Edit like an Editor: A Wattpad Featured Guide ✔

PRACTICE: Plot

Much of the plot section can't really offer Q&A type exercises, so why not apply what you've learned to your own work?

Pick your current book you're working on, or perhaps the last book you've completed, or the next book you keep tossing around in your mind and then answer the questions below.

You don't have to post your answers to avoid spoiling and plagiarism, but write down the answers for yourself on a piece of paper.

Don't feel pressured to answer every single one, but try to challenge yourself! There's no judging here. This is a safe space. Some questions might not actually even apply to your work, and that's totally okay.

Remember, the point of this guidebook is for you to improve and not feel the need to seek out an editor (at least not until you are one stage away from finally publishing your work!).

Have fun!

Building a Plot

1. What is your protagonist's main goal?

2. Is this goal worthy? Why or why not?

3. Your story needs an arc, something that transforms your characters. What transforms your main characters?

4. Is this transformation for better or for worse?

5. Do you have any subplots? Why did you decide to have one (or many)?

6. What makes the subplots' story worth telling alongside the main story?

Building a World

1. Is your characters' world in a real place or an imagined one?

2. Is it the past, present, or future?

3. What laws that govern the world, the way the government works?

4. What is the world's history, geography, technology, and mythology?

5. What's so important about this place?

6. How do people live here? Where does the food come from? What about cloth, timber, metal? What plants and animals are there and in the society? How technologically advanced are the people here?

7. What is their history and how might this have shaped them as a people, their beliefs, attitudes, and identity?

8. What races are present? How much migration is there from other places? How integrated are the migrants? How do the locals act towards the migrants and vice versa? What languages are spoken, and by whom?

9. What social classes are present, and how do they interact? What creates and sustains their division? How do the leaders gain, preserve, and relinquish power? How do other potential leaders view the current leaders?

10. How is the society organized, what do they emphasize, and what is their relationship with the environment and each other?

11. What are the big events that shape people's behavior today? What are people's beliefs about their creation, their purpose, their past, and their futures? What divergent interpretations of these real or imagined events are present in society?

12. How do the people relax? How do they express themselves creatively? What do they aspire to?

Cliché Exercise

Challenge yourself to purposefully write a clichéd scene in your current book you're working on, or perhaps the last book you've completed, or the next book you keep tossing around in your mind.

Then, attempt to fix it and make it original.

Since all of the questions regarding plot are focused more on your own work, there is no answer part for this section.