There must be some kind of a divine force out there for writers. I have gotten to the point in my draft where the timing was wrong, and I didn’t know how to fix it. The train route my characters take requires an additional 12 hours of travel, and according to my scenes it’s too much, I must end the ride in order to continue the story according to the plot. And what do you know. I go research the route, and turns out I got it wrong! It’s too long. It’s the old route of the Moscow-Simferopol train that went around Ukraine back in the old Soviet times, and that was later replaced by a faster route that cut through Ukraine and took one day less to travel, but then at the end of Perestroika it was returned to the old route again, to avoid Ukraine and go around due to the conflict. TUBE is happening in 1989, and this smack in the time when the last Moscow-Simferopol trains were going through Ukraine (I’m not entirely sure, as the sources don’t say the exact year when the route was changed, but it’s close enough), and so guess what that does? Cuts my route my about a day, so 12 hours gone! Wow! I’ve got shivers here. Really, this is crazy. It’s like this book wants to happen. Like all those drafts I wrote and discarded before were just not the right story, and this is the right one. It’s so right, it’s telling itself. It’s helping me. I’m speechless.
Read MoreThe Hero's Journey plot and subplots explained
To me. I have explained it to me in a way that makes sense to me, not as a circle, but as a deep dark lake with deep dark water and a humongous scary monster sitting in a deep dark cave smack in the middle of the lake's bottom. Anya magically transformed my quick flimsy sketch into the pretty diagram above, with the heroine (of course) jumping into said lake, about to meet her near death.
Okay, let me step back a little. I have only started learning about this whole hero's concept recently, but I can already see it everywhere. Of course. It's the journey of life, in a way. And the journey of learning. We have to come close to death to learn anything, it seems. Stubborn idiots. Anyway. It does look like a boob in crosscut, doesn't it? The reason I made it this way is I can picture it easily in my head when I write and read, and if the simple three-act structure needs more subplots, then I can just break up one of the curves into more curves, like I did for the cave at the bottom. It could be simple, with no additional curve, or it could be more complex. This way any story can fit into this model. Precisely what I wanted to make sense of it.
Read MoreWhy setting is important
DON'T FUCKING NEVER FORGET TO TELL US WHERE YOUR SHIT IS HAPPENING.
This rant is brought to you by my doing more editing and also reading more writing submissions on @ellowrites and lately setting some books aside because, well, they totally failed to give me the feeling that the story is real. I mean, I know it's a lie but I want to be fooled into thinking that it's real, and if I don't get the feeling about where the story is happening, like in an actual real place, geographically real or imagined on some planet but that still feels real enough, I don't believe a word the writer is saying and toss the book out the window.
I'm guilty of this too, don't think you're alone. Here are some tricks I use. See if you can steal some for yourself and maybe share some of yours in the comments for all of us to steal too.
1. Imagine you're describing a movie.
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