You will be familiar with my ongoing fascination with the wisdom of writing gurus who want to help you write better. First it was Blake Snyder, then John Yorke then I listened to the words of Michael Moorcock and Lester Dent. My latest find is Dwight V. Swain. I like his gnarly voice on the podcast I listened to. Gnarly has a different meaning in American I'm aware because one of the reviews for my stories said it was 'gnarly'. I think that was good. Yep, I've checked - it is good, and doesn't mean covered in knobs (well it does sometimes.
So, I am reading Dwight V. Swain at the moment. There are some very useful blogs about his technique. Check out Phillip McColllum's blog entry on Scene and Sequel but also Katie Ganshert's post on "Motivation-Reaction Units".
I love a bit of jargon.
So I went over The Beast of Whitby and tried to get my Motivation/Reaction Unit in place and arrange them in Scenes and Sequels.
The benefit of this for me was that Blake Snyder and John Yorke and also Christopher Vogler (to a lesser extent) gave an overarching story structure. Yorke makes the point that Acts and Scenes are fractal - so that they should mirror the overall story arc. Swain tells you exactly how to do that.
So, you have (Inciting incident) -> reaction -> dilemma -> decision -> goal -> conflict -> disaster.
And you repeat it. So each scene has that form, and each act has that form and the whole story is built from those bricks. This works well with John Yorke's idea of a five act structure being implicit in all stories.
I don't buy that every story is the Hero's Journey however, though I like Joseph Campbell a lot. There are lots of archetypal experiences that light us up - Leaving Home, Finding a Mate, Facing Death, Being Predated, Finding our Place in the Tribe's Pecking Order, Raising Young.
I don't know why I've given them all capital letters...
Peace dudes - be gnarly!
TW.
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