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Feeling stuck with your WIP?
You know the feeling: you’re reading through a draft of your novel, screenplay, or TV spec and something just feels off. But you can’t quite put your finger on why.
Don’t give up on your draft. The problem isn’t you. It’s structure, character motivation, setup and payoff, or some other diagnosable and fixable issue.
How every post works
Source → Mechanism → Tool
Every week: practical writing lessons from the pop culture currently making headlines, each with a tool to apply the lesson to your WIP. Here’s one from a recent post.
Source
Toy Story 4
For three films, Woody is loyal to his kid. By the end of Toy Story 4, he walks away from his kid. Instead of feeling like a betrayal, it has viewers reaching for Kleenex. Why?
Mechanism
Sell the want so the need lands
- Sell the want
- Hide the need in plain sight
- Honor the want before subverting it
The need fades into background noise until the climax forces it front and center.
Tool
A want/need worksheet
A new Under the Hood Toolkit worksheet for building a healthy want/need journey for any character. Free for two weeks, like every WLE tool.
Free or paid
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Free
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forever
- New articles each week. Turn the films, TV shows, and books you already love into writing lessons.
- Each week’s tool, free for two weeks after it’s published
Paid
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per month, or $50 per year (about $4.17 a month)
- Full access to the Under the Hood Toolkit. Got feedback that your WIP has a specific issue? Search the Toolkit for the exercise that fixes it.
- New articles each week
- Immediate access to each week’s new tool
- The Plot Doctor Diagnostic, a three-part course to make sure your draft hits every scene it needs
- The Writing Lessons Everywhere community on Substack chat
- Book club (coming soon)
The Under the Hood Toolkit
Every WLE worksheet, searchable by issue
If you need to refine your draft but can’t drop thousands of dollars on a book coach or narrative consultant, then Writing Lessons Everywhere is exactly what you need. Become a paid subscriber to access every WLE worksheet in the Under the Hood Toolkit.
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About Tucker
I’m a working mystery novelist taking the books, shows, and films you already love, finding the gear turning underneath, and handing you the tool. Same method, new source every time.