Helping Writers Become Authors

Learning how to choose the right character arc is one of the most important decisions you’ll make for your story. Whether you’re writing a Positive Change Arc, a Flat Arc, or a Negative Arc, the arc you choose will shape everything from plot structure to theme to emotional resonance.

If you’ve hung around here for any length of time, you know I tend to talk a lot about “archetypal” and “mythic” fiction. But what do those words really even mean—and why are they important? And why might we want to learn how to write mythic fiction?

Many contemporary writers are interested in writing mythic fiction. Partly this is because we associate the idea with a ...

The longer I study story, the more I understand it less as a collection of techniques and more like a single pattern expressed in many different ways. We talk about plot, character, and theme as if they are separate tools, but in practice they are all part of the same deeper structure that shapes not just the story on the page, but the experience of transformation wit...

What is story?

As someone who studies plot structure—and the shape of story—I find it an interesting thought exercise to consider the many ways in which the mark...