K.M. Weiland

K.M. Weiland is an internationally published, award-winning American author of historical and speculative fiction and a shelf of craft books that have become standard reading for working novelists. A native of western Nebraska, she has run the long-running Helping Writers Become Authors blog since 2007 and has published more than fifteen hundred posts on story craft, structure, and character development.

Her core craft library starts with Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success (2011), which reframes outlining not as creativity-killing prescription but as a brainstorming and discovery tool. Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story (2013) lays out the three-act structure and the scene-level mechanics underneath it. Creating Character Arcs: The Masterful Author's Guide to Uniting Story Structure, Plot, and Character Development (2016) maps the three primary character arc types (positive, negative, and flat) onto the story structure beats and is one of the most-cited modern references on character work. Writing Archetypal Character Arcs extends the framework into Jungian archetype-based arcs for adult life stages. Each title has a companion workbook designed to be applied to a novel in progress.

Her fiction crosses genres. The gaslamp fantasy Wayfarer is set in a Victorian London where steam-age machinery and magic coexist. Storming is a historical-dieselpunk adventure set in 1920s Nebraska. Dreamlander is a portal fantasy. Behold the Dawn is a medieval epic set during the Third Crusade. A Man Called Outlaw is a western. Her novels have won IPPY (Independent Publisher), NIEA (National Indie Excellence), and Lyra Awards.

She mentors authors through Helping Writers Become Authors, a weekly newsletter and blog covering story theory and technique that is widely cited by other writing teachers, agents, and editors. She also publishes the Story Structure Database, a free reference cataloguing the structural beats of well-known novels and films so writers can study how the structure plays out across genres.