Category: Opinion Pieces

Quote of the Week

“The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.” – Jules Renard

There’s something humbling about Renard’s idea here. The story exists. Your job isn’t to force it into shape, it’s to listen carefully enough to hear what it actually wants to be.

Which is exactly the problem when a subplot starts taking over your main plot.

You planned one story, but for some uncanny reason, it’s turning into another. The story underneath the story is whispering something else. And if you keep going down the same road you planned instead of the new road that’s slowly being revealed, the book will fight you the whole way.

So what can we do about it?

Deep Dive

Most writers have had this moment: you’re drafting along, and suddenly the scene you’re most excited to write isn’t the one on your outline. It’s the side thread. The minor character. The B-story you tossed in for texture.

Here are three signs your subplot is actually the real story.

1. The emotional weight lives in the subplot, not the main plot.

When you read back what you’ve written, the scenes that land hardest, the ones with real grief, real tenderness, real stakes, are happening in the subplot. The main plot has events. The subplot has meaning. That’s a problem, because readers follow feeling, not plot mechanics.

2. Your protagonist changes more because of the subplot than the main plot.

Ask yourself: what actually transforms this character? If the answer is the relationship with their estranged sibling, or the slow loss of an old friend, or a quiet decision made in a side thread, then that thread is doing the structural work of the main plot. Your A-story is just scenery around it.

3. You keep wanting to write the subplot scenes first.

This one is the most obvious. Writers procrastinate on the main plot when their instincts already know it’s not the real one. The scenes you keep drifting toward are the scenes carrying the book.

None of this means your main plot is bad. It often means your main plot is the vehicle and your subplot is the cargo. The question is whether you’ve got them the right way round.

Story Breakdown (In Action)

Imagine a novel set during a high-stakes legal trial. The main plot: a lawyer trying to win a difficult case. The subplot: that lawyer slowly reconnecting with their adult daughter, who they barely know.

As the writer drafts, the courtroom scenes feel competent but a bit mechanical. The scenes with the daughter, a shared meal, a difficult phone call, a moment of silence in a car, are the ones that ache. Beta readers cry at the daughter scenes. They forget the verdict.

That’s the book telling the writer something. The trial isn’t the story. The trial is the pressure that forces the reconnection. The reconnection is the story. Once the writer sees that, the revision becomes obvious: the courtroom shrinks, the daughter expands, and the book finally clicks.

Common Beginner Mistake

The most common mistake is treating the subplot as a problem to be cut rather than a clue to be followed.

New writers often feel guilty when a side thread starts pulling focus. They think they’ve lost discipline, gone off-piste, betrayed the outline. So they cut the subplot back, force themselves to return to the main plot, and end up with a book that feels strangely hollow (and not so fun to write!).

Practical Writing Exercise

Try this with your current project:

1. List your main plot in one sentence. “This is a story about ____.”
2. List your strongest subplot in one sentence using the same structure.
3. Now ask: which sentence describes the book you actually want to read?
4. Pick three scenes from your draft that feel most alive. Note which thread they belong to, main plot or subplot.
5. If two or more of those scenes live in the subplot, write a single paragraph imagining what the book looks like if you swap them. Main plot becomes the pressure. Subplot becomes the spine.

You don’t have to commit to anything. You’re just letting yourself see the book from the other angle.

Apply This in Clear ARC

This is exactly the kind of structural question Clear ARC is built to help you see clearly. Inside the timeline view, you can see your main plot and your subplots side by side as they happen and look at them as parallel threads rather than as one dominant story with decoration around it.

When you can see every thread in one place, with its own arc and its own scenes, the question “which one is doing the real work?” stops being abstract. You can literally look at the shape of each thread and notice which one is carrying the change.

It’s a quieter kind of insight than a writing tip, but it’s the one that tends to save books.

This Week’s Writing Challenge

This week, run the swap test on your current project.

• Take your strongest subplot and write one scene as if it were the main story.
• Take your main plot and write one scene as if it were the subplot supporting that bigger emotional thread.
• Read both back and notice which version feels truer.

You’re not committing to a rewrite. You’re just letting the book show you what it wants to be.

Quote of the Week

“The most important thing in a story is the why. If you know the why, the what takes care of itself.” Toni Morrison

I keep coming back to this one because it sounds simple and then quietly destroys whatever I thought I was writing.

Most of us can describe what happens in our story. A character leaves home. A betrayal lands. Someone makes a choice that changes everything. We can list the events.

But ask why, and a lot of plots get quiet. Not because the writer doesn’t care, but because the reason lived in our head three months ago and never made it onto the page. By chapter ten, we can’t remember if the protagonist quit her job because she was angry at her sister or because she’d been planning it since chapter two. Both feel possible. Neither feels sound.

That gap is what readers feel as scope drift, even when they can’t name it.

Craft Deep Dive

Every decision in your story has two layers: the action and the reason behind it.

The action is easy. She walks out. He lies. They agree to the plan. Those are the things you can see on the page, and most writers track them well because they’re concrete.

The reason is where stories quietly disintegrate.

Reasons are slippery. They’re often a mix of what the character believes, what they’re afraid of, what they want, and what they think they want. A single decision in chapter three might be driven by three overlapping reasons, and only one of them is conscious to the character. By the time you reach chapter ten and that character makes a decision that should feel inevitable, you need every one of those earlier reasons still available to you.

This is where pantsing tends to bite. Not in the early chapters, where instinct is enough, but later, when the story needs decisions to compound. A decision without a tracked reason is a decision you can’t build on. You can write past it, but you can’t reinforce it. It leaves the reader confused (or worse, bored or annoyed).

The fix is unglamorous. For every meaningful decision a character makes, write down the reason in your own words, in a single sentence, somewhere you can find it again. Not the reason you’d put in a query letter. The actual reason. The messy one. “She said yes because she’s scared of being alone and her mother just called.” That’s the kind of note that saves you later.

Reasons aren’t backstory. They’re load-bearing. Treat them that way.

Story Breakdown (In Action)

Imagine a quiet domestic novel. In chapter two, the protagonist accepts a job she doesn’t want. In chapter ten, she sabotages it.

If you’ve only tracked the actions, chapter ten reads as inconsistent. Why would she throw away something she chose? Readers will sense the wobble even if they keep turning pages.

But if you tracked the reason in chapter two (she said yes because she wanted to prove something to a parent who’d just stopped speaking to her), chapter ten becomes inevitable. The parent reaches out. The reason vanishes. The job has no meaning anymore. The sabotage isn’t a contradiction. It’s the same engine running in reverse.

Same action. Completely different read. The only difference is whether the reason was tracked.

Common Beginner Mistake

The most common mistake is assuming you’ll remember.

You won’t. Not in the detail the story needs. You’ll remember the gist, which is enough to keep writing forward but not enough to keep the story coherent when you start layering consequences. By the time you’re editing, the reason you had in mind for chapter three has merged with the reason you had for chapter seven, and neither is quite right anymore.

Writers who track only events end up with plots that move but don’t accumulate. Things happen. They just don’t add up.

Practical Writing Exercise

Try this with whatever you’re working on right now:

1. Pick three decisions your protagonist has made so far. Not events that happened to them. Decisions they made.
2. For each one, write a single sentence answering: why did they do this, really?
3. Now write a second sentence answering: what would have to change for them to undo this decision later?

That second sentence is often where your next plot turn is hiding.

Apply This in Clear ARC

This is exactly the kind of work Clear ARC is built to hold for you. When you’re planning a series of events in a scene, you can attach the reason behind each decision directly to the event where it happens, so it sits next to the action instead of floating somewhere in your notes app or your head.

Later, when you’re working on chapter ten and you need to remember why she said yes in chapter two, the reason is right there with all the other events in the chapter’s timeline. You don’t have to scroll, search, or guess. You read the reasons one after another in order, and it shows you the way the story works.

Clear ARC Feature Spotlight

Chapters, scenes, and events in Clear ARC let you keep a reason or motivation note alongside every thing you need to remember, so the why travels with the what through every revision. When you restructure, the reasons move with the scenes. When you cut, you can see what reasons you’re cutting too.

Start your first month of Clear ARC for free.

This Week’s Writing Challenge

Open the chapter you’re currently writing and find the single most important decision in it. Write one sentence, in your own words, explaining the real reason behind it. Then keep that sentence somewhere you’ll see it when you write the next chapter (or use Clear ARC so you’ll never need to remember where you put it again).

If the reason feels thin when you write it down, that’s the work. Fix it now, not in chapter ten.

Quote of the Week

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.” Jane Smiley

I keep coming back to this one when I’m halfway through a draft and the loops I opened in chapter two are still flapping around in chapter fourteen.

There’s something freeing about Smiley’s permission. The first draft just has to exist. But existing isn’t the same as tracking. And if you write the way I do (mostly by feel, mostly forward), the loops you open early have a habit of going missing.

That’s what this post is about. Not the perfect draft. Just an honest view of what you promised the reader, and whether you ever paid them back.

Deep Dive

Every story is a series of promises. Some are big (will she find her mother?), some are small (what was in the envelope?), and most sit somewhere in the middle. Writers call these open loops. You open one any time you introduce a question the reader expects an answer to.

Opening loops is the easy part. Pantsers especially are brilliant at this. You’re in the flow, a character mentions a strange phone call from years ago, and the reader leans in. Tension created. Question planted. Loop open.

The hard part is closing the loop. Not necessarily answering it, but acknowledging it. A loop can close in three ways:

• Resolved: the question gets answered, directly or through events.
• Transformed: the question changes shape because the character or situation has changed, and the original question no longer applies.
• Acknowledged and dropped: the character (or narrator) names that the question won’t be answered, and why.

What readers can’t tolerate is the silently abandoned loop. The phone call that’s never mentioned again. The locked drawer no one opens. The threat that simply evaporates because you forgot about it (unless of course you’re going to answer that in season 8 – if you’re lucky enough for your readers not to abandon it because you lost them due to unmet promises!).

This is the pantser’s hidden tax. You don’t notice the loops you opened because you were writing forward. But your reader is keeping a list, whether they realise it or not. Every unclosed loop is a small withdrawal from their trust.

The goal isn’t to close every loop tidily. It’s to know which loops you opened, so you can decide what to do with each one on purpose, not by accident.

Story Breakdown (In Action)

Imagine a novel where, in chapter three, the protagonist’s sister mentions she’s been seeing someone new but won’t say who. The reader files it away. Mystery. Promise.

By chapter twenty, the sister has a whole subplot about her job, her grief, her move to a new city. The mystery boyfriend? Never mentioned again.

The reader doesn’t always consciously notice. But something feels off. The book feels like it’s missing a beat it had earlier promised. That’s the cost of an abandoned loop.

Now imagine the same novel, but in chapter eighteen the sister says, almost in passing, “That guy I was seeing? It fizzled. He wasn’t who I thought.” Loop closed. Two sentences. The reader exhales, even if they couldn’t tell you why.

Common Beginner Mistake

The most common mistake is treating loops as decoration instead of debt.

New writers love opening loops because they create instant intrigue. A mysterious letter, an overheard conversation, a scar with no story. The text feels rich and layered.

But every loop you open is a debt you owe the reader. Open too many, close too few, and the book starts to feel cluttered and unsatisfying, even when individual scenes are working. The fix isn’t fewer loops. It’s tracking the ones you’ve opened so you can pay them off in some form.

Practical Writing Exercise

Do a loop audit on your current draft (or your last finished chapter if you’re between projects):

1. Read through and write down every question the text invites the reader to ask. Big or small. One line each.
2. Next to each one, mark it: Resolved, Transformed, Acknowledged, or Open.
3. Look at the Open ones. For each, decide: am I closing this later, or did I forget about it?
4. For the loops you forgot, choose one of three actions: plan a payoff, write a single line that acknowledges and drops it, or cut the moment that opened it.

You’re not trying to tidy everything. You’re trying to make every open loop a choice.

Apply This in Clear ARC

This is exactly the kind of work Clear ARC is built for. As you plan or review your scenes, you can capture each loop as it opens and track where (or whether) it closes across the rest of your outline. Instead of holding the whole tangle in your head, you can see your open and closed loops laid out alongside the scenes that own them.

For pantsers, this is especially useful in the revision pass. You write the messy first draft, then view the timeline in Clear ARC and let the structure show you what you actually promised the reader, and where those promises currently live.

Clear ARC Feature Spotlight

Clear ARC’s scene-by-scene planning view through the timeline is where loop tracking comes alive. You can move between scenes, mark which threads each one opens or resolves, and spot at a glance the threads that never get a closing scene. It turns the invisible debt of a draft into something you can actually see and decide about.

Start your free first month here

Writing Challenge

Pick one chapter from your current project and check out your promises in the timeline.

• List every question the chapter invites.
• Mark each one Resolved, Transformed, Acknowledged, or Open.
• Close, drop, or plan a payoff for at least one Open loop before you write your next scene.

Quote of the Week

“The reader should be surprised, then immediately convinced that the surprise was inevitable.” – William Goldman

Goldman puts his finger on the exact tension every twist has to hold. Surprise and inevitability sound like opposites, but a good twist needs both at the same time.

If it’s only surprising, it feels inevitable, the reader saw it coming a mile off and interest in the story wains.

The skill in writing is somewhere in the gap between those two reactions. That moment where the reader gasps, then re-reads the previous chapter and thinks “how did I miss that!”

A twist is a reveal that reframes everything the reader already accepted as true as false (or vice-versa).

A badly written twist says “and then suddenly something happened.” A well written twist says “the thing you thought was never going to happen just happened because of the one thing you forgot about earlier.”

There are three kinds of twists worth knowing:

Identity twists. The narrator, the villain, the helper, the dead person, the love interest is not who they appeared to be.

Situational twists. The setting, the timeline, or the rules of the world were never what the reader assumed.

Motivation twists. A character was acting for a completely different reason than the reader (and often the protagonist) believed.

All three rely on the same underlying mechanic: information planted earlier that the reader registered but misinterpreted.

A twist is not new information arriving at chapter 27. It’s old information finally being understood.

Which means most of the work for your twist happens in chapters 1 through 26.

Imagine a quiet domestic novel. A woman, Marta, is caring for her elderly mother who is slowly losing her memory. We get tender scenes, Marta brushing her mother’s hair, gently correcting her when she calls Marta by the wrong name, sleeping in the chair next to her bed.

The reader settles into a story about love and loss and the slow grief of dementia.

Then in chapter 18, a neighbour knocks on the door asking after “old Mrs Halberd,” and Marta says, calmly, “She passed away in the spring. I’m looking after her daughter now.”

The reader stops dead.

Go back through every earlier scene. The mother never used Marta’s name correctly because Marta was never her daughter. So, apart from wondering who and where this mysterious daughter is, we now realise the “gentle corrections” were rewriting a confused woman’s reality. Marta was gaslighting the whole family.

Nothing in the earlier chapters was false. It was all just read through the wrong lens.

That’s the inevitability Goldman is talking about. The reader supplied the lens; the writer supplied the facts.

Common Beginner Mistake

The biggest beginner mistake with twists is withholding information instead of misdirecting.

Withholding means the writer simply hides information the protagonist (or narrator) already knows, and dumps it at the reveal. Readers feel lied to, because they were.

Misdirection means the information is present on the page, but the reader’s attention is pointed somewhere else. A louder, more emotional, more obvious detail is doing the work of distracting them.

The fix: every clue that supports your twist should be on the page, in plain sight, sitting next to something more interesting. Trust the reader to look at the shiny thing and walk past the real one.

Practical Writing Exercise

Take the twist you’re planning (or the one already in your draft) and write it on a single line at the top of a blank page.

Underneath, list five pieces of information the reader needs to have seen for that twist to feel inevitable. Not foreshadowing in the vague sense, actual concrete facts, objects, lines of dialogue, or behaviours.

Now, for each of the five, write the louder thing happening in the same scene that the reader will look at instead.

If you can’t think of a louder thing, your clue is too exposed and readers will guess. If you can’t think of a clue at all, your twist is a withhold of information, not a twist.

Apply This in ClearARC

This is where a planning tool earns its keep. Twists die when writers try to hold every planted clue in their head across 90,000 words.

In ClearARC, you can tag the five clues you just listed to the scenes they appear in, then use the timeline view to see them spaced out across your manuscript. Too many clustered in one chapter, and readers will smell the twist coming. None for ten chapters, and they’ll forget the setup entirely.

Linking each clue to the reveal scene means when you edit, you can check at a glance whether your misdirection is still doing its job, or whether a rewrite has accidentally pulled a thread loose.

It turns “I hope this lands” into “I can see exactly how this lands.”

Try ClearARC free for a month

This Week’s Writing Challenge

Pick one twist in your current project. Find the single earliest scene where a reader could, in theory, work it out. Now go to that scene and add one louder, more emotional detail next to the clue.

Not to hide the clue. To give the reader something more interesting to care about while it sits there in plain sight.

Quote of the week

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.‘” — C.S. Lewis

What I love about this quote is that it doesn’t describe friendship as a status. It describes a moment. A specific, small recognition between two people.

That tiny exchange contains everything a long friendship is built on. Shared experience. Quiet relief. The discovery that you are not alone in some odd corner of your world.

Most of the friendships I write fail because I forget this. I describe the relationship instead of showing the moments it was built from.

Why “best friends since college” does no work at all

Here is a sentence I have written more times than I want to admit.

Sarah and Jen had been best friends since college.

It sounds fine. It tells the reader what to think. And it does absolutely nothing on the page.

Readers do not believe narration about relationships. They believe behaviour. If I have to tell you these two women are close, I have already lost the scene.

A label is a shortcut I am asking the reader to take on trust. A friendship is something I have to prove, line by line, through what these two people actually do when they are in the same room.

This is what I keep getting wrong. I write the label, then I write a scene where the two characters could be strangers and the dialogue would barely change. The relationship lives in the narration, not in the behaviour.

What a lived in friendship actually looks like

When I read writers who handle friendship well, three things show up again and again.

Shared shorthand. Inside jokes that nobody bothers to explain. A nickname that exists only between these two. A reference to something that happened years ago, dropped into conversation in five words (not fifty). The reader does not need the backstory. They feel the history precisely because it is not being walked through.

Texture, not just warmth. Real friendships have small irritations. Old arguments that get referenced in a single line and then dropped. Topics one friend learns not to bring up around the other. A mild eye roll that contains twenty years of context. Warmth alone reads as sentimental. Warmth plus friction reads as real.

Asymmetry. One friend orders for the other without asking. One always drives. One always pays and the other always protests, but it is the same protest every time, and it never changes anything. These tiny rituals do more work than any flashback ever could. They are evidence that this pattern has been running for years.

None of this is announced. It is shown, then left alone.

A small example:

Imagine two friends meeting in a cafe.

Version one: They had been close since their twenties and could finish each other’s sentences.

Version two: Jen sits down. The waiter approaches. Sarah says, “Two flat whites, and she’ll pretend she doesn’t want the brownie.” Jen does not look up from her phone. “I genuinely don’t want the brownie.” Sarah says, “Bring the brownie.”

The second version is twenty seconds of dialogue. It contains a ritual, an old argument that has clearly happened a hundred times, an asymmetry in who orders, and a quiet affection that no one had to label.

The reader now believes these two have history. I did not tell them. I let them watch.

The mistake I see most often in early drafts

The most common version of this mistake is what I call front-loading the bond.

The writer introduces two friends and immediately tries to convince the reader of the relationship’s depth. There is a paragraph about how they met. A sentence about how they have always been there for each other. Maybe a memory of a difficult time they survived together.

Then the scene starts, and the friendship has no behavioural footprint. The two characters speak to each other the way any two polite adults would speak. The history exists only in the narration.

The fix is almost always the same. Cut the introduction. Trust the reader. Then go back into the scene and plant three small pieces of evidence that this relationship has a past. A nickname. A reference. A ritual. That is usually enough.

A short exercise to try right now:

Take any scene in your current draft where two friends interact. Strip out every sentence that tells the reader how they feel about each other or how long they have known each other.

Now add three things:

One piece of shared shorthand that is not explained. One small asymmetry in how they behave around each other. One reference to something from their shared past, dropped in a single line, never expanded on.

Read it back. The scene will almost always feel more alive, and you will have used fewer words to get there.

How I track this inside Clear ARC

The reason I lose track of these details in long drafts is that they live in my head, not on the page. By chapter twelve, I have forgotten which nickname I used in chapter three, or whether the running joke about the brownie was established or just implied.

This is where character links inside Clear ARC do the heavy lifting for me.

For every important friendship in a book, I record three things on the link between those two characters. A shared memory or two. A recurring habit or ritual between them. A private word, phrase, or nickname.

Then, as I write each scene, those details are sitting beside me in the planning panel. I can drop them in as evidence. The nickname appears in chapter three, gets a callback in chapter nine, and resurfaces in the final act when one of them uses it for the last time. That kind of patterning is almost impossible to do from memory across a full novel. With the links visible, it becomes obvious.

The timeline helps too. I can see at a glance whether the friendship is showing up in scenes through behaviour, or whether I have gone three chapters relying on the reader to remember what I told them on page one.

If you want to try this on your own draft, you can plan and write your book inside Clear ARC for thirty days without paying anything. Start here: https://arc.cleararc.online

A challenge

Pick one friendship in your current draft. Write down three pieces of evidence that prove it on the page: a shorthand, a ritual, and a reference to shared history.

Then find one place in the story where you have written the label instead of the proof, and replace it.

That single edit will usually do more for the relationship than another paragraph of backstory ever could.

Side characters tend to disappear when the plot gets tense. This is because because we tend to stop tracking them. The tension narrows our focus to the protagonist, and everyone else gets quietly parked offstage until the scene calms down. The problem is, readers notice. They feel the cast shrink right when the stakes should make every relationship matter more.

The fix is simple. You need a way to know where every character is, what they want, and what they’re doing at the exact moment your protagonist is in the worst of it. That’s it. Once you can see your cast on a timeline, the disappearing act stops.

Why does this happen in the first place?

Tension creates tunnel vision in the writer, not just the protagonist. When we’re writing a chase, a confrontation, a betrayal, our brain locks onto the two or three people driving the conflict. Everyone else usually fades into the background.

Whilst this feels normal, it’s also the exact moment our side characters should be doing the most interesting work. The best friend who chose not to show up just as the hero is being attacked (the best friend doesn’t have to show up, the reader just needs to know they should have). The mentor whose advice the protagonist is ignoring (same thing, we don’t need the mentor showing up, just the mention that it would have been helpful).

If you don’t track them, you forget them. And if you forget them, your reader will too (but only after they’re wondering what their point was).

What does a vanishing side character actually look like?

It looks like a character who was central in chapter 7 and absent from chapters 8 through 12, then reappears in chapter 13 with no explanation (the ‘no explanation’ is the real problem here – it’s fine for any character to disappear from time to time as long as we’re not left in confusion). Readers don’t always articulate this, but they feel it.

A few common patterns:

• The loyal sidekick who’s mysteriously not around for the heist they helped plan (would be a great plot if it was meant to be that way provided we eventually find out why)
• The romantic interest who has zero reaction to the protagonist’s near-death experience
• The villain’s lieutenant who shows up to scheme in act one and is never seen again
• The family member who would obviously be in the hospital but is conveniently absent so the protagonist can brood alone

Each of these is a tracking failure. The character mattered. We just lost sight of them while we were busy with the main thread.

How do you keep a full cast active in a tense scene?

Ask one question for every named character before you write the scene: where are they right now and what do they want? Not in the book. Right now. In this hour we’re writing about.

You don’t have to put them on the page. You just have to know. Half the time, knowing is enough, because their absence becomes deliberate instead of accidental. The reader can feel the difference between a character who isn’t there because they chose not to come, and a character who isn’t there because the author forgot they existed.

Three practical moves:

1. Place them physically. Even one sentence in your notes: “Marta is at the hospital with her mother during the warehouse scene.” Now her absence has a reason.
2. Give them a parallel want. They’re not just absent, they’re pursuing something. That something can pay off later.
3. Decide what they hear and when. News travels. The moment a side character learns what happened in the big scene is itself a scene worth thinking about.

Why a timeline beats a character list

A flat character list tells you who exists. A timeline tells you what they’re doing. That second piece is what you actually need when plots get tense.

The reason we lose sight of characters is because most of us cannot hold everything in our heads at the same time. We need the cast somewhere we can see them.

A timeline view shows you, at any given moment in the story, who’s onstage, who’s offstage, who’s moving toward the protagonist, and who’s moving away. When you write a tense scene, you can glance at the timeline and see that the mentor is two days’ ride away, the rival is across town watching the same event unfold, and the best friend is sitting at home, not yet knowing what happened. Now the world keeps breathing while the protagonist suffers, and your readers are properly engaged and not confused.

When should a side character actually be offstage?

When their absence creates more tension than their presence would. That’s the only good reason. This assumes that the side-character is part of the story at this point. Otherwise your fine. It’s about expectations. If the reader remembers that a side-character was part of what led them to this point, then the side-character matters.

Some examples where absence works harder than presence:

• The character is doing something the reader doesn’t yet know about, which will detonate later
• Their absence is the reason the protagonist is in this mess
• The protagonist has pushed them away, and the loneliness is the point
• They’re racing toward the scene and won’t arrive in time

Notice that in every one of those, the writer knows exactly where the character is. Absence is a choice. The reader can feel the offstage character pulling on the scene even when they don’t appear in it.

What about minor characters who really don’t matter?

If a character genuinely doesn’t matter, cut them out. Don’t carry dead weight just because you introduced them in chapter two.

Every named character is a promise to the reader. You’re telling them: this person is worth remembering. If you don’t deliver on that, the reader stops trusting your signals. They start ignoring everyone you name, which is a disaster when you actually need them to remember someone.

A useful test: can you list, right now, what this character wants and what they’re afraid of? If you can’t, that’s not just your problem. You have a name without a job description. Either deepen the character or apply their function to someone else who’s already doing real work in the story.

How Clear ARC keeps your cast visible

This is exactly the problem Clear ARC was built to solve. You link characters to scenes, scenes to places, and the whole thing onto a timeline so you can see, at a glance, who’s where and when. You track changes in their behaviour, emotions, and traits as the story moves. The tense scene stops being a place where characters vanish, because you can see your whole cast in one view while you write.

Leave yourself todo notes when you realise a side character needs more to do. See them all in one place with links back to the scene that prompted them. Hit the write button when you’re ready, with your full plan beside you.

Frequently asked questions

How many side characters can one novel realistically support?

There’s no fixed number, but if the reader can’t keep them straight, you have too many. A useful rough guide: most novels comfortably carry 5 to 8 named characters who actually do something, plus a handful of one-scene roles. If you’re past that, ask whether two characters can become one.

Is it okay to introduce a side character late in the book?

Yes, if they earn their place. The risk is that a late introduction feels convenient, like the author needed someone with a specific skill. Plant them earlier, even just a mention, so their arrival pays off rather than feels manufactured.

How do I know if a side character is disappearing, or just resting?

Resting characters have a clear reason for being offstage and a clear moment of return. Disappearing characters have neither. If you can’t tell the reader (or yourself) where they are right now, they’re disappearing.

Should every side character have their own arc?

Not every one, but the important ones, yes. If a side character ends the book the same as they started, ask why they’re in the book. Even small shifts in belief or behaviour give them weight and make the cast feel alive.

What’s the fastest fix when I realise a side character has vanished?

Go back to the last scene they appeared in and write one line of notes about where they go next. Then scan forward and find the earliest plausible moment they’d reappear, react, or be mentioned. Often a single line of dialogue from another character is enough to keep them alive in the reader’s mind.

If you found this useful, I send regular newsletters on plotting, character work, and the craft problems that trip up new authors. Subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll send you the next one, plus a few of the techniques I use inside Clear ARC to keep a full cast on the page from chapter one to the end.

How deep a writer needs to go to plan their novel depends on the book they’re about to write (and not the writer). A quiet character study about grief and a six-POV political thriller are not the same when it comes to planning, so they don’t need the same outline. So the right planning depth is dependent on the book, not the personality of the author.

Most authors stall because they apply pantser advice to a structure-heavy book, or plotter advice to a story that wants to breathe. The fix is to recognise four planning layers (book, chapter, scene, event) and plan only as deep as the story actually requires.

Why the plotter vs pantser debate misses the point

The plotter vs pantser argument is a basic error most of us make. It treats planning depth as a personality trait when it’s actually a structural property of the book itself.

A literary novel about a marriage failing over one summer can survive on instinct and chapter notes. A 12-clue murder mystery with three red herrings cannot. The book (and its genre) decides, not the writer.

When people argue about which camp they’re in, they keep applying the wrong tool to the wrong story. That’s why 80,000 word drafts collapse in revision, and why planners spend three months outlining a book first.

The four planning layers most authors don’t realise exist

Every novel can be planned at four distinct depths, and you choose how far down to go. The layers stack like this:

• Book layer. Premise, ending, theme, protagonist arc. One page or less. Every novel needs this (it’s an excellent reminder later on if you get stuck).
• Chapter layer. What each chapter does for the story. A sentence or two per chapter is often enough.
• Scene layer. Scenes hold the beats together that form inside each chapter. Goal, conflict, outcome. Useful when chapters do more than one thing.
• Event layer. The causal chain of specific story events across the whole book. Who knows what, when, and why. Where mysteries and thrillers are won or lost.

Most authors only know about layer one and layer two, then feel guilty for not doing layer three. The truth is that layer three and four are tools, not virtues. You use them when the book needs them.

When is chapter-only planning genuinely enough?

Chapter-only planning works when voice, atmosphere, and a single character’s interior life carry the load. If your book lives or dies on the sentence and the mood, deeper planning often gets in the way.

Think quiet contemporary fiction, coming-of-age novels, single-POV literary work, memoir-shaped fiction. Books where the question driving the reader is “what does this character feel next?” rather than “what happens next?”.

For those, a list of 20 to 30 chapter titles with a one-line intent each is plenty. Some authors get there with even less. The risk is rambling in the middle, but that’s more of a revision problem rather than planning.

Useful advice is to simply stop reading articles that tell you to outline every scene. You’re being sold a tool you don’t need unless your novel is so complicated it can’t be done without it.

When do scenes start earning their keep?

Scene-layer planning earns its place during revision, pacing fixes, and transplant surgery on tangled chapters. Drafting at the scene layer can feel mechanical, but revising at the scene layer is where messy books get rescued.

When a chapter is doing three jobs and none of them well, you can only see the problem if you’ve broken it into scenes. Each scene gets a card: goal, conflict, outcome, who’s in it, what changes. Now you can move them, cut them, or merge them.

This is also how you fix pacing without rewriting from page one. If three scenes in a row have the same emotional shape, you spot it instantly when they’re listed side by side. You can’t see that in a 90,000 word manuscript.

For multi-POV books with 3 or more viewpoint characters, scene layer is closer to required. You need to see whose chapter follows whose, and whether each POV is pulling its weight.

Why mysteries and political thrillers live at the event layer

Mystery, thriller, and conspiracy plots succeed or collapse at the event layer because causality is the engine. When the reader’s pleasure depends on clues, reveals, and timing, you cannot wing it.

The event layer asks different questions than the scene layer. Not “what happens in this scene?” but “on what day did the killer learn the victim was lying, and which character witnessed which version of that event?”. It’s a timeline of facts, not a sequence of dramatic beats.

Books that need this:

• Detective and cozy mysteries with planted clues
• Heist plots where information asymmetry drives suspense
• Political thrillers with overlapping timelines
• Time-travel and dual-timeline stories
• Any book where readers will reread for clues

If you’re writing one of these and only planning at the chapter layer, you’ll discover the problem in revision. By then it will have become a structural rebuild (i.e. a bit of a headache).

How do you find the right planning depth for your current book?

Ask three questions and your book will tell you which layer it needs.

1. Does the reader’s pleasure depend on what happens, or on how it feels? If it’s how it feels, stay shallow. If it’s what happens, go deeper.
2. How many POV characters? 1 to 2 can survive on chapter layer. 3 or more usually needs a scene layer.
3. Does the plot hinge on who knew what, when? If yes, you need the event layer.

The honest answer is usually that different parts of the same book need different depths. The opening might be loose and atmospheric, the middle might need scene-level pacing work, and the climax might need event-level clue tracking.

That’s why you plan upward and downward as the book reveals itself. Start at the layer your instinct picks, then go deeper in the sections that resist you and shallower in the sections that flow. The plan serves the book (rather than the other way round).

Clear ARC was built for exactly this. Plan at book, chapter, scene, or event depth in the same place, link characters and places to whichever layer they belong to, and let the timeline show you when the layers don’t agree. Plan as deep as your book needs and no deeper.

Frequently asked questions

Should I plan before I draft, or as I go?

Both. Settle the book layer before you draft (premise, ending, protagonist arc) because changing those mid-draft costs months. Let chapter, scene, and event layers fill in as the book reveals itself. Rigid front-loaded planning kills momentum, and pure discovery loses structure.

Can a pantser write a mystery without planning events?

Rarely, and not without heavy revision. The clue-and-reveal structure of a mystery is causal, not intuitive, so most pantser mysteries get rebuilt at the event layer in draft two or three. You can pants the prose and plot the events, which is what most working mystery writers actually do.

How long should my outline be?

As long as the book needs and no longer. A literary novel might use a single page. A six-POV thriller might have 40 pages of timeline, scene cards, and event tracking. Length is a symptom of depth rather than some kind of goal.

What if I plan deeply and the book changes anyway?

Good. That means the plan was working as a thinking tool. Update the layer that changed, check whether layers above and below still agree, and keep going. A plan you never revise is a plan you stopped using.

Do I need separate software to plan at four layers?

No, but it helps. Spreadsheets break down once you have 3 POVs and 60 scenes, because the connections between layers stop fitting in rows and columns. A purpose-built tool keeps book, chapter, scene, and event linked so a change in one shows up in the others.

If this matched how you think about your book, the Clear ARC newsletter sends one short piece a week on planning, plotting, and finishing fiction without burning out. Subscribe to my newsletter for the next one.

A boring protagonist is a stakes problem. If your main character has nothing they’re terrified of losing, readers have no reason to keep turning pages. Give them a person, a place, a reputation, a belief, or a future they’re clinging to, and suddenly every scene matters. The protagonist doesn’t need to be quirky or witty or tragic. They need attachment. Loss is what creates tension, and tension is what readers actually show up for.

So before you rewrite your character’s backstory or pile on more flaws, ask one question: what does this person stand to lose, and do they know it yet?

Why does a protagonist feel boring in the first place?

Most flat protagonists are flat because they’re floating. They walk through scenes reacting to events, but nothing in the story is pressing on them. Nothing is at risk. They could win or lose and the reader’s pulse wouldn’t change.

You can write a beautifully described character with a compelling job and a tragic past, and they’ll still feel hollow if no current thread of the story is threatening to take something from them.

Readers don’t connect with traits. They connect with vulnerability. A character who loves their sister becomes interesting the moment the sister is in danger. A detective who prides themselves on always being right becomes interesting the moment they’re publicly wrong.

The trait alone is wallpaper. The threat to the trait is the story.

What does “something to lose” actually mean?

It’s not just life or death. In fact, life-or-death stakes are often the weakest kind because readers know the protagonist usually survives.

The strongest stakes are personal, specific, and irreplaceable. Here’s what your protagonist could be at risk of losing:

• A relationship they’ve built their identity around
• A belief about themselves or the world
• A place that represents safety or belonging
• A reputation, status, or position that took years to earn
• A future they’ve been planning toward
• A secret that protects someone they love
• A version of themselves they’re afraid to let go of

Notice that most of these are internal or relational. The external plot (the heist, the war, the mystery) is the engine. The thing your character could lose is the fuel.

The difference between a goal and a stake

A goal is what your character wants. A stake is what they’ll pay if they fail. New writers often confuse the two and end up with a protagonist who has plenty of goals but no skin in the game.

Goal: solve the murder. Stake: if she doesn’t, her brother goes to prison for it. Now the same plot has weight.

How do you find what your protagonist would lose?

If your character feels boring on the page, the answer is usually buried in their history, not their plot.

Start with three questions:

1. What did this person have before the story started that they’re trying to keep?
2. What did they almost lose once before, and how did that change them?
3. What would break them if it were taken away tomorrow?

The answers don’t have to appear in chapter one. They have to exist in your head while you write chapter one. The reader will feel them even when you don’t spell them out.

This is where character tracking matters. When you record what a character values, who they’re attached to, and what they fear in one place, you can pull those threads through every scene. In Clear ARC, characters link to scenes, places, and events, so the things they’re afraid to lose stay visible while you write. You stop forgetting that your protagonist’s whole arc hinges on her relationship with her father, because his name is right there in the side panel.

Why do new writers skip this step?

Because it feels obvious in your head. You know your protagonist loves her daughter. You know the antique shop means everything to him. You know she’d die before letting her sister find out the truth.

The reader doesn’t know any of that until you put it on the page in a scene where it matters. And it has to matter early, before they’ve decided whether to keep reading.

The other reason writers skip it is because building real attachment takes scenes. You can’t tell us the protagonist loves her daughter. You have to show them together, doing something specific, before the threat lands. Otherwise the threat is just plot.

This is why pantsers sometimes hit chapter three and feel the story’s going flat (or worse, feel it’s done). The plot is moving but the protagonist hasn’t been given anything personal yet. The fix isn’t more action. It’s a quiet scene where the reader sees what this character would die to protect.

How does loss change across the story?

The thing your protagonist is afraid to lose at the start should not be the thing they’re afraid to lose at the end.

Great character arcs work because what the character values transforms. At the start, your detective is afraid to lose her perfect record. By the middle, she’s afraid to lose a witness she’s grown to care about. By the end, she’s afraid to lose the version of herself who used to think the record was the point.

This layering is where stories stop feeling thin. Track these shifts as you write. Note when your character’s priorities change and what triggered the change. If you can’t point to the scene where the shift happened, the reader probably can’t feel it either.

A protagonist becomes interesting the moment they realise what they actually care about isn’t what they thought they cared about.

What if your protagonist genuinely has nothing to lose?

Then that’s your story.

A character who has lost everything, or believes they have, is one of the oldest setups in fiction. The story becomes about what they slowly let themselves want again, and what they’re terrified of losing once they have it.

The arc isn’t built on protecting something. It’s built on the dangerous act of caring again. That’s still loss-driven storytelling. The stakes just sit on the other side of the timeline.

If your protagonist feels boring even in this setup, it usually means you haven’t shown the reader what they’re tempted by. We need to see the thing they’re starting to want, and then we need to see them realise they could lose it.

Frequently asked questions

How early in a novel should the reader know what the protagonist could lose?

Ideally within the first chapter, often within the first few pages. You don’t need to spell it out, but the reader should sense an attachment that’s under threat. If they get to chapter three without feeling that pressure, most will put the book down.

Can a protagonist have multiple things to lose?

Yes, and the strongest characters usually do. One personal stake (a relationship, a secret), one external stake (the case, the war, the deadline), and one internal stake (a belief about themselves) creates layered tension. Just make sure the personal one is clear, because that’s what readers attach to.

What if my antagonist has more to lose than my protagonist?

That’s often a sign you’ve accidentally written the wrong protagonist. Either rewrite your main character with deeper attachments, or consider whether the antagonist is actually the more interesting story. Both options are valid. Flat protagonists usually mean the writer is more invested in the villain.

Does this apply to non-fiction or memoir too?

Yes. In memoir, the “protagonist” is you, and readers still need to know what you stood to lose at each stage of the story. Without that, even true events read like a recap. The risk is what makes the experience meaningful to share.

How do I track what each character has to lose without losing the thread?

Keep a single place where every character’s attachments, fears, and stakes live, and link them to the scenes where they show up. This is exactly what Clear ARC was built for. You can record what a character values, watch how it shifts across chapters, and keep all of it visible while you write so nothing gets dropped.

If you want more posts like this, on character, structure, and finishing the book you’ve been circling for months, Subscribe to my newsletter. I send one short, useful piece each week on writing fiction that actually keeps readers turning pages. No fluff, no filler.

Hero and villain tension is the engine of your story, and it works best when both characters want something the other one stands directly in the way of. Not generic good versus evil. A specific clash where every scene the two share (or share by proxy) raises the cost of one of them winning. If your reader can predict the next move, the tension is gone. If your reader feels physically uncomfortable turning the page, you’ve nailed it.

This post is about how to build that. The specific moves that make hero and villain tension feel earned, plus the mistakes that quietly drain it without you noticing.

Why does hero and villain tension drive the whole story?

Without opposition that matters, your plot is just a sequence of events. Readers don’t care about events. They care about pressure.

The hero wants something. The villain wants something incompatible. Every page either tightens that incompatibility or releases it.

The trap most new writers fall into is making the villain a generic obstacle. A bank robber. A dark lord. A bully. The label does the work the writing should do. Readers feel it instantly and switch off.

Good hero and villain tension is specific. This hero wants this thing. This villain wants this thing. They cannot both have what they want. And the closer they get to each other, the worse it gets for somebody.

What makes the conflict feel personal?

The villain has to threaten something the hero cannot afford to lose, and the hero has to threaten the same for the villain. Symmetry is what makes it bite.

If only one side has skin in the game, you’ve written a chase instead of a conflict. The reader will root for the hero, sure, but they won’t pay attention. They already know how it ends.

A few questions worth answering before you write a single confrontation scene:

• What does the villain love that the hero could destroy?
• What does the hero love that the villain could destroy?
• What do they secretly recognise in each other?
• What would each of them never admit out loud?

That last one matters more than people think. The unspoken thing between hero and villain (the recognition, the shared history, the mirror moment) is what lifts the tension above plot mechanics into something readers actually feel.

How do you build tension scene by scene?

Every scene the hero and villain occupy together, even at a distance, should change the balance of what each one knows or controls. The status shifts along with the Information, resulting in a high stakes shift the reader will notice.

But if two characters end a scene in the same emotional position they started it, that scene is just wasting the reader’s time.

A simple test I use: at the end of each scene involving either character, ask three questions.

1. What does the hero now know that they didn’t before?
2. What does the villain now know that they didn’t before?
3. Has the cost of losing gone up for either of them?

If two of those three answers are “nothing,” you’ve written filler content. Cut it or rewrite it.

Tension also lives in the small stuff. A character who refuses a question. A door that won’t open. A name that gets mentioned and then ignored. These tiny resistances build the pressure between confrontations. Big set pieces only land if the small scenes have done their job.

When should the tension break, and when should it hold?

Small tensions need to release within a chapter or two, the big one holds until the end. Get this wrong in either direction and readers either feel battered or bored.

If every small disagreement, every misunderstanding, every minor obstacle gets dragged across half the book, readers stop trusting you to resolve anything. They disengage to protect themselves.

If you resolve the big one too early, the rest of the book feels like a victory lap. Great for the victor, rubbish for the reader.

The pattern that works:

• Page-level tension breaks within a paragraph or two (a question answered, a door opened, a sentence completed)
• Scene-level tension breaks within the scene or the next one (a character backs down, a piece of information lands)
• Chapter-level tension breaks within a few chapters (a subplot resolves, a relationship shifts)
• Book-level tension between hero and villain holds until the climax

Mix them deliberately. Don’t let everything resolve on the same rhythm. Predictable rhythm is its own kind of tension killer.

What mistakes quietly drain hero and villain tension?

The five drainers I see most often in first drafts:

1. The villain has no goal beyond stopping the hero. Reactive villains are weak. The villain should want something specific that has nothing to do with the hero, and the hero just happens to be in the way.
2. The hero is never genuinely tempted. If the villain’s offer (or worldview) holds zero appeal, the conflict is one-dimensional. The best hero and villain tension includes a moment where the hero almost breaks.
3. Confrontations only happen at plot points. If the only scenes where pressure rises are the inciting incident, the midpoint, and the climax, the middle sags. Distribute pressure.
4. The villain is offstage too long. Out of sight is out of mind for readers. Keep the villain present through consequences, mentions, and indirect action even when they’re not on the page.
5. No internal opposition. External tension between hero and villain works best when it amplifies an internal conflict the hero already has. The villain becomes the externalisation of the hero’s worst fear or temptation.

How do you track tension across a whole book?

Most tension problems show up because nobody mapped where the pressure was supposed to be. You can pantser a story and still track tension. You just need to see it.

A timeline that shows where hero and villain interact (directly or through proxies), what each scene costs each of them, and how the stakes climb chapter by chapter is the difference between a book that builds and a book that meanders.

This is exactly the kind of thing Clear ARC was built for. Track every scene, link characters to events, see your tension arc laid out visually so you can spot the flat patches before your reader does. Plan it loose or plan it tight. Either way, you can see what’s actually happening to the pressure as the book progresses.

Frequently asked questions

How early should I introduce the villain?

By the end of the first act at the latest, even if only through their actions or reputation. Readers need to feel the shape of the opposition early so the rest of the story has weight. The villain doesn’t need to appear on the page, but the threat does.

Can the hero and villain be the same person?

Yes, and it’s one of the most powerful structures available. The internal villain (addiction, pride, fear, grief) follows the same rules as an external one. Specific goal, specific threat, real cost. The only difference is that the climax is internal rather than external.

What if my villain isn’t a person?

It still needs intent the reader can read. A storm, a system, a disease, a society. Give it patterns of behaviour, escalation, and apparent decisions. Readers anthropomorphise anything that resists the hero. They’ll understand.

How do I keep tension in romance subplots?

Same rules. Two people want something incompatible (or compatible but blocked). Every scene shifts what they know or what they’re willing to risk. The unspoken thing between them is doing most of the work. Stop the unspoken thing too early and the subplot dies.

Does every scene need tension?

Every scene needs a reason to exist, and most of the time that reason is tension of some kind. Quiet scenes can work, but they’re earning their place by setting up a release or contrast. If you’ve written three quiet scenes in a row, something’s wrong.

If you want a tool that helps you map every beat of tension between your hero and villain across an entire book, try Clear ARC free for 30 days. Plot, plan, write, track character arcs, and see your whole story laid out on a timeline so you can spot where the pressure drops before your readers do.

If you’re a pantser, this is for you.

The problem with us pantsers is that we like to work fast, and the only way to do that is to get it done.

Where a Michael Crichton might spend a year or two researching a book, we like to spend a minute or two.

Where a J K Rowling uses dozens of spreadsheets to work out her intricate plotting (some of which may not see the light of day until many books later), we plot our story arcs on the fly.

And where J R R Tolkien drew maps galore, and collaborated with his friend C S Lewis until he was sure he had it right before a single hobbit could be etched into history, we go blindly forward to the abyss without a care in the world.

Try as we might, pantsers just need a place to start writing. We don’t want spreadsheets, or complicated word-processors. All we need is a working title and a blank page headed ‘Chapter 1’.

When you think about it, that’s all any pure fiction writer needs. Pen and paper.

There’s still a problem though. Pen and paper means more work later transcribing it all, and work is one thing pantsers don’t need.

It’s not that we’re work-shy. We’re not. We love work – but it must be easy work. We fly when we’re in the zone.

We might start working at 7pm and not finish until 5am, exhilarated and exhausted, but that’s how we work (I do this when programming too – back in the day when I was a smoker, I’d emerge from my garden home-office shed with a whooshing sound as the smoke escaped its prison!).

We might also start at 3am and give up 10 minutes later for no good reason at all.

That’s just how we roll.

So we need a place where we can write once and not have to remember or do anything about it.

A spreadsheet or wordprocessor won’t do because we know how to forget whatever it was we started and where we put it on our maze-like hard drives.

We also don’t need some desktop based software because, well, you know, the machine crashes and you have to spend days trying to explain that you already paid for it and simply want to reinstall it with a new licence (and no, you’re not trying to rip them off).

And that means a web app. You go to the website, login, and continue where you left off. The only thing you need to remember is the URL (https://arc.cleararc.online)

The web app will remember the page you were at when you left, so you don’t need to.

It remembers the new character you just added and you can go straight back there by pressing G (for goto) and see all the other recent pages you were looking at as well.

So you flip to the Writer and carry on. Zero formatting options. No weird popups getting in the way (other than the help window, but that’s because you opened it manually by pressing its shortcut key: ‘?’)

Fiction (at least 99% of all fiction books I’ve ever read) don’t have formatting. They aren’t full of emboldened words, footnotes, indentations, or other aesthetic markers. They are just blocks of text signifying paragraphs.

About the only thing that does need formatting are chapter titles, and that’s done for you anyway.

The point being that we want nothing to GET IN OUR WAY!

We are pantsers. We know what we want. We know what to do. Just give us the tools we need and we’re away.

If you’d like to test drive Clear ARC. Sign up today and you get to try the full app for 14 days without paying a cent.

I wrote Clear ARC for me. That means it’s been tweaked and tweaked (and continues to be tweaked) to make my life easier.

If I want a new chapter, I press the ‘New Chapter’ button, name the chapter, and I’m straight back in the editor with the new chapter waiting to go.

I don’t need to remember to save my work because it is all autosaved. When I’m done I turn off the machine (or go somewhere else) – I don’t even need to log out. It knows where I got to.

If I want to start a new book (no matter where I am with the old book) I press Books > Add Book, and give it a title.

If I decide my new book will be part of a series, I click Series, name the series, then Books > my book and add it to the new series.

If I want to add a character, I click Characters > Add Character, name the character, and then add anywhere I like within my book (I could add it to the book itself, or specifically to an event inside a scene within a chapter.

And when I’m back in the editor, I can open all that meta-data I created in side panels so I have everything I need right in front of me.

And then, when I’m done with the writing, if I want, I can add front and back pages such as the title page, a legal page, a dedication page and so on.

I can even add back matter such as ‘Other books by the same author’ (or I could put that as an advert at the front along with a string of testimonials).

And finally I can hit the export button, which creates a stand-alone file I can view in any browser complete with tabs for the story itself (cut and paste straight into Kindle or any other publishing platform), front and back matter pages, characters, places, and items.

You don’t need anything else once you have a Clear ARC account.