To the right of this post is a list of the 22 Steps in the Plot Series: How do I Plot a Novel, Memoir and Screenplay? (a few more coming soon complete the series)
Now that I posted the directory of the YouTube series, I wish I started the list with the last one and encourage you work your way forward. Perhaps this will work as a strategy for the writer who never reaches the end, finishes, accomplishes her goals. Perhaps beginning at the end will help you stay true to the cause of writing your story.
Whether by conventional means and you begin at Step One or the unconventional way of beginning at Step 22, my intention is to provide you with a series of videos to guide you step-by-step through the plot elements that create a pleasing form, one that mirrors the universal story.
Benefits of watching the
Plot Series:
1) Become a better writer
Designed for the ecologically curious, Green Sundays is a regular event in Dalston’s Arcola Theatre that gets better every time. This Sunday 11th April 2010 the plan is to explore sustainable food.
The Secret Seed Society gang will be there creating some child-friendly magic. We are running two Story-telling sessions (12 and 2pm) and a Dip workshop (1.30pm) in which we reveal our simple formula: Good + Taste = Dip! Hope to see some of you there to design your own mouth-watering concoction!
The day will be bursting with food for thought: artists-at-work, guerilla gardening tour, talks on tackling food waste, live music and a film screening. Have you seen the award-winning documentary Food Inc yet? Come by 5.30pm if you want to watch it with a bunch of great people.
Back in the 1980s, Harvard freshmen parents weekend offered me a special opportunity to see a master teacher in action. A feature of the event was the choice of attending some of the survey classes offered to students. A class taught by one of my idols, biologist Edward O. Wilson, was on the list, so I eagerly attended.
I watched as Dr. Wilson, wearing a white lab coat, told the students the story of a visit to the Costa Rican rainforest as he showed slides of the trip. I found his casual travelogue interesting, but it didn't seem like a professor's lecture for beginning students. The more I listened, the more I realized that his presentation covered several basic principles of biology as he described what he saw and did in the forest. He embedded the facts so softly into his story that the students didn't realize their learning brains were on automatic pilot as they listened.
Fiction writers and fiction lovers sometimes talk of the power of story as if only made-up stories can carry that power. But nonfiction contains many fabulous stories, and when told in that format, it can make the real world at least as compelling as any world conceived in imagination.
Armed with my love of nonfiction story-telling, I just began teaching a class for the University of Montana Osher Lifelong Learning Institute program for people 50 years old and up. My class is full of curious students, each with ideas about what they want to write. About half of them have family stories to share, and the rest have varied interests. I am not daunted about these differing ambitions, however, as I know the basic principles of writing good stories are the same, whatever the genre. Basically, there is one fundamental requirement--keep your readers turning the page!
I've found one of the best books on the subject of storytelling is "Story," by Robert McKee. His book and seminars focus on writing for the screen, but it doesn't matter. Novelists as well as screen writers attend his seminars and refer to his book. One of my new students, as a matter of fact, showed me a summary diagram in the book called "The Three Levels of Conflict" that has helped him in structuring his stories. 
Conflict and its resolution are at the core of any story worth reading. As soon as we find out the main character has a problem, a conflict, we want to know how it is going to be resolved, and as long as the main character is off balance and having to struggle through a series of challenges, readers stay engaged.
The "main character" doesn't have to be a person. In my own work, my main character is often an animal, or even a complete ecosystem. "The Right Dog for the Job: Irah's Path from Service Dog to Guide Dog," features a Golden Retriever puppy whose life undergoes some surprising twists and turns before he becomes a successful Guide Dog for the Blind. In "When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature's Balance in Yellowstone," the main character is Yellowstone National Park, put out of balance during the 1920s when the top predator, the gray wolf, was killed off in the park. The book tells how returning wolves to Yellowstone during the 1990s has gradually led to restoring the natural balance in the park. It's a satisfying story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like any fiction.
That's a great strength of much of today's nonfiction for children--it combines engrossing stories with important and interesting information about the real world, a powerful combination for learning.
I’m in a school, but not as visiting author this time. I’m with a group of waste management specialists (including my husband) who are visiting the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Recycling School in Moqattam in Cairo. It’s an unusual, but exciting school. It caters for the boys of the Zabbaleen community of informal recyclers – they used to be informal garbage collectors – what we’d have once called rag-pickers - but things have moved on.
The Zabbaleen originally came to Cairo from the countryside, and started to work sorting through the refuse of the more prosperous neighbourhoods, picking out whatever could be recycled, and selling it to middlemen. They lived in shanties, with heaps of waste lying in front of the dwellings. Here the families sorted the refuse and the pigs rootled through to pick out the organic matter and eat it. It wasn’t a bad system, especially not the input of the pigs, who produced both meat and fertiliser, but it wasn’t very healthy, and child mortality was high. Enter Laila Iskandar, who started off the girls’ school here. The girls recycled clean paper and textiles and learned, at the same time, literacy and basic hygiene. Nowadays, you may well buy the handmade paper they make in outlets in the West – lovely paper in beautiful colours and patterns. Their textile products – recycled from industry’s offcuts - are selling to fashion outlets in Europe. The Zabbaleen are intelligent, resourceful people who have taken every opportunity that’s been given them and run with it. Some of the first graduates from the girls’ school have gone on to university.
So, twenty-seven years on from Laila’s first visit, things look very different. The Zabbaleen now have brick-built houses, from whose windows and balconies hang beautifully clean laundry. There are still people sorting refuse, but that is done, largely, in workshops, separate from the dwellings. And now much of the actual recycling is done in Moqattam, which means the Zabbaleen can sell plastic pellets on to factories, though in some instances they make plastic products too. We visit one of the recycling workshops, where a £50,000 machine melts the plastic into an endless sausage of curiously pleasing hot gunk and feeds it into an extruder, fro
To the right of this post is a list of the 22 Steps in the Plot Series: How do I Plot a Novel, Memoir and Screenplay? (a few more coming soon complete the series)
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Great ideas! Thanks for this, super appreciated. Us aspiring writers can use all the advice we can get.
Sarah Allen
(my creative writing blog)
I've watched them and studied them alongside the book and am so grateful to you for posting the videos. I pick up new ideas each time I hear your instructions. I mentioned you and your work in my latest blog post last night, On the Cusp of Completion.
Thanks for your support, Sarah Allen!
You're so nice, Denise. Give me a date you'll be finished and write The End...
Did it. Today was the day. Put a fork in in, Martha, and call it done. I just typed THE END.
Now for a quick celebration and then the REAL WORK begins! WOO HOO!
CONGRATULATIONS, Denise!!
My advice right now? After the celebrations, let the story and you rest for a spell...