The last five minutes of a film can make or break it. The last 2,000 words of a novel. The last sentence of a short story. Finishing a story is what makes a story.

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The TL;DR is: it’s really frustrating when strangers send me a direct message asking for me to subscribe to them, in exchange for them subscribing to me. I’m sure you’re not one of those people, but we’ve all met them, right?

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As I close in on the finale of my weekly serial Tales from the Triverse, I’m thinking a lot about foreshadowing, and how it works for online serial fiction.

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How does structure affect your story? Can the two ever be separate?

How I build stories: https://open.substack.com/pub/simonkjones/p/how-to-construct-a-story?r=3rwg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Brad's podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7tAaS2mnD3SC03xbSjtU9z?si=6_VLSZd7SRWRYL2QXvCPXQ

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I share more tips on how to publish a fiction newsletter without going mad.

Here's that post on building indexes for your work: https://open.substack.com/pub/simonkjones/p/how-to-help-new-readers-get-on-board?r=3rwg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Writing fiction is hard. Finding readers is even harder. Achieving success, regardless of how you personally measure it, is near impossible. In this episode I talk about how I've gone about it.

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Something’s been a bit…off with television lately. Have you noticed?

Useful links:

- Vulture article: https://www.vulture.com/article/severance-season-two-euphoria-season-3-why-so-long.html

- Bob Chipman's video essay on commerce and art: https://youtu.be/_9iab0z6Kyg?si=_m0Ov7FLyqidTbNg

- Simon Owen's newsletter: https://open.substack.com/pub/simonowens/p/substack-is-becoming-the-subscription?r=3rwg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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An aspect of subversion that I especially enjoy is when you think a story is one thing, and then it turns out to be something else entirely. It’s a topic that has been on my mind recently, as I’ve been trying to pull off this exact trick in Tales from the Triverse, my ongoing serial.

Attempting such sleight of hand made me want to go back and look at examples in literature, cinema and gaming that have done just that. I threw it out to the writing community, as I knew you lot would come up with great examples, and wasn’t disappointed.

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Today is about how to build a story from the key components: world building, themes, characters and plot. Which is quite a big topic, and clearly not something one should try to cover in a 25 minute video. Yet here we are.

Things we’ll cover in the video:

* What are the building blocks of a story? 🧱

* Which genres require world building? (spoiler: it’s all of them)

* How does world building impact a story?

* The seven components of defining a world 🌏

* How to not get lost in your own world building

* The iceberg metaphor 🧊

* Why plot is overrated

* Using themes as a navigational compass for your story 🧭

* How to quickly sketch character personalities 🎭

* How mobile phones messed with a lot of established thriller scenarios 📱

* Why food is important 🍜

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Writers have been around for centuries, long before the filmmakers and the game designers and the podcasters. We’ve been oddly starved of tech innovation, watching bemused from the sidelines as movies and games and radio and music reinvented themselves for the internet era. That's now changed.

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