This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 348th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

Podcast.

This week was exciting because I finished outlining my way to a clear structure for my portal fantasy work in progress

dreambreaker. The outline isn't finished not by a long shot but I've got a firm sense

of where the plot is going which is great. I felt like I was swimming around in the sometimes murky waters of the big picture, a little more than usual on this one since it had comparatively so little brew time in my imagination since last summer. But now I know exactly

where I need to be going with this and I'm super excited about the route it's

wanting to take. I read an article recently in Writers Digest that talked about the value of bringing

your logical left brain into the creative process by looking at your art, whether it's writing or

photography or whatever, as a puzzle to be solved.

And I totally resonated with that since it's largely how my outlining process works.

It also harmonizes with Stephen King's analogy that writing a story is like

unearthing dinosaur bones. The whole dinosaur was there all along you just have to keep digging until you can uncover the whole skeleton.

The latest post on my blog is don't make this mistake with your story structure.

Readers may be willing to overlook certain missteps in your story structure,

but not this one.

Discover the worst story structure mistake you can make, and why Iron Man 3 was guilty of it.

This is the seventh in the series The Dues and Don'ts of Storytelling, according to Marvel,

which you can find on my site at helping

writers become authors.com. And now I hope you enjoy this week's podcast

entitled How to Use Scrivener to Edit your novels. As a writer you need tools that will help you organize your

thoughts and eliminate distractions so you can focus on what's really important, the story.

One of the best tools, possibly of all time for this, is the powerhouse writing software

...