Podcast: What Writing Books Miss with Lori Puma
hosted by Rachelle Ramirez
Are you stuck despite reading every writing craft book you can find? Developmental editor Lori Puma reveals what those books missed. In this episode, Rachelle sits down with Lori Puma, who read 70+ writing craft books searching for answers her editing clients needed—and discovered critical gaps in the advice writers typically receive.
What you'll learn
Why "Story Foundation" problems kill most first novels (and how to fix yours)
The "Invisible Story" elements that make or break your manuscript
How antagonist vs. antagonist conflict creates unexpected obstacles
Why you should struggle to reorder your scenes (it's a good thing!)
Lori breaks down the four major concepts missing from traditional writing advice, including specific examples from The Princess Bride to illustrate how master storytellers use these techniques.
Key takeaways
Your main conflict question must run from beginning to end
Every character needs independent goals (not just "stop the protagonist")
Strong cause-and-effect chains make scenes impossible to reorder
Multiple antagonists create richer, more surprising plots
More from Lori Puma
Get Lori's free ebook "What Craft Books Left Out” — perfect for writers who've hit a wall with their manuscript or anyone looking to level up their storytelling beyond the basics.
Subscribe to the Pages & Platforms newsletter for weekly writing insights.
*Affiliate link — we get a small commission when you purchase, but you don’t pay more.
transcript
Anne Hawley: Are you a writer who's read every book on writing you can find, and you're still having trouble making your story work? Well, this one's for you.
Hello, writers, and welcome to The Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the happily Ever Author Club. In today's episode, Rachelle Chats with developmental editor Lori Puma, who offers some little known tricks for pulling that manuscript into shape.
Let's dive in.
Rachelle Ramirez: All right. Hi, Lori. Welcome. How are you?
Lori Puma: Hi, Rachelle. I am so excited to be here and talk to you today.
Rachelle Ramirez: That's awesome because we are going to talk about an ebook you wrote and some advice you have for writers on specifically what books on writing craft left out, which is a very catchy, if not sexy, definitely not sexy title.
It's very intriguing. So what can you share with us about what writing books left out, or first of all, maybe why did you write the book?
Lori Puma: I started as a developmental editor back in 2017, and my first couple clients, they asked me questions that I didn't have the answers to. And they were like this stuff that you're telling me, it's not really making sense. So I was looking both for information to fill in the gaps in my own knowledge, and then also looking for alternative ways to explain to writers this is what I mean.
And, so I went on a journey. I read, I think it's now up to about 70 writing craft books. 'cause I was like, somebody in all of these books must have written down the answers to all of these questions. And I found that was sometimes true, but not always. And so that was how this book came to be.
Rachelle Ramirez: All right, so it's my understanding that you have about four general ideas that you want to share with us, and the first one I wanna ask about is, what the heck is this about Story Foundation?
Lori Puma: One of the biggest things that I saw, especially when I was working with authors who are working on their first novel, is that the vast majority of them had what I call a problem in their story foundation. They either had a vague main conflict or not really much conflict at all. And main conflict is the conflict that goes from beginning to end of the book. It's the "will Katniss win the Hunger Games?" That kinda level question.
And so the Story Foundation is that main conflict question, the protagonist, the antagonist, the genre, and the message. And usually those things for first timers were going off in totally different directions, where one part of the story was suggesting one question and then another part of the story would suggest a different question.
And the writing books do have info about how to create a main conflict, but what they were really missing was that like, okay, I have this funky kind of a main conflict that's going in all these different directions. How do I hone that and make that something that is going to keep readers' attention throughout the whole story and be worth a novel's worth of words?
Rachelle Ramirez: Do you have some general advice over how to do that? How to make sure your story foundation is, first of all, there.
Lori Puma: Yeah. I actually made a worksheet. I have a set of symptoms that you can look for that suggests that you might have a story foundation problem.
That's stuff, like if you've been editing your story over and over again and it just isn't coming together, then it's likely that you might have a a story foundation problem. If your manuscript is lacking a sense of urgency or stakes, that's another sign. If you're tempted to abandon the project entirely because it's not fun anymore or it just doesn't feel like it's ever gonna go anywhere, that's probably like a problem with the Story foundation is actually probably the number one reason that first timers abandon their manuscripts mid draft. So those are the symptoms, and there are links to to a troubleshooting guide in the ebook that can help you so that I'm gonna tell you all of these things so you don't have to remember all of them.
If you get the ebook, there is a link to a troubleshooting guide so that you can figure out what your issue is. But to bring it back to what to specifically do. On the Strengthening the Story Foundation really that tends to be looking for just asking yourself or having somebody else ask you a set of questions of what really is most important to you?
Do you want to write a story about a relationship or is this story about defeating the villain? It's trying to identify what are those pieces where you're getting pulled in different direction, and then how do we bring those back together so that they're all pointing in the same direction?
Rachelle Ramirez: You mentioned that there is something called an invisible story that's left out of writing craft books. Can you talk a little bit about what that is?
Lori Puma: Invisible story is all of the stuff that is happening that in the big picture aspect of your story, stuff like your protagonist's character arc, and their backstory. It's what all of the side characters are doing when they're not on the page. And there's a lot of genre specific elements. So in romance, you wanna create circumstances that keep your romantic heroes together long enough to fall in love. And in a mystery you've got to create a puzzle of suspects and clues that your sleuth is gonna follow. And obviously for any speculative fiction, there's the whole world building thing. So the invisible story is a gigantic topic, but what I focus on in the ebook is one that goes across pretty much all genres, and it's something that I have worked on with absolutely every single writer that I've worked on since I've been an editor.
And that is, it looks at how authors go wrong with antagonists. I actually diagrammed out two different ways that things can go wrong in the ebook. One is that the protagonist just basically never is blocked in reaching their goals, and that means that while there might be fights and arguments and people punching each other, there actually isn't any meaningful conflict because meaningful conflict is preventing your protagonist from reaching their goal.
So they have to have a goal and then they have to encounter an obstacle to to reaching that goal. So that's one way that people go wrong with antagonists.
And then the other way that tends to go wrong is that the protagonist is blocked in reaching their goal, but every single antagonist essentially forces the protagonist to overcome the same or a very similar obstacle. So the protagonist never really has the rug completely pulled out from under them. They never really have to detour from their original plan.
That's not ideal. 'cause that can end up making a story feel repetitive and cliche. And what you ideally want is you want to have your antagonist creating a variety of obstacles because they also have conflicts with each other and not just with your protagonist. So sometimes the protagonist is directly in their way and the conflict is, antagonist versus protagonist.
And sometimes your protagonist is just caught up in the chaos because it's one antagonist versus another antagonist and they're creating an obstacle. And when you know how to create that network of relationships between your antagonists, then you have a lot more potential for creating plot twists and stories where you can really surprise the reader because you're using both indirect and direct methods and you can vary it all over the place.
Rachelle Ramirez: That's interesting. I've never heard somebody talk about antagonist against antagonist creating an obstacle for the protagonist. That's the first time I've heard somebody talk about that. Do you have any examples?
Lori Puma: Let's talk about the Princess Bride, because that's something that everybody knows. There's the three men who kidnap the princess. there's, Inigo, Fezzik and Vizzini, and all three of them are antagonists .
But Inigo and Fezzik later on become allies with the Man in Black, Wesley, because they're just working with Vizzini to pay the bills. Vizzini thinks that he's this master criminal and he's always yelling at Fezzik and Inigo 'cause they're not doing the work the way that he wants them to. He wants them to go faster. He wants them to be more effective. They are at each other's throats as well. It's that conflict. Vizzini dies and then Inigo and Fezzik are like, okay, what do we do now?
Inigo wants to find the six fingered man, and he doesn't have somebody else to direct him and help him out. And they connect with Wesley because they're like, okay, you can help me create my goals. All of your characters need to have their own goals.
I've seen a lot of characters where the writer is creating characters that always describe the goals for the antagonist in relationship to the protagonist. And I'm just like, that's not what we want. What we want is for them to be independent people that have their own unique motivations, and it's those motivations that are gonna create conflict and that we can use to manipulate the conflict , that's how we can switch them from allies to enemies because their underlying motivations rarely change, but their strategies for meeting their goals based on those motivations, those can totally change, and that's what we want to do.
Rachelle Ramirez: And you also talked about shaping sequences and scenes being something that writing books left out. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Lori Puma: Designing scenes is something that's really well covered. The most popular way to design scenes was created by Dwight Swain. He was a writing teacher I think at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s, and he created a system that he calls Scene -Sequel.
It also gets changed to into other names. But I would say probably 80 or 90% of the people that talk about scene design are using a variation of scene sequel. That covers individual scenes. But really, if you want to tell a great story, you wanna link those scenes together in a chain where what happens in one scene causes consequences that the hero must deal with in the next scene.
And it's that cause and effect chain that I see a lot of authors really struggle with, and one really easy way that you can test your own story is you can look at how difficult is it for me to reorder my scenes? Because if you can reorder your scenes, that is a sign that your cause and effect links are not very strong.
You want to make it so that if you reorder the scenes, it takes a lot of work for you to get them back into the story flow.
Rachelle Ramirez: And how can people follow you?
Lori Puma: Yeah, so my website is loripuma.com. L-O-R-I-P-U-M-A dot COM. And if you go to my website and click on the menu item ebook, that'll get you to the right place.
Rachelle Ramirez: That's awesome. All right. Thank you so much for talking to me today and being willing to share your ebook with listeners. That is very generous of you and I hope to talk to you soon.
Lori Puma: Thanks Rachelle. I love talking about writing and can talk about it forever, so that's great. Alright, thank you.
Anne Hawley: Be sure to request your copy of Lori's free ebook, What Craft Books Left Out. You can get there by scanning the QR code or going to loripuma.com
And if you'd like a weekly dose of writing insight and mindset and marketing tips in your inbox, subscribe to the Write anyway newsletter at pagesandplatforms.com/subscribe.
And that's it for this episode of the Write anyway podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.