WHAT ARE THE CONTOURS OF YOUR STORY?( CONT’ D)
outlined BUILDING. Use A them BELIEVABLE as outlines.
There is the Journey Story and how old is that baby? But it serves great purpose. Use it, don’ t defuse it. Set your character( s) on a journey as in King’ s IT – the journey
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. George Lucas’ Luke Skywalker is asked to do the same. Sometimes the journey is what happens on a bus ride across a continent, one obstacle after another. There are archetypal story SHAPES that you should use. The Buddy film, the romantic Comedy, the Fish Out of Water films such as … well just fill in the blank.
As a young author, I railed against these shapes like the Wolf at the Door tale, or the Mythology of the Gods with their moralistic endings in the false belief that I could create a unique Good vs. Evil-shaped story, but the Good vs. Evil had then to be utilized, not disparaged. Still I wanted to create unique Shapes of my own. No, there is no new shape to be made, only what you can do within the context of a shape( or two or three used in same work).“ Every story under the sun has been done” really refers to the OUTLINE, the Form, the Shape. The poets and playwrights have their shapes and formats to conform to as well, for instance, the Sonnet or the Haiku. Pretty tight formats, but within them uniqueness happens. Shakespeare creates an entire play in iambic pentameter, damn! But he did so using Romantic Tragedy perfected by the Greeks.
I had a student once who insisted that a Poem could be anything. I asked for an example, to which he confidently replied with the single word:“ IT. The single word IT can be a poem; that it requires no‘ shape’ or form. The gauntlet tossed at my feet, I had to reply.“ But what use is IT? What comes of IT? What is one to do with IT as IT stands alone and without shape or connection to anything that has come before IT?” In short, I soundly rejected the notion, the student left the class, and I never saw him again, which was sad but his choice, and I suspect he has written a thousand One-Word Poems by now, all Shapeless in Overall Meaning. He proved the extreme example of a person rejecting any orchestration or learning from writers throughout the ages, like a painter who dares ignore the history of painting that has come before him.
There exists the Revenge tale, the murder mystery, the horror story for a reason, as tools to explore the dark side of the human condition just as light romantic comedy and other forms explore the brighter side of humanity. My final advice to young authors is simple: To learn how to plot and do so quickly and proficiently, sit down and write a Mystery, for within the confines of this one shape, you must badger and press yourself to get it done, to develop a storyline and to not stop at a mood, a tone, a character sketch. This shape of all the shapes
WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
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FALL 2017