Fixing Your Plot & Story Structure Problems by Janice Hardy

Janice Hardy runs the awesome Fiction University site. In this book, she goes through a whole bunch of possible plot problem, like how to fix endings that don’t resolve the core conflict, or dealing with too much or not enough setups, or fixing endings that don’t involve the protagonist, or how to make information-heavy scenes more tense, or ways to add subplots.

This is a really nice reference to keep on your shelf. It seems aimed at the revision process and is organized like a series of do-it-yourself workshops.

If we as a group ever decide to do a topic-oriented meeting structure — or add a topic to our weekly meetings on top of whatever we’re reading at the time — then this could be a great format. We could pick a different one each week and look at examples of our work that illustrate the problem and really dig down on ways to fix it. You could bring in an example of your own work that has this problem, or a piece of a famous book or story that we all know, and discuss that, to help develop those skills.

Buy on Amazon.