Blog Archives

I love to beat on story structure, partially because it fascinates me, and partially because I think it’s one of the most important things a writer must get right. Whether you plan your story in every detail or write by the seat of your pants, in the end, the story must have this structure. Movies are a great way to see it in action because they follow it religiously, and it’s quicker than a novel. It’s true that a novel does not have to follow the structure as precisely as a movie does, but the closer it is to it, the better.   The ...

Most writers don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a word processing program, and they don’t need to. There are many free or very inexpensive programs that do everything a writer needs, without all the bells and whistles of Word or WordPerfect. I used WordPerfect for years, and I still consider it vastly superior to Word, and I wish I could use it. But they sell it for about $250. So I started to look around for a good word processor that was free or very inexpensive. The one I found is Atlantis. It costs about $35, and it’s worth every ...