Once Upon a Time and Narrative Plotting

By Anna Rollins

Several years ago while I was in the query trenches for my forthcoming memoir, I tried to distract myself from agent ghostings and rejections by outlining my next book.

I enrolled in #AmWriting’s Blueprint For A Book challenge and over the course of ten weeks thought about the skeleton of a book’s structure: from the hook and the back jacket copy to the overarching “why” the book should exist in the first place.

One exercise involved using the framework of a “once upo...