This is a thorough, detailed, and informative exploration of story. It's also just plain fun!
Re-live one popular movie story after another! You'll see how a novelist or screenwriter knits together an Inciting Incident, Turning Points, and the closing Crisis Decision and Climax. Each time this dance of story elements is revealed it becomes clearer how raw events get arranged into a story.
Why spend years learning by trial and error? Accelerate your learning curve by watching these key elements at work in a range of stories. As a story developer you'll see the elements in relationship to each other, the story itself, and others of its genre. Crack the storytelling code.
You'll discover:
* How to harness events to an Inciting Incident early on that crystallizes the one new problem confronting the hero.
* How to guide your characters into theme-tied decisions that cluster into a turning point.
* How to enhance the Midpoint's coverage of theme, showing shifts in character attitudes and tone before and after that point.
* How to layer in what's expected and escalate beyond that in the Crisis Decision, embedding resistance in your hero's response.
* How to unfold the events of the Climax so they reveal much about the characters, encapsulating and surpassing what the verbal conflicts already have highlighted up to that point.
* How to invest in your story's Climax a test as much for everyone around the hero as for the hero herself.
Writing this deepened my own understanding of story process, and led to completing my first novel not long after. Novelists and enthusiasts of story in all its forms stand to benefit from this fun how-to look at the storytelling craft.
