Whether I’ve blown it at work or reacted poorly at home (hypothetically of course), I often need a fresh start. Why? Because I’m human and I have a tendency to get in a rut. Sometimes my ruts are grounded in bad habits or faulty beliefs.
It’s not great for me as a human being, but it’s terrific for fiction. The first step to making a fresh start for me or my characters? Figuring out our default settings.
Have you ever faced this kind of issue? You have a scene goal in mind, you know the characters involved, where they are and what they want, but HOW does the scene play out? What exactly happens to bring the characters from Point A to Point B in the story?
That’s when the power of improv might come in handy.
I’ve recently gotten my roommates to watch Arrested Development with me, which is great because Netflix released the new season a couple weeks ago (which I still haven’t watched), so the three of us are working through the first three seasons together. We’re pretty much all snickering through each episode. But that’s the whole point of comedy, right?
Welcome to the last of the seven basic plots: the Comedy.
I recently re-read The Phantom Tollbooth, which was one of my favorite books in grade school, and still holds up fairly well ten-to-fifteen years later. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it, but it largely centers around a boy named Milo who is convinced he lives this boring life and is content to just slump his way through it, until one day there is a mysterious package waiting for him when he gets home, which contains the titular tollbooth. Milo assembles the tollbooth, gets in a toy car, and suddenly is in a magical land of logic, numbers, words, ideas, and more puns than you can shake a stick at. He makes some friends, goes on a Quest, becomes a hero, and returns home a little more mentally stimulated and less bored.
This structure is the cousin of the Quest: the Voyage and Return.
Posing a good dramatic question in the minds of your readers is the best way to create suspense and keep people reading. In Monday’s post, we talked about what the dramatic question is. Today we’re going to talk about how to use it effectively.
Here are seven steps to create suspense with the dramatic question:
Yeah, like you’re going to see a list of plot types that doesn’t include the Quest. The Quest is a search for a place, item, or person that requires the hero to leave home in order to find it. Sometimes the item is just a MacGuffin to drive the plot along; other times the thing driving the quest is specific to the story’s circumstances. Either way, the hero is leaving home to find whatever the heck the story demands, and we get to come along for the ride.
