Rhino Puzzlings

Reposting some advice I gave about using Save the Cat and on conflict in writing. Save the Cat is a formula and a set of beats, but it can't force you to add conflict to your story, which is where a lot of the reader's interest in a story begins. How will Princess Arabella get to the ball to meet lonely Lady Tarantella? How will brave warrior Stu the Terrible escape the were-chicken's nest in time to rescue the orphans from the fire? Romance is very attuned to a structure, and a romance "beat sheet" builds in highs and lows automatically: that first introduction, the situation that gets them together, the rise and fall and rise again of their pairing. Formula is important in that genre, but you must give your characters something to overcome. Give them conflict. The structure is there to guide, but by itself, it's not particularly interesting. What opportunities for conflict are there within the structure? In a romance, there's so many ...

I took advantage of our hiatus from weekly classes to focus on getting the drafted second edition of  One Last Quest done up. It's cooling off now, in the (virtual) trunk, the necessary waiting period between finishing one phase of creating and entering another. I can see the structure I was hoping for, and I can see the impatience I had in writing the early scenes versus the later ones. The re-read and revision felt like flipping through a forgotten photo album, especially where I remember being surprised at the points where the story took on its own life. I also remember how magical that moment felt, the weird writer's high of characters and situations unfolding without intervention. Yes, the voices in my head started taking control, and what of it? Now it's cooling off. We have a six week session going now, and it's been my habit to keep my projects apart, one for class time and our structure exercises, and one for out-of-class time, usually a more matured piece tha...

Astrohaus  recently sponsored their second-annual "flash fiction" Freewrite 500 writing challenge . You might know their name. They're makers of various typewriter-like writing devices  with a high design-y aspect. I don't  need  one, but I've kept my eyes on them for a while. They gave away three models to the top three entrants, in a field of over one thousand. Alas, I didn't place (again, I don't need one ) but I put an entry in. The theme this year was "Haunted" with a hard limit of 500 words. Being a novelist, I'm not used to constraining myself to that tight a limit, and it was a genuine personal challenge to pack as much story as I could into as little space as was allowed. I cut a lot of setup out, and spent a fair amount of time iterating on swapping out words, opening up space in one portion to be able to expand in another. As an exercise, I learned a lot. If they run it again next year, I...

  One Last Quest  is getting questier. I'm still working to keep the shape of the story the same, staying with the original beats but mixing in new motivations, new richness, and new dumb jokes. At its core, this was always a book that amused me to write. I'm still amused by it, though I'm also shocked at the number of typos present, the weird sentence structure, and the plot gaps. To my eyes now, it reads like a first draft that tried. I'm around 75% through the initial re-read and injection pass, and the book has expanded from around 60K to over 100K in wordcount. I think the skeleton is still strong, and I know I've hung some flabbiness from it, but it's still a shock that I've almost doubled the original "finished" work, just by layering in more. I think this is a good lesson for anyone, especially those looking at their finished work and realizing that their aspirations will require another 20-40K at least to meet some wordcount goal. All thos...