I have followed K.M. Weiland over at her site Helping Writers Become Authors for several years. She is an award-winning, self-published author. The advice she offers on her site is some of the best I have come across online and comes from her years of seasoned experience.

When I realized that she had written some books on how to write a story, I was thrilled with the idea of reading them! I decided to start with the second book in her series, Structuring Your Novel.  I already love to outline like crazy, but I don’t always know how to get my story into a structured form with clearly defined scenes.

And I have to say, I was not disappointed!

K.M. Weiland takes you by the hand from the very beginning and breaks the process of forming your ideas into a story into comprehensible, understandable chunks. She explains that there are three acts to every story and what a reader expects to see in each of those acts. If it’s your opening act, where is the hook to draw your readers in? If it’s the middle, are decisions being made by the characters that move the story along? And at the end is everything tied up nicely? Do you want everything tied up nicely, especially if you are writing a series?

One of the great things that K.M. Weiland did in her book was use examples from well known books, TV and movies to illustrate her point. I was able to think through the story she was talking about and figure out each of the story structure parts.

I also loved how K.M. Weiland took the time to answer common questions in regards to not only story structure, but also about scenes, grammar, sequels and sentence structure.

The most important thing that I took away from reading her book though, is that writing a whole story is easy if you know when to place events, characters and scenes in your story just right. Story writing is an art that can be learned! 🙂

If you are interested in learning more about story structure, I highly recommend this book! And I would also encourage you to check out K.M. Weiland’s other books and her website!