Act two is the middle of your story–the largest part, at least 50%. The best description of the second act I’ve ever heard came from one of Brandon Sanderson’s teaching videos on YouTube, which I highly recommend. He said that…
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Three Act Structure–Act Two
Tagged with: Cathleen Townsend, dark night of the soul, first pinch point, midpoint, plot point number two, second act, second pinch point, story structure, three act structure
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Three Act Structure–Act One: The Point of No Return
You’ve written your hook, messed up your character’s life with the inciting incident, and now it’s time to finish act one. Your character must initially come to grips with this thing that’s happened to them. In National Treasure, Ben Gates…
Tagged with: act one, Cathleen Townsend, first act, first plot point, point of no return, three act structure
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Three Act Structure–Act One: Inciting Incident
So, you’ve got your story idea, and it’s a good one. Now you want to write it up and do it justice. Being smart, you’re going to learn about story structure first, so you don’t write 80,000 words and then…
Tagged with: act one, Cathleen Townsend, inciting incident, story structure, three act structure
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
The Hook
No matter what story structure you use, or even if you don’t consciously use story structure at all, every writer should have an understanding of the hook. It is, of course, so named because you want to hook readers at…
Watch Out for Homophones
Misspellings in general are always to be avoided, but homophones (aka homonyms) are particularly tricky, because Word and other word processing programs won’t catch them. You’ve used a correct English word—it’s just that you’ve used the wrong one. 1)There—they’re—their There…
Three Act Structure–An Overview
The three act structure is arguably the oldest around, if you accept that it began with Aristotle’s assertions that stories must have a beginning, middle, and end. But while this is a decent start, it’s not particularly useful for storytellers.…
Tagged with: Brandon Sanderson writing course, Cathleen Townsend, novelists, screenwriters, three act structure
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Twitter Encounter with Robin Hobb
As far as I’m concerned, this story made opening my Twitter account worthwhile all by itself. When I started following people on Twitter, I looked up some of my favorite authors to see if they had accounts, and I was…
Story Structure–Important for Both Plotters and Discovery Writers
Story structure is incredibly important to your writing. It’s the skeleton on which you hang your entire tale. No matter how lovely your prose, if you aren’t telling a solid tale underneath, most readers will be unhappy with it. They…
Tagged with: Cathleen Townsend, discovery writer, outline, pantser, plotter, story structure, synopsis
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Editor’s List of Common Mistakes
I found these tips here at AbsoluteWrite, an online writing group that was a great help to me in dealing with the horrible helpless feeling over having no idea how to edit my books. This list was the very first…
Your Protagonist–Don’t Write a Mary Sue
New writers have a tendency to write characters who are unrealistically perfect. After all, if you’re female, wouldn’t it be great to have long blonde hair, perfect boobs, and big blue eyes that charm every guy around? And if you’re…
Cathleen Townsend 