For a full explanation of each potential plotting problem, click on the post title to view the full article.
10. Backstory Blunders: The past is prologue, for sure, but you can tell too much too soon, if everything about the characters' past is explained right upfront in Chapter One...
9. Boring Beginnings: If you have to rely on your readers' patience while you get the story set up, you're likely to lose most of them. Start where the protagonist's problem starts, or just before that, and feed in the backstory later...
8. Limping to a Conclusion: You don't want the reader to think you ended the book just because you ran out of paper...
7. Sagging Middle: The middle has to do more than just fill up the space between beginning and end...
6. Tumors and Parasites-- The cast of thousands: Secondary characters are distinguished from major characters-- the protagonist(s) and the antagonist usually-- by their lack of a story journey...
5. Plodding Pacing: Pacing is primarily a function of how many cause-effect related events happen in the book...
4. What a Coincidence!: Coincidence is fun in real life...
3. Conflicts about Conflict: Conflict is the fuel that powers the plot and forces the characters into action...
2. Structural Weaknesses: Many a good story is sunk by a weak structure: a hidden protagonist (the readers can't tell early whose story this is), meandering setups, mispresented conflict, rushed climaxes, incoherence between the protagonist and the plot (the main character doesn't have much to do with the main plot, or this person would never do what the plot requires him to do)...
1. Whose Story Is This, Anyway? The Plight of the Protagonist: The biggest single plot problem I see in my judging, editing, and critiquing is actually a character problem: the passive or undermotivated protagonist-- that is, a protagonist who is not truly involved in causing the plot to unfold...
copyright 1998 Alicia Rasley
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