What most people do is they get a good idea and start writing. Then their story runs out of team around page 60 and they don’t know what to do. The first solution is to pad the story with more stuff, which weakens the overall story. The better solution is to use subplots. A subplot […]

Most plots can be summed up as simply as Man vs. Man, but some plots are more like Man vs. Nature. So how do you make a natural event a compelling villain? You create a person to represent the villain. In “The King’s Speech,” the biggest obstacle is the Duke of York’s stuttering problem, which […]

Here’s a one-dimensional story. A villain is doing something bad for the sake of being evil, and the hero defeats the villain just because the hero is always good. Boring, right? Here’s how to make it more interesting. Your villain has his own goal and your hero has his own problems. Neither one cares about […]

Take a true story and it’s rarely interesting when told factually. Most true stories have long periods of time when nothing exciting happens and that makes true stories less interesting. When turning a true story into fiction, you have to condense, trim, and modify facts to form a coherent story. “The Men Who Stare at […]

Your villain has a goal that has nothing to do with your hero. Your hero also has a goal that has nothing to do with the villain. Somehow you have to link your hero to your villain so their worlds collide. Initially, your hero is stuck in a dead-end life and your villain is busy […]