The number one thing I learned from screenwriting is story structure. Robert McKee, author of STORY, explains that there are two kinds of talent: story talent and literary talent. Most writers focus on literary talent … which are the words, the phrases, and how you use them. Often, literary talent is what we’re taught in creative…
I had an absolute blast at AWP16 this past weekend! I’m so grateful to everyone who came to my panel Staging the Story: Screenwriting Techniques for YA Fiction and saw me, Cori, Amy Rose, and Jennifer chat up a storm. It was a lively and wonderful discussion with a packed room! We talked story structure, visual storytelling, creative…
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…
In my last post we began our survey of alternative story structures. That post covered non-linear structure, episodic structure with an arc, wheel structure, and meandering structure. Today we’ll continue to push past the traditional story structure idea of a mountain or triangle shape to consider branching structure, spiral structure, multiple POV structure, parallell structure, and cumulative…