It's finally cracked!

A craft post on plot

I feel a little disingenuous, telling people (readers, friends, family, my agent, passersby, seatmates on airplanes) that I am “working” on a novel when I am in my current stage of novel writing. I usually describe this stage as “plotting,” and it comes after research, itself an amorphous and overwhelming stage, as I am a writer of predominantly histori…