S44E7 – During Act III: The Exterior Plot
Act 3 is the whole book in miniature. There’s a beginning, middle, and end. Rising action, climax, and falling action. – Jeff Gerke
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S44E5 – Plot: The Halfway Point
When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. – Margaret Atwood
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S44E1 – Plot: Before Act 1
Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn’t tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren’t working, or what kind of beat needs to come next. – Marcus Sakey
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S34E2 – Plotting vs. Pantsing, Take Two
Write down everything that happens in the story, then in the second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along. – Neil Gaiman
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S30E6 – Heist Stories, aka The Caper
Charlie, there are two kinds of thieves in this world: The ones who steal to enrich their lives, and those who steal to define their lives. Don’t be the latter. Makes you miss out on what’s really important in this life. – Italian Job
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S30E5 – A Descent Into Villainy and Madness
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep…
To sleep, perchance to dream
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet
S25E2 – A Guide to Plotting a Hero’s Journey
There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before. – Joseph Campbell
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S21 Bonus – Story Building: Plot First or Character First?
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. – Ray Bradbury
But how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you’ve traveled with them through every page? – Shannon Hale
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S11E8 – Plan: Basics of Planning a Story from Start to Finish
I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest. – Kurt Vonnegut
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