Tag: Craft

Structure

Writing as Craft IconJust like we need a bit of structure in our lives in order to thrive and stretch our selves to reach our goals, our writing needs a bit of structure to it. This helps keep the story coherent and cohesive and helps it resonate with the reader. I’m sure there are experimental constructions out there where upon first glance it makes no sense at all and as a reader you can’t make heads or tales of it, until you learn the structure and suddenly everything clicks and makes sense.

Now, structure isn’t the same as plot, nor is it the same as a formula.

When people talk about stories, books, tv shows and movies as being formulaic, they don’t necessarily mean their structure is boring and worn out. Usually they mean their plot is tired and so well-worn, there are no surprises for us.

However, people have been telling each other stories for millenia. Some jaded folks claim there are no new stories or ideas. But we’ve seen numerous stories told where the structure is repeated time and time again. Why? Because it works with a wide variety of plots and people are comforted and satisfied by the familiar. Indeed many of the same basic plot lines have been retold with new characters throughout the ages.

The most familiar form is probably the three Act Structure as described by Aristotle in his Poetics. It can be found from ancient Greek plays to numerous books and movies of today.

Aristotlean Play Structure

Structure: Exposition->Rising Action->Climax->Falling Action->Denoument

  1. Exposition
  2. Rising Action
  3. Climax
  4. Falling Action
  5. Denouement/Resolution

This system will look very familiar if you graph it like Gustav Freytag did at the right when he analyzed ancient Greek and Shakespearean dramas.

Many people are interested in how novels and screenplays are organized and each have their own perception of how it works best and why. Some look at it from the angle of characterization and the emotional stories of those characters. Others have likened it to a journey that the character takes and the steps involved to propel the character on his journey and the adventures and trials experienced and his glorious return as a hero. here’s even a twist on this for the heroine’s journey. Yet there are others yet who are more plot-oriented with some delving into what motivates the characters to make the decisions that they do during the course of the plot.

Popular Takes on Structuring A Novel or Screenplay

  • Traditional Three Act or 5-Part Structure
  • Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey
  • Peter Dunne’s Emotional Structure
  • Debra Dixon’s Goal/Motivation/Conflict
  • Michael Hauge’s Six Stages
  • Kara Lennox’s breakdown for a 400-page novel
  • Billy Mernit’s Seven Steps for Romantic Comedies

I’ll be looking closer at these in the coming months, but I don’t think most of them are really completely different structures so much as various lenses with which to analyze a story or alternate sets of questions to ask yourself as you go about building your story.

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser will determine your level of comfort and need for outlines, but I’m sure you’ll still find yourself asking these same types of questions that will affect your structure at one point or another, either before your first draft or as you try to assemble a later draft into a coherent story.

 

Which type of structure comes naturally for you? Have you ever used some other type of structure? Diary, Framed Flashack, Family Saga, or something else?

Goals, Accountability & Blog Plans

The Writer IconIt’s the time of year to talk about New Year’s Resolutions and Goals.

But what if you don’t want your hopes, dreams and plans to go the way of every other year’s abandoned or failed New Year’s resolutions?

Last year, I joined an accountability group and learned goals must be WRITTEN down. Committing goals to a fixed form helps keep your eye on the prize instead of watching good intentions disappear with those New Year’s champagne bubbles.

Goals

Once you have them written down, take a close look at them. Are your goals, S.M.A.R.T.? That is to say, are your goals

Specific

Is your goal clear and unambigous? What exactly do you want to accomplish?

Measurable

How will you know when you’re done?

Achievable

Can you realistically attain this goal? What changes will you need to make in order to reach this goal?

Relevant

Why is it important to accomplish this goal?

Time-Bound

When will you have it completed by? How long will it take you? Is this realistic?

Bob Mayer in his Who Dares Wins book and Warrior Writer workshops, teaches the idea that not only do you need to know WHAT you want to accomplish, but WHY you want to achieve those goals and HOW you plan to overcome any obstacles along the way. These ideas, learned in his Green Beret days, dovetail nicely with the S.M.A.R.T. goals mentioned above.

Accountability

Now that you have your set of goals, you need to make sure you keep working toward hem. Personal accountability is only so good. It’s been proven we do better if we have to answer to someone else. If you don’t belong to a writers’ group (online or off) or a writing forum of some sort already, these can be great sources of support and people who can hold you accountable.

Other ways to hold yourself accountable include:

  • Posting your goals publicly on your blog.
  • Write your goals on a post-it and tape it to your monitor or something else you look at every day.
  • Sending email to your future self via a service like futureme.org
  • Posting your small daily goals on Twitter some #hashtags already exist for writing: #amwriting, #writegoal, #goalwar
  • Using task management software like Things for the Mac, or Lifetick online

Also important is the periodic reviewing, adjusting and reality checking of your goals. You need to make them and your daily routine work for you and change what isn’t working.

Blog Plans

One of the goals I promised myself I’d work toward this year is having a more active blog. I brainstormed a long list of topics and then organized them into several categories. I want to keep exploring the creative process of writing, but I also want to explore more of the Regency Era of early 19th Century England as well as improve my Regency Resources Page.

I’ll be covering a wide array of topics I hope will prove interesting and valuable resources in the future. The writing categories I’ve chosen (The Writer, Writing as Art, Writing as Craft, and Writing Life) will rotate on a weekly basis and I want to do at least one Regency Resource post each week. So I hope you’ll follow along this year and chime in too!

 

So, are you gonna reach your goals in 2010 and beyond? I came closer than ever before in 2009 by using these concepts, and I know 2010 is going to be even better!

Warrior Writer Recap

So, the Warrior Writer Workshop. I was scared it was going to be too similar to Todd A. Stone’s Novelist’s Boot Camp, but reading the book, Who Dares Wins, I realized the Blood Lessons and the Circle of Success rang much truer and allowed me to take those ideas beyond the writing and see the applicability to other parts of my life. This is for those who want to be the elite, not just the rank and file. One is filled with only tactical approaches, Warrior Writer is a strategic approach that helps you build for overall success.

Continue reading “Warrior Writer Recap” →

Reversing Motives

digging deeperAnd with this post, I’m diving back into Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. I didn’t completely abandon it over the last week, but I haven’t had big chunks of time to work without distractions, so this exercise has taken longer than usual.

I think the title of this exercise is a little misleading. The main point of the exercise seems to be digging down through the characters and their motivations so that you don’t just stop at “the easy or obvious answer” but there’s no focus whatsoever on taking an opposite approach to the scene, just a different one. Maass has you take any scene with your protagonist and figure what their motivation is as written and what their objective for the scene is. Then, you brainstorm a list of ALL the possible reasons why they might want this objective. Once you’ve created a list, you take the last one and rewrite the scene with that reason in mind as their primary motivation.

Maybe I’ve done this one incorrectly and missed the original intent, but I played the Why Game. Maybe you just need to get a variety of UN-related reasons on your list, but since these characters are pretty defined in my head, the resulting ideas I came up with related to one another. Anything else didn’t seem appropriate. So, I started out with my hero and came up with the following:

Goal: Get heroine to open up to him during dinner — she’s shy and ignoring him and he takes it as a personal challenge.

Why?

He wants to prove he can be a good boy.

Why?

He’s annoyed his hostess sat him next to her to keep an eye on him.

Why?

He’s scared his hosts were serious about kicking him out of their household.

Why?

He’s tired of being considered just barely socially acceptable.

Yes, let your inner toddler free to explore and keep asking why as long as you can stand it. Personally, I hate when my kids (tweens now) decide to be silly and play that game, but it is useful here in writing. Too often the first idea to pop into your head is very simplistic or very obvious. The deeper you dig into the why’s of the piece, the more interesting, fresher and honest it can become.

So I’m off to finish rewriting this particular scene, picking one for my heroine and then doing at least 3 more for each of them. Fun, huh? You betcha.

The TeePee Cake

Blue & Gold Dinner teepee cakeI figured since I talked about it so much, I better share it.

The cake was baked as part of my son’s annual Blue & Gold dinner for Cub Scouts. Each year a different theme is chosen for the cake decorations. We’ve done sports & games (a 3-d chess piece), space (a 3-d Vader’s Tie Fighter & Death Star), animal kingdom (a 3-d Mayan pyramid with animals & trees stuck on it), and patriotism (the Washington monument with fireworks, 2-d thanks!) in the past.

So this being our last year, I said, “OK, we can try 3-d again.” And I convinced him that we wanted to do a teepee. I don’t know if I’ll work with fondant again, but it was definitely a learning experience.

The cake base is a tube cake and a 8″ layer with a layer of 3 texas-sized cupcakes and a single one on top of that. Then I took a couple bamboo skewers to use as the poles and cut a hole in the fondant. The first attempt resulted in much torn fondant. The second with a hole in the center and a slit out to the edge still wanted to tear as gravity pulled it against the skewers. Hence, the second apron at the top reinforced by the three holes cut into the center.

I would have liked a bit more decoration on the teepee itself, but Dh usually does the fine artistic details on top of my structural base, but he had a horrible headache yesterday and we ended up leaving it more “functional than decorative”. The firepit is made from white M&Ms and the fire itself is pretzel sticks, Cherry & Orange Wildfire Fruit roll-ups and a few red M&Ms for coals. The log beside it is a tootsie roll. The grass is just green decorator sugar and the scuffed dirt is chocolate cake mix.

The cake was part of the live auction last night and I ended up spending $40 to get it back. 🙂  I’d told the kids they could bid up to $25 each on cakes and DD decided she wasn’t bidding this year. It’s all for a good cause and I was happy to finally have a cake in the live auction instead of just on the side for the silent auction. A very sweet ending to the night.

Adjust Your Volume

volumeJust like a piece of music won’t sound good if it’s played at all the same volume, writing needs to ebb and flow in its power and intensity as well. This isn’t always about the plot and intrigue, but sometimes it’s about your characters. Are they always running full tilt toward those windmills you have them chasing or do you give them a break and let them breathe a little?

They need to be larger than life, but if you also have them run full tilt all the time, they don’t get a chance to catch their breath nor will your reader. I mean, what will you do when you need that extra.. push over the cliff… if you’re already at 10, where can you go from there? Listen to Nigel — you need to leave a little room to get to 11!

At the same time, you’ll lose readers just as quickly if you start out with everything turned down mellow to only 3 or 4. There are times when basic actions are required, but other times understatement or blowing something completely over the top will work better.

That’s the current exercise in the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. The exercise was a familiar one since it was along the same lines as one introduced in Margie Lawson’s lecture on Deep Edits.The fun here is to take a random action in your manuscript and empower it so it’s stronger and makes a bigger impact or to take that action and trim it down until it’s so muted that it also created a strong impact on the reader.

Which one will work best? Trial and error baby. Sometimes you can get very silly with these and it shows. Don’t use that one. 😉 I loved the two classes I took from Margie and gained a lot of useful tools and ideas from them. I think it is possible to carry it too far, and that all things in moderation are necessary.

It was great to see Jodi‘s comment the other day about “sometimes–yeah, it does take a year or so for things you think you should know, and really do know, to soak in and become part of the way you look at things.” It’s always reassuring when she thinks I’m heading in the right direction, even if she’s not sure about my method of getting there. Is there anything better than when different approaches click together and you realize that you’re managing to run some of these processes in the background?

Larger Than Life

attack-of-the-50-ft-womanWorking along in the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass, now that I’ve supposedly gotten a good grip on who my characters are and what they want, the next exercise is to figure out how to make them larger than life and discover the one thing they’d never say, never do, or never think.

And, you guessed it, find places for them to do just that during the course of the story.

So, I’ve got this mousy heroine that I’m working on and I need her to become a lioness. The thing is, I feel her character arc has had a decent treatment and she’s already doing and saying some things she would never consider at the beginning of the story. I probably need to do some work on the “thinking” part, but I’m not unhappy with her development at this point.

The hero’s another story. He’s the one I need to closely examine and shift from his table-top cardboard display cut-out existence to something more on the level of Allison Hayes in her role as Nancy Archer, an abused wife who takes revenge in a way that is both literally and figuratively larger than life. We’ll just hope he doesn’t come out more like Darryl Hannah. *ahem*

Ok, so maybe Attack of the 50-ft. Woman was too corny of an example to use. But who hasn’t daydreamed about taking revenge for something in some over the top manner, if only to make ourselves feel better. I think some of the best characters exhibit these larger than life behaviors and it’s part of what makes us follow their stories. What are they capable of, that we’d never be brave enough to do. All through their character arcs, they keep doing things that you wouldn’t to expect them to do, but each time that surprise just seems inevitable, even if we’re just a bit jealous of their pluck and rapier wits.

The nice little twist that Maass includes in this exercise is to find a place where the character forgoes one of these larger-than-life actions. When and where they back off from (to borrow a phrase from Michael Hauge) living in their essence and retreating behind their identity.

I think it’s important to see this hesitation, because without it, you don’t get the impact of their final decision to fully exist in their true form as a larger-than-life decision that is validated by their motivations and rewards their sacrifices and suffering through their inner conflicts and growth during their arc.

Inner Conflicts

ripplesI’m sure everyone is going to be sick of the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass by the time I’m done, but I’m finding it useful to think about these topics from outside the point of view of thinking only about my characters and I hope it provides someone else some insight along the way. So, thanks for putting up with it.

Looking back through some of my previous posts here, I think this is one of the areas where I need work. The idea seems simple enough: find a goal for the character and find something diametrically opposed or at least mutually exclusive to it and make the character want to strive for both equally. For romance novels, this seems to work best when both the hero and the heroine’s goals are mutually exclusive as well. Finding this sweet spot is proving elusive for me.

I went back and reread parts of On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels mostly just to remind myself about how the hero and heroine need to be forced together into the same problem and writing this post led me back to the post I wrote reading this book the first time: Ker-Snap!

Now, it’s annoying to realize that I wrote that post last March and that I still haven’t managed to pound these ideas into my head, let alone make it work in my manuscripts.

So what’s this have to do with “inner conflicts” and my current manuscript? Both my characters have inner conflicts. Check. Do they have a problem that they’re trying to solve that threatens to keep them apart? Not particularly. The problem is the hero currently is just along for the ride. He’s very reactive, not proactively seeking anything at all.

So… back to digging deeper and figuring out not only what makes this guy tick, but also how what he wants creates conflict between him and the heroine that needs to be overcome. It’s not simply the fact that they like to inhabit very different social roles, but what exactly that is, I need to work out.

Defining Qualities

A magnifying glass studying definitions in a dictionary.Today’s exercise that I’m working on from the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maasshas to deal with choosing defining qualities. What makes your characters who they are and not someone else? While you may take the easy route ( I seem to do so often enough! ) and choose an archetype that represents all that’s heroic about my characters, it may not be enough. You don’t want cardboard cutouts of people populating your stories. You need to find ways to show the reader the other sides of their character.

How can you show the human side of the arrogant and unfeeling rake or villain? How can you show the strength of the shy and demure heroine? Hmm… I seem to be dredging up a lot of opposites here, but what better way to create dimensionality and plant the seeds of inner conflict according to Maass?

I’m sure we can all name an absolute defining characteristic for all our favorite characters from books and movies. The question is, can you name more than one and how they also demonstrate its opposite during the course of the plot? Can you name three? Four? More?

What’s the point? Why bother? The more life and realistic contradictions you can put into your characters especially your main characters, the more realistic, human, and sympathetic they can become. You can’t just rely on plot points to provide opportunities for these extra qualities to emerge, though it will happen if you keep an eye out for them, but use these additional sides of your character, perhaps in unexpected places. Say your hero hates cats, but the heroine’s green-eyed ball of fluff is caught in a tree. You might have painted him as rude and insensitive rake, but what does it say about him if he rescues the poor stranded kitty?

Tons, depending on how you show it.

And really, that’s the point, make each character a distinct individual that can’t just be interchanged for another piece of cardboard in your story. Honestly, aren’t the characters the real reason why some books stay on your keeper shelf and others don’t?

Who’s your hero?

Hero or Zero? The Greatest American Hero (Ralph Hanley) played by William Katt.
Hero or Zero?
The Greatest American Hero
(Ralph Hanley) played by William Katt from 1981-83.

I got the Workbook that goes with Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. I read the main book a while ago, and I haven’t had a chance to read much beyond the first chapter of the workbook yet, but what I’m seeing looks like a lengthy, but worthwhile endeavor.

The first exercise asks, “Who are your personal heroes?”

I have to admit I sat there dumbstruck for the longest time. This isn’t something I think about on a regular basis. How am I supposed to come up with someone off the top of my head. And just one person? C’mon, I’d much prefer to say all those single mom’s out there who make it look so easy (heck, any mom out there that makes it look easy!) than narrow my answer down to a single person.

Besides, won’t it matter who I pick and which protagonist I’m writing about? Won’t different characters require different heroic qualities to be focused on? Shouldn’t it matter who I name based on if I’m looking at a heroine or a hero for my story?

These are the questions I wrestled with yesterday. So did I arrive at any answers? Sorta.

You see, I’m going to run with the idea that it’s going to matter which individual I pick as a personal hero based on which character I’m trying to focus on. Juliet Gordon Low isn’t going to fit for every heroine I write. Jim Henson won’t work for just any hero or even likely ever more than one I write.

The other thing is, someone I see as a hero, no one else ever will. Things I see as heroic qualities may be no big deal to someone else. I think the series, The Greatest American Hero covered that quite well since much of the time they focused on every day situations instead of save-the-world type scenarios. Not everyone can be superman. Not everyone can afford Batman’s toys. Not everyone lives in such dire straights.

I can’t wait to see what other thought provoking questions the book holds in store. I mean, really, how often have you thought about who your personal heroes were since you had to write some corny essay about it in school?

Who would you name today? Why? Do you even remember when you first realized this person had that particular heroic quality?