Structuring Your Novel Quotes

“The Resolution is not just the ending of this story, but also the beginning of the story the characters will live in after readers have closed the back cover.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Most stories aren’t meant to tell every detail of a character’s life. A story is just a snapshot, a set period of time chosen and extracted from a character’s life because it offers the necessary dramatic arc.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“…the ending is the last chance you have to impress your reader before they pick up your next book. Do you want to wow them or [leave] them feeling dissatisfied?” —Christa Rucker”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Character and change. That’s what story is all about. We take a person and we force him onto a journey that will change him forever, usually for the better.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“The moment fiction becomes dishonest is the moment it ceases to matter.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“If your characters don’t have a response—in speech, in thought, or in action—to the events happening to them, they haven’t been touched by those events, and the reader will likewise remain untouched and uninvolved.” —Beth Hill”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis.” —Anne Rice”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“If we turn too much of our backstory into the story or illustrate too much of it via detailed flashbacks (either at the beginning of our stories or in subsequent chapters), we rob our readers of the sense of weight given by the 9/10 of the iceberg floating under the water of our stories.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“A strong dilemma section will drive home to readers that your characters are realistic, thinking human beings. Just as importantly, it will provide a solid bridge between the previous scene’s disaster and the following scene’s goal.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Conflict” and “tension” are often used interchangeably, not so much because they’re the same thing—because they’re not—but because they’re kissing cousins that fulfill similar functions within the story.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“In order to have a plot, you have to have a conflict, something bad has to happen.” —Mike Judge”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Few of us would want to subsist on a steady diet of tragedy, but all of us are better for having cleansed our reading palate with the astringent bite of these unflinching portrayals of bittersweet truth.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“You should write something happy,” people tell me, and I don’t understand. Happy like Anna Karenina? Happy like The Grapes of Wrath? Happy like ... Catch-22 or ... Hamlet?28”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“A great first line is the collateral that grants the author a line of intellectual credit from the reader.” —Chuck Wendig”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Being too easy on their character and their readers.” —Lori Devoti”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Is that what we’re doing when we write sad stories? Are we squelching hope, beauty, and wonder? Or are we perhaps exploring the opposite side of the same coin? Life is just as full of sadness as it is of happiness. To ignore that fact is to limit both our personal experience of the human existence and our ability to write about it truthfully. To cap every story with a happy ending is dishonesty to both ourselves and our readers. The moment fiction becomes dishonest is the moment it ceases to matter.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.” —William Landay”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Examine your story. Where does it truly begin? Which event is the first domino in your row of dominoes? Which domino must be knocked over for the rest of the story to happen?”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Consider your First Plot Point, which will be the first major turning point for your characters and, as a result, often the Inciting or Key Event. The setup that occurs prior to these scenes should take no more than a quarter of the book. Anymore than that and you’ll know you’ve begun your story too early and need to do some cutting.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“A flashback can sometimes function as one of the major plot points, but only if the character’s act of remembering this incident changes his course within the main story and prompts him to react in a decisive and plot-altering way.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“Don’t dump your backstory into your reader’s lap right away, no matter how vital it is to the plot. How many of us want to hear someone’s life story the moment after we meet him?”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story

“the Hook, the Inciting and Key Events, the period of character reactions, the Midpoint, the period of character actions, the Climax, and the Resolution. There’s”
― K.M. Weiland, Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story