Drudge people.  You see them every day.  On the news.  In your town.  Outside your window.  Perhaps, even in your own home.

You can easily recognize them as they have lost their tales.  With no tale, they are directionless, shuffling endlessly forward with no destination.

How did they become Drudge People?  They were not born that way, oh no!  Each and every one came into this world as we all did, with a curious mind and an inquisitive spirit.  Life seemed an endless wonder and full of opportunities to explore.  Each new discovery was a tale to tell – a eureka moment so powerful that we ran to share it with our loved ones and friends, lest it burst within us before we could release the pressure of epiphany.

And then we started school.  Suddenly, there was regimen.  Conformity was rewarded, individuality punished.  Oh, not in in such direct terms (that would be abhorrent to our democratic ideals in these United States.)  And yet, we were all gently guided away from enthusiasm and into the soft protective embrace of routine.  Layer by layer, responsibilities, obligations, social sensitivity, compromise and procrastination became our shellac and armor in what we were constantly reminded was a cold and dangerous world.

Our education ended when we were fully indoctrinated, inoculated, and insulated from any original thinking and targeted instead on whatever mindless task was placed before us.  In short, we were ready for the work place.  And it was here the alchemist’s art of turning students into automatons was refined into the science of creating a population of  robot-slaves.

In a technically savvy world, the shackles must be so subtle as to be invisible to all except the jailers – the emperor’s new closed mind.  No tangible restraints can be seen.  But for those with a keen eye and a little patience, you can identify the Drudge People in our midst.  If you suspect someone, ask yourself, “When was the last time (Person Z) bolted into my cubicle aglow with something (he or she) couldn’t wait to tell me?”  When was the last time they posted something original on Face book, other than their new high score on some life-eating game or a link to someone else’s pictures or a re-post of someone else’s thought or (most telling of all) simply clicked the “Like” button without writing anything in response?  You see, when you lose your tale you have nothing to say.  The Muse has run out of you and your creative juices have crystallized in your veins.

We become infected whenever we consume rather than create, when we opt for a virtual experience instead of an actual one, a recorded adventure as a safer substitute for the real thing.  The more we show up right on time for our daily coat of varnish, the less it becomes our shield and the more it serves as our prison.  After years of build-up, the constraints have become so thick that one may become wholly beyond redemption.

But there is hope for some of us, my friends.  If your eyes have been opened and you can now (perhaps for the first time) see the glossy membranes that are hardening around you, there is still a chance to avoid permanent incarceration.  You need to re-grow your tale.  This will not be easy.  Through atrophy, it has likely been almost wholly absorbed back into your system and re-tasked as raw material to be added to your casing.

Begin as thus: seek out original thinkers – those few individuals whose clarion voices resound out above the din of the mindless masses.  They are they outcasts, perhaps even the outlaws in our civilized society.  Listen to their call, but not too long, for it as easy to become lured by the siren song as it is to become deaf to innovation.

Take in these new voices just long enough to resonate within yourself – to build up a sympathetic vibration that begins, ever so gradually, to create cracks in your full mental jacket.  Then funnel the energy of those maverick rants into your core – recharge the cells at the base of your tale until, through the synthesis of many alternative ideas you begin to form one of your own.

All it takes is a single concept – something you’ve not thought or heard before.  Take note – this is a delicate and crucial time in the clockwork of your escape!  Do not let that concept simply fade away as you are distracted by the next mind-numbing diversion that drifts upon you from the mill of collective mundanity.  Nurture that embryonic thought, feed it with research and water it with conjecture.  Allow it to place roots in your mind, so strong that it will not be scoured from your consciousness by the next brisk breeze of life.  Grow it stout and tall until it bears fruit.  And as it expands, it will poke out through one of the cracks in your cage and you will find that your tale has begun to grow again.

But tales are not self-sustaining, they must be exercised regularly if they are to become and remain the rudder of your life course.  This can only be accomplished by putting them into action – wagging your thoughts.  And you do this just as when you were a child – you run excitedly to your loved ones and friends to tell them of your wonderful new experience or discovery.

You can do this in fiction.  You can do it in fact.  You can do it in music or pictures or words.  You will find that it quickly burns within you – an intensity of life you had either forgotten or perhaps not ever experienced.  And the more your engage it, the more brightly it shines, as do you.

And finally, when you are a self-starting engine of creativity, when life has become both raw and meaningful again, perhaps you will take a moment to cast a life line to another who is still not wholly beyond hope.  A life line such as this article I’m throwing to you.  But, for the love of God, don’t just post a link to this or simply “like” it without any original comments of your own, or you may be truly lost and doomed to remain one of the Drudge People forever….

Melanie Anne Phillips

“Narrative Space” describes the complete breadth and depth of subject matter in which you seek to define a story.

Simply put, most authors don’t come to a story with a complete structure immediately in mind.  Rather, they are attracted to the subject matter, which may include setting, time period, activities and events, personalities, snippets of dialog, situations and anything else that is not inherently part of the argument of a narrative.  For example, take Santa Claus.  You can have him be the main character or a victim or a villain.  You can make him a spirit or a man.  You can have him involved in a western, a science fiction, a romance, a buddy picture or a tragedy.  In and of itself, subject matter is not part of a structure but just the raw material from which a structure is formed.  That is part of the reason that in Dramatica theory we named a story’s structure the storyform as it brings form to story.

Think of subject matter as the interstellar gas and material from which solar systems are formed.  This is the narrative space.  Just because you carve out a piece of this space – enclose a particular cloud of star stuff – does not create planets that orbit in understandable patterns.  The job of an author is to look into the nebulous nature of an area of subject matter – a particular historic event, an aspect of human nature – and to coalesce that material into a tale or a story.  A tale in a given narrative space would simply explore the subject matter and make a statement about it.  A story would transcend that and make the case for the best (or worst) of all possible ways to organize (or live through) that material.

As you might expect, there does not have to be a just one single storyform within a narrative space.  In fact, there can be an infinite number of stories told within a given realm of subject matter.  Some of these may exist in different corners, completely separated from each other.  Some may overlap slightly, covering similar areas of subject matter with two complete different structures and messages.  In fact, two completely different storyform arguments may actually occupy the exact same portion of the overall narrative space but form the raw material toward two contradictory purposes, much as two scepters might fashion artistically incompatible statues from identical pieces of clay.

As a final thought in this brief introduction to the concept, consider that when you are developing your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them, and what it all means, just because there are parts of the narrative space subject matter that are the reasons you want to write this story does not mean that they can all fit into the same storyform.  Often, to make a complete argument, we must exclude favorite subject matter pieces that would have to be ham-handedly crammed into our story and would never truly fit.  Further, we may have to include additional elements that really don’t inspire us, because if we went with only the parts we truly care about, our overall argument would be full of holes.

Lastly, take solace that you can always write a second story or a series of them about the same narrative space (subject matter) until you have devised enough structures to powerfully explore them all.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

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There are two ways to approach the craft of writing. The first is to step into the role of each character and write it very personally, as if you were an actor portraying a part. The second is to consider what each character must do to fulfill its purpose in the story, then orchestrate their interactions as if you were directing a movie or stage play.

Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages.  Let’s explore them one at a time and then see how we can use them both to make our story at compelling as possible.

The Writer-Actor

On the plus side, the Writer-Actor exudes passion. His or her characters are alive with a personal perspective with which the reader or audience can instantly and deeply identify.

Each character is seen through the eyes of all the others, so the reader/audience feels as if they come to know the characters, not just as players in the Big Picture, but as real people who not only love and hate, but are loved and hated as well.

This creates a rich emotional fabric to a story. But the benefits of being a Writer-Actor don’t stop there. Indeed, even the narrative itself benefits from this approach. Small experiences and individual observations illuminate the environments through which the characters pass.

A Writer-Actor’s narrative is likely to be filled with sensory descriptions as to the temperature, background sounds, colors, textures, tastes, and smells that are present in each scene. In this way, not only do the characters feel real, but so does the world in which they move.

But what about the downside of such a personal approach? The greatest danger of allowing oneself to actually become a character while writing is that one loses site of the needs and structure of the overall story.

Characters tend to take on a life of their own and almost demand that they move in certain directions, even if those are in conflict with the purposes of the story at large. In addition, the benefits of some unifying overview are often lost in the cacophony of individual voices.

Having briefly explored the pros and cons of the Writer-Actor approach, let’s examine some of the benefits and drawbacks of the Writer-Director’s method.

The Writer-Director

In the plus column, the Writer-Director produces a vision. The characters take on a grand importance as pawns in a larger scheme, a greater meaning.

Each character is seen as a cog in an elegant machine, inexorably moving forward like clockwork toward a specific purpose which will ultimately be revealed. The natures of their interrelationships are discovered and defined as understandable threads in the tapestry of the tale.

In addition, characters are tied directly to plot, theme, and genre, integrating them into the story as a whole, illustrating their interdependence with the forces that shape their world and, by inference, ours as well.

But in the negative column, a Writer-Director tends to objectify characters, leading them to come across more as puppets than people. All the beats of character growth are precisely hit, yet the overall flow can feel forced and formulaic.

What’s more, the stage on which the characters strut can seem more Machiavellian than organic, and the story plods along in some sort of Calvinistic pre-destination rather than an unknown realm in which anything might happen.

If you have begun to think that perhaps neither of these approaches, by itself, is sufficient to the task of creating a passionate story that leads to a well-defined message, you are correct.

And that is the point of this exercise. By nature each of us tends to be one of these two kinds of writers. As a result, we excel in half of what readers/audiences are craving, yet fall short in the other side of their needs.

The solution, of course, is to learn to employ tools in the areas in which we do not have natural ability or inclination. That is, in fact, the concept behind learning the craft of writing. We study and exercise not to make ourselves more talented, but to supplement our effectiveness in those areas in which we are not as innately gifted.

So, the first step of the task at hand is to identify which kind of writer you are. The second step is to practice writing with the other method as well.

Here’s a handy method for finding out which kind of writer you are naturally:

1.  First, sit down to create a character from scratch. Pick a name, a gender, an age, a job or vocation and a problem or goal that is their biggest concern in their lives.

2. Based only on that limited information about that character try to put yourself in the character’s shoes. Imagine you are them, they are you.  See if you easily get a feel for them or can even make yourself feel as if this is happening to you.

3.  Now see if you can come up with a description of how the problem or goal affects their lives and what they are thinking or doing about it. Who are the other people in their lives, and how are they affected at a personal and/or emotional level by the problem and by the potential solutions?

If you found that exercise easy, perhaps even fun, then you are a Writer-Actor by nature. If you found it tedious, uninspiring, and fruitless, you’re a Writer-Director.

Now, to be sure which kind of writer you are, try the other method:

1. Start with the same bare-bones information about the character, their problem or their goal and ask yourself what you want them to do about it.

2. List some other characters you want in your story and describe how you want them to help or hinder your character.

3.  What kinds of character conflicts do you wish to explore, which characters are they between, and how are these resolved?

If this was the easier one, then you are a Writer-Director without doubt. You see, both approaches are trying to get to the same place, but they come to it from a different creative mind set. And in so doing, they miss different things along the way.

In summary then, to enhance your abilities as a writer, you need to be fluent in both the Writer-Actor and the Writer-Directory approach, using them in a complementary fashion to fully ignite the fires of passion within a solid logistic framework.

But how can you accomplish that?  How can you develop your skills in both areas?

Here are two methods to get you going. Well call this strategy, “Hats and Charts,” and again, we’ll explore them one at a time:

Hats (for developing Writer-Actor skills)

A surprising number of authors actually wear different hats while writing different characters. I’m not speaking metaphorically here, they actually wear physical hats. This helps them imagine themselves as a given character, such as a cop or a chef.

Not surprisingly, the extension of this is to wear costumes – the clothing you expect your character might brandish. It can be as simple as a scarf, the way you comb your hair, your make-up, perfume or cologne, or all the way to a full wardrobe.

It is really not as silly as it sounds. Do you not feel differently depending upon the kind of clothing you wear on a given day? Does not a uniform influence the way a person thinks? It is not any less true that a writer’s work will very depending upon what he or she is wearing while creating.

Try music that a character might play, put on a television show or movie your character might watch. Tack pictures your character might have in their home to a cork board in your line of sight as you write. Perhaps add pictures that seem like the realm in which they move – a desert island, a ship, the dark dungeons below the Vatican.

All of these ideas grow from the “Hats” concept. You can and should give some time to thinking about other similar ways of making yourself feel like your character feels.

Charts (for developing Writer-Director skills)

To become a better Writer-Director, you need a completely different plan – “Charts”. The idea here is to objectify your characters – to see them as components in the store, elements with which you will build the tale.

You can begin my making a chart of each character and listing as many details about them as you can. For example, where did each character go to school? What hobbies does each have? What are their religious affiliations, if any? To what political party do they belong? How strongly do they subscribe to the philosophies in these groups? What are their physical abilities/disabilities? What are their hair colors, skin texture, skin color, weight?

Create a time-line graph for each characters’ emotional journey through the story. Use different colors for different moods or feelings and plot the intensity of those emotions. By examining these passions analytically, it helps you see patterns and uncover skipped or missed beats in the flow.

Using index cards and colored yarn show all the relationships among your characters including familial, professional, historical, philosophical, and so on.

Try writing a description of each character as if you were a private detective hired to follow them for a day. You have no personal interest in the character, but your job is to document everything they do (and even how they act) in as much detail as possible.

Each of these exercises helps you step out of a character’s shoes and see them in a functional manner, both as themselves and also how they interact with others.

Hats and Charts together:

As you have no doubt surmised, the perspectives of the Writer-Actor and Writer-Director are so divergent that it is virtually impossible to do both at the same time. In the writing process, therefore, you should use them in succession.

Begin with the approach to which you are naturally inclined for this will provide you with the greatest raw inspiration. When you have finished a section or your Muse comes up for air, use the opportunity (which would otherwise be wasted down-time) to apply the exercises from your secondary approach to the material you have just written.

By revisiting the material while it is still fresh in your creative spirit, but from an alternate point of view, you can reprocess the material and fill in the gaps left by your initial creative burst.

Once you have finished the complete story, go back and run it through both approaches again to ensure that not only do the individual scenes sing like a Spring bird, but that the entire work unfolds smoothly, like the passage of a fine season.

In the end, if you take the time to learn, practice and employ both methods of developing characters, your stories will be far more powerful, well rounded, and well received.

Just a reminder, you’ll find both of these approaches are integrated into my StoryWeaver Story Development Software that takes you step by step from concept to completed novel or screenplay through a path of more than 200 interactive Story Cards.

Click here to learn more or to try it risk free for 90 days!

Melanie Anne Phillips

 

Sweet potatoes are the best.  And they are best described in Ralph Ellison’s story of a black man coming to terms with his identity entitled “Invisible Man,” in which he has always avoided eating his favorite childhood food, hot buttered yams, sold by street vendors, so he would not be stereotyped, as he now works in an office in a suit.  But he finally accepts his true love of the food, stops by a vendor, puts down his briefcase and eats the wonderful sweet salty treat with abandon, proclaiming in his mind, “I yam what I yam.”

Personally, in 7th grade art class, we were given an assignment to bring in pictures to illustrate how to show distance.  One techniques was loss of detail.  I brought in a picture from Mad Magazine where a little boy had just cut off the tail of a cat with a pair of scissors and labelled it “Loss of De Tail.”  He looked at it for a moment and said, “You want to add this to the other examples in your portfolio?”  Man had no sense of humor.  He lost it by living a life as someone he wasn’t.

In each of the two narratives above, one fictional and one a true story, two different people for completely different reasons had stepped away from who they really were to fashion lives that didn’t reflect them at all.  They felt justified in doing this when it started because they never imagined the path would lead them to where they ended up.

It starts with a single compromise to oneself – doing a job you hate to achieve something you want or putting your own art on hold to pay the bills as a teacher.  But to maintain that compromise, you need to make another, and another in support of it until you’ve built up a whole network of interconnected dependencies that form the bars of a framework behind which you are self-imprisoned.

You’ve put so much effort into building this damn thing called “your life” that you can’t bear to let it go – like a cancerous tumor you’ve become really attached to, to the point you won’t let anyone remove it from you.

Captain Kirk said, “I need my pain,” when he was offered the chance to become “magically” angst-free.  Our pain is the scar we wear, the badge of honor for all the suffering we endured on the way to the life we have fashioned for ourselves.  It defines our struggle, so it defines ourselves, or at least who we have become.

But is that who we really “are” much less who we would want to be?  Of course not.  But are we willing to change?  Hell, no!  We’d not only risk everything and everyone we have, but will then have to face that maybe those aren’t the things and people we really want.  And then there’s the kids, and all those who depend upon us, and our responsibility to future generations….

Shakespeare said,

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

But in this case, it is not the after-life we fear, but life itself.  Can we really face having to acknowledge we’ve spent years of our lives weaving a fabric with a horrible pattern that doesn’t reflect us at all?  And wouldn’t THAT be dandy, to not only have to face that knowledge, but then to crash it all down in order to be ourselves so all we end up with is lost time and nothing at all to show for it?  Gambler’s syndrome – if I spend a little bit more I’ll eventually score big enough to cover all of my loses and still come home a winner.

No, it’s not an easy place to go.  But as artists, we head right for that place like lemmings, subjugating our Muse “until later” or because we need to be “responsible.”  Seriously?  What kinds of lame excuses are these?

Don’t lie to yourself that it will happen someday, because it never will – not on its own.  It will only happen someday if you make it happen.  And there’s no time like the present.  Yeah, sure, okay,  you’re not going to abandon your family and head off to another continent to rediscover your Muse (though some have done just that).  But you probably won’t.  I never have, but I’m no freaking example of much of anything, ‘cept to myself, of course.

No, you’ll probably want to write the great American (or some other nationality) Novel or Screenplay, and you’ll “grunt and sweat under a weary life.” to try to make that happen while still trying to maintain everything else.  After all, J. K. Rowling did just that, didn’t she?

But honestly, how many J. K. Rowlings are in the world?  One, of course,  So give up the dream of writing what you want and expecting it to make mega bucks.  Could happen, but you’ll probably have better odds with the Lotto.  Besides, as soon as cold, hard cash enters the picture, your Muse seizes up in a mental charlie horse, all twisted up and contorted into a Gordian knot of creative deadlock.  Oh, yeah. That’s fun.

Listen my friends (I can call you my friends, can’t I?) if you want to be happy in writing, just write whatever you freaking want.  And write it how you want.  And tell it the way you want it told.  But never sell out your Muse for security – oh, no…  Just take a job on the side and realize it has nothing to do with your creative self.  Be truthful, it’s just for the money.  Differentiate between your worker-bee self and your inventive spirit self, and don’t ever, not now, never, under any circumstances lock the two together or they will both go down into the deep and you along with them, waving to yourself like Ahab on the whale of your reality as your inspiration sinks below the waves leaving no one to tell the tale because the damn writer in you just drowned in self-pity and was never heard from again (though some mindless husk continues to crank out text under the same name).

You yam what you yam.  Eat it.

Melanie Anne Phillips

By Melanie Anne Phillips

In story structure there is a dramatic element called the Story Limit.  It has two varieties: the time lock and the option lock.  Some stories come to a climax because they run out of time, others because they run out of options.

In a time lock story, you are rushed.  In an option lock story you are pressured (because the undesired situation remains an irritant until you finally find a solution).

The same thing applies to writing.  If you have a deadline for a publisher, then you are writing with time lock.  But if you are creating for yourself, you are writing with an option lock.

And so, it really doesn’t matter how big the ocean is, you have all the time in the world to paddle across it.  And, if you enjoy the process of writing, the more time it takes, the more you get to enjoy it.

A little effort every day will get you there.  Even if there are days that don’t produce much if anything, there are days that will produce a lot so that, in time, step by step, page by page, you will one day find yourself on the opposite shore with a finished novel.

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Structuring before writing or anywhere in the beginning of the process hobbles the Muse and creativity stops and progress bogs down.  This can make it appear as if story structure is your enemy.

But, if you apply structure at the right point in the process, story structure can be your greatest ally.

To turn structure from foe to friend, follow these four steps:

First Step

Create your story world: What are all the elements you would like in your story?  Don’t force creativity – just make a list of all things you want in your story – the people, events, messages, and moods you’d like to explore.

If you have specific ideas for a battle, a line of dialog, a clever plot twist – anything that you want in your story – jot it down.  Then, develop those ideas into the world in which your characters live an in which your plot will take place.

For some tips on how to develop your story world, click here.

Once you feel you have the basic outline of your story in focus, write a synopsis of your story.  A synopsis talks about what’s in your story – not so much the order of events.  It is intended as a conversational description of what your story is about, as if someone asked you, “I hear you are writing a novel (or screenplay).  What’s it about?”

If you answered that question, you wouldn’t answer by telling them the order in which things occur.  You would tell them about all the major concepts, interesting moments, and principal characters.  You would describe your story world so they get an idea of what the finished story will be like.  That, is your synopsis.

Second Step

Create a pathway through those elements – your story’s spine or timeline, including quest, characters and plot.

Your story’s timeline (often though of as your plot-line, though it also includes your character arcs and the development of your story’s message) is like a journey through the story world you created in the first step.

Imagine that your story world is a map of the terrain you wish to cover in your story.  Then the timeline is a journey across that terrain – the sequential order in which you visit each of the interesting concepts you’ve developed.

It can be difficult to turn a list of ideas into a pathway, however, but if you run into trouble, click here for a method of generating your timeline from your story world.

One you have your timeline, imagine that the person who asked what your story was about in the first step responded with, “Cool!  I like it!  How does it unfold?

Your answer would be a conversational recounting of the key events or happenings in your story in sequential order – not too much detail, just the essentials.  If you write that down, it becomes what is called a story treatment.”

Essentially, a treatment is a description of how your story will unwind, minus any dialog unless it is absolutely essential to understanding a particular event.

Third Step

Once you have your treatment, add in structural story points. I’m not talking about building your story’s complete narrative structure – not yet.  For this step, you just want to make sure all the critical structure story points are all in there, such as Goal, Requirements, thematic conflict, a main character, and whether that main character ends up changing their nature (like Scrooge) or holding on to their point of view (like James Bond).

You see, structure is composed of two parts – the essential story points and the dramatics that hold them together.  Every story has the same points, but it is the way they are connected to one another that creates your story’s unique narrative structure.

We’ll worry bout those connections in the next step.  Here, just make sure all the most important story points are in your story, and if not, put them in so they fit with what you’ve already developed.

For a list of the twelve most important story points you really need, click here.

Fourth Step

Create a narrative structure for your story.  To do this, you will want to look at all your story points and then determine how they hang together.  This can be done by intuition and experience, but it is always a little “iffy” if you rely on that alone.

That’s why we created a software program that can do it much more precisely.  You can use it for free to work out the narrative structure in  your story.  But, the software is not the point.  The point is to create a template for your story that would show you what a perfect structure would look like.

Now, nobody reads a book or goes to a movie to experience a great structure.  Rather, we are drawn to stories to have our passions ignited.  Still, there are some essential structural components that can scuttle the best-told and most exciting story every conceived.

So how can you reconcile structure with your Muse?  Simple.  Don’t try to make your story’s structure perfect, just better.  Use your structural template as a guide – like a blueprint.

Writing is a strange endeavor, as it is best done when you build the house first, and then determine the perfect blue print for it later.  Then, you lay that template over your story and see where you can bring your story into better alignment with it, without destroying all the design concepts and decorations you already have in place.

In the real world of story development, perfect structure is a myth.  Trying to make a story structure perfect will drain the life out of it. And trying to create a structure first and then write from it will create a “paint by numbers” picture.

But if you use structure only at the end (after completing your first draft is ideal), then you can hone your story as closely as possible to the most solid structure, without undermining your passionate expression.

Now I said you could use our story structuring software free, and here’s how.  We created a product called Dramatica, based on our concepts of narrative structure.  It contains a Story Engine that uses those concepts to help you build a structure that best represents your story.  The demo version is fully functional, including the Story Engine!  So, you can use it to structure your story and you don’t have to spend a dollar.

You can download the demo version for Windows or for Mac here.

You’ll find the demo has complete instructions and even a path for beginners called the StoryGuide that will walk you through the story structuring process step by step.

What it won’t tell you is how to apply that structure to your story without crushing the creativity.

For that, just keep in mind – the structure that Dramatic generates should be treated as a collection of guidelines, not a list of rules.  Use each story point in the structure to gain insight into your story, and then apply it if you can and as best you can to strengthen your structure.

And, of course, your friendly neighborhood story coach is always available, as described below.  Plus, you may also with to try my other software, StoryWeaver, to help you with the creative part of the process as well.

Contact me about narrative analysis for fiction and the real world

~AND~

Try my StoryWeaver Software for Step By Step Story Development

 

By Melanie Anne Phillips

The Muse explodes outward into a world of passion and possibilities.

As a teacher of creative writing for twenty-five years, my experiences with many types of writers tell me that one should never consider structure at all until a first draft is completely written.

Structure gets in the way, it hobbles the muse.  We all think in narrative anyway, so whatever we create already has a fuzzy structure in it.  The Muse is okay with this.  So let her be; let her range free and roam wild.  And when she is done, spent, and filled with satisfaction, then you bring in structure as a framework upon which to hang what she has created so that it is displayed in the best light.

Now is the time to break free of bonds.  Structure will follow in its own moment in time.

Contact me about narrative analysis for fiction and the real world

~OR~

Try my StoryWeaver Software for Step By Step Story Development