From the beginning, I've been stubborn about following a model for my story arc. If I wrote a good story, I figured, it would have a natural arc without me obsessing over the “inciting incident” and “crisis” and “resolution.” If all authors stuck to a strict story arc template, I rationalized, books would be boring! […]
Feedback is hard to come by during the query process, as I explained in a post last week. Several agents rejected my manuscript after reading sample chapters or even the entire project, but most of them didn’t say why. Actually, perhaps I should rephrase that. Not many of them offered a helpful why. Several said […]