Craft Your First Story With This Creative Writing Reference Chart

From LifeHacker comes this nice chart of the basics of story structure. Of course, it’s up to you to make the content compelling, unique, and moving.

There’s no shortcut to writing a great story. However, there are guidelines that can help get you started if you’ve never done it before. This chart compiles several different forms of advice for beginners into one handy reference.
Reddit user nibs1066 created this chart compiled from advice from several different writing advice books. It covers the basics like progressive rising action, as well as suggesting a few basic story types like a revenge story, an adventure, or a chase. Of course, these aren’t hard, fast rules that can’t be broken. If you’re struggling with you first story they’re a handy way to get on track.

Click here to view full article at lifehacker.com

Cassandra Anderson

Cassie is a writer and editor. She lives in Arizona in the United States with her two dogs.

Writing & Author Tips

NaNoWriMo: Thirteen Days and 25,000 words

ByMarkus McDowell November 14, 2014August 18, 2022

Seventeen more days to go in National Novel Writing Month. The draft of my novel, To and From Upon the Earth (working title) is on target to reach 50,000 words by the end of November. In fact, at this pace, I will hit the mark before the last day. I have had a few days where writing…

Writing & Author Tips

NaNoWriMo: Preparations, Part 1 (approach and tools)

ByMarkus McDowell October 23, 2014August 18, 2022

As I discussed in my post on October 9, 2014, I have joined the National Novel Writing Month community this year. On November 1, I will begin writing my next novel. The goal is to write 50,000 words by November 30, ideally by writing about 1700 words each day. I usually write between 800 to…

Writing & Author Tips

Using Scrivener (Roundup)

ByMark McFaddyn September 28, 2015August 18, 2022

There are a lot of writers using Scrivener. Some of our most popular posts are about using Scrivener. This is a series of posts from She’s Novel on using Scrivener for writing stories, covering a good bit of the process.

Writing & Author Tips

How to Write What You Know

ByMark McFaddyn August 22, 2016August 18, 2022

Here is a brief post on “writing what you know,” the old chestnut for writers. (We actually believe that is good advice, but also, you can research like made and then write that. Which, of course, you then know.) Jeff Elkins shares his experience finding out how to write what he knew, and three steps…

Writing & Author Tips

Writing 50,000 words in a month (NaNoWriMo)

ByMarkus McDowell October 9, 2014August 18, 2022

[box type=”bio”] We are pleased to publish this series of guest posts by Dr. Markus McDowell, an author and editor. He writes primarily nonfiction in the fields of law and religion, but we discovered that he has written fiction since he was 14 years old (but never published any). We convinced him to give NaNoWriMo…