Structure and Plotting
Structure is the underlying foundation of a story that makes your reader want to keep reading. It's as important in memoirs as it is in fiction.
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Creative Writing, Point of View and Character Development, Structure and Plotting, Training, Lessons
It’s All About The Why’s
Often, an issue that confounds writers is finding they’ve written themselves into a corner or dead end. They wind up stuck, not knowing what happens next or how to resolve the problem. Invariably, this comes from not paying attention to the Why’s. Why would the character do something like that? Why can’t he just…whatever? Where does he go from here? This indecision is usually based on a lack of understanding of the character’s psychology — his motivations, which are based on his flaws and emotional wounds, his deepest fears and his goals, his secret desires and his limiting beliefs. Every action the character takes has a motive, and it can’t be just that the…
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Writing Your Life as The Hero’s Journey
You want to create your memoirs or autobiography. You want to write about your life, but it seems like a series of unrelated incidents, random events happening one after another. However, If you look closely, you can see where certain choices and decisions were the key points where your life diverged from one path to a different one. Each of these “inciting incidents”, to use a fiction-writer’s terminology, had a profound effect on you in one way or another, but at the time, you didn’t see them or the effect they’d have on your life’s journey. The Hero’s Journey is a formula for writing fiction that was identified and…
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How to Rivet Your Reader with Narrative Drive
What is it that keeps a reader interested in your memoir? Why should they keep reading what you have to say? And what’s Narrative Drive anyway? I first heard the term narrative drive from John Truby, Hollywood screenwriter, and one of my heroes. Narrative drive is the momentum that carries any story forward – a situation, investigation or inquiry that must be resolved in order for the story to make sense to the reader and satisfy their curiosity. Why do we love stories? Some people identify with characters – their adventures resonate with the reader in some way, giving them a sense of “Yes, I get that,” when they find a…
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How Important is Scene Construction in Memoir?
Are You A Pantser Or A Plotter? When I started taking my writing seriously in 2015, I was an avowed “pantser” — someone who writes by the seat of her pants, with no thought to plotting, construction or structure. No scene construction for me, boy! I wanted my fictional characters to tell me their story without trying to impose myself on their creativity. It was a heady time, great fun, and I fell in love with most of my characters. But…it wasn’t very good. My narratives wandered about and never reached a conclusion, so I never finished anything of any great length. My short stories were much better, though they…