The Mythic Journey Joseph Campbell so passionately explored and shared with the rest of us and Christopher Vogler so brilliantly captures by in his book Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers is part of the Universal Story.The Universal Story is the heartbeat of the universe. It's in the undercurrent of every breath you take, every story you tell yourself, and all the stories you write. The Universal Story represents the story of one man changing and evolving as part of the bigger story …
Plot Help for Weary Writers
I've encountered another example of something I've wondered about for years.Rarely do I read a writer’s work before a plot consultation, other than the Character Emotional Development Profile for the main character(s) and the Thematic Significance Statement for the project. So, I can't prove this impression. But, I wonder if the writers who start out really verbal and attempt to tell me everything at once, write that way, too. In other words, is the first 1/2 hour of settling down into the plot …
Relinquishing a Bit of Backstory
A writer hears it from me when we do a plot consultation -- the mother needs to die at the 1/4 mark / the end of the beginning. Flash forward several years (I mean several, like four or five or six), she hears it again from her critique group. Then she starts reading The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master and unravels that old plot planner I created years before and affixes it to her wall. There it is again, at the one quarter mark -- the mother must die.Hers is a …
Keep the Climax in Mind
Three plot consultations with three separate writers, all with similar strengths and the same weakness. Each story has well thought out scenes that draw the reader into the Beginning 1/4 of the project. Each one develops character emotional development through dramatic action in the Middle 1/2. In other words, for these three writers, three quarters of their projects work, at least on a structural plot level.At the end, these same three projects falter with little or no real Climax to top off …
Plot Book Group for Writers
Each Monday, we upload the latest session of the Plot Series: How Do I Plot a Novel, Memoir, Screenplay? Plot Book Group for Writers. This month's book selection is Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. We chose Helen Simonson's debut novel and New York Times best-seller, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand to demonstrate some of the plot techniques she used so effectively that the story won a coveted New York Times Book Review.Last week - 1A - you were asked to:- Determine the basic …
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