More tips

• Start at the climax of your story and work backwards (already having a vision of how your protagonist is transformed at the end).
• Pay attention to coherence and meaning as you generate story ideas
• Link dramatic action to emotional development
• During a walk, visualize yourself plotting the scenes.
• Hang a plot planner on the wall to remember the story sequence.
• Try showing a character's emotional growth in linear form on a plot planner that's separate from the dramatic action planner. Then compare both to see how they interact.

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The beginning - comfort and separation

• Introductions (characcters, theme): Who/What/Why. Dramatic action, character emotional development to happen, thematic significance.
• Grounding: When/where.
• Beginnings are times of grandiose dreams of escape, success, change,and possibilities.
• Introduce one character at a time, beginning with the protagonist. Give the reader a chance to become grounded in the style of the story, to become familiar with the setting, to focus on the main character. Don't overwhelm them.
• Establish the story's time and place
• Setup the dramatic action and underlying conflict that will run throughout the story
• Introduce major characters, giving an idea of who they are, their emotional makeup and the weight they carry in the story.
• Allude to the theme
• Introduce the protagonist's short-term goal and think on his long-term goal
• What do you promise your readers the story is about? 
• Place alerts to the limitations of your story
• Don't tell a character's backstory until the readers had a chance to meet him
• Begin by showing the character on his best behaviour, hint at weaknesses and flaws, but leave them at the background. Then the reader will be more forgiving.
• Consider how curiosity works! The longer you wait to deliver the backstory, the explanation of what in the past made the character who she is today, the greater the impact of the relevation.
• Flashback / dumping details in-dialogue / what you leave out is as important as what stays in
• You can inject backstory info through word choices, mood, tone, actions, reactions.
• In rare cases, infodumps work.
• Rather than backstory, show what the character is unable to do due to flawed beliefs. The middle then becomes a journey to relearn / reattain a skill / knowledge lost / forgotten / stolen necessary to conquer his greatest challenge at the climax. 

Middle

• Resistance and struggle
• The characer is confronted with a strange new world that's fertile ground for exploration/exposition. The old rules and beliefs no longer apply.

Halfway point

• The next major turning point.

The crisis

• Often, before the true road appears, failure, brokenness, fear, emptiness and alienation cause suffering and loss, and the old must be destroyed

The writer's way

• Staggering from metaphorical death and pain, you enter a threshold. Choices: (1) resist what is and become a victim (2) yield to what is and become a victor.
• Stripped of everything at the crisis, you already see your protagonist's story mirror your own.

End, transformation and return

• After the crisis, the energy of the story turns down briefly and then expands.
• The pieces of the story begin to form a bigger picture.
• The end begins when the protagonist takes the final steps necessary for the completion of his long-term goal.

Climax

• Reconnect with ultimate destiny. The promise of transformation is fealized and released.

Resolution

• The sum of the character's actions. Gives the reader a sense of what the story would look like now that the protegonist is transformed.

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• Foreshadowing = anticipation
• Write a synopsis of your story
• Diagram: revisit the theme bubbles. Cross out all but the strongest themes. Keep tewaking the theme by combining the smaller bubbles differently.
• Accidents are a rebellion against authority.