I haven’t posted for a while as I have been concentrating on some major changes to Habit for Killing. In fact the story has changed completely from a medieval mystery to a full-on fantasy set in the historical 14th century.
I’ll provide some more details once I have got a bit further with the plot.
In my latest attempts at plotting I have found that looking at listing all the issues at stake for the characters a useful method. So for instance what possible events could happen that make things harder for the lead characters and increase the stake they have in the story. After brainstorming this list I then put them in order of magnitude, so the more minor events first building up to events that increase the pressure on the characters the most. An this pretty much gave me the plot for the second act of the book.
This tip came from Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell.
Another tip of his that I used was, as this was now more of a thriller, to look at creating a knock-out ending before working much of the rest of the plot. I think I have a really stunning ending now, that the rest of the plot can work towards. Whereas when I was planning to write a mystery, how the mystery was uncovered was in many ways more important than the ending.
