Author and editor John D. Brown
The blog posts are wonderful, however the SFWA site won’t display them in chronological order, forcing you to read them backwards are puzzle through pages of posts. I’ve arranged links to the articles in chronological order below:
- Part 1 – It’s All About the Reader
- Part 2 – The Three Problem Types
- Part 3 – It’s gotta be difficult
- Part 4 – Uncertainty
- Part 5 – Character troubles
- Part 6–Character deservingness
- Part 7 – Character draws 1-4
- Part 8 – character draws 5-8
- Part 9 – character draws 9-10
- Part 10 – Clarity, the first principle of plot
- Part 11 – Make the problem hard to solve with disadvantages
- Part 12 – Make the problem hard to solve with conflict
- Part 13 – Make the problem hard to solve with growing troubles and surprise
- Part 14 – Put Your Plot Together with the Story Cycle
- Part 15 – Story Cycle Action & Trouble
- Part 16 – The Story Cycle’s Dynamo (and a little Hitchcock)
- Part 17 – Structure is Problem Solving, Not Voodoo