CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Daily › Tasks › Revision 02
Say it once: Revision Exercise
Use a character from your novel, try a short story idea or start with a blank page. Each prompt includes a hint and links to craft guidance.
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CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Plan a scene
How to write a scene that turns
By Robert McKee, Story Strip the vocabulary out and it says: something that mattered was in one state at the top of the scene and is in a different state at the bottom.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › First pages
First pages: what makes an agent stop reading
On page one, the model the reader is building is the model of whose story this is, so a slide does not merely confuse them, it withdraws the offer while they are still deciding whether to accept it.
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Daily › Archive
Creative Writing Prompts & Exercises Archive
Start a story with someone trying to complete a small job before a visitor arrives. Try this task 2 Nov 2026 · Tension
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Sagging middle
How to diagnose a sagging middle
This is Shawn Coyne's insight in The Story Grid, minus the spreadsheet: he has editors log every scene as a row and then read down the columns rather than across the rows, because the story-level faults only show themselves when…
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Point of view and psychic distance
Point of view: psychic distance is a dial
John Gardner called it psychic distance, and defined it with unusual plainness for a man who could be quite grand about fiction: the "distance that the reader feels between himself and the events of the story".
CMwww.chaptermuse.com › Guide › Revise a novel
How to revise a novel so the revision ends
It is negative progress: it cost you an hour and it made the chapter feel more finished, which makes you less willing to cut it, which is how a book ends up organised around its best paragraphs rather than around its story.
