Author Archives: Melanie Anne Phillips

Write Your Novel Step by Step (Step 5)

Before we dive into this step, let’s take a moment to review the steps that got us here in order to set the stage for what comes next.

In Step 1 (Stage of Story Development), we outlined four stages in the creative process – Inspiration, Development, Exposition, and Storytelling. In novels, each of these stages touches on all four aspects of story – Characters, Plot, Theme and Genre. And so, our step by step method of story development begins with Inspiration.

Each stage starts with general steps that lay the groundwork for that stage, which are then followed by specific steps about your Characters, Plot, Theme and Genre before moving on to the next stage.

Step 2 (Get Out of My Head!) was about jotting down any and all creative ideas you may already have for your story so you can clear your mind and see the material in front of you in preparation for finding the center of your story.

Step 3 (What’s The Big Idea?) is about boiling down all your existing story material into a single log line – a one sentence description of what your story is about. This becomes the lighthouse beacon that defines the reason for and center of your story that will guide all your future creative endeavors.

Step 4 (The Creativity Two Step) presents a method to generate a wealth of new material for your growing story. Guided by your log line, you apply a question and answer system to your story ideas from Step 2 that alternates between logical analysis and the passion of the Muse.

Here is Step 5, we’ll once again clarify things by boiling them down to create a synopsis of our story so far.

Pulling It All Together

In Step 2, you jotted down any and all story ideas you may have already had for your novel. In Step 4, you probably generated a huge number of additional creative ideas for your novel. (If not, repeat Step 4 until you do!)

Problem is, the resulting collection of notions for your story from Steps 2 and 4 probably ranges far and wide, resulting in a hodgepodge of interesting concepts and schemes, all out of order and jumbled up in something of a chaotic mess.

So, before we go on into future steps, we need to do a little necessary housekeeping lest things get out of hand. Just as we boiled down your Step 2 ideas into a single log line, in this step we’ll pull together all the material you’ve created so far into a more manageable form: synopsis of your novel,

A synopsis is like a map of the ground your story is going to cover, noting all the landmarks and important things that happen at them. Just as we originally had you jot down any ideas you already had in Step 2 and then boil them down to a single log line in step 3, we’re now going to take all the creative concepts you spewed out in Step 4 and pull them together into a this single conversational description of your novel’s content.

The length of a synopsis is completely variable. The shortest form would be a thumb-nail sketch, perhaps just a paragraph long – the minimum necessary to outline the key elements and scope of your story.

Typically, the longest synopsis is usually no more than a page. So, don’t feel compelled to write more than comfortably flows, or to limit yourself to less than you have. For example, Tolkien created whole worlds, histories, cultures, and languages in synopsis form before putting any of it in story form.

Our goal here is simply to take that unwieldy shopping list of story elements from Steps 2 and 4 and to turn it into conversational language that, more or less, describes all the interesting people, events, topics, and stylistic flourishes you’d like to include in your novel, as if you were talking about your story to a friend, rather than actually trying to tell your story.

So, for this step, your task is to refer to all that you created so far and describe it as if you were telling someone about your story who was very interested in it and wanted to hear every juicy detail.

“My novel is about….” There. I started it for you. Now, go to town. Guided by your log line that describes the crux and center of your novel’s concept, write your synopsis of every interesting and/or essential thing that is going to be in it, based on the work you’ve done in the last step.

Sample Synopsis (from my own work):

Snow Sharks: Don’t Eat Red Snow

The government has been developing a new breed of shark that lives in snow rather than water for use as mobile land mines in places such as Siberia or the Arctic. A transport plane carrying them crashes in a storm high in the Rocky Mountains, just above a high-priced ski resort for the rich.

Normally closed at this time, the resort was opened for a powerful client so that his college-age daughter and her friends could have a ski vacation. The sharks gradually slither down from the heights into the bowls shaped resort and begin feating on the kids.

Characters include the handsome but stupid jock, the stuck-up daughter of the patron, a cheerleader, a nerdy science geek who is the tag-along token outcast, and the usual crew of stereotypical college kids.

Scenes include night skiing where the proprietors had installed disco lights on the ski run, so they light up and create changing colored patterns under the snow. During the night skiing, we see one of the kids ski by, followed by the silhouette of against the disco lights of a snow shark following him. This is the first attack that alerts them that something deadly is out there on the slopes.

In a later scene, the jock trying to escape by out-skiing the others when the sharks attack and leaving them to die. He ski-jumps over a chasm, looks back and laughs, looks forward and a snow shark has also jumped the chasm by shooting down the hill on the other side and is coming right for him. The skis land solidly on the other side of the chasm with nothing but boots attached, and bloody stumps sticking out of them.

The government sees this as a great opportunity to see how effective the sharks are and send in an agent to document but not interfere. He ends up dying a horrible death that both divulges to the kids what the government has done and provides the idea of how to escape.

Ultimately, they learn the sharks can no longer live in water, only in snow, so they blow up a geothermal spring to flash-melt the snow above the bowl-shaped valley, ironically drowning the sharks, and barely escaping dying in the flood waters themselves.

Armed with this rather cliche example, its time to write the first synopsis for your own novel. As we continue through our step by step method, we’ll pause after each major new creative effort to fold what you’ve just developed into a revised synopsis. In this way, you have a story right from the beginning that is continually evolving, step by step, into your finished novel.

Next, in Step 6, we’ll stand back a bit to look at the first draft of your synopsis just as your readers will, looking for any holes they might see. Then in the step after that, we’ll begin to fill them.

This article was based on our StoryWeaver Step-by-Step Story Development Software that guides you through more than 200 interactive Story Cards from concept to completion of your novel or screenplay. Just $29.95 for Windows or Macintosh.

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50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks! (Trick 5)

(Excerpted from the book, 50 Sure-First Storytelling Tricks)

Trick 5

Building Importance (Changing Impact)

In this technique, things not only appear more or less important, but actually become so. This was a favorite of Hitchcock in such films as North By Northwest and television series like MacGuyver. In an episode of The Twilight Zone, for example, Mickey Rooney plays a jockey who gets his wish to be big, only to be too large to run the race of a lifetime.

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“Hero” is a Four Letter Word (Part 3)

Excerpted from “Hero” is a Four-Letter Word

Redistributing the Hero

In part 2, we split the hero down into its component structural and storytelling elements. But why would one want to do such a thing? In this part, we provide a well-known example of how the components of the hero can be reassembled in different combinations to create a powerful dramatic impact.

In the classic story of racial prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Protagonist function and the Main Character View are separated into two different characters, rather than into a single hero.

The Protagonist is Atticus, played by Gregory Peck in the movie version. Atticus is a principled Southern lawyer in the 1930s who is assigned to defend a black man wrongly accused of raping a white girl. His goal is to ensure justice is done, and he is the Prime Mover in this endeavor.

But we do not stand in Atticus’ shoes. Rather, the story is told through the eyes of Scout, his young daughter, who observers the workings of prejudice from a child’s innocence.

Why not make Atticus a typical hero who is also the Main Character? First, Atticus sticks by his principles regardless of the dangers and pressures brought to bear. If he had represented the audience position, the audience/reader would have felt quite self-righteous throughout the story’s journey.

But there is even more advantage to splitting these qualities between two characters. Here’s how it works, step by step: First, the audience identifies with Scout. And we share her fear of the local boogey man known as Boo Radley – a monstrous mockery of human form who forms the stuff of local terror stories. All the kids know about Boo, and though we never see him, we hear their tales of his horrible ways.

At the end of the story, it turns out that Boo is just a gentle giant, a normal man with a kind heart but low intellect. As was the custom in that age, his parents kept him indoors, inside the basement of the house, leaving him pale and scary-looking due to the lack of sunlight. But Boo ventures out at night, leading to the false but horrible stories about him when he is occasionally sighted.

As it happens, Scout’s life is threatened by the father of the girl who was ostensibly raped in an attempt to get back at Atticus. Lo and behold, it is Boo who comes to her rescue. In fact, he has always been working behind the scenes to protect the children and is not at all the horrible monster they all presupposed.

In a moment of revelation, we, the audience, come to realize we have been cleverly manipulated by the author to share Scout’s initial prejudice against Boo. Rather than feeling self-righteous by identifying with Atticus, we have been led to realize that we are just as capable of prejudice as the obviously misguided adults we have been observing.

The message of the story is that prejudice does not have to come from meanness, but will happen within the heart of anyone who passes judgment based on hearsay rather than direct knowledge. This statement could never have been successfully made if the elements of the typical hero had all been placed in Atticus.

So, the message here is that there is nothing wrong with writing about heroes and villains, but it is limiting. By separating the components of the hero into individual qualities, we open our options to a far greater number of dramatic scenarios that are far less stereotypical.

Are there more ways to split up the stereotypical hero and redistribute his traits? Absolutely! But to explore these, we first need to take apart our villain as well.

“Hero” is available for Kindle

Narrative Dynamics (Part 4)

Excerpted from the book, Narrative Dynamics

The Dramatica Model

In this book, I’m documenting the development of a whole new side of the Dramatica theory – story dynamics.

Dramatica is a model of story structure, but unlike any previous model, the structure is flexible like a Rubik’s Cube crossed with a Periodic Table of Story Elements. If you paste a story element name on each face of each little cube that makes up the Rubik’s Cube, you get an idea of how flexible the Dramatica model is.

That’s what sets Dramatica apart from other systems of story development and also what gives it form without formula. Now, imagine that while the elements on each little cube already remain on that cube, they don’t have to stay on the same face. In other words, though there will be an element on each face, which ones it is next to may change, in fact will change from story to story.

What makes the elements rearrange themselves within the structure? Narrative Dynamics. Think of each story point as a kind of topic that needs to be explored to fully understand the problem or issue at the heart of a story. That’s how an author makes a complete story argument. But, just as in real life, the order in which we explore issues is almost as important as the issues themselves. At the very least, that sequence tells us a lot about the person doing the exploring. In the case of story, this is most clearly seen in the Main Character. So, the order of exploration of the issues by the Main Character illuminate what is driving him personally.

The Dramatica model already includes a number of dynamics that describe the forces at work in the heart and mind of the Main Character, as well as of the overall story, the character philosophically opposed to the Main Character and of the course of their relationship as well. But, in a structural model – one in which the focus is on the topics and their sequence, there are a lot of dynamics that simply aren’t easily seen.

For example, you might know that in the second act, the Main Character is going to be dealing with issues pertaining to his memories. But how intensely will he focus on that? How long will he linger? Will his interest wane, grow, or remain consistent over the course of his examination of these issues. From a structural point of view, you just can’t tell.

And that is why after all these years I’m developing the dynamic model – to chart, predict and manipulate those “in-between” forces that drive the elements of structure, unseen. Part of that effort is to chart the areas in which dynamics already exist in the current structural projection of the model.

Read Narrative Dynamics

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Storytelling Tip: Trapped in a Routine

As with real people, characters can become trapped in their routines. When a person sets up a routine in order to achieve a goal, service the infrastructure of his or her life, cope with an emotional necessity, or engage in a desired ongoing experience, the situation, reasons, passions, or even the nature of the person himself may have changed in some way that makes the routine no longer effective, counterproductive, inordinately costly, or unsustainably unpleasant.

Still, because the human mind responds to conditioning, a person may continue in their routine by sheer force of psychological inertia. And since the human mind filters out going non-threatening repetitive stimuli (such as a ticking clock or air conditioner noise – called a selective filter) a person may never even become aware that they are in a routine, no matter how difficult or unenjoyable the routine is.

Stories that explore such issues can be very involving for readers or an audience, as they not only strike close to home, but also spark internal consideration which may illuminate similar solvable dissatisfactions in their own lives.

Learn more about incorporating thematic topics in your story in our book:

A Few Words About Theme

Learn more about storytelling in our book:

50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks!

Writing Stories About Hopes and Dreams

A lot of people, writers included, use the words “hope” and “dream” pretty much interchangeably. Fact is, each describes a completely different way of imagining the future. Being clear not only of their definitions but of the different states of mind each invokes will not only help you better communicate with your readers or audience, but may also open a deeper level of sophistication in the message you are trying to convey.

Hope is a desired future to which at least one definitive pathway exists. It doesn’t have to be a sure thing or even a likely outcome that the hope will be achieved – just that there is at least one causal path that, if completed, will arrive at the desired future.

For example, if one hopes to graduate, it is a matter of following a laid out series of steps that, when completed, will result in a diploma.

In contrast, Dream is a desired future for which no definitive pathway exists. Dreams may be likely to be realized or may be nearly impossible, but there must be at least some possibility of being achieved or it is not a Dream but a Fantasy.

For example, if one dreams of becoming a movie star and sits around a popular restaurant for studio executives every day, there literally is no Hope, but the dream can remain alive forever.

It is important to note that the pathway to achieving a hope is not necessarily only linear. While getting a degree may require taking some course in given order (101 before 201, for example), other course are electives and the only requirement to achieve the hope is that a certain number are fulfilled, regardless of the order.

Similarly, one can try to realize a dream by taking steps, such as singling out a studio exec and stalking them, or by creating a favorable environment, such as showing up not only at a restaurant, but also at a gym and a charity fundraiser, believing that by being more visible, the odds are increased for being “noticed.”

To be a true hope, there must be a certain cause and effect relationship between the steps or conditions in which one engages and the achievement of the hope state. But a dream, by definition, is built on indirect relationships and influence, rather than certain connections.

Keep in mind that there are two kinds of causal relationships – if/then and when/also. If/then is standard temporal causality, as in One bad apple spoils the bunch. When/also is the spatial version of causality, as in Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In each case, there is a direct connection between condition one, and condition two: If condition one is met, condition two is certain.

It is this absolute association that is not present in dreams. But from an emotional standpoint, there is no difference between hoping and dreaming. Each is a future state that is highly desired, but in hoping, one expects that future if all the conditions are met, while in dreaming, meeting the conditions provides no guarantee.

In Dramatica theory, Hope vs. Dream is a thematic conflict. It describes stories in which the message revolves around proving that in the given situation of that particular story, it is either better to hope or to dream.

Is one deluded by an intense dream into thinking there is real hope? Or, is one missing out on life experience and the rare but real advent of a lucky chance by confining oneself to only those things for which hope exists?

We’ve all seen these kinds of stories in books, movies, television and stage plays. As an author, it can improve both your work and your life to explore the difference between the two.

Here are the specific definitions of Hope and Dream from the Dramatica Dictionary:

Hope

Variation – dynamic pair: Dream ↔ Hope

a desired future if things go as expected

Hope is based on a projection of the way things are going. When one looks at the present situation and notes the direction of change, Hope lies somewhere along that line. As an example, if one is preparing for a picnic and the weather has been sunny, one Hopes for a sunny day. If it was raining for days, one could not Hope but only Dream. Still, Hope acknowledges that things can change in unexpected ways. That means that Hoping for something is not the same as expecting something. Hope is just the expectation that something will occur unless something interferes. How accurately a character evaluates the potential for change determines whether he is Hoping or dreaming. When a character is dreaming and thinks he is Hoping, he prepares for things where there is no indication they will come true.

syn. desired expectation, optimistic anticipation, confident aspiration, promise, encouraging outlook.

Dream

Variation – dynamic pair: Hope ↔ Dream

a desired future that requires unexpected developments

Dream describes a character who speculates on a future that has not been ruled out, however unlikely. Dreaming is full of “what ifs.” Cinderella dreamed of her prince because it wasn’t quite unimaginable. One Dreams of winning the lottery even though one “hasn’t got a hope.” Hope requires the expectation that something will happen if nothing goes wrong. Dreaming has no such limitation. Nothing has to indicate that a Dream will come true, only that it’s not impossible. Dreaming can offer a positive future in the midst of disaster. It can also motivate one to try for things others scoff at. Many revolutionary inventors have been labeled as Dreamers. Still and all, to Dream takes away time from doing, and unless one strikes a balance and does the groundwork, one can Dream while hopes go out the window for lack of effort.

syn. aspire, desiring the unlikely, pulling for the doubtful, airy hope, glimmer, far fetched desire

Learn more about Theme in my book:

A Few Words About Theme

50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks! (Trick 4)

(Excerpted from the book, 50 Sure-First Storytelling Tricks)

Trick 4

Message Reversals (Shifting Context to Change Message)

When we shift context to create a different message , the structure remains the same, but our appreciation of it changes. This can be seen very clearly in a Twilight Zone episode entitled, Invaders, in which Agnes Moorhead plays a lady alone on a farm besieged by aliens from another world. The aliens in question are only six inches tall, wear odd space suits and attack the simple country woman with space age weapons. Nearly defeated, she finally musters the strength to overcome the little demons, and smashes their miniature flying saucer. On its side we see the American Flag, the letters U.S.A. and hear the last broadcast of the landing team saying they have been slaughtered by a giant. Now, the structure didn’t change, but our sympathies sure did, which was the purpose of the piece.

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“Hero” is a Four-Letter Word (Part 2)

Excerpted from “Hero” is a Four-Letter Word

The Hero Breaks Down!

Groucho Marx once said, “You’re headed for a nervous breakdown. Why don’t you pull yourself to pieces?” That, in fact, is what we’re going to do to our hero.

Now many writers focus on a hero and a villain as the primary characters in their stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But as we are about to discover, there are so many more options for creative character construction.

Take the average hero. What qualities might we expect to find in the fellow? In fact, there are four principal attributes.

For one thing, the traditional hero is always the Protagonist. By that we mean he or she is the Prime Mover in the effort to achieve the story goal. This doesn’t presuppose the hero is a willing leader of that effort. For all we know he might accept that charge kicking and screaming. Nonetheless, once stuck in the situation, the hero provides the push to achieve the goal.

Another quality of a stereotypical hero is that he is also the Main Character. By this we mean that the hero is constructed so that the audience stands in his shoes, or at least right behind his shoulder. In other words, the audience identifies with the hero and sees the story as centering around him.

The third quality of the most usual hero configuration is being a “Good Guy.” Simply, he intends to do the right thing. Of course, he might be misguided or inept, but he wants to do good, and he does try.

And finally, let us note that heroes are usually the Central Character, meaning that they get more “media real estate” (pages, screen time, lines of dialog) than any other character.

Listing these four qualities we get:

1. Protagonist.

2. Main Character.

3. Good Guy.

4. Central Character

Getting right to the point, the first two items in the list are structural in nature, while the last two are storytelling. Protagonist describes the character’s function from the Objective View described earlier. Main Character positions the audience in that particular character’s spot through the Main Character View. In contrast, being a Good Guy is a matter of personality, and Central Character is determined by the attention given to that character by the author’s storytelling.

You are probably familiar with the terms Protagonist, Main Character, and Central Character. But you’ve probably also noticed that I’ve used them here in very specific ways. In actual practice, most authors bandy these terms about more or less interchangeably. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for structural purposes it’s not very precise. That’s why you’ll see me being something of a stickler in its use of terms and their definitions: it’s the only way to be clear.

In fact, it is not really important which words you use to describe the four attributes of the hero. What is important is to recognize each of these qualities and to understand what they are.

“Hero” is available for Kindle

Psychology, Personality, Persona and Perception

When developing characters, consider the four “P”s – Psychology, Personality, Persona and Perception.

Psychology is the underlying mentality of the individual.

Personality is the individual’s manner and style.

Persona is the impression the individual wants to create.

Perception is how the individual is seen by others.

All four of these attributes are present in every real person, and must therefore also be present in every fictional character, be it human or otherwise.

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Notes on Timelock and Optionlock

Working on a new dynamic model of narrative to complement the structural model of Dramatica. Coming up with some interesting thoughts about Timelock and Optionlock as defined in Dramatica and expanded into dynamics.

Here’s some notes:

Timelock in Dramatica is defined as having a narrative come to a climax because it runs out of time – either a deadline or an amount of time, even if spread out non-continously.

Optionlock is defined as running out of options, such as “three wishes” – when the last one is made, it’s over. But it can also be making something large enough or small enough, such as trying to get enough hot air into a balloon to take to the skies before the cannibals arrive.

Deadline – you can retire at 60 and get social security, but each year you wait up until age 70 you will get more per month for the rest of your life. But, if you retire anytime after 70, you won’t get any additional beyond the maximum. What kind of lock is that? Perhaps a combination of timelock and optionlock, or is it best looked at as “optimal time” – or some sort of time constriction rather than a lock?

Timelock vs. Optionlock – Mom: “Time to come in” Child: “Just one more game” or “Just five more minutes.” and did “Time to come in” really mean a specific time, or a time of day such as “getting too dark?”

Early man was almost all optionlock. The seasons are more conditions than specific times. Even looking at a solstice being marked by ancient stones, is it really a time or set of conditions. Timelock requires a regular repeating time that is independent of what is being measured and used as a temporal measuring stick. So, a solstice or equinox is what is being measured and cannot therefore also be the measuring stick. Planting and harvest are not tied to solstice and equinox, but are around them, one way or the other, more analog than discrete.

Sundials provide true timelocks, but hour glasses do not, unless they are truly an hour, calibrated against a sundial, for example. Otherwise, they can be arbitrary in time and are optionlock devices instead, such as “when the sand runs out.”

Timelock thinking is more natural for men who think in discrete terms, than for women who think in more analog terms – one is particle, the other wave, linear logic vs. holistic logic. This, of course, is only dictated by biology at the preconscious level. The other three “levels” of the mind (subconscious, memory, and conscious) are determined to be timelock or optionlock by experience, training, and choice, respectively.

Optionlock thinking is more geared toward child rearing (when child is hungry, when it is sleepy) – Timelock is geared more toward goals, first this, then that or, as would be the case with primitive man, timelocks were of a lower resolution such as before, now, after.

Blue collar work place often timelock (time cards, number of hours, quitting time). White collar often optionlock (salary, when the job is done, when it is good enough).

Inner city culture is more optionlock – poverty leads to optionlock thinking as any one time is as good as another, conditions more important, tune into the rhythms of the city. Sensing danger an opportunity as an ebb and flow, rather than clocking it against an objective measure. Much more like primitive man, in touch with the earth. A complex society becomes so awash in tiny discrete elements that comprise its systems that at the bottom, they cease to be perceived as structures and are connected to as dynamics.

Blue collar work requires timelocks. Those in poverty live and are trained in optionlock. This provides an effective barrier to improving one’s condition is that the non-working class below blue collar cannot perform to timelock expectations, preventing them from taking regular work, leading to the opportunities being day labor, migrant labor, gang membership, or joining the military. The military is an optionlock organization in which one is “on” all the time, and do whatever is asked whenever it is asked.

On the other side of blue collar the white collar folk are all optionlock. They are usually the more intelligent because in school, tests are timed. The smartest never learn the timelock because the usually finish before the time limit, so they are not trained out of optionlock thinking, which is inherent to children and only abandoned when one moves away from the here and now to consider consequences and long-term benefits. Makes corporate leaders more like children, reaping what they can now, and the hell with later.

To reform society must be aware of time/space strata and their connection to social strata.

All for now….

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Creative Writing, Story Development, Story Structure, Narrative Science