A comment elsewhere by Deep Lurker nailed something so fundamental that I don't think I'd ever fully realized it before, when brainstorming story ideas and rejecting what seem like perfectly reasonable suggestions:
When I have a Cool Idea as a story-starter, I really don’t want it to become the Story Problem. It might be the Cool Solution to the ( Read more... )

Patricia Wrede has a post up about character goals, and specifically story-level goals vs. scene-level goals and how each might be helpful (or not) for the writer at various stages.

Although it's a character-oriented post, and I've ranted many times about how I get character stuff when I ask for help with plot, I think this might actually be useful ( Read more... )

( More spoilerish rambling about unpublished novel )

This is an example of why plot as it's usually discussed doesn't make sense to me.

( Spoilers for as-yet-unfinished and unpublished novel... )

So, here I sit, some few chapters/15,000 words or so from the end of the novel. I know, in broad strokes, what still needs to happen: they find the bad guy's contact and interrogate him/her, the rebels do that thing I've been thinking about since I realized I had a sub-plot, the second both helps and gets in the way of the first, etc., etc ( Read more... )

I mentioned in a very previous post that I came up with a way to ask something, and it didn't work ( Read more... )

(Whattaya know, for once I've actually managed to do the 'nother post ( Read more... )

Ever have one of those days when you can't seem to finish anything without twelve other things interrupting, if you set something down for a second you end up having to ransack the entire house to find it again, and the only way to get something put away is to keep it clutched tightly in your hand until it's where it belongs and never set it down ( Read more... )