Dramatic Principals & Devices FTW
Every composition teacher will draw out a rising action graph on the board (yes, we’re old school). But how do you translate that diagram into the sentences and paragraphs that keep your readers engaged in your story? In his book, Scene and Structure, Jack Bickham says to do it...
Common Scene Errors
Today we tackle Jack Bickham’s Common Scene Errors, and boy, are there a lot of them, 14 to be precise. According to Scene and Sequel, these simple problems will derail your scenes, rob them of their impact and drag down your novel. We go through each error, identifying if...
Dispatches from a DIY Writing Retreat
What writer hasn’t dreamed of leaving behind the stress and obligations of their day-to-day lives for a quiet, secluded space where they can just write? This past October, we did just that, renting an Airbnb for five days and making real progress on our memoir and novel. During those...
The One Where We Go on a Writing Retreat
In this episode, Kim interviews award winning science fiction author, Charlie Jane Anders about her recently published craft book, Never Say You Can’t Survive! After the interview, we take a break from our usual craft book analysis and writing exercise because…Kim and Renee went on a writing retreat! We...
Getting Wild with Scene and Sequels
After 70 pages of Jack Bickham’s Scene and Structure we feel we’ve got a pretty good handle on how to break our stories down into action-packed, disaster-ending scenes and the more contemplative internal sequels that hold the book together. What we’ve had a harder time with is finding these...
Speeding Up and Slowing Down your Novel
Chapter 8 – Scene & Structure Subscribe to our Newsletter How do you take a ponderous story into a page turner? How do you take a Michael Bay paced novel and make it about more than one disaster after the next? In this episode, we explain Jack Bickham’s techniques...
Sequels: the Glue that Holds Scenes Together
When you’re bored with action-packed scenes and want to dive deep into the mind of your protagonist, maybe you should try a Sequel. In today’s episode, we explore Bickham’s idea of sequel, its parts, and how it glues the scenes together. But we don’t just take Scene & Structure’s...
Bend It Like Bickham (the scene, that is)
We’re on our penultimate episode for our reading of Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure. So, what does the bullet point Meister have to squeeze into an end of a book that 90% of its readers will probably never get to? Well, first we give ourselves a little pep talk and...