To engage your reader, especially in today's world filled with distractions, you must keep your story exciting. Excitement is created through dramatic action where a positive outcome for the protagonist is constantly threatened.
Without gorgeous writing, exciting action and/or compelling characters (preferably all three), a reader's mind wanders. A reader with a wandering mind detaches from the story, puts down the book and later, if she does pick the story up again, she'll not recognize where she left off because, though her eyes skimmed the words the first time, meaning didn't penetrate.
Because she has to go back to find where she last remembered reading consciously, any true connection to the story has been compromised and the reader may never fully commit to finishing your story.
Plot Tip:
Find a scene, passage, chapter, section that's boring to you? You can be sure the reader became bored even earlier in the story than you did. Now, rewrite the scene using extreme ideas, wild choices, any surprising elements you can pull in. Brainstorm for all possible ideas to create more conflict and excitement and then hone them to fit your story.
Today I write.
Join me May 1st at 10am Pacific and learn 10 Tips to Immediately Create Great Plots: Everything You Need to Plot a Great Story
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PLOT WORKSHOPS and RETREATS
WRITER PATH PLOT and SCENE RETREATS in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains. May 30 – June 1 Your story deserves to be told. Your writer’s soul needs to be nourished. Learn to identify and write the key scenes that build a page-turning story, master crucial scene types and go deeper into your plot by applying the three key layers that run through all great fiction: action, emotion and theme. Reserve your spot now for the 1st Annual Writer Path Retreat Spring 2014.
A PATH to PUBLISHING
Pre-orders now available for an entirely new support system based on PlotWriMo for writers ready to Revise Your Novel in a Month.
For more: Read my Plot Whisperer and Blockbuster Plots books for writers.
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By: Martha Alderson, M.A.,
on 4/21/2014
Blog: Plot Whisperer for Writers and Readers (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: tension, 10 Tips to Immediately Create Great Plots: Everything You Need to Plot a Great Story, An Essential Element of Scene: Excitement (or Conflict, Suspense and/or Curiosity), Add a tag
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By: Martha Alderson, M.A.,
on 4/21/2014
Blog: Plot Whisperer for Writers and Readers (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: tension, 10 Tips to Immediately Create Great Plots: Everything You Need to Plot a Great Story, An Essential Element of Scene: Excitement (or Conflict, Suspense and/or Curiosity), Add a tag
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