Showing posts with label story structure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label story structure. Show all posts

Monday, March 3, 2014

YouTube Goodness: Talent, Structure, Steampunk and GUNS

I like to look for treasures on YouTube.

It's a bit like looking for treasures at the dump. The amount of junk one must sort through is appalling. Thank heaven for decent search engines.

I want to share with you now some of my favorite YouTube goodies that I found in the last month.

1. Howard Tayler on 'Who Needs Talent?'


This is only the first part. But watch all four parts. It completely changed the way I think about writing, 'talent', and what I have potential to do.

2. Dan Wells on 'Seven Point Story Structure'.

This is an AWESOME seminar that helped me a lot. I'm a budding outliner (I used to think I was a freewriter, but I think I'm changing with age) and having only ever freewritten my entire life, I was lost as to how to begin. This helped me through. First of five parts.


3. The Definition of Steampunk


Brilliant. Just brilliant.

4. World's Fastest Gun Disarm


Because maybe one of your characters needs to be able to do this. There are tutorials, but I'm fairly certain most of us can't be as fast as this dude.

Speaking of gun tutorials: do you have a character who needs to know how to intelligently use a firearm?

5. This guy has a channel with, like, 900 videos on how to shoot a gun, for newbies. He's got stuff from the difference between smoky and smokeless powder, to reasons why not to put your thumb behind the slide on a semi-automatic... which is what the next video is about. If you want details, this guy will give you details.


Hope something in this grab bag of a post was useful to you! Tell me about it in the comments, if you did.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The Home Improvement Guide to Story Structure

by Deren Hansen

[Several people who were unable to attend my presentation last week asked about the subject. What follows is one of the topics I covered.]

There is an eternal law, inscribed into the very essence of the universe before even the gods came on the scene, that any home improvement project will require at least three trips to the store.

Don't believe me?

Many creation myths show the gods making several attempts before we get the world in which we live. Even the book of Genesis has a do-over with Noah.

Why?

Many stories are basically a series of try/fail cycles.

Consider the archetypical home improvement project:

  1. Having decided to undertake some repair or improvement, you go to the store and get what you need.
  2. After working on the project for a while, you make another trip to the store to get all the things you didn't know you needed.
  3. Finally, a few injuries and explicatives later, you make a final trip to the store to get what you really need (as well as to replace the pieces you broke).
Of course, there are times when you make one trip because you know what you're doing and what you need. The point is that you would rarely tell a story about that activity because, a, "This was the problem so I got that part I needed and fixed it," story is boring--in fact, it's not a story, it's a recipe.

For a story to be interesting, it must show how the protagonist triangulated on a solution to a difficult problem. It's like the process of artillerymen finding the range to a target: the first shot falls short so they increase the elevation; the second shot lands behind so they dial back, but not as much as the first setting; the third shot is much more likely to hit.

And suddenly, without trying, we've discovered the three-act story structure: try/fail (act 1), try/fail (act 2), try/succeed (act 3). Each try is a possible solution and each fail shows why the solution falls short as well as ratcheting up the scope of the problem. In the realm of DIY, for example, you fail to reattach the loose tile in the bathroom because the wallboard behind has water damage, but you can't just replace the wallboard because the pipe inside is leaking.

If you scrape away all the formal baggage around, "The Three Act Structure," it really is that simple.

[That said, like any good DIY project, there's a big gap between the theory and actually putting it into practice in the form of a finished novel.]

Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Storytelling on British and American Television

by Deren Hansen

I enjoy British sitcoms more than American ones.

There I said it. And I'm prepared to face accusations of a lack of patriotism or, worse, elitism.

Part of it is the cultural distance: it's easier to believe people across the pond are like the ones I see in the programs because I don't rub shoulders with many counter-examples. Cultural distance is, however, even more important on a structural level. The British programming with which I'm most familiar has come through the good offices of various PBS stations, who presumably have selected from among the best programs.

I also confess a weakness for the language. Between the accents and the slang, viewing British comedies is a more engaging experience because it requires effort on my part to follow along. Their writers seem to have a particular gift for articulate, literate, sarcasm.

But I think the most important reason is the format. Thanks to the commercial interruption, American sitcoms have two acts, where their British counterparts have only a single, longer act.

In addition to forcing the story into two acts, the American format requires the first act to end on a strong enough note to keep the viewer's interest during the commercials. Then the second act must bring down the tension in order to have enough runway to build to the climax of the story. In other words, the story has to have two high points: a false climax at the end of the first act and the narrative climax at the end of the second.

In contrast, British sitcoms can spend the entire half-hour developing the characters and building the narrative tension toward a natural (in the sense of having only one climax) resolution.

This is why there's some truth to the generalization that British comedies are driven by character, while American comedies are driven by caricature.

Of course my point here is not to argue for English superiority but to show how structure effects storytelling.

If you haven't seen any British sitcoms, you owe it to yourself as a writer to compare and contrast. It's an eye-opening exercise.