Is your story a good enough conversationalist, or does it need to go back to finishing school with another draft before it is ready for prime time? You have days, months, perhaps even years to prepare your story to exude enough charisma to sustain just one conversation. How disappointing is it to an audience when a story’s personality is plain and simply dull?

As an author, thinking of your story as a person can actually help you write the story. All too often, authors get mired in the details of a story, trying to cram everything in and make all the pieces fit.

Characters are then seen only as individuals, so they often unintentionally overlap each other’s dramatic functions. The genre is depersonalized so that the author trying to write within a genre ends up fashioning a formula story and breaking no new ground. The plot becomes an exercise in logistics, and the theme emerges as a black and white pontification that hits the audience like a brick.

Now imagine that you are sitting down to dinner with your story. For convenience, we’ll call your story “Joe.” You know that Joe is something of an authority on a subject in which your are interested. You offer him an appetizer, and between bites of pate, he tells you of his adventures and experiences.

Over soup, he describes what was driving him at various points of his endeavors. These are your characters, and they must all be aspects of Joe’s personality. There can be no characters that would not naturally co-exist in a single individual. You listen carefully to make sure Joe is not a split-personality, for such a story would seem fragmented as if it were of two or more minds.

While munching on a spinach salad, Joe describes his efforts to resolve the problems that grew out of his journey. This is your plot, and all reasonable efforts need to be covered. You note what he is saying, just as an audience will, to be sure there are no flaws in his logic. There can also be no missing approaches that obviously should have been tried, or Joe will sound like an idiot.

Over the main course of poached quail eggs and Coho salmon (on a bed of grilled seasonal greens), Joe elucidates the moral dilemmas he faced, how he considered what was good and bad, better or worse. This is your theme, and all sides of the issues must be explored. If Joe is one-sided in this regard, he will come off as bigoted or closed-minded. Rather than being swayed by his conclusions, you (and an audience) will find him boorish and will disregard his passionate prognostications.

Dessert is served and you make time, between spoonsful of chocolate soufflé (put in the oven before the first course to ready by the end of dinner) to consider your dinner guest. Was he entertaining? Did he make sense? Did he touch on topical issues with light-handed thoughtfulness? Did he seem centers, together, and focused? And most important, would you invite him to dinner again? If you can’t answer yes to each of these questions, you need to send your story back to finishing school, for he is not ready to entertain an audience.

Your story is your child. You give birth to it, you nurture it, you have hopes for it. You try to instill your values, to give it the tools it needs to succeed and to point it in the right direction. But, like all children, there comes a time where you have to let go of who you wanted it to be and to love and accept who it has become.

When your story entertains an audience, you will not be there to explain its faults or compensate for its shortcomings. You must be sure your child is prepared to stand alone, to do well for itself and to not embarrass you. If you are not sure, you must send it back to school.

Personifying a story allows an author to step back from the role of creator and to experience the story as an audience will. This is not to say that each and every detail in not important, but rather that the details are no more or less important than the overall impact of the story as a whole. This overview is one of the benefits of looking at a story as a Story Mind.

Excerpted from the book,

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Don’t Try To Be Shakespeare – He Didn’t!

Shakespeare just wrote as himself, and you should too. While trying to emulate another famous writer can be useful as an exercise (just as an artist might copy the Mona Lisa as a “study”), that approach is never useful in creating or advancing your own art.

Sure, read what other write, dissect their work, and practice their techniques – even in your own creations, but ONLY if those techniques also fit your own personality and style.   The best way to achieve Writer’s Block is to try and write like someone else.  When you do, you are hobbling your Muse; locking her in irons.  You are trying to play a role for which you are unsuited.

Of course we all want to be beloved successful writers, but we are not all going to be.  You are only as good as you own talent – GET OVER IT!

Why are you writing in the first place?  To make a buck?  To make a name for yourself?  Or perhaps, just perhaps (Lord help us) because you actually like writing?  Or maybe, just maybe, because you want to like writing, but don’t, try as you may?

Fact is, while money and fame are good motivators for any career, be it singing, dancing, playing a sport or writing, if they are the Prime Motivators, you won’t have a very good time doing it, whatever “it” is.

The Wise Man famously said, “Work at what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  The important aspect here is that he didn’t expect to become a famous wise man when he said it.  It just occurred to him as part of his personally satisfying manner of thinking.  Just as it occurs to me to say, “Don’t blame the weather – its’ only humid.”

Now that clever little phrase is never going to make me rich OR famous.  But I did have a really enjoyable time telling it to you.  And that, dear readers, is the very essence of the writing life to which we should all aspire.

Unless you truly enjoy laboring over a single book for your entire life, word by word, with endless rewrites and improvements, then just write it out as you feel it.  Plot doesn’t make sense?  Come back to it later when you know your story better.  Characters dull and derivative?  You’re not going to fix them by micromanaging them.

Give it up and get on with it.  Write endlessly.  Write until your fingers fall off.  Keep an archive somewhere to put all the stuff the world should never see and then post the bulk of the rest on your blog.  (You DO have a blog, don’t you?  All real writers have a blog…..)  And for those gems – the occasional piece that just zings and sings and hits the mark – well those you send off to a publisher, magazine or agent.

If you’re looking for gold, you won’t find as much by sifting the same sand through a finer and finer mesh as you will by marching from one dig to the next in search of nuggets.  So be prolific, knock the blocks out from under your tires, throw open the stop-cocks and let loose the dogs of words.

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Available in Paperback and on Kindle

*****

Also available:

This article was inspired by  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.

Click here for details, demo, or to purchase.

Excerpted from the book,

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Story Structure for Passionate Writers

We all know that a story needs a sound structure. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. And no author writes because he or she is driven to create a great structure. Rather, audiences and authors come to opposite sides of a story because of their passions – the author driven to express his or hers, and the audience hoping to ignite its own.

What draws us to a story in the first place is our attraction to the subject matter and the style. As an audience, we might be intrigued by the potential applications of a new discovery of science, the exploration of a newly rediscovered ancient city, or the life of a celebrity. We might love a taut mystery, a fulfilling romance, or a chilling horror story.

As authors what inspires us to write a story may be a bit of dialog we heard in a restaurant, a notion for a character, a setting, time period, or a clever twist of plot we’d like to explore. Or, we might have a deep-seated need to express a childhood experience, work out an irrational fear, or make a public statement about a social injustice.

No matter what our attraction as audience or author, our passions trigger our imaginations. So why should an author worry about structure? Because passion rides on structure, and if the structure is flawed or even broken, then the passionate expression from author to audience will fail.

Structure, when created properly, is invisible, serving only as the carrier wave that delivers the passion to the audience. But when structure is flawed, it adds static to the flow of emotion, breaking up and possibly scrambling the passion so badly that the audience does not “hear” the author’s message.

The attempt to ensure a sound structure is an intellectual pursuit. Questions such as “Who is my Protagonist?” “Where should my story begin?” “What happens in Act Two?” or “What is my message?” force an author to turn away from his or her passion and embrace logistics instead.

As a result, authors often becomes mired in the nuts and bolts of storytelling, staring at a blank page not because of a lack of inspiration, but because they can’t figure out how to make their passions make sense.

Worse, the re-writing process is often grueling and frustrating, forcing the author to accept unwanted changes in the flow of emotion for the sake of logic. So what is an author to do? Is there any way out of this dilemma?

Absolutely! In fact, part 4 of this series of excepts from the book provides one method of breaking that logjam to get things flowing again.

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Available in Paperback and on Kindle

*****

Excerpted from the book,

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Writing from the Passionate Self

Who are you, really? Do you even know? Or do you just think you know?

At the center of our beings, at the heart of our souls, can be found the truth of our identity: our compassion, our anger, the breeding ground of the very stuff that makes us love and hate.

Yet, though a lifetime of compromise in the attempt to garner approval and avoid rejection, most of us have hidden the true nature of ourselves so far behind the shield of a pseudo persona that we are no longer privy to the essence of our own selves.

Unable to tap directly into the firestorm of our Id, we live on second hand passions and pass them off in what we write as the gritty truth of personal reality. A writer can survive a career without ever becoming aware of his or her true essence.

What might you write if you became aware of your Passionate Self, and could tap into the primal force of your psyche?

The issue then becomes the effort to mount an inner expedition to the darkest reaches of your mind. It is dangerous territory. You may very well lose your sense of self in the process, discover you are a completely different person than you thought, and this knowledge may ultimately cost you your relationships, family, friends, job, and even your own peace of mind.

You don’t need to tap this cauldron of angst and elation in order to write interesting stories that captivate others. But as a writer, wouldn’t you like to be able to access it?

Let’s examine how and why we hide ourselves and then outline a method for recovering our first nature from the labyrinth of our second.

It all goes back to your childhood. You came from a loving, caring family, or from an antagonist family where you were always afraid of punishment, or were just ignored. Sure, there are many variations, but they all lead to the same syndrome.

If we are raised in a loving household, we learn compassion and empathy, and come to want to please others, even if it is at our own expense. Usually, we are accepted as ourselves in such a household, but when we arrive at pre-school or kindergarten, suddenly we are confronted by those who make fun of us because of inherent qualities that are expressions of our true selves. We quickly learn that to avoid displeasing others and to get the same kindness we have at home, we must hide certain traits and pretend to possess others. In short order, we establish a pseudo personality that no longer reflects ourselves, but reflects as nearly as possible the mean average of what we feel others would prefer us to be.

If we are raised in an angry recriminating household, we learn to hide any trait that could bring punishment or ridicule, and also create a mask we can wear to avoid pain and enhance pleasure. If we are just ignored as children, we invent an ersatz persona to attract attention, and/or as an attempt to make ourselves noteworthy.

It is almost an inevitable human endeavor.

As we grow, the mask must become more complex. We add to it whenever a new situation arises. We look to see how others act so we will know what to do in similar situations.

Slowly, we come to realize that it hurts not to express our true selves. And then we do one of two things: We break out of the mask and let it all hang out in a teenage rebellion, or we learn to stop looking inside at the real us, so that we don’t suffer the pain of suppression.

Even those who rebel, may later compromise their inner integrity to advance in a career, impress peers, or justify a lack of success to themselves. Very few of us reach full adulthood still knowing who we really are.

In most cases, we hide our true natures away from ourselves for so long that we forget how to find ourselves – we forget who we were, and have no idea who we have become down there in the darkness.

Our true selves are like ROM chips on a computer. They are preprogrammed with the essential elements of our personalities, and they are designed to load specific portions of that programming into our minds at various junctures, such as when we learn to walk, the onset of puberty, the arrival at childbearing age.

Our minds are like RAM in a computer. Into our minds we load our experiences. They sit on top of the ROM personality that has been loaded. In a sense, experiences are the data that is crunched by the personality program from our ROM.

But when you create a pseudo persona, you fill up RAM with another program. You create protected memory where nothing else can be loaded. And so, as you grow, the ROM personality tries to load, but sees that there isn’t enough space, and aborts the operation to try again at a later time.

As our minds expand with growth, there would be enough room for the ROM, but we also expand our personas so that there is never enough room. So our ROM personalities – our true personalities – can never load. And we become stunted in our emotions; never advancing past the development of the year we first invented our mask. And our true selves, hidden deeply in the ROM, remain only a potential, not an actualized self.

We meet a mate, we get married, we have children, we advance in our careers, and all with people responding to our personas, not to the true selves, which have never been realized, even to ourselves.

So the mate we attract is one who loves the false us. The children we raise associate love and comfort with a fake person who is not us. And they support that image with their holiday gifts, secret glances, and tender moments.

It becomes a web of lies from which we dare not attempt to escape lest we lose the love and respect of others when we reveal our actual essence and expose the person they thought they knew to be no more than a sham.

But you are a writer. And as a writer, you peddle emotions. And if you are a worthwhile writer, you want your wares to be honest and true. Yet how can they be, if you aren’t true to yourself?

If you are game then, how can you discover that inner person? Simply put, you have to pass through pain. You will need to come to feel the lack of all of your ROM programming. You will need to see your everyday self as a lie. You will explore the pain until you can stand it no more. And when you are ready, you will take a leap of faith and dump your RAM persona by unprotecting its files – files you have spent a lifetime building. When you do, the ROM will notice. It will rush in and overwrite your false self with all the past due sections of your self that should have been loaded along the way. And in one electric moment you will feel your old self vanish as if you had been exorcised, then feel perhaps a second or two of emptiness, followed by the force of your embryonic actual self-rushing in to fill the void.

You will then realize that the old files are gone. You cannot recover them, no matter how much you may want to. You make the leap of faith and there is no going back – ever. You cannot even rebuild them. You would have to start all over from scratch, and there probably isn’t enough lifetime left to do that.

But the consequences! You are now a different being, a more vibrant being, a creature of foundational power that we all have the potential to experience. So will your loved ones, and those you depend on find you acceptable and embrace the “New You,” or will they recoil, feel betrayed, abandoned, and perhaps mourn the loss of the person they thought they knew through all the seven stages of grief?

No one can predict the response of others, but positive or negative there will be a response from everyone you encounter once you have crossed to the other side?

If you are willing to take this risk, how to you get to that magic moment when you can shift over to a new reality? Through your writing: you need to keep a personal journal. You need to express your deepest thoughts and feelings in it daily.

My personal journal has sometimes resulted in 17 typewritten pages in a single day. More often, it amounts to a page or two. There have been years when I kept no journal at all. But I have always found that when I do keep a journal, angst is discovered become one with, and evaporated – eventually.

Usually, this major sea-change occurs in a time of extreme mental pressure – loss of a business or a loved one, or some impending change of lifestyle, situation, or relationship that rocks the very foundations of your soul.

These are the times to keep a journal without fail. The words you write will help you work it through, keep you sane, and in time reveal the actual issues that drive you.

Still, you don’t have to take that path. You can content yourself with the comfortable life you have fashioned around your pseudo self, and continue to write intriguing stories populated by compelling characters engaged in riveting action. You may find that sufficient. You may, even after all of this, believe that is all there is, “as good as it gets.” But what if there is something powerful within you – something basic and honest and true. Are you prepared to go to your death bed never knowing who you really are?

Be a Story Weaver – NOT a Story Mechanic!

Available in Paperback and on Kindle

*****

Although it is important to work on the particulars of your story you can lose track of the big picture in doing so exclusively.

Step back from time to time to take in your story as a whole.  See it as the readers or audience will and appreciate it not just for how it works but for how it feels and what it means.

Too many writers fall into the trap of making Structure their Story God. There’s no denying that structure is important, but paying too much attention to structure can destroy your story.

We have all seen movies and read novels that feel like “paint by numbers” creations. Sure, they hit all the marks and cover all the expected relationships, but they seem stilted, uninspired, contrived, and lifeless.

The authors of such pedestrian fare are Story Mechanics. A Story Mechanic is a writer who constructs a story as if it were a machine. Starting with a blueprint, the writer gathers the necessary dramatic components, assembles the gears and pulleys, tightens all the structural nuts and bolts, and then tries to make the story interesting with a fancy paint job.

But there is another kind of writer who creates a different kind of story. These Story Weavers begin with subjects or concepts about which they are passionate and let the structure suggest itself from the material. They see their players as people before they consider them as characters. Events are happenings before they become plot. Values precede theme and the story develops a world before it develops a genre.

A book or movie written by a Story Weaver is involving, riveting, and compelling. It captures the fullness of human emotion, and captivates the mind.

Although some writers are natural born StoryWeavers, there is still hope for the rest of us. In fact, you can become a StoryWeaver just by practicing a few select techniques until they become second nature.

First, clear your mind of any thoughts about characters, plot, theme, and genre. Avoid any consideration of character arc, hero’s journey, acts, scenes, sequences, beats, messages, premises, settings, atmosphere, and formulas. In short – don’t give structure a second thought.

Now work to create a world in which people live and interact, things happen, meaning can be found and the environment is intriguing. To do this, we’ll progress through four different stages of story creation: Inspiration, Development, Exposition, and Storytelling.

Stage One – Inspiration

Inspiration can come from many sources: a conversation overheard at a coffee shop, a newspaper article, or a personal experience to name a few. And, inspiration can also take many forms: a snippet of dialogue, a bit of action, a clever concept, and so on.

If you can’t think of a story idea to save your life, there are a few things you can do to goose the Muse.

First of all, consider your creative time. Some people consistently find inspiration in the morning, others in the afternoon, evening or even in the dead of night. Some people are more creative in the summer and can’t write worth a darn in the other three seasons. There are authors who work in cycles and those who come up with ideas in spurts. The key to using your creative time is to keep a log of your most fertile moments and then plan ahead to keep that kind of time open for further inspirations.

And don’t neglect your creative space either. There are authors who go off to a mountain cabin to write. Some like lots of noise or babble, like a city street below their open window or an all-news station on the radio as background. There are writers who prefer a cluttered room because it engenders chaos, which leads to serendipity. Others can’t think a lick unless everything is orderly, neat and in its place. Creative space includes the clothes you wear while writing. There are those who wear hats when developing characters and others who pantomime action sequences to get in the feel of it.

Open yourself to different writing media. If you only use a desktop computer, try a laptop, a palm organizer with a folding keyboard, long hand on a pad, or a digital voice recorder. And don’t be afraid to switch around any of these from time to time and mood to mood.

If you still can’t come up with an idea, try the Synthesis Technique. In brief, you want to subject yourself to two disparate sources of information. For example, put a talk radio program on while reading a magazine or watching television and let the odd juxtaposition spur your notions.

Finally, if all else fails, try using Nonsense Words. Just jot down three random words, such as “Red Ground Rover.” Then, write as many different explanations as you can for what that phrase might mean. For example, Red Ground Rover might be:

1. A red dog named rover whose legs are so short his belly rubs the ground.

2. The Martian Rover space vehicle on the red planet’s surface.

3. Fresh hamburger made from dog

Your list might go on and on. Now most of these potential meanings might be pure rubbish, but occasionally a good idea can surface. If the first three words don’t work, try three different ones. And, in the end, even if you don’t find an idea directly from your explanations of each phrase, you’ll have so stocked the creative spirit that you will find yourself far more prone to inspiration than before you started the exercise.

Use these inspiration techniques to come up with a log line for your story. A log line is simply a one- or two-sentence description of what your story is about in general. They are the same kind of short descriptions you find in TV Guide or in your cable or satellite TV guide.

A sample log line might be, “The marshal in an old western town struggles to stop a gang that is bleeding the town dry.”

Stage Two – Development

Once you’ve been inspired enough to create a log line, you can move into the second stage of Story Weaving: Development. Here is where you take your basic concept and flesh it out with lots more detail.

In Development you’ll begin to populate your story with people you might like to write about, work out some of the things that will happen in your story, and establish the world or environment in which it takes place. These efforts will ultimately result in your characters, plot, theme, and genre.

There are many Story Weaving techniques for the Development stage, but one of the most powerful is to project your world beyond what is specifically stated in the log line.

As an example, let’s use the log line from above: “The marshal in an old western town struggles to stop a gang that is bleeding the town dry.” Now let’s see how we can expand that world to create a whole group of people who grow out of the story, some of whom will ultimately become our characters.

The only specifically called-for characters are the marshal and the gang. But, you’d expect the gang to have a leader and the town to have a mayor. The marshal might have a deputy. And, if the town is being bled dry, then some businessmen and shopkeepers would be in order as well.

Range a little wider now and list some characters that aren’t necessarily expected, but wouldn’t seem particularly out of place in such a story.

Example: A saloon girl, a bartender, blacksmith, rancher, preacher, schoolteacher, etc.

Now, let yourself go a bit and list a number of characters that would seem somewhat out of place but still explainable in such a story.

Example: A troupe of traveling acrobats, Ulysses S. Grant, a Prussian Duke, a bird watcher.

Finally, pull out all the stops and list some completely inappropriate characters that would take a heap of explaining to your reader/audience if they showed up in your story.

Example: Richard Nixon, Martians, the Ghost of Julius Caesar

Although you’ll likely discard these characters, just the process of coming up with them can lead to new ideas and directions for your story.

For example, the town marshal might become more interesting if he was a history buff, specifically reading about the Roman Empire. In his first run-in with the gang, he is knocked out cold with a concussion. For the rest of the story, he keeps imagining the Ghost of Julius Caesar giving him unwanted advice.

This same kind of approach can be applied to your log line to generate the events that will happen in your story, the values you will explore, and the nature of your story’s world (which will become your genre).

Stage Three – Exposition

The third stage of Story Weaving is to lay out an Exposition Plan for your story. By the time you complete the Development Stage, you will probably have a pretty good idea what your story is about. But your audience knows nothing of it – not yet – not until you write down what you know.

Of course, you could just write, “My story’s goal is to rid the town of the gang that is bleeding it dry. The marshal is the protagonist, and he ultimately succeeds, but at great personal cost.”

Sure, it’s a story, but not a very interesting one. If you were to unfold your story in this perfunctory style, you’d have a complete story that felt just like that “paint by numbers” picture we encountered earlier.

Part of what gives a story life is the manner in which story points are revealed, revisited throughout the story, played against each other and blended together, much as a master painter will blend colors, edges, shapes and shadows.

As an example, let’s create an Exposition Plan to reveal a story’s goal. Sometimes a goal is spelled out right at the beginning, such as a meeting in which a general tells a special strike unit that terrorists have kidnapped a senator’s daughter and they must rescue her.

Other times, the goal is hidden behind an apparent goal. So, if your story had used the scene described above, it might turn out that it was really just a cover story and, in fact, the supposed “daughter” was actually an agent who was assigned to identify and kill a double agent working on the strike team.

Goals may also be revealed slowly, such as in The Godfather, where it takes the entire film to realize that the goal is to keep the family alive by replacing the aging Don with a younger member of the family.

Further, in The Godfather, as in many Alfred Hitchcock films, the goal is not nearly as important as the chase or the inside information or the thematic atmosphere. So don’t feel obligated to elevate every story point to the same level.

Let your imagination run wild. Jot down as many instances as come to mind in which the particular story point comes into play. Such events, moments or scenarios enrich a story and add passion to a perfunctory telling of the tale.

One of the best ways to do this is to consider how each story point might affect other story points. For example, each character sees the overall goal as a step in helping them accomplish their personal goals. So, why not create a scenario where a character wistfully describes his personal goal to another character while sitting around a campfire? He can explain how achievement of the overall story goal will help him get what he personally wants.

An example of this is in the John Wayne classic movie, The Searchers. John Wayne’s character asks an old, mentally slow friend to help search for the missing girl. Finding the girl is the overall goal. The friend has a personal goal: he tells Wayne that he just wants a roof over his head and a rocking chair by the fire. This character sees his participation in the effort to achieve the goal as the means of obtaining something for which he has personally longed.

Stage Four – Storytelling

By the time you’ve created an Exposition Plan for each story point you worked on in the Development phase, you’ll have assembled a huge number of events, moments, and scenarios. There’s only one thing left to do: tell your story!

Storytelling is a multi-faceted endeavor. It incorporates style, timing, blending of several story points into full-bodied scenes, sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary, and good old-fashioned charisma.

Later in this book we’ll explore a number of different storytelling techniques in great detail. But in this introduction to StoryWeaving I want to address the primary storytelling problem writers encounter – a passionless presentation of what would otherwise be an intriguing story.

Story Mechanics often get stuck at this point in story development. They are so taken with the “perfect” structure they have created, they tend to anguish over the opening sentence when finally sitting down to write the story. Eventually, after writing with the problem for far too long, they write one great line and then become so intimidated by its grandeur they are afraid to write anything else lest it not measure up to that initial quality!

Fact is, you’re only as good as your own talent – GET OVER IT! Don’t grieve over every phrase to try and make yourself look better than you are. Just spew out the words and get the story told. Something not up to snuff? That’s what re-writes are for!

Another common problem is the inability to let loose, emotionally. Each of us is born a passionate human being. But we quickly learn that the world does not appreciate all our emotional expressions. In no time, we develop a whole bag of behaviors that don’t truly reflect who we really are. But, they do help us get by.

Problem is, these false presentations of our selves appear to be our real selves to everyone else. They cause others to give us presents we don’t really want, drive us to make friendships with people we don’t really like, and even marry people we don’t really love!

This false life we develop is a mask, but by no means is it always a well-fitting one. In fact, it chafes against the real “us.” The emotional irritation could be eliminated if we removed the mask, but then we might lose our jobs, friends, and lovers because they might find the actual people we are to be total strangers and not someone they like.

So instead, we just tighten the mask down so hard it becomes an exoskeleton, part of what we call “ourselves.” In fact, after a time, we forget we are even wearing a mask. We come to believe that this is who we really are.

Now, try getting in touch with your passions through that! The mask dampens any emotional energy we have and our writing dribbles out like pabulum. Even the most riveting story becomes dulled by such storytelling.

Want to really be passionate in your storytelling? Then try this: Lock the doors, take the phone off the hook, search for hidden video cameras, and then sit down to write. For just one page, write about the one thing about yourself you are most afraid that anyone would ever find out.

By writing about your most shameful or embarrassing trait or action you will tap right through that mask into your most powerful feelings, and a gusher of passion will burst out of the hole.

Once you know where to find the oil field of your soul, you can drill down into it any time you like. Of course, every time you draw from that well you put more cracks in the mask. Eventually, the darn thing might shatter altogether, leaving you unable to be anyone but yourself with your boss, your friends, and your lover. Downside risk: you might lose them all. But, you’ll be a far better writer!

And finally, go for broke. Exaggerate and carry everything you do to the extreme. It is far easier to go overboard and then temper it back in a re-write than to underplay your work and have to try and beef it up.

Remember, there is only one cardinal sin in Story Weaving, and that is boring your audience!

Having outlined all four stages of StoryWeaving, you are now ready to break away from the mechanics, and become a true StoryWeaver.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

This article is drawn from the author’s
StoryWeaver Story Development Software

Try it risk-free for 90 days and write
your novel or screenplay step by step

 Click for details and free bonus….