What makes you keep reading a story? I keep reading a story if I am waiting for a conflict to be resolved, a mystery to be solved, or to see the fairytale ending. Without a clear well defined plot you cannot hook your readers and keep them reading. I have recently reviewed several works that did not have clear plots. These stories had a lot of adventure and conflict but at the end of the story I couldn’t identify what the plot was. Some of these works had 3 or 4 mini plots but not an overarching goal linking them together.

The plot is all the events in a story related to the achievements of the protagonist, primarily consisting of the conflicts the main character faces in opposition to the antagonist. The plot should have a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The beginning should give readers a chance to learn about the characters, the setting, and the problems/conflict that needs to resolve. The middle should contain the majority of the action and reveal why the problem cannot be easily solved. The end is where the protagonist finally resolves the problems or conflict.

You can start developing a great plot by developing a believable character with a problem that has to be solved by the character’s bravery and cleverness. Truly engaging works often have the main character try and fail several times before solving the problem or resolving the conflict.

Would you like to know how well you have developed your plot? Submit your story to Review Fuse and let our writing community critique your plot.

Jacob

Here is a list of free online writing courses. I have not completed any of these courses yet so please let me know what you think of these courses. Writing is not easy. Any new writer should start by taking time to really understand his/her craft. While you are here, feel free to join Review Fuse and submit your stories for peer critique.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Introduction to Fiction
• Writing and Reading Short Stories
• Advanced Essay Workshop

Open University

• Fiction Writing Course
• Descriptive Writing Course
• Essay Writing Course

University of Utah

• Introduction to Shakespeare
• Introduction to Creative Writing
  

Western Governors University

• Rhetorical and Critical Writing
• Language and Communications
• Literature Course - Parts I and II

Purdue University

• Proofreading Your Writing
• Conquering the Comma

E-Zine University

• Writing Clearly and Effectively
• Conquering Confusing Words
• Quick Ways to Clean Up Your Writing

Wikiversity

• Narrative Dialog Editing

Enjoy the classes,

Jacob

Villains come in many forms such as monsters, people, aliens, mental disorders, ghosts, and relatives. Villains provide the conflict a story needs to be entertaining and interesting. Here are the top 10 ways to create a truly vile villain.

1. Perform the introduction and follow up interviews with the villain. In order to develop villains that are credible, believable, and logical, you must know them as well as you know your hero.
2. Thoroughly explain throughout your story the villain’s motives and why he feels his actions are justified and rational.
3. Explain your villain physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Make him a three-dimensional and complete person.
4. Show your readers that the villain has the power and resources to destroy the hero. Make the villain very threatening.
5. Do not allow the villain to see himself as evil, insane, stupid, or whiny. People don’t typically view themselves this way, and it will destroy the villain’s credibility if he views himself this way.
6. Keep the plot uncertain. Never make it look like either side is definitely going to win. Suspense intensifies a story and pulls the reader in more effectively than any other tool.
7. Use the villain to showcase the hero’s qualities. The perceived power of the hero is strongly correlated to the villainy demonstrated by the villain.
8. Strengthen the villain by giving him a chance to present his case while demonstrating his intelligence, logic, and adaptability.
9. Give the villain traits most people hate or loathe about themselves or society at large. This allows the reader to understand and relate to the villain’s motives.
10. Give the villain normal or even likable traits that are demonstrated by average people. Doing so will strengthen the plot and the characters by creating an inner conflict within the reader who despises what the villain is doing, while at the same time relating to and possibly even liking him.

Do you want to know how vile your villains are? Join Review Fuse and let our community critique your work.

Jacob

Bad dialog plagues most beginning writers. The following top 10 list will help you write good dialog.

1. Start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes. Never have two people speak in the same paragraph.
2. Make sure the reader knows who is speaking.
3. Make the speech sound like normal conversation.
4. Be concise; cut out words that do not serve the conversation’s purpose.
5. Break up the dialog with action, as readers can be overloaded with too much dialog.
6. Avoid profanity, slang, and stereotypes. Each of these types of speech will date your writing and help it quickly go out of style.
7. Use correct punctuation and mechanics.
8. Use quotation marks to indicate words which are spoken by characters.
9. Read good and bad dialog to determine what works and what doesn’t.
10. Reveal new facets about your character through the dialog.

Are you curious about well you have developed your dialog? Upload your story and let the Review Fuse community critique your work.

Jacob

Developing characters is difficult. Here are the top 10 things you have to get right in order to develop great characters.

1. Characters must act naturally within the context of the story and setting.
2. Readers must be able to identify with and admire the characters.
3. The protagonist must be heroic, logical, have common sense, face complicated problems, and have worthy goals.
4. Characters need to struggle to overcome conflict. Characters that sometimes fail are easy to identify with. Conflict is the backbone of a story, so make your characters really struggle.
5. Characters should be well rounded physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If any of these three dimensions are missing the characters will feel either hollow or forced.
6. Possess universal traits such as love, hate, fear, guilt, grief, and embarrassment. Everyone possesses these traits which makes it easy to relate with and understand characters with these traits.
7. A character needs flaws. Always doing the right thing for the right reason is boring and predictable. Perfect people are easy to resent and hard to love.
8. The protagonist’s greatest weakness needs to be hammered on throughout the story. This creates both internal and external conflict and establishes the plot.
9. Never let the hero back down. Despite their weaknesses heroes always find a way to face their fears.
10. Make each character a truly unique individual. Give them quirks and provide details that give us insights into who the characters really are.

If you wonder how well you have developed your characters please join our writing community and let us critique your work.

Jacob

In order to learn enough about your protagonist to effectively write about him you need to conduct a follow up interview that focuses on details you need to develop the story. This follow up may interview look short, but should take longer than the initial interview. The two questions you need to answer are:

• What major weakness undermines your protagonist’s strong personality traits?
  • The protagonist needs to be likable so avoid weaknesses that will make people permanently loathe him.
• What monstrous problem does the protagonist have to overcome?
  • The problem should prey on the weakness. The final struggle to overcome the weakness should be part of the victory of the story.
  • Remember to never let the protagonist know he is going to succeed in overcoming this weakness. Let him face a complex set of problems that require his strong personality traits to overcome the issues. Ultimately the sacrifice of his weakness should be required for him to triumph.

Your secondary characters should only have one fundamental problem to solve. Do not try to get to know your secondary characters as well as your protagonist. If you do you will be tempted to develop too many complex characters which will result in a convoluted plot.

Feel free to sign up with or upload your story to Review Fuse, our community will tell you how well your characters have been developed and give you great ideas about how to further improve your story.

Jacob

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas to create a rhetorical or paradoxical effect. For example, the word “oxymoron” was created by combining the Greek words “oxy”, meaning “sharp”, with “moros”, meaning “dull,” making the word oxymoron an oxymoron.

Oxymorons should be used to draw attention to contradiction. Notable authors, like William Shakespeare, filled their works with oxymorons like “damned saint”, “honorable villain” and “loyal deceit” to help readers capture the depth and character of their stories. The absurd descriptions oxymorons create often add humor and emphasize that the subjects they refer to are not real.  Examples include:

• Jumbo shrimp
• Meatless hamburger
• Fun run
• Working vacation
• Roaring silence
• The living dead
• Virtual real estate
• Genuine imitation
• Tight slacks

Oxymorons improve writing in a variety of ways by evoking fresh and vigorous images in your reader’s mind.

Do you want to have your writing critiqued? Join our writing group and let us help you.

Jacob

Paradoxes improve writing by engaging your reader’s intellect with an unsolvable dilemma.  The main components of a paradox are one or more true statements that lead to contradiction in the reader’s mind by defying intuition.  For example, the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, wrote: “Cretans always lie.” This is a wonderful example of a paradox, as it leaves one scratching their head wondering whether Epimenides, the Cretan stating that “Cretan always lie,” is telling the truth, which invalidates the statement, or is a liar himself, thus exemplifying the statement.

While a paradox can contain a variety of elements, a typical paradox complies with three laws:  (1) self reference, (2) one or more contradictory statements, and (3) a circular flow of logic. In the above example, all three laws of the paradox are contained within a single sentence. Firist, Epimendes makes a self-reference by referring to Cretans, which race he belongs to. Then, by presenting the “truth” as a lie, Epimenides forms a contradictory circle of logic, which cannot be resolved.

The paradox’s powerful use of contradiction and circular logic create an intriguing dilemma in our minds that can be endlessly debated but never definitively resolved. Consider Victor Hugo‘s classic novel, Les Misérables. This novel is based on two primary moral paradoxes: (1) whether it was right or wrong for Jean Valjean to steal bread to feed his sister’s starving child, and (2) whether the good acts Jean Valjean performs while a fugitive erase the debt he owes to society? Paradoxes, like these, are perplexing and engaging for readers because they are forced to consider contradictory moral principles, while setting aside their natural tendencies to want to come to a final conclusion about whether the actions were right or wrong.

Some other effective elements that can be used in paradoxes include half-truths and biased assumptions. Consider the use of these tools in the following classic paradox:  A father and son are driving down the road. Their car collides with a light post killing the father and severely injuring the boy. The boy is rushed to the nearest hospital and prepared for surgery. Upon entering the surgery suite, the surgeon exclaims, “I cannot operate on this boy. He’s my son.” Are you trying to figure out how a dead father can operate on his son? If so, then this paradox has effectively performed its job! Happy head scratching!

Jacob

A simple metaphor can improve your writing by drawing vivid pictures in your reader’s mind, helping you to effectively communicate your thoughts and feelings. A metaphor’s power lies in its assertion of the similarities between the subject and the object of a sentence. The subject of the sentence borrows the attributes of the object by claiming that the subject is equal to the object. Thus, when using a metaphor, the subject only needs a brief description because it inherits the attributes of the object.

Consider this metaphor: Time is a thief. How well did I just describe time? What does this metaphor assert are the similarities between the subject and object of the sentence, time and a thief? This example illustrates how combining a few simple words in a simple metaphor can elicit powerful associations and emotions.

Every literary tool, including metaphors, should be used to enhance the elements of your story, such as the conflict, plot, setting, dialog, and achievements of the characters. Using metaphors appropriately will make your writing more interesting and entertaining. What is your favorite metaphor?

Jacob