Ideas always feel fully formed in our minds. But when we sit down to put them into words, the struggle begins. Ideas don’t just morph into narrative form. They resist our efforts, and soon the process of storytelling becomes torture.
Thankfully there are strategies you can use to overcome the stubborn nature of an idea and successfully rise to the challenge of writing a great story.
And one of the best strategies you can use is the Three-Act Structure.
When we read books, books with characters we love, we can learn how to write our own characters by studying what details the writers included. There are so many details about your characters you could include in a character description, but which ones do you need?
Let’s look at the advice Stephen King gives in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft about good description and see if applies to Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
The Hero’s Journey is easily the most-used and most-loved storytelling structure in the history of humanity. It resonates with readers in ways that are as old as human D.N.A. itself.
If you want to connect with readers and engage them on a deep level, you would be at an advantage to study this storytelling method and use as much of it as possible in your writing.
One of the best ways to study and master the Hero’s Journey is by seeing it at work in another story. And in recent history, there is no clearer use of the Hero’s Journey than George Lucas’s space opera, Star Wars.
I love Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the idea that every hero, and hero’s journey, uses many of the same characters, symbols, and themes.
So in honor of Thanksgiving, let’s write a story with the Noble Gobbler in the role of the hero, or Pro-turk-onist!
Life is filled with stranger-than-fiction moments. You might be wondering, though, how do you know how to write a book based on a true story? Because in practice, it’s much harder than it sounds, right?
