crime story masterclass
Presented by the Developmental Editors of Pages & Platforms:
Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez
Are you writing a Crime story, mystery, heist, or caper?
Are you wondering about the following:
Whether you’re writing Crime or another Story Type?
Giving your Crime story a solid structure?
What parts a Crime story needs?
Adding more plot-driven elements to a character-driven story?
If so, you’re in the right place.
In the Crime Story Masterclass from the Pages & Platforms developmental editors, Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez help you:
Learn the essential elements of the Crime Story Type and how to write the story that’s in your heart to tell.
Gain a set of tools to bring a story idea or zero-draft up to the level of a Professional Draft of a Crime Story Type.
Create a protagonist with a singular, clear desire (motivation).
Establish your story stakes, something the protagonist wants to gain and something they fear losing that is specific to the Crime story.
Ensure the protagonist pursues their desire and experiences Crime-specific pressure and conflict which causes them to change.
Define a straightforward story premise that is reflected in every scene. (We provide several archetypal premise statements you can use as a basis for a premise more specific and personal to your story.)
Identify and drive toward the emotion the reader of the Crime story expects to feel.
Include the specific characters, situations, and moments your reader expects to find.
Discover whether your Crime story needs to be primarily plot or character driven.
Take a deep look at the Crime story and better understand the kind of Crime story you’re telling.
Review over 30 Crime story examples you can use to study for their use of essential elements, point of view, tone, word count, characterization, setting, description, backstory, and blurbs.
Take a deep dive into these concepts by analyzing the 2018 film Widows.
Join Anne & Rachelle for The crime story masterclass and finally get your story unstuck.
Rachelle Ramirez is a certified developmental editor who helps fiction and nonfiction writers structure and finish their projects. She is a co-creator of the Story Path course and numerous writing masterclasses. She is a co-host of The Happily Ever Author Club and author of the forthcoming book, The ADHD Writer: From Frustrated to Focused to Finished.
Anne Hawley is a certified developmental editor of literary, historical, and fantasy fiction, and is the author of Restraint, a novel of forbidden love in Regency England. She was the producer and writer of the popular Story Grid Roundtable Podcast, and currently teaches and develops writing courses at Pages&Platforms LLC.
Not sure yet if The crime story masterClass is for you?
Consider this question:
What kind of story are you writing?
Usually, when we ask writers that question, they’ll say something like YA, Women’s Fiction, Fantasy, Dystopian, Memoir, or Historical.
Those answers aren’t wrong, but they’re marketing categories and setting types often grouped as genres to help publishers direct readers’ attention to books they hope to sell.
Unfortunately, those categories are less valuable to you as a writer, especially while you’re still writing and structuring your professional draft.
While marketing categories and settings types are important, they can’t tell you:
How to construct your story.
How to meet ANY of the requirements of a professional working draft.
What your protagonist wants and needs—the desire that drives them.
What the protagonist has to gain or lose—what’s at stake for them based on the inherent stakes of your Story Type.
How the protagonist in your story will change under pressure from the antagonist.
Whether you’re articulating the premise or message of your story.
What kinds of emotions your intended readers hope to experience.
Clues to the types of characters, situations, and specific moments your kind of story should have to satisfy your reader.
All those elements? Those are what Story Types guide you toward. (Note: There are Seven Essential Story Types; Action, Crime, Horror, Love, Worldview, Validation, and Redemption.)
The Crime Story Type is necessary to tell and differentiate from the others. After all, you don’t want to promise your reader the kind of story they’ve been searching for and then deliver a different type of story. That’s a fast track to upsetting your reader and getting a one-star review.
By focusing on the Crime Story Type rather than marketing categories or setting types, you will:
Delineate a clear beginning, middle, and end—that is, a clear act structure—for your story.
Understand the general beats or situations your story needs to hit.
Meet reader expectations and spot clear opportunities to subvert those expectations to create surprise.
Define the basic desires (want and need) that drive your protagonist.
Construct your protagonist’s character arc by broadly defining what your protagonist has to gain and lose.
Clarify which scenes, settings, and moments belong and which need to be cut or changed.
Declutter your zero draft—or slot in scenes, characters, and moments you might have missed.
Break free from trying to fit the story you want to tell into a marketing category that isn’t right for it.
Know what emotional experience the reader of the Crime Story Type expects (whether they know it consciously or not) and write towards that emotion—and that reader—with confidence.
Define what pressures or conflicts you need to apply to your protagonist to make them change.
Finish your professional draft.
