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That Lovin' Feeling
THAT LOVIN' FEELING:
Putting Emotions On The Page People read stories for the emotional journey they hope to experience. If she's reading a romance, the reader wants the illusion that she's falling in love. If he's reading a thriller, the reader wants the illusion that he's in mortal danger and has the tiniest of chances to come out alive. If she's reading a fantasy, the reader wants the illusion that she's stepped into this wonderful and magical world that doesn't exist in her ordinary life. But emotion is the trickiest part of life--and the trickiest part of writing. Emotion makes your character vulnerable and that vulnerability makes your reader identify with your character. The ultimate connection with your reader happens when she gets lost inside your character's skin and lives the story as your character lives it. New Age gurus would have you think that you can control your thoughts and, therefore, control your life. The truth is that passion, not reason, controls most people's lives. And struggling with emotions is a part of dealing with problems. Passion, not reason, makes your character take action. This emotional struggle creates conflict and leads to the drama that sucks in a reader and makes your reader feel the story. The best way to achieve this connection is to get deep into your character's thoughts. Emotion names--anger, love, jealousy, despair, hatred--are labels. A character isn't likely to think, I'm angry. More than likely, she'll think, Damn it! Is the man incapable of closing any drawer? as she slams shut the dresser drawers her husband left open when he got dressed that morning. The thought is an expression of her anger. It shows rather than tells the emotional state. The reader can feel and see the anger in a way she can't when she reads She was angry. Here's another example. You're alone in your house. It's past midnight. Thunder growls outside. Lightning crazes the ceiling of your bedroom. Then a series of creaks travels up the wooden stairway. Your heart races, your hands shake, and you're sweating even though you lowered the thermostat to fifty for the night. But what led to those reactions? Your thoughts. Your heart raced, your hands shook, your armpits sweat because you thought, Oh, my God. There's someone in the house. I'm going to die. Your body churns because you registered the situation as dangerous. Now take that same situation--same dark and stormy night. Give yourself a different thought. Thank God, he's home safe. Your caged breath releases. Your muscles relax. And you snuggle deeper into the covers. Same situation, different thought, different bodily expression. The mind leads the body. Then to make things more complicated, emotions don't stay constant. They go up and down like a rollercoaster. The woman in the bed might first feel relief, then anger. What took him so long? He left work three hours ago. Why didn't he call? Then she might move to guilt when she sees him standing soaking wet with mud all over his pants and shirt--especially when she learns he had a flat tire and his cell phone battery died so he couldn't call AAA. This ever-changing movement helps create the internal struggle that leads your reader to feel the story. This concept of making emotions live on the page takes a lifetime to master, so go easy on yourself. Emotion rarely shows up in a first draft. It tends to come after you've figured everything else in your story. As Jerry Cleaver suggests in his book Immediate Fiction, as you revise, ask yourself, "What are my character's worries, fears, and hopes?" Stories are about conflict and threat. If someone threatens something your character values, he worries and fears he'll lose it while he also hopes that he can find a way to save it. These worries, fears, and hopes run through his mind until the problem is solved, and your story ends. If you can create the desired emotional experience for your reader, you've succeeded as a writer--and your reader will come back for more. © 2009 Once Upon a Time…Setting up a Story Plan I discard as many story ideas as I develop. One way to figure out if a story has enough oomph to carry the weight of a whole novel is to track the basic story line. I start with a flawed character and figure out what situation I could put this character in to attack his flaw in a way he can't ignore. (Or the other way around--I have a situation and figure out what character flaw it best attacks and who would most likely have that flaw.) Then I run through the basic goal/motivation/conflict questions. If the results jazz me, I move forward with the story. If not, I either scrap the idea or see if there's a way to amp up the basic elements. Basic Questions: Who's the
main character? I find working up a simple table helps me keep things focused. I may not fill all the boxes for the antagonist and the other characters, but if I can't fill them for the main character, the story needs more thought. STORY PLAN CHART
© 2009 EVERY
HERO NEEDS A FRIEND:
Or the Importance of Secondary Characters Every story is character driven. Even the most explosive of plots needs characters to play against the special effects. Car chases only mean something insofar as we care about what happens to the drivers or the people on the sidelines. Every story has a main character whose goal drives the story. Most stories also have secondary characters who help or hinder the main character's attempt to reach his goal. A sidekick is a faithful supporter. He stands loyally by someone or something. He encourages and points the way to success. He's a cheerleader. "You can do it." "I believe in you." He can be almost gullible in his faith in a plan, person, or possibility. Usually, we think of a sidekick as a friend of the main character's. But faith in someone or something isn't just the purview of the good. Villains can also have people who believe in them and their goals. The sidekick can serve as a mirror for the hero. You can create conflict by having the hero fear what he sees in the mirror and turn away from the person who has his best interest at heart. Or you can have this faithful friend disappointed at the hero's behavior and turning away. Both these events leave the hero struggling alone. In the sidekick, the hero can see what he could become if he could give up his flaw or get over his fear. Donkey in Shrek is the ultimate sidekick. Just as villains can have friends, a hero can have someone around him who echoes the voice of doom. "This idea will never work." "If you do this, you're going to fail." A skeptic opposes. He sees failure around every corner. He doubts everything--the plan, the person, the possibility. You can place doubt in the hero's mind about his choices by having him listen to the skeptic's black-cloud thoughts and doomsday warnings. Or you can advance the plot by having the hero turn away from the negative voice--feel the fear, but move forward anyway. In the skeptic, the hero can see a glimpse of his future self if he can't give up his flaw or get over his fear. The Lion in The Wizard of Oz constantly opposes going into the unknown. In a tightly woven story, every character offers a different take on the theme. In the movie Liar, Liar, every character in the story reflects the central conflict of lying--from the senior partner at Fletcher Reede's law firm who has no respect for the truth, to witnesses willing to lie on the stand, to his secretary who's forced to lie for him, to his client who's as pathological a liar as he is and wants to take her children away from a good father. In this story world, the loved ones are the ones who are hurt by the lies in every sub-plot--Fletcher's ex-wife, his son, his client's children. Fletcher's wife reflects the path of telling the truth. Fletcher's son reflects faith that Fletcher can change and tell the truth. The concentrated whole achieves a satisfying story. By using your secondary characters to reflect your theme, you can pressurize the coal of your initial idea into a story gem that shines as brightly as a well-cut diamond. © December 2008 LEAP OF FAITH:
Fall or Fly I believe in happy endings. As cynical as I am, some part of me believes that everything will work out right in the end. And if happy can't happen in real life, then at least I can make it happen in my fiction. As writers, we put our characters through a lot as we steer them through the rocky story path. Then they reach that last decision point in the story. Do they take a chance and fly—no guarantees—or do they fall back to the known, however much it's hurting them? For the happy ending to take place, the hero will have to face a final obstacle. He'll have to make some sort of sacrifice, either physical or philosophical. He has no resources left, except himself. He comes face-to-face with his flaw, his fear, that has kept him following the path of least effort all of these years. Everything the hero believed in has changed, and the story takes a drastic turn. He must make a new decision to face "death" (this could be physical death in a suspense or emotional death in a straight romance) head on. Is he willing to give up his life and/or soul? The harder you can make that decision, the more satisfaction the reader will derive. Making a decision between good and evil is easy. Making a decision between two equally good or two equally bad outcomes is much harder. And if the writer sets up that moment well enough, the decision point crackles with energy, making the reader hold her breath with anticipation. I've come to think of that teeter-totter of will-he-or-won't-he as the point of hope. The decision he makes in that moment leads to a commitment to some sort of action—to a leap of faith. He's not sure about the new path yet, but he's willing to take a chance. And that decision to take some sort of action will lead him to his destiny—good or bad. This last action tests his faith, his resolve, his character, and his endurance. He's pushed to the limit physically, mentally, emotionally. If he chooses to take the leap of faith, then hope wins, whether or not the hero achieves his goal. He'll never be the same person again. He's changed; he can't go back to the status quo. This action proves to the reader that the change will stick, that the hero has learned his lesson, that the hero deserves his happy ending—or something better. In Heart of a Hunter, Sebastian's sacrifice is physical during the showdown with the villain, but also philosophical when he relinquishes part of his control to Liv—when he sees Liv not as Olivia, but as a person of her own—allowing them to work as partners in all senses of the word. In A Little Christmas Magic, the sacrifice is philosophical. Logan remembers who and what his daughter stood for and realizes that he's taken the wrong path. He wanted to be a living dead because he thought it was a fitting punishment for the life his daughter wouldn't have. For him to decide to live and to love is a huge moment. When he shows that change by making a Christmas in the hospital for Beth and Jamie, and involving the whole community, the reader believes he deserves the family he needs. In the movie Just Like Heaven, David creates the garden of Elizabeth's dream. He could have chosen to wallow in this second loss of love, but he chose to nurture himself and Elizabeth. He took the leap and won, even though he lost Elizabeth. When he hands her the key and they touch, Elizabeth remembers. Her ghost time with David was real. They have finally connected with each other on every level, and can now reap the reward of a relationship. In real life, we tend to push back. We don't face our fears. We stay with what feels safe, even if it's not working in our best interest. This is why I believe the leap of faith is an important story moment. When the hero reaches this point in the story and leaps, hope sings inside us on a soul level. And maybe next time we face such a decision, remembering his leap of faith will strengthen our own courage. © 2008 THEME AS A CRUCIBLE
FOR CHANGE: Or How to Cut a Brilliant Diamond Merriam-Webster defines theme as "something laid down; a subject or topic of discourse or of artistic representation; a specific and distinctive quality, characteristic, or concern; a written exercise; a melodic subject of a musical composition or movement." Blake Snyder in Save the Cat defines theme as "a debate about the pros and cons of a particular point of view." John Truby's definition in The Anatomy of Story follows along the same line: "I don't refer to theme as subject matter. Theme is the author's view of how to act in the world. It is your moral vision." I once heard someone describe writing a story as cutting a diamond. Every facet enhances the core stone. Every cut serves to make the final product more brilliant. To me, theme isn't necessarily my view of how to act in the world, but my various characters' views of how to act in the world. By having characters represent different views, whether I agree with them or not, I can create a fuller picture of that particular exploration. Theme comes from the main character’s personal change from the beginning of the story to the end of the story. What is he going to learn as he goes through your story's journey? For example, in A Little Christmas Magic, the story explores my various characters' views of how to deal with grief. The prism of living and dying reflects these views. Every scene addresses living, dying, and grief in one way or another. You use your story's basic arc to set up the theme you want to explore. Each waypoint along the journey offers a new glimpse—a chance to debate, to question, to reform. Why has this character gone through these particular escalating problems to reach this unique moment of crisis? What values and beliefs are being put to the test by your story's torturous road? In A Little Christmas Magic, Logan and Beth have gone through these conflicts to rediscover their ability to love and to live fully. How did I get there? By figuring out what's important to these characters. What do they want to avoid? What are they most afraid to face? Fear becomes the driver of their behavior. Because Logan doesn't want to hurt anymore, he chooses to isolate himself far from home. Because Beth doesn't want to feel pain anymore, she throws herself into so much activity that she won't have time to think, let alone feel. Both are dealing with the death of a loved one. Both are handling the situation in different ways. This concentrates the story around the theme of "how to deal with grief." Other characters continue to etch the story diamond by offering their views on the subject. The more universal you can make your theme, the more your readers will connect with your story. Even if we haven't lost a daughter or a husband, we've lost someone or something important in our lives and have gone through the pain of grief. By tying the action of your characters to your theme, both gain power and purpose and build the suspense, because the reader is emotionally involved. By allowing your theme to challenge your main character's fear and show him, through other characters' views and actions, a different way to act, he can challenge those fears and grow, creating a diamond-bright story that stays with your readers. © Sylvie Kurtz, September 2008
MAGIC MOMENTS by Sylvie Kurtz I like to put a "magic moment" at the mid-point of my stories. Something happens that binds the hero and heroine closer together on an emotional level. It's a preview of how things could be if they could get over their flaws or their fears, a small glimpse of the possible ending. So they kiss for the first time, or have sex for the first time, or form some sort of emotional connection. We see their specialness together. But the power of this connection scares them, so their inner demons flare up, and they pull back physically or emotionally from the connection. They aren't ready for heaven yet. Their fears are getting in the way. But for that one magic moment, they saw a different way of living. The result is that now all the stakes are higher, because the relationship has taken on more power. Their emotional bond is tighter. They understand each other on a deeper level. They've seen what the other can do to enrich their lives. The getting or giving up of the goal takes on more importance, because now relationship factors in. Will he give up the goal for the girl? Will he go for the girl and give up the goal? There's no going back to the status quo. Even if he could at this point, he's had a taste of something different, so the status quo wouldn't satisfy him anymore, and worse, he's now aware that he can never go back to the way things were, and that scares him. He can't go back. But going forward means heading in that scary unknown. In Heart of a Hunter the magic moment is an afternoon skate on a pond where the old Olivia and the emerging Liv come together, and Sebastian, for the first time, recognizes he likes parts of this new woman. We get a taste of what their relationship will evolve to once they make peace with themselves and their roles. They’re skating on the edge of something new and wonderful—and it scares them both. In A Little Christmas Magic, the magic moment occurs during an ice storm. What each of the characters truly desires is a family. During this ice storm, they become a family. We see their emotional bond tighten as they help each other through the crisis and realize they are absolutely what the other needs. Their frozen hearts are thawing. In the movie Just Like Heaven, the magic moment is when Elizabeth realizes that she’s in a coma. She tries to put herself together and fears that if she can’t, she’ll die. Then David touches the comatose Elizabeth's body, and she can feel his touch on her ghost form. They’ve achieved a way to connect. We know this is a special connection, because even though her niece can also see her, Elizabeth can't feel her niece. If you can make this scene metaphorical, you’ll add an extra layer of depth. This is because images are the language of the soul. A symbol reaches all the way down to the level where no words are needed to create understanding. In A Little Christmas Magic the warm house in the ice storm serves as a metaphor. It shows the theme of living vs. dying. Their frozen hearts are thawing, but they still have a way to go to find their way out of the storm. In Heart of a Hunter the metaphor is the pond ice, which echoes the fragile state of their relationship. At any moment, they could crash through and get soaked. In Just Like Heaven the metaphor is the touch—which echoes the theme of connection. To prevent a sagging middle, think about creating a magic moment for your characters. One that gives the reader a peek at the possible gain or loss for your characters and launches them to the next step of their transformation. A GOOD BAD GUY: Or How To Take Your Villain
Out Of His Cardboard Box And Make Him 3-D When we set out to create a story, we don't want to end up with something black-and-white filled with cardboard characters that the reader will forget five minutes after putting down the book. We want a full, blooming story that pops with color and will live on in the reader's mind. We spend a lot of time working on our main character, on conflict, and plot. But the bad guy often gets the short end of the plan. He's a bad guy and bad guys do bad things. What's so hard about that? That lack of planning can lead to a character that's all evil, which, despite his easily recognizable over-the-top badness, makes him boring. I'm not saying that you need to turn your evildoer into a loveable mutt you want to take home. But to snap him out of his flat two-dimension, you have to understand him as well as you understand your hero. Like your hero, he needs a concrete, specific, and worthwhile goal to pursue. Like your hero, he has to really want this goal. Like your hero, he needs some sort of motivation that fuels his desire. He may want to steal all the gold in Fort Knox, but deep-down, it's not the money he needs, it's the sense of security that much gold represents, it's the self-esteem he'll gain by pulling off the impossible heist, it's the glory of providing his love with all she desires, because how can she possibly reject someone who can give her the world? Most people aren't born evil. Your bad buy doesn't wake up in the morning wondering who he'll kill today. He most likely has a mother, sister, girlfriend—someone—who loves him. He has reasons for what he does. In his world, he's the good guy. He's the one who's not understood. He's the one who's been victimized. He's the one who's right. He may spend all day carefully torturing a man to give up his secrets, and come home to play with his kids with just as much patience. He can function as a respected executive, yet go home and beat his wife because she missed a spot in the sink. He has likes and dislikes that appear normal—and maybe a few that don't. He's an avid cyclist, a collector of Jazz albums, a wine connoisseur. He doesn't like his peas to touch his mashed potatoes. He's allergic to roses. He knows a thousand ways to break a bone. His need, like ours, is to survive in this harsh world. What he does to survive makes sense to him, even if the rest of society shrinks in horror. He doesn't just take out his gun and shoot at anything that moves. More often than not, he has a set of principles values he follows and values he lives by. It's okay to walk into a house and steal everything, because the door was unlocked. It's okay to use a knife, but not okay to use a gun, because the dying have a right to see who kills them. It's okay to kill a man, because a man can defend himself. His view of compassion or justice or love may not match ours, but it guides his every move. He's stalking her, not because he wants to scare her, but because he loves her so much. He would reveal himself. Soon. But he wanted her to know the depth of his love first. When he pulled away the veil of mystery, she would say, Of course, it had to be you. Then she would smile and walk into his arms. (Honor of a Hunter) You can often find the seed of his motivation in how he's been hurt in the past. What happened to him to make him hurt? What painful lesson has he learned time and again? What does he do to avoid a repeat of that pain? How does his pain skew his perception of himself and the world? How does that need to avoid pain lead to protect himself by hurting others? What makes him angry? What stresses him? What makes him lose control? How does he feel after he hurts someone? How does he hide his dark side? When does it come out? The more you can get his motivation across, the more his actions will make sense, and heighten the horror of what he does for your reader. One hand cradled her jaw. "If I can't be with you on earth, then I want to be with you in heaven." (Honor of a Hunter) What the bad guy doesn't do is back down. Unlike the hero, he doesn't change. He doesn't grow. He doesn't overcome his flaw. He's stuck in his mode of survival, because he can't see another way out. Even if he engineered the successful destruction of the world, he still wouldn't be happy, because that still wouldn't fill the thing missing inside him. Because he can't change, the outcome for him leads to decay or death. Your job as a writer is to understand your bad guy and all his weird and twisted ways, even if you don't share his beliefs. Before you start writing, leak your story plan to your bad guy. Let him call you up. And when he says, "Listen, you got it all wrong…," take notes. The complexity of his personality will allow you to add depth to his character and a greater sense of danger to your plot. IT'S MY WORLD: How Perception Affects Action Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes enter a house. Mary sees the sharp corners, the ungated stairs, and the unprotected plugs that could hurt a child in her care. Sherlock notices the broken window clasp, the barely visible footprint on the freshly vacuumed carpet, the disturbed papers on the desk, leading him to conclude that someone had entered the house and taken something. Who's right? They both are. They viewed the house through the filters of their perceptions. We all tell ourselves stories. If I ____, then I'll ____. Because of _____, I _____. Fill in the blanks with your own (or your characters' filters.) We make snap decisions about who's a foe and who's a friend based on our past experiences. A dark parking garage is just another garage to a hulk of a weightlifter, but a minefield of danger to a petite woman wearing high heels. Because the weightlifter doesn't perceived the dark garage as dangerous, the sound of footsteps behind him may not even register. The same sound most likely would make the woman palm her keys as a ready weapon, wish she'd worn sneakers and taken a karate class. What we don't realize is that we draw boxes around ourselves that limit us. These limits affect how we engage in the world. This truth applies to your characters, too. Every character whether he lives in a mansion or in a cardboard box, wakes up with unseen assumptions about his world, about how to survive and how to get ahead in a place of limited resources. The frame of his mind defines and confines him. Every problem, every dilemma, every obstacle appears unsolvable within his specific point of view. How he gets himself out of his box is by changing the borders of that box to allow for new opportunities. What is his daily reality? What are his borders? How do you force him to change those borders? Those types of questions will get you to the meat of your character, show you how he'll act and react to the obstacles you place in his way, and point the way to creating organic conflict that keep your story moving forward. Mary, Sherlock, the weightlifter and the woman all acted and reacted to their situation from the base of their perceptions. The answer to a great internal conflict that complements your outer conflict is all in how your character sees his world. HURTS SO GOOD: Making Your Characters Suffer to Heal Them According to James Bonnet, a main character's arc is like a spiral. If it spirals upward, he ends up at a better place than at the beginning of the story, taking him closer to paradise. If it spirals downward, he ends up worse off than where he started, miring him in hell. The way to create an arc that resonates with the reader is to start with a flawed character. If you make your main character perfect, then he’s not interesting. Every one of us is broken or wounded in some way. None of us are perfect, and we don’t like our fictional people to be either, because it’s hard to empathize with someone who’s perfect. Our favorite characters tend to have dents and cracks. Your main character needs a flaw that gets in his way—even if he doesn’t realize that it is. The first hint of this flaw usually comes from an event or series of events that happened when the character was young. Why? Because, according to brain researchers, when we’re young, our brains operate at a lower frequency that closely resembles a hypnotic state. That's so that we can learn quickly how to survive into the environment into which we're born. We're downloading a tremendous amount of information in a short period of time. Think of babies and how much they learn in those first few years. We take everything literally and our parents' and caregivers' behaviors and beliefs become our own. That’s also why someone can easily break us. We haven’t yet developed the ability to distinguish between real and perception. Imagine those tender years filled with the message that you're stupid or that you're not good enough or that you'll never amount to anything. Those messages go straight to the subconscious who'll make sure that those beliefs prove themselves to us time and again, and those beliefs become the truths that unconsciously shape our behavior. As we grow older, outside programming becomes less of an influence, but by that time, information already fills our subconscious about how the world works. So the situation that starts the main character's flaw usually happens in the formative years (birth to twelve) and, as she grows up, other experiences “prove” that the flaw is good protection against the pain of this world. Effective flaws come from fear, which in turn come from some kind of hurt that the person doesn’t want repeated. If you then take this flaw and force your character to face it, you'll create all that beautiful conflict a good story needs. This flaw becomes the thing around which everything else in your story revolves. One way to get to the flaw is to look at the character’s backstory. What kind of things made him into who he is? Filling out a character dossier with hair color and food preferences never worked for me, but looking at his psychology gives me an X-ray of his personality and something meaty to work with. Why? Because that's where you're going to find the motivation that drives him to do the things he does and make them sound logical—at least to him. Although your character won't state his fear so clearly, because he's probably not fully aware of it, the thought process runs along the lines of: If I do X action, then I can prevent Y pain. What happened in the past to give him his view of life right now? What decision did he have to make that influenced how he sees the world? How does he see himself? He's going to show these perceptions of himself and the world in his behavior in the present. And this is what you can exploit to make your story stand out. The more you can force your main character to face his fear during the course of the story, the more he'll have to alter his way of acting. At first he tries to hang on to what's always worked in the past. Then bit by bit he changes. One last test shows him that he can't ever go back. This allows the new and healthier habit to better his life. (Or, if you're into tragedy, then he doesn't learn and ends up an even shallower shell of himself.) Logic doesn't drive the human mind. The most primitive part of the brain is pure emotion—fight or flight or freeze. Protect yourself and live. As human beings we’re programmed for survival. And we respond with primal emotions. Analyze your characters' fears, where they started, what behaviors they cause, how those behaviors are keeping him from reaching his goal. Then force them to face the thing they fear most. If you choose a universal fear, the reader can't help empathize with your main character's plight, cheer for him as he faces each new obstacle, and celebrate his success, (or mourn his failure.) Those stories that touch us, touch our emotions, and you can trace those primal emotions to that fear, that flaw the main character uses to protect himself from the pain of the world, helping you create a character arc that fuels your story conflict. THE POWER OF STRUCTURE by Sylvie Kurtz Story has many definitions. For John Truby, author of The Anatomy of Story, a story is "a speaker telling a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why." For Michael Hauge, author of Writing Screenplays That Sell, a story enables "a sympathetic character to overcome a series of increasingly difficult, seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve a compelling desire." For Jerry Cleaver, author of Immediate Fiction, story boils down to an equation, "CONFLICT + ACTION + RESOLUTION = STORY." According to Joseph Campbell, our souls are born craving stories. It’s part of our genetic makeup. It’s how we understand who we are and how we make sense of the world around us. He spent a lifetime studying the stories of the world, from creation myths to fairy tales, and discovered that no matter where you're from, your basic stories all distill down to the same basics. Our brains are wired to look for the pattern of a story, and if we don’t find it, we end up feeling dissatisfied. And the number one rule of successful story writing is to satisfy the reader. Each genre comes with specific expectations. If a reader picks up a romance and there's no relationship, she'll be disappointed. If he picks up a mystery and the sleuth fails to interpret the clues and solve the case, he'll be disappointed. If Joe Average fails to conquer the monster, if the knight fails to slay the dragon, if the action hero fails to conquer the evil villain, the reader will be disappointed. The power of structure is its ability to assure satisfaction for your reader. Every profession has a baseline of some sort. A house starts with a plan. A painting starts with a sketch. A cake starts with a recipe. Even our own incredible bodies have a skeleton on which to drape the flesh. Successful stories are no exception. They all have certain elements and, for soul satisfaction, those elements appear in certain places. Ugh, I can hear the cries reverberating through cyberspace. "That sounds like formula, and formula is bad. Formula doesn't allow for creativity. Formula gets you cookie-cutter stories." So change the word to structure. Structure gives you form. Structure gives you solidity. Structure saves you from reinventing storytelling with each new story. Stories are foremost about people. So the first thing your story needs is a main character through whose eyes your story will unfold. That main character is going to want something concrete and specific, and want it desperately. That main character isn't going to be perfect; he's going to be flawed—like all of us, so that we can identify with him. He's going to have a fear/attitude/belief of some sort that will keep him from being all he can be. To make the story interesting, we're going to throw an opponent in his way—someone who's going to put sticks in his wheels and poke at his flaw. We're going to make this opponent create an event that will force the main character to look at his flaw and make a decision that will change his life forever. Because we want him to overcome his flaw, we're going to give him an ally of some sort that will help him through his journey. How do you play these elements in their most effective way? Through the various signposts that create forward movement along your main character's journey. For me, what works best is dividing the story in four sections that roughly cover one quarter of the story. In the set-up, I introduce the main character, the opponent, the ally and any other important story character. I give the reader of glimpse of my character's "ordinary world," then I throw that world in chaos by introducing an event that changes the balance of his world and throws him into conflict. I let the reader know what the main character wants, what he fears, and what he risks losing if he doesn't choose to change his ways. At the end of the set-up, I force my character to make a decision that will propel him into action. In the second quarter, the main character tries to solve his problem using outdated methods. He tries to restore his balance to where it was before and fails. He tries and makes things worse. He may win something on one level, but he'll lose something on the level that would take him forward on his growth. I end this section with a mid-point event that gives the main character a glimpse of what his reward for change could be, then have him fall back on old habits because of fear. I make this event emotional, and if possible, reiterate the theme of the story in a metaphorical way. By the third quarter, he knows he has to change or he'll lose what's important to him. He's taking steps with a new mindset. It's hard, but he perseveres. Then at the end of this section, I force him to have to make another choice. I test his resolve. This decision is going to yield to disaster that will start the fourth quarter. It's going to look as if he's going to lose whatever he's after. He's at his most vulnerable. Motivations that he might not have understood were pushing him come to the surface. He can now act by making a conscious choice. He makes some sort of sacrifice that shows he has changed and will not go back to his old ways. He now deserves the prize. For me, life's too short for an unhappy ending. I get enough defeat in real life. When I take the time to read (or write) a story, I want the hero to get what he wants or something better. And if he doesn't end up with his prize, I at least want to know that he's changed for the better. The power of structure is knowing I have a solid skeleton in place. This allows my mind to spend its energy on finding creative ways to attach the flesh that will yield a fully formed story that will, I hope, provide my reader with a satisfying experience. May 2008 Click here for more Writing Tips!
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