There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.
In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.
I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.
Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.
I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.