Monday, February 9, 4:00-5:30 PT/7:00-8:30 ET (Zoom)
Recording available
$97 USD. Free with Labyrinth Membership.
Some stories want to be mapped out in detail. Others need something simpler first—a way to find or re-find their shape without closing off possibilities.
In this Labyrinth Craft Workshop, I’ll introduce Bare Bones Plotting: a light, flexible scaffolding that helps you orient yourself in a story at any stage, including revision. At the heart of this approach are Five Milestones—not scene-level beats, but large-scale markers that clarify what your story is doing and how its deeper movement unfolds.
We’ll begin with a clarifying conflict question—the core tension your story is exploring—and look at how each milestone grows organically from that question. Rather than relying on “Master Plots” or prescriptive story formulas, Bare Bones Plotting is thematically driven, making it especially useful when revising with an eye toward meaning, coherence, and direction rather than surface fixes.
This approach is especially useful if you are:
- Giving an idea enough shape to become a viable storyline
- Revising and wanting to re-see the larger arc of a draft
- Stepping back to understand how the parts of a story are working together
- Looking for a framework that can support later, more detailed planning or revision tools
If you’re deep in the trees and trying to re-orient to the forest, Bare Bones Plotting offers a way to step back and see the whole—without flattening the richness of what you’ve already written.
You’ll leave with a clear, adaptable model you can return to whenever you need perspective, momentum, or a steadier sense of where your story is headed.