, but the whole did not cohere. In 2018, I realized that my problem was structural: My chapters were too long, preventing me from moving nimbly among my three subjects.

Reading Abigail Thomas taught me that when it comes to structure there are no rules. I broke the book down into segments—chapters—of varying length, interweaving longish chapters and very short ones; narrative chapters and chapters in which I commented on my own experience. This enabled me to return time and again to the subject of the bread without getting bogged down.

My agent, the wonderfully patient Eleanor Jackson sent the book out in 2019. It didn’t sell. I rewrote a bit and she sent it out again in 2020, just as the pandemic brought the world to a halt. The book sold in February 2021. Two publishers were interested, and I got a decent deal.

Due to the pandemic and the assiduousness of the Algonquin’s editorial process—the book will be published on August 15, 2023. Happily, this delay meant that I will be able to market the book live, meeting readers in person.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The Rye Bread Marriage is my fourth book, so I had a pretty good sense of the publishing process. I was surprised, however, and delighted by the quality of my editors at Algonquin. The acquiring editor, Abby Muller, was only 26 when she bought this book describing a marriage that has lasted many more years than she has been on this earth.

Despite the differences in our ages, Abby got me and my book. She became its inhouse champion. When Abby was recruited by another publishing house, she made sure that my book, rather than being an orphan, became the property of Algonquin’s brilliant editor in chief, Amy Gash.

Amy was respectful of Abby’s fine editing. I will forever be grateful to Amy, however, for honing in on something I had missed: in several key spots I had glossed over the implication of my own words, my own story, chickening out from fully knowing myself. Amy encouraged me to think again, and I had the brains to take her advice.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Memoir requires a depth of focus, a condensation of language, and a discovery of imagery and structure (the material determines the structure) that go far beyond a simple recounting of facts and a telling of stories. I hadn’t known if I were capable of working at this deep level, until I did it.

The other happy surprise: I rediscovered—and fully owned—my own humor. A million years ago when I was single, I had written humor for Cosmopolitan Magazine: first person humor pieces about my life as a single woman in New York City. Writing funny came naturally, but I felt these magazine pieces only skimmed the surface. I had a sense that someday, when I was a better writer, more able to write in depth, I would return to writing in the first person and writing humor.

And, in fact, that is precisely what happened.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

This is a tough one: Readers get what they get, and I respect that, although sometimes it is a bit surprising. In an ideal universe, I would like readers to come away with a new understanding of and appreciation for the impact of history and of stories on all of our lives. I would like them to understand what it means to be a refugee, a displaced person. I would love it if they were able to view their relationships, all their relationships, with a new understanding of—and tolerance for—psychological complexity. I want them to have a deeper understanding and appreciation of food in general and of bread, this first and most fundamental food, and I would like them to laugh.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Allow yourself to experiment. Allow yourself to play. Understand that overcoming your fear of your own literary insufficiency, is part of the writing process. Work hard, but don’t rush. The book will take as long as it takes.

If you feel stymied. Take writing courses—but only from teachers who know their stuff and are kind. Hang out with other writers when it works for you, but allow yourself to (temporarily) withdraw if that is what you need.

Learn to trust yourself and your own story. Oh and this: Having an agent is great (I am infinitely grateful to Eleanor Jackson), but your agent cannot save your life. By which I mean, you have to find your story by yourself. No one else can do this work for you.

[Click to continue.]

The post Michaele Weissman: On Finding the Answers to Bread, Relationships, and Herself appeared first on Writer's Digest.

She lives in Northern California with her husband and her daughter’s very spoiled, retired service dog. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, Deborah shares how a song and depth psychology helped inspire her novel, along with some thoughts on the publishing process and outlining.

Name: Deborah Crossland
Literary agent: Mollie Glick
Book title: The Quiet Part Out Loud
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Release date: June 27, 2023
Genre/category: YA Contemporary
Elevator pitch for the book: For fans of You’ve Reached Sam and A Heart in a Body in the World, this searing and heartrending teen novel follows an ex-couple as they struggle to reunite in the wake of a devastating earthquake.

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What prompted you to write this book?

A couple years ago, a song called “If the World Was Ending” by JP Saxe and Julia Michaels made its way onto one of my playlists. It’s about a couple who’d broken up and are now living completely separate lives. After a small earthquake, they ask each other that if a major disaster struck, would they spend their last days together. I became obsessed with this idea that two people, who loved each other intensely enough to want to share their last moments on earth together, couldn’t get out of their own way long enough to be happy.

At the time, I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D. in mythological studies with an emphasis in depth psychology, so I was reading a lot about C. G. Jung’s shadow archetype theory. And the song reminded me of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice where Orpheus journeys all the way into the underworld to retrieve his love.

Somehow all of it became enmeshed and Mia, one of the main characters was born. Because I wouldn’t stop talking about the premise, my critique partner dared me to put my dissertation aside and write what we were calling “the earthquake book,” and I did.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The entire process took about three years. The major storyline never really changed but how I structured it went through the most variations. After the premise rumbled around in my brain for a month or so, I started playing with the plot.

I knew I wanted to tell the story of their romance as well as the one after the quake, but I wasn’t sure how I could fit all of it into one book. It took some trial and error with point of view and present and past tense, and then I did the thing every English teacher (including myself!) tells their students not to do—wrote one POV in second person.

I’ll admit, I did wrestle with how I wanted the story to end, but I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Oh, yes! I feel like what a pre-published author knows about the actual publishing process is akin to reading a blurb on the back of a book to figure out a story’s complete plotline. I had no idea how many people it takes to make a story book-worthy, but I am so grateful for every one of them. I probably asked way too many questions!

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I’m a huge plotter. I use sticky notes, a white board, and have even developed my own 27-step Heroine’s Journey outline. Outlining the two points of view separately was its own task, but the process of putting them in conversation with each other was a fun challenge.

I loved crafting sentences and sayings they would’ve picked up from each other when they were together and using them in the post-earthquake storyline to show how much they’re still connected.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I’m an internal stakes stan. Give me a story where I can dive deep into a character’s psyche, and I’ll be over the moon. So, if readers could take anything away from The Quiet Part Out Loud, it’s the metaphor of the earthquake and all that goes with it.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

The best thing I could tell other writers is to not be afraid to challenge yourself. Trust your instincts and write the thing.

[Click to continue.]

The post Deborah Crossland: On Finding a Premise and Outlining appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Grammar rules for writers.)

Rather, we’re looking at bigger picture mistakes and mishaps, including the error of using too much exposition, neglecting research, or researching too much. This week’s writing mistake writers make is ending your story too soon.

Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Ending Your Story Too Soon

Have you ever read a book with a really unsatisfying ending? I don’t mean stories with purposefully abrupt endings, like a diary ending due to the character death. I’m also not going to discuss books that end with a cliffhanger as a part of series. And, no, I don’t mean a book with a twist right at the end that goes against your expectations.

So what do I mean?

I’m talking about a book that has perfect pacing … until you get to the end. The conclusion might feel rushed or pushed aside in favor of getting to The End. As a reader, it always makes me feel like the writer was tired of the story and just wanted to wrap it up quickly so they could move onto something else.

When it comes to the pacing of your work, you have to give just as much love and care to the end as you do to the beginning or to the climax. Neglecting your ending will frustrate your readers and might even make them feel like they’ve wasted their time.

(Six Logical Writing Structures)

Mistake Fix: Understand Your Story’s Structure

If you haven’t heard of the three-act story structure, you might already know it. It’s the most popular structure for narratives in the Western world. It looks a little like this:

• Act I—Setup: Introduction, Inciting Incident, Plot Point One 
• Act II—Confrontation: Rising Action, Midpoint, Plot Point Two 
• Act III—Resolution: Pre-Climax, Climax, Falling Action

In Act I, we are introduced to your character and their world—this is where we will get to understand what their day-to-day is like. Then we have the inciting incident or the point where the usual becomes unusual. This is the moment when Prim is selected for the Hunger Games, Elsa hits Anna with an ice blast, and Elizabeth overhears Mr. Darcy’s negative opinion of her at the ball. Plot point one is where your character will decide to answer the call to action presented in the inciting incident—Katniss takes her sister’s place, Elsa and Anna reconnect at Elsa’s coronation, and Elizabeth’s opinion of Mr. Darcy is cemented.

Act II is where the action ramps up and will be the bulk of your plot. Rising action is where your characters will face challenges as they pursue their goal—they may overcome them or be defeated by them, but regardless, you are working to build conflict and tension. This is where Katniss trains to enter the Games, Elsa flees the kingdom while Anna chases after her, and Elizabeth rejects Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal. The midpoint is, of course, the middle of your story. This is where something should go horribly wrong or incredibly right for your character. This is where Katniss has to choose between giving up or joining in on the violence of the Games, Anna arrives at Elsa’s ice palace, and Elizabeth reads Mr. Darcy’s letter explaining himself after her rejection. Plot point two is generally when your protagonist is down-and-out—we want to give them time to reflect on their journey and pivot their plans in some way. This is when Katniss tracks down Peeta, Anna’s hair begins to turn white while Elsa continues to fail to control her emotions, and Elizabeth realizes that she might not have been completely right about Mr. Darcy.

Act III kicks off with the pre-climax. This is where the protagonist gears up to face the antagonist—Katniss realizes that the hounds have the eyes of the tributes, forcing her to face trauma she’s been ignoring; Kristoff takes Anna back to the palace to be betrayed by Hans and Elsa is captured; Lydia elopes with Mr. Wickam, which Elizabeth believes will ruin any chance to redeem her family in Mr. Darcy’s eyes. While the pre-climax is usually comprised of several scenes, the climax itself is normally contained to a single scene. This is the do-or-die moment, the moment Katniss and Peeta outsmart the game makers, Anna sacrifices herself for her sister, and Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy affirm their feelings for each other.

Now we get to the part where a lot of writers will try and speed through—the falling action.

The falling action is where all of your loose ends will be tied up, where the protagonist (and your reader!) will be able to take a deep breath for the first time in a long time, and where you will underscore your story’s theme and fulfill the promises you made to your reader at the start of the story. Think about this as when Katniss and Peeta are taken to the hospital and then back home after being removed from the arena, when Elsa revives Anna and they reaffirm their relationship with one another (and Anna shares her kiss with Kristoff), and the Bennet’s react to Lizzy and Mr. Darcy’s engagement as well as their wedding scene. The falling action should be more than a single scene and the pace should slow from the rush-hour of the pre-climax and climax to something gentler and more thoughtful.

Again, not every single story will follow this structure, but if yours does, take another look at your falling action. It could be the difference between a story that falls short of crossing the finish line and a story that will touch your reader’s heart and give them something they will definitely remember!

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The post Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Ending Your Story Too Soon appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Joseph Epstein wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that “81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them—and that they should write it.” He then urged people not “to write that book … Keep it inside you, where it belongs.”

(Embracing the Blank Page: Why All Writing is an Act of Courage)

Setting aside Epstein’s advice, it is obvious that far fewer than 81 percent of the population actually become published.

Why is that? What separates professional writers from amateurs? Whatever the perceived talent of each writer, which is subjective, it is an objective fact that every published author started out as an amateur writer. The first, and perhaps most important, difference between the professional and the aspiring writer, is that the published ones finished their books.

When I started writing my first novel, The Serpent Sword, time was the main thing holding me back. Or rather, a lack of it. I had a young family, a full-time job, and on top of that, I sang in a gigging rock band!

I quickly decided that if I was going to make writing work, I needed a plan that would help me to take advantage of what little time I had.

The first thing I did was to set myself a weekly target of three thousand words. It’s important to have challenging but achievable goals so that you have something to celebrate each week.

I only had small windows of time in which to write (an hour while my kids were at dance class, Taekwondo, or band practice, a couple of hours in an evening after they were in bed, that kind of thing). I didn’t have the luxury of being able to sit down for hours on end waiting for the muse, so I structured my writing process around small chunks of time and wrote wherever I could (sitting at the edge of a sports hall, waiting in the car outside, in a coffee shop, on a plane, in a hotel room while on a work trip, on a train, anywhere).

Ten novels later, I am now a full-time writer, I’ve left the band, and my kids have grown up, but, although my word count target has increased, I still use the same basic approach to getting words on the page (or more accurately on the screen).

There are broadly speaking two approaches to writing: those who plan, and those who write by the seat of their pants (referred to in the writing community as “pantsers”). I don’t plan every detail upfront, as I would find that stifling, but I definitely do a certain amount of plotting. If you want to just start writing, good luck to you. There are plenty of successful authors who fall into that category, but I find that some form of roadmap helps with productivity.

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The first thing I do is map out the high-level synopsis of the novel. This is a very rough story outline; general ideas about the characters, what they will do, their goals and conflicts, significant events, and the overall story arc.

As I write historical fiction, at this stage, I need to do enough research to make sure that the story hangs together, but I try not to get bogged down in the minutiae. For me, story beats history every time.

By the time the synopsis is complete, I have the backbone of the novel.

Next, I break that down into chapters. For each chapter, I write a mini synopsis. If a chapter contains more than one scene, I break it down into smaller chunks. Each scene has its own short description, which can be just one sentence, like “Character A discusses the battle with Character B”). I try to keep the length of each scene to something I can ideally write in one sitting, typically between 500-1500 words. Completing a scene gives you a great sense of achievement.

One of the mistakes writers often make is to continually go back over what they have written, rewriting and tweaking. If you do that, the prose of your first chapter might become very polished, but it will take a long time to finish that elusive first draft. And without a completed manuscript, there is no chance of getting published.

So, avoid tinkering, and write chronologically. Start at the beginning and keep writing. Apart from keeping you focussed on getting the draft written, writing sequentially helps to give novels pace. If you are getting bored writing a certain section, you will hurry it up so that you can move on to the next, hopefully, more exciting part.

As I get to each unwritten chapter, I take stock of whether the original mini synopsis is still accurate. As I don’t plot out every single thing that happens in the story, new characters might have appeared, or events might have played out slightly differently than I originally anticipated. However, the general gist of the chapter is usually still intact.

When I sit down to write, I first re-read what I wrote in the last session and do some minor editing; just typos and fixing mistakes. This helps clean it up a bit, but more importantly, it gets me back into the story, allowing me to pick up the narrative easily.

As the word count adds up, things inevitably change from my original ideas, but I do not allow my progress to get derailed. If I get stuck on a point, such as a name, or a historical detail, I put the section in square brackets [like this] and carry on writing. In this way, my flow is not interrupted. The goal is to complete that first draft. For me, that is the biggest and most important milestone. After that, everything is polish and improvement, but the story is there.

When you have finished the first draft, well done—you’re a writer! As soon as the warm glow of achievement wears off, search through your files for all the square brackets, and start filling in the gaps you left during the writing.

After doing that, I print the whole thing out and read it through. This is the closest I ever get to experiencing what it is like for a reader of my books. The first chapters were written months before, so I cannot remember all the details. This is the phase when I start critiquing the work.

While reading, you will find errors, and sections that need to be expanded, moved, or even deleted. Be truthful and ruthless.

After I have made the necessary changes, I send the book to a few trusted test readers, who provide me with completely fresh feedback.

Once I have addressed their comments, the book is ready to be sent to my editor. He will almost certainly ask for more changes, but from this point, the novel has been handed over and is part of the publishing process. Of course, there is still a lot of work to do—copy editing and proofreading, and the terror of strangers reading my writing. But that comes later and, hey, I wanted to be a writer, right?

Nobody said writing a novel would be easy, but if you can finish putting your story idea into words, you are that much closer to publication. Whether you decide to follow some of my process, or if you prefer to just sit down and go for it, or if you choose a different approach entirely, I wish you luck. Whatever happens, I’ll be rooting for you.

We authors need to stick together.

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The post Writing for the Time Impoverished: How to Structure Your Writing to Make Sure You Finish Your Novel appeared first on Writer's Digest.