Basic Plots: Vonnegut’s From Bad to Worse

Ciao, SEers. I’ve been talking about Vonnegut’s five basic plots. So far, I’ve discussed Man in Hole, Boy Meets Girl, and Cinderella, which you can find by clicking the links. Today, I’m going to talk about the fourth plot type, From Bad to Worse. As I’ve described before, Vonnegut plotted all stories on a grid. …

Basic Plots: Vonnegut’s Cinderella

Ciao, SEers. I’ve been talking about Vonnegut’s five basic plots. So far, I’ve discussed Man in Hole and Boy Meets Girl, which you can find by clicking the links. Today, I’m going to talk about the third plot type, Cinderella. As I’ve described before, Vonnegut plotted all stories on a grid. The vertical axis was …

Basic Plots: Vonnegut’s Boy Meets Girl

Ciao, SEers. Last time I was here, I talked about the first of Vonnegut’s five basic plots, Man in Hole, which you can find by clicking the link. Today, I’m going to talk about the second, Boy Meets Girl. As I mentioned last time, Vonnegut plotted all stories on a grid. The vertical axis was …

Basic Plots: Vonnegut’s Man in Hole

Ciao, SEers. I’m back again to talk about story structure (admittedly an obsession of mine). Love him or hate him, one of the twentieth centuries most influential and prolific authors was Kurt Vonnegut. Though he studied at some of our nation’s finest institutions (including my alma mater), he never studied writing. And when he wrote …

What’s In an Edit?

Hey, SE Readers. Joan with you today. Let’s talk about editing. I recently read a book that had a good plot. The story was intriguing. The writing grammatically correct. I didn’t find any spelling or punctuation errors. Sound like the person had a good editor, right? Not necessarily. Throughout the book, there were countless repeated …