We’ve spent quite a few weeks taking a look at the ten key scenes a variety of writers have offered to share with readers of Live Write Thrive. As many respected writing instructors teach, it’s crucial that novelists get the important scenes worked out and laid out in the right place to ensure a solid framework for a story.
That won’t make up for a weak premise or boring characters. For this ten-key-scene framework to hold up your story, you need a strong premise. You need a compelling character going after a goal in a passionate way. You need high stakes and lots of significant conflict. And to make your story memorable and one that will resonate with readers around the world and across decades, you need strong universal themes.
These are the four corner pillars of novel construction I drive home to writers year after year. Too many novels written by beginning writers don’t have a worthy premise—a premise worth writing hundreds of pages about. A premise a writer can or should expect readers to want to devote ten or more hours of their life to. Continue Reading…
