Backstory and its kissing cousin flashback are techniques authors use to provide amplifying information about a situation, a location, or a character. Flashbacks and backstory differ from “front story” in that the author jumps away from the story’s current timeline to relate them, then returns to the story’s present to continue.

Jumping forward in time—a “flash forward”—can have the same purpose, and everything below also applies to it.

Good Backstory Technique

Flashing back is just a technique for relating backstory. A brief interruption of the story’s flow, it can be:

• Initiated by the narrator to provide information not available to the characters or which would be unnatural for the characters to provide;
• A chara...

I was originally going to title this article “Confused Timeline” but as I put my notes together I realized time isn’t the problem (other than me not having enough of it). Of course it’s important that a story flow in a logical sequence of events from its beginning to its end (with some exceptions I’ll get to in a moment), but that sequence doesn’t have to follow a time-linear order.

In fact, more than likely, it won’t. Consider:

• If there’s even one flashback, flash-forward, or instance of a character remembering something, the perfect time sequence is broken. This is true even if the story is written in the present tense.
• Same thing if there are multiple plot lines or point of view characters...

In a way it’s hard to say that a story’s plot is overly complex. Many stories have multiple plot lines, each with their own subplots, and yet the story “works”: the reader can understand what’s going on, the plot lines all make sense (eventually, anyway), and things come together at the end. Maybe the conclusion doesn’t tie everything together in a pretty bow—if the book is part of a series, it shouldn’t unless it’s the last one—but the story doesn’t end in a Gordian knot, either.

So the question isn’t whether a story’s plot is too complex, but whether it’s too complex for the space allotted to it...

This is the first of a 3-part series on critiquing a story’s plot.

The basic concept of plot is simple: it’s the series of events that the characters experience and are involved in that builds in intensity, leading to the story’s climax and resolution. Every story—fiction or non-fiction—has one. In a so-called “literary” story, most of the “action” may be internal to the characters (emotional and/or psychological) rather than external. It may seem like there isn’t much plot, but there has to be some. At the other extreme, pick up any Tom Clancy novel and there’s tons of external activity—chases, explosions, spycraft, you name it—as well as internal action.

The point of this post isn’t to examine...

Quite a collection in today’s Great Stuff. There’s the Hero’s Journey, Niccolo Macchiavelli, who was probably not a hero, Aunt Edna, who might or might not have been one, and a cadaver or two. All in the service of writing. Plus foreign rights agents, dirty talk, and much more. Dive in!

CRAFT

Gregory Ciotti’s (@GregoryCiotti) Copyblogger post, What a Notorious 16^th-Century Philosopher Can Teach You About Content Marketing Today, might seem to have nothing to do with creative writing, given that its target market is the business blogger. That seeming would be wrong. Niccolo Macchiavelli’s The Prince was controversial, sure, and it’s the book he’s most remembered for, but what’s important to us short story and novel writers is how he used controversy to stir—and maintain—inte...

I’ve written about beginnings in the last couple of posts. For the next couple, I’ll discuss the endings of sections or scenes, chapters, and the entire piece. I’ll look at the first two here.

Articles and short stories are often divided into sections or scenes, sometimes even into chapters. Books of all kinds are almost always divided into chapters, and those chapters often have scenes within them.

Why would a chapter, article, or short story be divided into scenes? In fiction, scenes contain the action in a specific time and place, from a particular point of view, or focused on a certain character...

Hey! What happened to Monday? I was traveling, that’s what. And Tuesday? Trying to catch up. And Wednesday? STILL trying to catch up. I’m almost there. So, herewith is an abbreviated and tardy version of Great Stuff: outlining and word choice and beginnings and endings; branding and Goodreads and mastery and saving your work on the cloud.

CRAFT

If you’re an outliner, you understand that your outline is a fixed thing, graven in stone. In What Comes After Once Upon a Time, Robert J. Sadler describes how a little item he threw into a story, not thinking it was going to turn out to be important, instead became a key element in getting his latest novel to its conclusion by a path he never intended. But he trusted his storyteller’s instinct and good things happened.

We all know that we s...

I hope you’re enjoying Great Stuff’s new home. I had a bit of a scare with it on Friday (web site launches are always a bit fraught anyway, so I shouldn’t have been surprised) but all ended well. There’s still more to do with the site but at least we’re up and running.

Today’s Great Stuff is full to overflowing, so I won’t hold you up any longer. Dive in!

CRAFT

You might not think that writing and lawyering have much in common (we’ll not get all snarky here), but lawyer and published novelist Tara Conklin (@TEConklin) makes the case for the commonalities—or case-preparation techniques—you can use to write more effectively in Write Like a Lawyer: 5 Tips for Fiction Writers. A few examples: create a timeline, interrogate your characters, and use only persuasive facts.

Jam...