Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories

To raise the stakes, you have to earn the reader’s (and your own) trust and suspension of disbelief—if we’re not fully convinced that one giant rock-tunneling spider is bad, then we won’t be scared when there’s suddenly an army of giant rock-tunneling spiders.

And that’s the crux: sometimes you have a plot device just to have a plot device, and it just ends up generating more clutter. And then sometimes, you have a yawning chasm in your story, or you need something to add stakes and tension early on, and a good plot device can be just the thing. And again, plot devices aren’t just objects—they can be stu

Sometimes, I’ll throw in a dozen plot devices and see which one sticks—and by “sticks,” I mean “generates some good moments and causes the characters to come alive.”

I try to hold off committing to plot devices until I get to the revision stage,

At a certain point, a plot device gets embedded in the foundation of your story. The characters start having emotional attachments to the McGuffin, and the themes and ideas of the narrative connect deeply to a particular thing or situation.

What people do is usually more interesting than why they do it—unless the “why” is really personal,

That’s the way a lot of first drafts are, and it’s actually fine.

Basically, if a given plot device starts wearing out its welcome, you can swap it out for another one (or a whole cluster of them). If the characters have spent a hundred pages trying to escape from a dungeon or pull off a heist, then the turning point comes when they either fail or succeed. And there are unforeseen consequences either way, which t

Every plot can be boiled down to two basic elements: plot devices, and turning points.