6 Writing Equations to Get Into Your Story

Solve your plotting problems with these easy structural set-ups

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili

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Hiya, welcome to The Forever Workshop.

First time? Read this first »

Back again? Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

A workshop for:

Writers who struggle with starting a new idea and need some surefire methods of jumping right in.

Your instructor:

Erin Karbuczky — writer, workshop facilitator, and creative process expert

Takeaways:

• Explore the question at the heart of your story

• Discover how conflict creates structure

• Use your protagonist’s “authority” to shape their character arc

• Create tension and surprise with cleverly placed details

• Set the mood with atmosphere and tone

• Layer up meaning with symbols and motifs

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have six new clever hacks to help unlock your story, build your plot, and develop your characters, until you’re ready to write!

Find A New Way into Your Story

When it comes to writing prose, I’ve always had an affinity for beautiful sentences and an intuition for voice. That all lent itself well to writing poetry, which is where I got my start, but when I decided I wanted to be a novelist, I had a bit of catching up to do in terms of things like structure, conflict, and characterization.

Always a good student, I spent my time reading a lot of craft books and tried my best to internalize the advice. But the more I read, the more I noticed that many craft books teach the various components of fiction and writing entirely separately from one another, with a chapter or so on each component.

This confused the heck out of my brain, because while I understood what they were saying about each part, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get the parts working together — as a whole body, like a piece of writing should — until I developed my series of “story equation” hacks, which put corresponding elements together from the start, taking out the guesswork. I hope they can help someone else out there who also needs to see it presented differently.