Plot a Mystery
Plot a mystery
- Imagine you want to write a mystery. Who is your main character?
- Where is your main character?
- Your next nine answers should form a mystery story. At number one, how would you introduce the character and place?
- At number nine how would your story end? Does your MC ride off into the sunset, or jetski into space, or…?
- At number five, what crisis or mystery would you like your character to solve?
- At number seven, how would a second crisis grow from the first one, making it a mystery that really has to be solved?
- At three, how might your character end up in a place where he/she/it would encounter the mystery?
- At two, why would your character end up there?
- At four, give the character a need to care.
- At six, show how one crisis turned into another.
- And at eight, tell how the crisis was resolved by your character before the ending.
Protected: Grammar, with Trista Cornelius
Protected: Writing tips, from Steve Thieme
Writing action scenes, from Sheila Deeth
Writing Action Scenes
Sheila’s September 2013 talk and writing exercise were taken from a chapter in Writing Fantasy Heroes, edited by Jason M. Waltz
WRITING ACTION SCENES
Writers’ Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Seventh Star Press) may well be the better book, but a particular chapter in Writing Fantasy Heroes caught my eye. The chapter’s called Writing Cinematic Fight Scenes, by Brandon Sanderson, but the lessons apply to any action scene, and we all write action scenes sometimes, or else nothing happens.