How to Fix Your Plot and Pacing With the Four Act Novel Structure

How to Fix Your Plot and Pacing With the Four Act Novel Structure

I recently went on a writing retreat with several other Young Adult writers, and Beth Revis helped each of us to fix the pacing and plot holes in our novels by using her four-act structure for a novel.

Some writing techniques aren’t for everybody, but as soon as she walked me through this outlining process, I was hooked. It gave me the perfect guideline for plotting all of my future novels. In fact, I used it to plot my NaNoWriMo novel for this year.

So let’s talk about the four-act novel structure and what some of the key points are in the outline to help you plan out your next book.

Inside the Mind of an Author Writing a Book

Inside the Mind of an Author Writing a Book

Are you writing a book? If so, you might be surprised by some of the things you’re thinking and feeling. Writing a book can be an strange, emotional experience! You might even wonder if some of the things you’re thinking and feeling are normal.

Today, I want to give you an inside view of my thoughts and emotions as I write a book so that you can see that even after being a professional writer for years and writing seven books, I still struggle with insecurity and self-criticism. Plus, I’ll share how I deal with negative feelings without getting derailed by them.

How Do You Sell 100 Million Copies of a Book?

How Do You Sell 100 Million Copies of a Book?

A few days ago, as I was in the middle of revising my book, a question occurred to me: “How do you sell 100 million copies of a book? Is there a way to reverse engineer that kind of success?”

In this post, we will dissect what makes the top best-selling books of all time books so popular, and then look at how we can apply those lessons to our own writing.

How to Write a Book Using an Outline

How to Write a Book Using an Outline

So, you’ve got a great idea for a book. You have a clear picture of the opening scenes and the climactic scene, and maybe some scenes in between, so you jump in and start writing.

But once you’ve knocked out the scenes in your head, the well runs dry, or you find yourself galloping down a series of dead-end roads.

If you’ve ever gotten stuck during the writing process, you might feel like you don’t know where to turn. How do you connect the beginning to the end? Is your epic novel idea nothing more than a character sketch, a piece of world-building, or a loosely related set of scenes?

The secret: making a book outline.