Have you ever wondered how to bring more depth into your scene and make it less in-your-face? How to make the reader feel like there is more going on under the hood?

This template leads you through all the tactics and approaches of bringing secrets into your scene.

You might know that conflict is the most powerful engine of a story. But in bad dialogue, the exchange is often too direct, and the back-and-forth comes more from the brain than from the heart.

How do you make good old conflict thrive fully in your dialogue?

This template lets you easily organize feelings, actions, triggers and much more. It explores all the aspects of your conflict and gives you ideas for how the characters challenge each other and how one thing leads to the next. Escalation hits like a lightning bolt!

What makes your scene suspenseful? Which elements can you bring in to create danger and tension?

Fill in this template, and you have all the elements of hair-spiking suspense right at your fingertips.

Keeping the overview over what your characters want and what drives them at each point in the story is important – and makes it much easier to coordinate your characters’ goals and actions and to tie up all of the story elements. 

This template does this for you with its neat labels and columns.

Write down your entire story construct on one single sheet of paper! This mini-template will strip your story down to its bone and make it simple for you to keep its most important elements in plain sight.

From there, it’s easier to develop the finer nuances.

Putting yourself into the shoes of all of these different characters can be confusing.

This template tracks how each of your characters feels at each point in the story, so you can keep their emotions perfectly clear. It also includes emotion diagrams.

If you want to bring more message and subtext into your story, then this one will be gold for you. It’s a step-by-step instruction on how you can inject purpose and meaning. It will make you:

    1. Detect the hidden message in your finished story; 

    2. If necessary, bring in a new message/new subtext; and 

    3. Make sure your subtext is powerful, but not pushy

Fill in the blanks, check some boxes – and done is your magical romance story!

This template will make you ponder the right questions, guide you along the important elements and thinking patterns for romance stories, and finally tie everything up for your passionate Romeo-and-Juliet tale. (8 Pages)

This template does exactly the same thing for you as the Romance Story Template; only this one is for your Fantasy story.

It helps you find all of the fantastic story elements that make this genre so intriguing, and also helps by organizing your plot, subplots, characters and story elements, so they all make sense as an exciting unit. (6 Pages)

The third genre template is for Mystery and Crime stories. Here, you will find a guide to invent the complete riddle your story holds: First, backwards-engineer it for a logical buildup, and then start from the beginning of the story to create an enticing plot arc and reader experience. (7 Pages)

This template will help you out with Fantasy, Science Fiction, Children’s Books, or any other story that builds on its own world. (6 Pages)

It will get you to look at your world from angles you never thought of before, and guide you to a well-balanced, exciting universe in which everything makes sense.

Not writing comedy? Maybe you think you don’t need this sheet then. However, think about it: Situational irony makes stories of every genre much more interesting. It’s additional fun for the reader and a spice that makes the main dish that much more enjoyable.

When you think of James Bond (Thriller), American Psycho (Horror), Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (Fantasy), or many other great books and movies: They all are amazing in their own genre, but the touch of humor brings them to a whole other level. And you can do this too – easily and step by step, with this template.