Writing the Breakout Novel
by Donald Maass · Donald Maass
A craft guide from a veteran New York literary agent on what separates breakout fiction from competent midlist novels. Covers raising stakes, building layered characters, interweaving plot lines and theme, with end-of-chapter checklists for revising a manuscript.
This link may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate disclosure
More resources on Novel Writing
Mythcreants
Long-running craft blog and podcast by Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi, analyzing story structure, worldbuilding, character arcs and common failure modes in published speculative fiction. Posts diagnose why specific scenes work or collapse, giving writers repeatable revision criteria.
Writing Excuses
Podcast founded by working genre novelists including Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal and Dan Wells, with hundreds of archived episodes on plot, character, revision and career. Each short episode closes with a writing exercise to apply immediately.
Helping Writers Become Authors
K.M. Weiland's long-running craft blog and podcast covering story structure, character arcs, outlining and scene construction. Readers get a consistent structural vocabulary of beats, arcs and act turns for diagnosing why a draft stalls and revising it.
Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description
In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to the techniques that masters of fiction use to ground a story in a concrete world. From the most realist settings to the most fantastical, writers will learn how to describe the physical world in sharp, sensory detail. We will also learn how to build credibility through research, and to use creative meditation exercises to deepen our own understanding of our story worlds, so that our readers can see all that we imagine.
Structuring Your Novel
A guide to classic three-act story structure for novelists, explaining where the hook, inciting event, plot points, midpoint and climax belong, and how scene-and-sequel patterns shape individual scenes. Readers learn to outline a novel or diagnose a draft's pacing.
writersdigest.com
WritersDigest.com is a comprehensive resource for writers, featuring craft articles, writing prompts, market guides, contests, and publishing tips to help aspiring and established authors improve their craft and get published.