Sublime

He should have one strong goal, usually inspired directly by the inciting event and often motivated further by strong beliefs or past experiences, that will carry him throughout the book, probably right up to the end (although sometimes it’s necessary for characters to completely change their goals at some point in the story).

Of course you’ll want to weave Plants and Payoffs all through the story. You can often develop these in rewrites, and it’s a good idea to do one read-through just looking for places to plant and payoff.

Writing about a hero who transforms—who comes out of the story a different person than who they started as—is the secret sauce of best-selling novels.

The best ghostwriters don’t actually get paid to write. They get paid to stress-test the client’s thinking. They get paid to ask thoughtful questions, present different perspectives, and sharpen ideas down to something easily digestible. This is what’s “valuable” to the client.

In the first six months of writing anywhere social on the internet, you have three primary goals: Goal #1: See whether or not you can be consistent.

My first goal is to hammer all this down into a premise: a single sentence that conveys the plot and the theme.