I want to thank everyone for reading my Organic Architecture Series! I realize this was a long series with lots of posts. The following are the links to all the different articles. Feel free to bookmark this page for easy reference! Happy plotting, structuring, and designing, everyone! Organic Architecture Series: Organic Architecture Series Introduction Classic…
I’ve spent the last two months talking all about classical design, alternative structures and plots, and designing principles! Hopefully you’ve seen that there are innumerable design possibilities at your fingertips. But as I walked us through this series, I’m sure a few of you read my posts and thought to yourself: Doesn’t that story fit…
The final category in my series on designing principles is the storyteller. Who is your novel’s storyteller? At the outset, it might not seem like the point-of-view or the narrator you chose to tell your story would have a large impact on its structure, but it does. Imagine if how differently the The Usual Suspects…
Some stories are not about a single protagonist. Sometimes a group or community becomes the larger focus. Using a community as a designing principle is the fourth category in this series. Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Struasser explores the complexity of a school shooting and could have been told from POV of the shooter,…
We live our lives in a linear progression and that affects the way we think about narrative, how to live our lives, and what we value. Structurally and metaphorically time can be an interesting element to design with. Continuing our discussion on designing principles, lets see how the way we use time can become an…
My second category in my series on designing principle is using your setting and environment to as inspiration for your story’s design. It’s interesting that the predominant structure we talk about is a mountain, which is ultimately a metaphor for a certain kind of movement and escalating energy to a story. In my first post…
My first category exploring the concept of a designing principle is a character’s mental state. A lot of novels today are written in the first person and the reader is allowed inside a character’s mind. If you’re writing in first person consider the mental state of your character. Is there a design that could mimic…
I’m my previous posts I’ve given you a pandora’s box of alternative plots (Alt. Plots Part 1 and Alt. Plots Part 2) as well as alternative structures (Alt. Structures Part 1 and Alt. Structures Part 2). And we ought to take classic design, the hero’s journey, and three act structure and throw them in that box…
In my last two posts I covered a variety of alternative plots that deviate from traditional arch plot. In this post I want to address what is known as a plot genre. You’ve probably stumbled across craft books that told you there are x-number of plot types and the story you are writing probably falls…
Some of you may know that I am obsessed with story structure. If you didn’t know this, please check out my WIP novel structure chart or my collection of story structure diagrams. It’s no big surprise that I did my VCFA graduate lecture on structure and story design. I love this topic. Thus, I’ve broken down…