structure – K. A. Excell

July 29, 2022

Beats Part I: How to Structure a Beat

Stories are made up of character’s reactions to the outside world. They learn something new, they process that information, they react, and you’re off to the races! But writing that moment, that emotional transition where the character is processing new information, can be difficult. Quite often, they can be skipped over or stunted...

July 29, 2022

Beats Part II: When and How to Use Beats

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but you don't always have to explicitly write out some of these beats. In fact, sometimes minimizing those moments can really help the pacing of your story! It really depends on the purpose of the beat you’re exploring. If the transition is...

August 13, 2022

Beats Part III: Structuring Beats for Non-POV Characters

Previously in this series, we’ve already covered how to structure a beat, and how those beats impact tension, pacing, and processing time for the reader. Since then, it’s been pointed out that my previous posts on beats only covered beats as experienced by the POV character. Well, this post is for all those poor non-POV characters I’ve accidentally excluded up until now. ..

August 17, 2022

Question of the Day: Starting Over

Today's question goes like this. I've sunk over a year of my life into the draft of a novel. It's changed so much since it started. Now I'm to the point where I hate almost everything and want to take the world in a completely new direction...

August 18, 2022

Info Dumps: what they are, how they work, and how to avoid them

If you’ve ever had your novel (especially genre fiction) critiqued by someone else, you’ve probably found that giant highlight which covers two-to-three paragraphs and is attached to a comment which only says “info dump”. The process of giving your readers all the information they need without “info dumping” is a hard one, but it doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’ll break down exactly what turns a paragraph of information into an “info dump”, how to avoid those things, and how to better dispense information throughout your novel.

September 9, 2022

Narrative Lens and Narrative Distance

Narrative lens and narrative distance are two of the tools a writer should always have on their tool belt.

October 17, 2022

5 Essential Details to Ground Your Scene

Have you ever written a scene, only for your beta reader to be utterly confused for the first five paragraphs? Have you ever wondered whether there was an importance to the order in which you give details in your scene? Have you ever thought about how to structure your scene in order to immerse your reader as quickly as possible? If you have, then you need to learn about the five essential questions you need to answer in order to ground your scene. In this post, we will cover the essential questions, the order in which they should be answered, and the reasons behind that order.

October 22, 2022

Question of the Day: How to Find THE END

I used to struggle with my endings a lot. Part of that was because I didn’t have a really good idea of what I wanted to write, and the other part was because I had absolutely no grounding in story structure. Here’s the process I now use to figure out a good ending to my story. ...

October 26, 2022

A Guide to the Dark Night of the Soul

Dark Night of the Soul. One of the most emotionally devastating, yet brilliantly fulfilling moments in any story. Done correctly, this moment will move your readers to tears, then scoop them back up and fling them to untold emotional heights...