Plot First

Cherie Caruso has spent nearly two decades helping writers understand why readers turn pages. She began her career as a freelance fiction editor, reading more than a thousand manuscripts before she ever taught a class, and she has since led craft workshops at writing conferences and regional literary centers across the United States. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines including *Grist*, *Booth*, and the *Southeast Review*.

*Plot First: Plan a Conflict-Driven Story From First Spark to Final Scene* is her first book, built from the classroom handouts, whiteboard diagrams, and hallway conversations of more than a decade of teaching. Writers tell her they learned more about structure in one weekend workshop than in years of writing alone, and she wrote this book to give that weekend to everyone who cannot attend.

When she is not teaching, Caruso is at work on a novel set in the Pacific Northwest — a ghost story about inheritance, ambition, and the things a family builds to forget. She lives in Oregon with her family and a small dog that appears in none of her books but supervises all of them.