Angela Benedetti’s post on plot is prompting me to write a little bit about it myself. (Tremble with fear when I get on my soapbox. Though, disclaimer: I don’t know everything, and I know I don’t know everything.)

There are a lot of theories about how many different kinds of plots there are and how they break down (I have a book called Twenty Master Plots, for example, which I think is as much as you can refine them), but I think they’re all basically elaborations on these two plots: man vs. internal and man vs. external. And the best written stories combine the two, so there’s an A plot and a B plot.
(more…)

(This probably won’t be a regular thing, actually, but I had to call this post something.)

Because this has come up a time or two in conversation with readers, it feels like time to explain what chiaroscuro is and why I chose it as the title for my first novel. Bear with me: I was a humanities major in college and can ramble on about the things I love for quite some time.

(more…)