Conclusion

This has probably been my longest course to date. It’s easily the longest of all the writing courses. Because, in the end, plot is the actual meat of the book. Everything else informs it, shapes it, helps it. But in the end, the actual scenes, events and story beats are all part of the plot.

I sincerely hope the information was helpful. I also hope you actually did the challenge chapters. The only way to get better at writing, is by writing (and reading) a lot. The challenge chapters help you focus a writing project on one idea, asking you to experiment with it and train it.

Why? So that you don’t need to memorize it or look it up later. Once you’ve trained with it for a full story, it’s now part of your intuition and general writing skill.

The next time you write a story, you intuitively make all the right decisions. Because your head is filled with thousands of experiences and their outcome. Trying different narrative structures, trying different approaches to plot, trying different target audiences or themes.

That’s why I say there are no true pantsers who 100% improvise. Because once you’ve written a few stories, your head automatically plans ahead and sees overall patterns in the plot. That, to me, is the true skill of storytelling. To be such an experienced storyteller that you can improvise great stories on the spot, doing all the right things to get Promise, Progress and Payoff.

I am almost entirely an improviser. And yet, here I am, writing this course about all sorts of structures and ways to outline your stories ;) Most of this course was written off the top of my head, merely double-checking details or referencing older articles of mine (from my Dutch blog). All that knowledge did not come from reading books or “studying”. It came from years of work, writing hundreds of stories, which left me with deeper connections and realizations about plot.

If you want to give one of my stories a try, I write under my real name Tiamo Pastoor. I’ve written in Dutch for years, but as I launch this course, I’ve switched to English almost entirely.

As always, I recommend checking out the other courses in the Creative Writing category.

Keep learning,

Pandaqi