Alexandra Sokoloff's Blog, page 16
November 10, 2015
Nanowrimo, Week 2: Inciting Incident - Call to Adventure
by Alexandra Sokoloff
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
So, Nano, Week 2! Those of you who are doing it may be into your Act II, part one by now. But wait. Before you race on ahead, you might want to make sure you've asked yourself this key question:
Does your Act I have a clear INCITING INCIDENT? Or the term I prefer: the CALL TO ADVENTURE?
If you're not sure, maybe you want to read on.
Of all the many things I love about e books, I may love this feature the most: sampling. I'm a voracious browser and when I want something to read, unless I know exactly the book I want, I'll often go through a few dozen first chapters of a few dozen books in a row to find something that grabs me.
This is a fantastic exercise when you're struggling with a first chapter of your own.
I read through a bunch of first chapters last night, a couple dozen books at least, and it was pretty shocking how few of them grabbed me enough for me to want to keep reading.
Now, I'm not saying these books are badly written. The prose is fine, really. I'm just like everyone - there are very few books out there (proportionately) that I'm actually going to take the time to read. I like certain things in a book and if they're not there, I'll move on. Nothing wrong with that AT ALL - the wonderful thing about books is that there ARE books that deliver the exact or almost exact experience we're looking for. So of course we look for those over less satisfying ones. I'm perfectly aware that just as many people discard MY books after the first few pages because I'M not delivering the experience they're looking for. I'm certainly not for everyone's tastes.
But there was something I was noticing in book after book that I started and then discarded last night that was just a structural error that could so easily have been fixed to - I think - increase the number of people who would want to keep reading. It's pretty simple, really.
I couldn't figure out what the book was about.
Or why I should care, either.
What was missing in the first ten, or twenty, pages I was reading was the INCITING INCIDENT, or CALL TO ADVENTURE.
The Inciting Incident is basically the action that starts the story. The corpse hits the floor and begins a murder investigation, the hero gets his first glimpse of the love interest in a love story, a boy receives an invitation to a school for wizards in a fantasy. (More discussion on this key story element here).
SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN, IMMEDIATELY, that gives us an idea of WHAT THE STORY IS ABOUT.
You can do this to some extent by setting mood, tone, genre, hope and fear, and an immediate external problem, but there is something about that first action that lets us know, at least subconsciously: "Oh, I get it. That teenage girl was murdered and that cop is going to find the killer." "Oh, I get it. There's a shark out there off the coast eating tourists and that police chief is going to have to get rid of it somehow."
And once we know that, we can relax. It is a very disorienting and irritating thing not to know where a story is going.
Which means in general you should get to your INCITING INCIDENT and CALL TO ADVENTURE as soon as possible. Especially if you are a new writer, you cannot afford to hold this back. And I would argue it's critical to get it out there if your book is or has any chance of being an e book, too, because it's just so easy to go on to the next e book on your reader.
Genre fiction is popular because we go in knowing pretty much what the story is going to be about. The kid is kidnapped and the detective has to get him back. The house is haunted and the new residents are going to have to fight to survive. But setting your book in a certain genre does not always guarantee that the reader is going to know what the story is going to be about (as evidenced by what I was reading last night.)
So I'm suggesting - find a way to get that critical inciting incident into the first few pages or at the very least, strongly hint at it right up front.
Reading a bunch of first chapters in a row points out a lot of common errors, actually. So here’s a brief list.
1. Inexperienced writers almost inevitably START THEIR STORIES IN THE WRONG PLACE.
Now, please, please remember – I am not talking about first drafts, here. As far as I’m concerned, all a first draft has to do is get to “The End”. It doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you. Screenwriter and novelist Derek Haas refers to his first pass of a story as “the vomit draft”. And that's what Nano is about. Exactly. Just get it all out – you’ll make sense of it later. (for more on this: Your First Draft Is Always Going To Suck)
BUT - when you’ve gotten to the end, you will probably want to start your story 20, 30, 50 pages later than you do. And this is partly why:
For some reason newer writers think they have to tell the whole back story in the first ten pages. Back story is not story. So -
2. NEVER MIND THE FUCKING BACKSTORY!!!!!
With almost no exceptions, you should start your book with an actual scene, in which your main character (or villain, if that’s who you start with) is caught up in action. You should put that scene down on the page as if the reader is watching a movie – or more specifically, CAUGHT UP in a movie. The reader should not just be watching the action, but feeling the sweat, smelling the salt air, feeling the roiling of their stomach as they step into whatever unknown.
We don’t need to know who this person is, yet. Let them keep secrets. Make the reader wonder – curiosity is a big hook. What we need to do is get inside the character’s skin.
Here are two tips:
3. IDENTIFY THE SENSATION AND EXPERIENCE YOU WANT TO EVOKE IN YOUR READER – AND THEN MAKE SURE YOU’RE EVOKING IT.
I cannot possibly stress this enough. We read novels to have an EXPERIENCE. Make yourself a list of your favorite books and identify what EXPERIENCE those books gives you. Sex, terror, absolute power, the crazy wonderfulness of falling in love? What is the particular rollercoaster that that book (or movie) is? Identify that in your favorite stories and BE SPECIFIC. Then do the same for your own story.
Now that you know what the experience is that you want to create, start to look at great examples of books and films that successfully create that experience FOR YOU. In other words - Make A List.
4. USE ALL SIX SENSES.
A great exercise is to make sure that every three pages you’ve covered specific details of what you want the reader to see, hear, feel, taste, smell, and sense. All six categories, every three pages.
5. SHOW, DON’T TELL.
This is one of those notes that always annoys me until I have to read 15 pages of “telling”. Then I realize it’s the essence of storytelling. If your character has a conflict with her brother, then let’s see the two of them fighting – don’t give me a family history and Freudian analysis.
6. DETAIL THE INTERNAL DRIVES OF YOUR CHARACTER AND SET THE GENRE.
You don’t need to detail the family tree or when they moved to whatever house they’re living in or their great love for their first stuffed animal.
What we need to know their DESIRE and WHAT IS BLOCKING THEM. We need to feel HOPE AND FEAR for them. We need to get a sense of the GENRE, a strong sense of MOOD and TONE, and a hint of THEME.
So while you're writing your brains out today, take a few minutes to ask yourself these key questions:
Do you know where your inciting incident is? Is it soon enough? Honestly?
Do we KNOW where your story is going by page ten of your book?
Can you maybe do a little rearranging to make sure this happens, before you move on?
And for more discussion and examples of all of these terms, see ELEMENTS OF ACT ONE.
- Alex
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 14.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
So, Nano, Week 2! Those of you who are doing it may be into your Act II, part one by now. But wait. Before you race on ahead, you might want to make sure you've asked yourself this key question:
Does your Act I have a clear INCITING INCIDENT? Or the term I prefer: the CALL TO ADVENTURE?
If you're not sure, maybe you want to read on.
Of all the many things I love about e books, I may love this feature the most: sampling. I'm a voracious browser and when I want something to read, unless I know exactly the book I want, I'll often go through a few dozen first chapters of a few dozen books in a row to find something that grabs me.
This is a fantastic exercise when you're struggling with a first chapter of your own.
I read through a bunch of first chapters last night, a couple dozen books at least, and it was pretty shocking how few of them grabbed me enough for me to want to keep reading.
Now, I'm not saying these books are badly written. The prose is fine, really. I'm just like everyone - there are very few books out there (proportionately) that I'm actually going to take the time to read. I like certain things in a book and if they're not there, I'll move on. Nothing wrong with that AT ALL - the wonderful thing about books is that there ARE books that deliver the exact or almost exact experience we're looking for. So of course we look for those over less satisfying ones. I'm perfectly aware that just as many people discard MY books after the first few pages because I'M not delivering the experience they're looking for. I'm certainly not for everyone's tastes.
But there was something I was noticing in book after book that I started and then discarded last night that was just a structural error that could so easily have been fixed to - I think - increase the number of people who would want to keep reading. It's pretty simple, really.
I couldn't figure out what the book was about.
Or why I should care, either.
What was missing in the first ten, or twenty, pages I was reading was the INCITING INCIDENT, or CALL TO ADVENTURE.
The Inciting Incident is basically the action that starts the story. The corpse hits the floor and begins a murder investigation, the hero gets his first glimpse of the love interest in a love story, a boy receives an invitation to a school for wizards in a fantasy. (More discussion on this key story element here).
SOMETHING HAS TO HAPPEN, IMMEDIATELY, that gives us an idea of WHAT THE STORY IS ABOUT.
You can do this to some extent by setting mood, tone, genre, hope and fear, and an immediate external problem, but there is something about that first action that lets us know, at least subconsciously: "Oh, I get it. That teenage girl was murdered and that cop is going to find the killer." "Oh, I get it. There's a shark out there off the coast eating tourists and that police chief is going to have to get rid of it somehow."
And once we know that, we can relax. It is a very disorienting and irritating thing not to know where a story is going.
Which means in general you should get to your INCITING INCIDENT and CALL TO ADVENTURE as soon as possible. Especially if you are a new writer, you cannot afford to hold this back. And I would argue it's critical to get it out there if your book is or has any chance of being an e book, too, because it's just so easy to go on to the next e book on your reader.
Genre fiction is popular because we go in knowing pretty much what the story is going to be about. The kid is kidnapped and the detective has to get him back. The house is haunted and the new residents are going to have to fight to survive. But setting your book in a certain genre does not always guarantee that the reader is going to know what the story is going to be about (as evidenced by what I was reading last night.)
So I'm suggesting - find a way to get that critical inciting incident into the first few pages or at the very least, strongly hint at it right up front.
Reading a bunch of first chapters in a row points out a lot of common errors, actually. So here’s a brief list.
1. Inexperienced writers almost inevitably START THEIR STORIES IN THE WRONG PLACE.
Now, please, please remember – I am not talking about first drafts, here. As far as I’m concerned, all a first draft has to do is get to “The End”. It doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you. Screenwriter and novelist Derek Haas refers to his first pass of a story as “the vomit draft”. And that's what Nano is about. Exactly. Just get it all out – you’ll make sense of it later. (for more on this: Your First Draft Is Always Going To Suck)
BUT - when you’ve gotten to the end, you will probably want to start your story 20, 30, 50 pages later than you do. And this is partly why:
For some reason newer writers think they have to tell the whole back story in the first ten pages. Back story is not story. So -
2. NEVER MIND THE FUCKING BACKSTORY!!!!!
With almost no exceptions, you should start your book with an actual scene, in which your main character (or villain, if that’s who you start with) is caught up in action. You should put that scene down on the page as if the reader is watching a movie – or more specifically, CAUGHT UP in a movie. The reader should not just be watching the action, but feeling the sweat, smelling the salt air, feeling the roiling of their stomach as they step into whatever unknown.
We don’t need to know who this person is, yet. Let them keep secrets. Make the reader wonder – curiosity is a big hook. What we need to do is get inside the character’s skin.
Here are two tips:
3. IDENTIFY THE SENSATION AND EXPERIENCE YOU WANT TO EVOKE IN YOUR READER – AND THEN MAKE SURE YOU’RE EVOKING IT.
I cannot possibly stress this enough. We read novels to have an EXPERIENCE. Make yourself a list of your favorite books and identify what EXPERIENCE those books gives you. Sex, terror, absolute power, the crazy wonderfulness of falling in love? What is the particular rollercoaster that that book (or movie) is? Identify that in your favorite stories and BE SPECIFIC. Then do the same for your own story.
Now that you know what the experience is that you want to create, start to look at great examples of books and films that successfully create that experience FOR YOU. In other words - Make A List.
4. USE ALL SIX SENSES.
A great exercise is to make sure that every three pages you’ve covered specific details of what you want the reader to see, hear, feel, taste, smell, and sense. All six categories, every three pages.
5. SHOW, DON’T TELL.
This is one of those notes that always annoys me until I have to read 15 pages of “telling”. Then I realize it’s the essence of storytelling. If your character has a conflict with her brother, then let’s see the two of them fighting – don’t give me a family history and Freudian analysis.
6. DETAIL THE INTERNAL DRIVES OF YOUR CHARACTER AND SET THE GENRE.
You don’t need to detail the family tree or when they moved to whatever house they’re living in or their great love for their first stuffed animal.
What we need to know their DESIRE and WHAT IS BLOCKING THEM. We need to feel HOPE AND FEAR for them. We need to get a sense of the GENRE, a strong sense of MOOD and TONE, and a hint of THEME.
So while you're writing your brains out today, take a few minutes to ask yourself these key questions:
Do you know where your inciting incident is? Is it soon enough? Honestly?
Do we KNOW where your story is going by page ten of your book?
Can you maybe do a little rearranging to make sure this happens, before you move on?
And for more discussion and examples of all of these terms, see ELEMENTS OF ACT ONE.
- Alex
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 14.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
November 3, 2015
Nanowrimo: Act I questions and prompts
by Alexandra Sokoloff
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
So hopefully you're on fire. living your Act I by now, right?
I'm traveling crazily this month - in Ventura for the 805 Writers Conference, in LA for meetings on the Huntress Moon series, in Albuquerque for an all day Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop.
I'm doing lots of signings, panels and events - hope to see some of you at one or another of these!
But today I wanted to post some questions and prompts that might be useful for Act One. And of course, Act II to follow!
ELEMENTS OF ACT ONE:
- In a 2-hour movie, Act One starts at the beginning and climaxes at about 30 minutes.
- In a 400-page book, Act One starts at the beginning and climaxes at about 100 pages.
And adjust proportionately depending on the length of the story.
First, identify the separate SEQUENCES of this act. What time do they start, and what time do they climax? (Full discussion here.
In a movie there will usually be two approximately 15- minute long sequences, Sequence 1 and Sequence 2, and the climax of Sequence 2 will be the Act 1 Climax, at about 30 minutes into the movie. But if the movie is longer or shorter the sequences will be longer or shorter to match, or there might be three sequences or even (rarely) four in Act I. There may also be a short PROLOGUE.
In a book you have more leeway with number and length of sequences – there may be three or four in one Act, and they may vary more in length – 40 pages, 20 pages, 30 pages. But generally in a 400 page book, the Act One climax will be still be around p. 100.
- OPENING IMAGE/OPENING SCENE
Describe the OPENING IMAGE and/or opening scene of the story.
What mood, tone and genre does it set up? What kinds of experiences does it hint at or promise? (Look at colors, music, pace, visuals, location, dialogue, symbols, etc.).
Does the opening image or scene mirror the closing image or scene? (It’s not mandatory, but it’s a useful technique, often used.). How are the two different?
* What’s the MOOD, TONE, GENRE (s) the story sets up from the beginning? How does it do that?
* VISUAL AND THEMATIC IMAGE SYSTEMS
(More discussion here.)
* THE ORDINARY WORLD/THE SPECIAL WORLD
What does the ordinary world look and feel like? How does it differ in look and atmosphere from THE SPECIAL WORLD?
* MEET THE HERO OR HEROINE
How do we know this is the main character? Why do we like him or her? Why do we relate to him or her? What is the moment that we start rooting for this person? Why do we care?
• HERO/INE’S INNER AND OUTER DESIRE
What does the Hero/ine say s/he wants? Or what do we sense that s/he wants, even if s/he doesn't say it or seem to be aware of it? How does what s/he thinks s/he wants turn out to be wrong?
• HERO/INE’S PROBLEM
(This is usually an immediate external problem, not an overall need. In some stories this is more apparent than others.)
* HERO/INE’S GHOST OR WOUND
What is haunting them from the past?
• HERO/INE’S CHARACTER ARC
Look at the beginning and the end to see how much the hero/ine changes in the course of the story. How do the storytellers depict that change?
• INCITING INCIDENT/CALL TO ADVENTURE
(This can be the same scene or separated into two different scenes.)
How do the storytellers make this moment or sequence significant?
* REFUSAL OF THE CALL
Is the hero/ine reluctant to take on this task or adventure? How do we see that reluctance?
• MEET THE ANTAGONIST (and/or introduce a Mystery, which is what you do when you’re going to keep your antagonist hidden to reveal at the end).
How do we know this is the antagonist? Does this person or people want the same thing as the hero/ine, or is this person preventing the hero/ine from getting what s/he wants?
* OTHER FORCES OF OPPOSITION
Who and what else is standing in the hero/ine’s way?
• THEME/ WHAT’S THE STORY ABOUT?
There are usually multiple themes working in any story, and usually they will be stated aloud.
• INTRODUCE ALLIES
How is each ally introduced?
* INTRODUCE MENTOR (may or may not have one)
What are the qualities of this mentor? How is this person a good teacher (or a bad teacher) for the hero?
• INTRODUCE LOVE INTEREST (may or may not have one).
What makes us know from the beginning that this person is The One?
* ENTERING THE SPECIAL WORLD/CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
What is the Special World? How is it different from the ordinary world? How do the filmmakers make entering this world a significant moment?
This scene is often at a sequence climax or the Act One Climax. Sometimes there are a whole series of thresholds to be crossed.
* THRESHOLD GUARDIAN
Is there someone standing on the threshold preventing the hero/ine from entering, or someone issuing a warning?
• SEQUENCE ONE CLIMAX
In a 2-hour movie, look for this about 15 minutes in. How do the filmmakers make this moment significant? What is the change that lets you know that this sequence is over and Sequence 2 is starting?
(Each sequence in a book will have some sort of climax, as well, although the sequences are not as uniform in length and number as they tend to be in films. Look for a revelation, a location change, a big event, a setpiece.).
• PLANTS/REVEALS or SET UPS/PAYOFFS
Discussion here
• HOPE/FEAR and STAKES
(Such a big topic you just have to wait for the dedicated post.)
* PLAN
What does the hero/ine say they want to do, or what do we understand they intend to do? The plan usually starts small, with a minimum effort, and gradually we see the plan changing.
• CENTRAL QUESTION, CENTRAL STORY ACTION
Does a character state this aloud? When do we realize that this is the main question of the story?
* ACT ONE CLIMAX:
In a 2-hour movie, look for this about 30 minutes in. In a 400-page book, about 100 pages in.
How do the storytellers make this moment significant? What is the change that lets you know that this act is over and Act II is starting?
You will also possibly see these elements (these can also be in Act Two or may not be present):
***** ASSEMBLING THE TEAM
***** GATHERING THE TOOLS –
***** TRAINING SEQUENCE
And also possibly:
***** MACGUFFIN (not present in all stories but if there is one it will USUALLY be revealed in the first act).
*****TICKING CLOCK (may not have one or the other and may be revealed later in the story)
* And always - look for and IDENTIFY SETPIECES.
=====================================================
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 13.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
So hopefully you're on fire. living your Act I by now, right?
I'm traveling crazily this month - in Ventura for the 805 Writers Conference, in LA for meetings on the Huntress Moon series, in Albuquerque for an all day Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop.
I'm doing lots of signings, panels and events - hope to see some of you at one or another of these!
But today I wanted to post some questions and prompts that might be useful for Act One. And of course, Act II to follow!
ELEMENTS OF ACT ONE:
- In a 2-hour movie, Act One starts at the beginning and climaxes at about 30 minutes.
- In a 400-page book, Act One starts at the beginning and climaxes at about 100 pages.
And adjust proportionately depending on the length of the story.
First, identify the separate SEQUENCES of this act. What time do they start, and what time do they climax? (Full discussion here.
In a movie there will usually be two approximately 15- minute long sequences, Sequence 1 and Sequence 2, and the climax of Sequence 2 will be the Act 1 Climax, at about 30 minutes into the movie. But if the movie is longer or shorter the sequences will be longer or shorter to match, or there might be three sequences or even (rarely) four in Act I. There may also be a short PROLOGUE.
In a book you have more leeway with number and length of sequences – there may be three or four in one Act, and they may vary more in length – 40 pages, 20 pages, 30 pages. But generally in a 400 page book, the Act One climax will be still be around p. 100.
- OPENING IMAGE/OPENING SCENE
Describe the OPENING IMAGE and/or opening scene of the story.
What mood, tone and genre does it set up? What kinds of experiences does it hint at or promise? (Look at colors, music, pace, visuals, location, dialogue, symbols, etc.).
Does the opening image or scene mirror the closing image or scene? (It’s not mandatory, but it’s a useful technique, often used.). How are the two different?
* What’s the MOOD, TONE, GENRE (s) the story sets up from the beginning? How does it do that?
* VISUAL AND THEMATIC IMAGE SYSTEMS
(More discussion here.)
* THE ORDINARY WORLD/THE SPECIAL WORLD
What does the ordinary world look and feel like? How does it differ in look and atmosphere from THE SPECIAL WORLD?
* MEET THE HERO OR HEROINE
How do we know this is the main character? Why do we like him or her? Why do we relate to him or her? What is the moment that we start rooting for this person? Why do we care?
• HERO/INE’S INNER AND OUTER DESIRE
What does the Hero/ine say s/he wants? Or what do we sense that s/he wants, even if s/he doesn't say it or seem to be aware of it? How does what s/he thinks s/he wants turn out to be wrong?
• HERO/INE’S PROBLEM
(This is usually an immediate external problem, not an overall need. In some stories this is more apparent than others.)
* HERO/INE’S GHOST OR WOUND
What is haunting them from the past?
• HERO/INE’S CHARACTER ARC
Look at the beginning and the end to see how much the hero/ine changes in the course of the story. How do the storytellers depict that change?
• INCITING INCIDENT/CALL TO ADVENTURE
(This can be the same scene or separated into two different scenes.)
How do the storytellers make this moment or sequence significant?
* REFUSAL OF THE CALL
Is the hero/ine reluctant to take on this task or adventure? How do we see that reluctance?
• MEET THE ANTAGONIST (and/or introduce a Mystery, which is what you do when you’re going to keep your antagonist hidden to reveal at the end).
How do we know this is the antagonist? Does this person or people want the same thing as the hero/ine, or is this person preventing the hero/ine from getting what s/he wants?
* OTHER FORCES OF OPPOSITION
Who and what else is standing in the hero/ine’s way?
• THEME/ WHAT’S THE STORY ABOUT?
There are usually multiple themes working in any story, and usually they will be stated aloud.
• INTRODUCE ALLIES
How is each ally introduced?
* INTRODUCE MENTOR (may or may not have one)
What are the qualities of this mentor? How is this person a good teacher (or a bad teacher) for the hero?
• INTRODUCE LOVE INTEREST (may or may not have one).
What makes us know from the beginning that this person is The One?
* ENTERING THE SPECIAL WORLD/CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
What is the Special World? How is it different from the ordinary world? How do the filmmakers make entering this world a significant moment?
This scene is often at a sequence climax or the Act One Climax. Sometimes there are a whole series of thresholds to be crossed.
* THRESHOLD GUARDIAN
Is there someone standing on the threshold preventing the hero/ine from entering, or someone issuing a warning?
• SEQUENCE ONE CLIMAX
In a 2-hour movie, look for this about 15 minutes in. How do the filmmakers make this moment significant? What is the change that lets you know that this sequence is over and Sequence 2 is starting?
(Each sequence in a book will have some sort of climax, as well, although the sequences are not as uniform in length and number as they tend to be in films. Look for a revelation, a location change, a big event, a setpiece.).
• PLANTS/REVEALS or SET UPS/PAYOFFS
Discussion here
• HOPE/FEAR and STAKES
(Such a big topic you just have to wait for the dedicated post.)
* PLAN
What does the hero/ine say they want to do, or what do we understand they intend to do? The plan usually starts small, with a minimum effort, and gradually we see the plan changing.
• CENTRAL QUESTION, CENTRAL STORY ACTION
Does a character state this aloud? When do we realize that this is the main question of the story?
* ACT ONE CLIMAX:
In a 2-hour movie, look for this about 30 minutes in. In a 400-page book, about 100 pages in.
How do the storytellers make this moment significant? What is the change that lets you know that this act is over and Act II is starting?
You will also possibly see these elements (these can also be in Act Two or may not be present):
***** ASSEMBLING THE TEAM
***** GATHERING THE TOOLS –
***** TRAINING SEQUENCE
And also possibly:
***** MACGUFFIN (not present in all stories but if there is one it will USUALLY be revealed in the first act).
*****TICKING CLOCK (may not have one or the other and may be revealed later in the story)
* And always - look for and IDENTIFY SETPIECES.
=====================================================
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 13.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
November 1, 2015
Ready, Set, Nano!
by Alexandra Sokoloff
It's here - the big day. Big month. Big everything.
The queen of suspense, Mary Higgins Clark, said about first drafts:
Writing a first draft is like clawing my way through a mountain of concrete with my bare hands.
Isn't that the truth?
Well, the point of Nano is to write so fast that you - sometimes - forget that your hands are dripping blood. It's a stellar way of turning off your censor (we all have one of those little suckers) and just get those pages out.
I'll be posting Nano prompts throughout the month, but here's a list of helpful hints if you find yourself stuck.
1. Keep moving forward – DO NOT go back and endlessly revise your first chapters. You may end up throwing them out anyway. Just move forward. If you’re stuck on a scene, just write down vaguely what might happen in it or where it might happen as a place marker and move on to a scene you know better. The first draft can be just a sketch – the important thing is to get it all down, from beginning to end. Then you can start to layer in all the other stuff.
2. Keep the story elements checklist close at hand for easy reference.
- Story Elements Checklist for Generating Index Cards
Or if you prefer the elements in a narrative:
- Narrative Structure Cheat Sheet
3. Review the elements of the act you're stuck on.
- Elements of Act One
- Elements of Act Two, Part 1
- Elements of Act Two, Part 2
- Elements of Act Three
- What Makes A Great Climax?
- Elevate Your Ending
- Creating Character
4. As you're writing, you will find out more about your story. Write the premise again, and make sure you have identified and understand the Plan and Central Story Action.
- Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action
- What's the Plan?
- Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action, part 2
5. When you’re stuck - make a list.
- Stuck? Make A List.
6. Do word lists of visual and thematic elements for your story to build your image systems. Start a collage book or online clip file of images if that appeals to you.
- Thematic Image Systems
7. Remember that the first draft is always going to suck.
- Your First Draft Is Always Going To Suck
8. You can always watch movies and do breakdowns to inspire you and break you through a block.
Good luck, everyone - and feel free to stop in and gripe!
- Alex
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 13.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
It's here - the big day. Big month. Big everything.
The queen of suspense, Mary Higgins Clark, said about first drafts:
Writing a first draft is like clawing my way through a mountain of concrete with my bare hands.
Isn't that the truth?
Well, the point of Nano is to write so fast that you - sometimes - forget that your hands are dripping blood. It's a stellar way of turning off your censor (we all have one of those little suckers) and just get those pages out.
I'll be posting Nano prompts throughout the month, but here's a list of helpful hints if you find yourself stuck.
1. Keep moving forward – DO NOT go back and endlessly revise your first chapters. You may end up throwing them out anyway. Just move forward. If you’re stuck on a scene, just write down vaguely what might happen in it or where it might happen as a place marker and move on to a scene you know better. The first draft can be just a sketch – the important thing is to get it all down, from beginning to end. Then you can start to layer in all the other stuff.
2. Keep the story elements checklist close at hand for easy reference.
- Story Elements Checklist for Generating Index Cards
Or if you prefer the elements in a narrative:
- Narrative Structure Cheat Sheet
3. Review the elements of the act you're stuck on.
- Elements of Act One
- Elements of Act Two, Part 1
- Elements of Act Two, Part 2
- Elements of Act Three
- What Makes A Great Climax?
- Elevate Your Ending
- Creating Character
4. As you're writing, you will find out more about your story. Write the premise again, and make sure you have identified and understand the Plan and Central Story Action.
- Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action
- What's the Plan?
- Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action, part 2
5. When you’re stuck - make a list.
- Stuck? Make A List.
6. Do word lists of visual and thematic elements for your story to build your image systems. Start a collage book or online clip file of images if that appeals to you.
- Thematic Image Systems
7. Remember that the first draft is always going to suck.
- Your First Draft Is Always Going To Suck
8. You can always watch movies and do breakdowns to inspire you and break you through a block.
Good luck, everyone - and feel free to stop in and gripe!
- Alex
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 13.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
October 31, 2015
Happy Halloween sales!
Happy Halloween, everyone!
One of the perks - or not - of being a spooky thriller writer is that I never have Halloween off. Today and tomorrow I'm teaching/signing at the 805 Festival in Ventura (but I expect some great costumy street action later this evening.
Hope you Nanos are taking the holiday off to celebrate - but I'll be back tomorrow and throughout next month with prompts for your journey.
In the meantime, being that I AM a spooky thriller writer, I have Halloween sales going on.
Amazon has dropped the price of HUNTRESS MOON, BLOOD MOON and COLD MOON in the US, UK and AU - to just 1.99 each. Celebrate Halloween with a spooky binge read!
The Huntress/FBI Thrillers
Huntress: Amazon: $1.99 Blood Moon: Amazon: $1.99 Cold Moon: Amazon: $1.99
Special Agent Matthew Roarke thought he knew what evil was. He was wrong.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I turned to crime, I wrote novels that my publisher called supernatural thrillers and other people called horror. So if you're REALLY in the mood for something spooky:
An ambitious Boston homicide detective must join forces with a beautiful, mysterious witch from Salem to solve a series of Satanic killings.
"A wonderfully dark thriller with amazing "Is-it-isn't-it?"suspense all the way to the end. Highly recommended." - Lee Child
Book of Shadows (all territories) 3.99
The Unseen is a haunted house story – two psychology professors take a group of psychically gifted students into a house with a history of poltergeist manifestations, to replicate a controversial experiment from the 1960’s.
I was inspired by the real-life, world famous ESP testing and poltergeist investigations that took place at the Duke University parapsychology lab, headed by Dr. J.B. Rhine.
The Unseen 3.99
Five troubled students left alone on their isolated college campus over the long Thanksgiving break confront their own demons and a malevolent presence – that may or may not be real.
Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award (horror) and Anthony Award (mystery) for Best First Novel.
“Absolutely gripping...It is easy to imagine this as a film...Once started, you won’t want to stop reading.” --London Times
Now in the UK and AU as well as worldwide The Harrowing 3.99
A Boston District Attorney suspects his wife has made a terrible bargain with a mysterious hospital counselor to save the life of their dying child.
"Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre." -- The New York Times Book Review
"The Price is a gripping read full of questions about good, evil and human nature... the devastating conclusion effectively leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question to consider: 'If everyone has a price, what's yours?' " -- Rue Morgue Magazine
The Price 3.99
Or - get three books for just 5.99! Haunted: boxed set
One of the perks - or not - of being a spooky thriller writer is that I never have Halloween off. Today and tomorrow I'm teaching/signing at the 805 Festival in Ventura (but I expect some great costumy street action later this evening.
Hope you Nanos are taking the holiday off to celebrate - but I'll be back tomorrow and throughout next month with prompts for your journey.
In the meantime, being that I AM a spooky thriller writer, I have Halloween sales going on.
Amazon has dropped the price of HUNTRESS MOON, BLOOD MOON and COLD MOON in the US, UK and AU - to just 1.99 each. Celebrate Halloween with a spooky binge read!
The Huntress/FBI Thrillers
Huntress: Amazon: $1.99 Blood Moon: Amazon: $1.99 Cold Moon: Amazon: $1.99
Special Agent Matthew Roarke thought he knew what evil was. He was wrong.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before I turned to crime, I wrote novels that my publisher called supernatural thrillers and other people called horror. So if you're REALLY in the mood for something spooky:
An ambitious Boston homicide detective must join forces with a beautiful, mysterious witch from Salem to solve a series of Satanic killings.
"A wonderfully dark thriller with amazing "Is-it-isn't-it?"suspense all the way to the end. Highly recommended." - Lee Child
Book of Shadows (all territories) 3.99
The Unseen is a haunted house story – two psychology professors take a group of psychically gifted students into a house with a history of poltergeist manifestations, to replicate a controversial experiment from the 1960’s.
I was inspired by the real-life, world famous ESP testing and poltergeist investigations that took place at the Duke University parapsychology lab, headed by Dr. J.B. Rhine.
The Unseen 3.99
Five troubled students left alone on their isolated college campus over the long Thanksgiving break confront their own demons and a malevolent presence – that may or may not be real.
Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award (horror) and Anthony Award (mystery) for Best First Novel.
“Absolutely gripping...It is easy to imagine this as a film...Once started, you won’t want to stop reading.” --London Times
Now in the UK and AU as well as worldwide The Harrowing 3.99
A Boston District Attorney suspects his wife has made a terrible bargain with a mysterious hospital counselor to save the life of their dying child."Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre." -- The New York Times Book Review
"The Price is a gripping read full of questions about good, evil and human nature... the devastating conclusion effectively leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question to consider: 'If everyone has a price, what's yours?' " -- Rue Morgue Magazine
The Price 3.99
Or - get three books for just 5.99! Haunted: boxed set
October 29, 2015
Nanowrimo Prep: What's the PLAN?
by Alexandra Sokoloff
Today I want to review what I've come to believe is the key to any second act, and really the whole key to story structure: The PLAN. If you're going to read any of my posts before Nanowrimo, this is probably the one!
You always hear that “Drama is conflict,” but when you think about it – what the hell does that mean, practically?
It’s actually much more true, and specific, to say that drama is the constant clashing of a hero/ine’s PLAN and an antagonist’s, or several antagonists’, PLANS.
In the first act of a story, the hero/ine is introduced, and that hero/ine either has or quickly develops a DESIRE. She might have a PROBLEM that needs to be solved, or someone or something she WANTS, or a bad situation that she needs to get out of, pronto.
Her reaction to that problem or situation is to formulate a PLAN, even if that plan is vague or even completely subconscious. But somewhere in there, there is a plan, and storytelling is usually easier if you have the hero/ine or someone else (maybe you, the author) state that plan clearly, so the audience or reader knows exactly what the expectation is.
And the protagonist’s plan (and the corresponding plan of the antagonist’s) actually drives the entire action of the second act. Stating the plan tells us what the CENTRAL ACTION of the story will be. So it’s critical to set up the plan by the end of Act One, or at the very beginning of Act Two, at the latest.
Let’s look at some examples of how plans work.
I’m going to start, improbably, with the actioner 2012, even though I thought it was a pretty terrible movie overall.
Now, I’m sure in a theater this movie delivered on its primary objective, which was a rollercoaster ride as only Hollywood special effects can provide. Whether we like it or not, there is obviously a massive worldwide audience for movies that are primarily about delivering pure sensation. Story isn’t important, nor, apparently, is basic logic. As long as people keep buying enough tickets to these movies to make them profitable, it’s the business of Hollywood to keep churning them out.
But in 2012, even in that rollercoaster ride of special effects and sensations, there was a clear central PLAN for an audience to hook into, a plan that drove the story. Without that plan, 2012 really would have been nothing but a chaos of special effects.
If you’ve seen this movie (and I know some of you have … ), there is a point in the first act where a truly over-the-top Woody Harrelson as an Art Bell-like conspiracy pirate radio commentator rants to protagonist John Cusack about having a map that shows the location of “spaceships” that the government is stocking to abandon planet when the prophesied end of the world commences.
Although Cusack doesn’t believe it at the time, this is the PLANT (sort of camouflaged by the fact that Woody is a nutjob), that gives the audience the idea of what the PLAN OF ACTION will be: Cusack will have to go back for the map in the midst of all the cataclysm, then somehow get his family to these “spaceships” in order for all of them to survive the end of the world.
The PLAN is reiterated, in dialogue, when Cusack gets back to his family and tells his ex-wife basically exactly what I just said above: “We’re going to go back to the nutjob with the map so that we can get to those spaceships and get off the planet before it collapses.”
And lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens; it’s not only Cusack’s PLAN, but the central action of the story, that can be summed up as a CENTRAL QUESTION: Will Cusack be able to get his family to the spaceships before the world ends?
Or put another way, the CENTRAL STORY ACTION is John Cusack getting his family to the spaceships before the world ends.
(Note the ticking clock, there, as well. And as if the end of the world weren’t enough, the movie also starts a literal “Twenty-nine minutes to the end of the world!” ticking computer clock at, yes, 29 minutes before the end of the movie. I must point out here that ticking clocks are dangerous because of the huge cliché factor. We all need to study structure to know what not to do, as well.)
And all this happens about the end of Act I. Remember that I said that it’s essential to have laid out the CENTRAL QUESTION and CENTRAL STORY ACTION by the end of Act I? But also at this point – or possibly just after the climax of Act I, in the very beginning of Act II – we need to know what the PLAN is. PLAN and CENTRAL QUESTION are integrally related, and I keep looking for ways to talk about it because this is such an important concept to master.
A reader/audience really needs to know what the overall PLAN is, even if they only get it in a subconscious way. Otherwise they are left floundering, wondering where the hell all of this is going.
In 2012, even in the midst of all the buildings crumbling and crevasses opening and fires booming and planes crashing, we understand on some level what is going on:
- What does the protagonist want? (OUTER DESIRE) To save his family.
- How is he going to do it? (PLAN) By getting the map from the nutjob and getting his family to the secret spaceships (that aren’t really spaceships).
- What’s standing in his way? (FORCES OF OPPOSITION) About a million natural disasters as the planet caves in, an evil politician who has put a billion dollar price tag on tickets for the spaceship, a Russian Mafioso who keeps being in the same place at the same time as Cusack, and sometimes ends up helping, and sometimes ends up hurting. (Was I the only one queased out by the way all the Russian characters were killed off, leaving only the most obnoxious kids on the planet?)
Here’s another example, from a much better movie:
At the end of the first sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (which is arguably two sequences in itself, first the action sequence in the cave in South America, then the university sequence back in the US), Indy has just finished teaching his archeology class when his mentor, Marcus, comes to meet him with a couple of government agents who have a job for him (CALL TO ADVENTURE). The agents explain that Hitler has become obsessed with collecting occult artifacts from all over the world, and is currently trying to find the legendary Lost Ark of the Covenant, which is rumored to make any army in possession of it invincible in battle.
So there’s the MACGUFFIN, the object that everyone wants, and the STAKES: if Hitler’s minions (THE ANTAGONISTS) get this Ark before Indy does, the Nazi army will be invincible.
And then Indy explains his PLAN to find the Ark: his old mentor, Abner Ravenwood, was an expert on the Ark and had an ancient Egyptian medallion on which was inscribed the instructions for using the medallion to find the hidden location of the Ark.
So after hearing the plan, we understand the entire OVERALL ACTION of the story: Indy is going to find Abner (his mentor) to get the medallion, then use the medallion to find the Ark before Hitler’s minions can get it.
And even though there are lots of twists along the way, that’s really it: the basic action of the story.
Generally, PLAN and CENTRAL STORY ACTION are really the same thing – the Central Action of the story is carrying out the specific Plan. And the CENTRAL QUESTION of the story can be generally stated as – “Will the Plan succeed?”
Again, the PLAN, CENTRAL QUESTION and CENTRAL STORY ACTION are almost always set up – and spelled out – by the end of the first act, although the specifics of the Plan may be spelled out right after the Act I Climax at the very beginning of Act II.
Can it be later? Well, anything’s possible, but the sooner a reader or audience understands the overall thrust of the story action, the sooner they can relax and let the story take them where it’s going to go. So much of storytelling is about you, the author, reassuring your reader or audience that you know what you’re doing, so they can sit back and let you drive.
Try taking a favorite movie or book (or two or three) and identifying the PLAN, CENTRAL STORY ACTION and CENTRAL QUESTION of them in a few sentences. Like this:
- In Inception, the PLAN is for the team of dream burglars to go into a corporate heir’s dreams to plant the idea of breaking up his father’s corporation. (So the CENTRAL ACTION is going into the corporate heir’s dream and planting the idea, and the CENTRAL QUESTION is: Will they succeed?)
- In Sense and Sensibility, the PLAN is for Marianne and Elinor to secure the family’s fortune and their own happiness by marrying well. (How are they going to do that? By the period’s equivalent of dating – which is the CENTRAL ACTION. Yes, dating is a PLAN! The CENTRAL QUESTION is: Will the sisters succeed in marrying well?)
- In The Proposal, Margaret’s PLAN is to learn enough about Andrew over the four-day weekend with his family to pass the INS marriage test so she won’t be deported. (The CENTRAL ACTION is going to Alaska to meet Andrew’s family and pretending to be married while they learn enough about each other to pass the test. The CENTRAL QUESTION is: Will they be able to successfully fake the marriage?
Now, try it with your own story!
- What does the protagonist WANT?
- How does s/he PLAN to do it?
- What and who is standing in his or her way?
For example, in my spooky thriller, Book of Shadows , here's the Act One set up: the protagonist, homicide detective Adam Garrett, is called on to investigate the murder of a college girl, which looks like a Satanic killing. Garrett and his partner make a quick arrest of a classmate of the girl's, a troubled Goth musician. But Garrett is not convinced of the boy's guilt, and when a practicing witch from nearby Salem insists the boy is innocent and there have been other murders, he is compelled to investigate further.
So Garrett’s PLAN and the CENTRAL ACTION of the story is to use the witch and her specialized knowledge of magical practices to investigate the murder on his own, all the while knowing that she is using him for her own purposes and may well be involved in the killing. The CENTRAL QUESTION is: will they catch the killer before s/he kills again – and/or kills Garrett (if the witch turns out to be the killer)?
- What does the protagonist WANT? To catch the killer before s/he kills again.
- How does he PLAN to do it? By using the witch and her specialized knowledge of magical practices to investigate further.
- What’s standing in his way? His own department, the killer, and possibly the witch herself. And if the witch is right … possibly even a demon.
It’s important to note that the Plan and Central Action of the story are not always driven by the protagonist. Usually, yes. But in The Matrix, it’s Neo’s mentor Morpheus who has the overall PLAN, which drives the central action right up until the end of the second act. The Plan is to recruit and train Neo, whom Morpheus believes is “The One” prophesied to destroy the Matrix. So that’s the action we see unfolding: Morpheus recruiting, deprogramming and training Neo, who is admittedly very cute, but essentially just following Morpheus’s orders for two thirds of the movie.
Does this weaken the structure of that film? Not at all. Morpheus drives the action until that crucial point, the Act Two Climax, when he is abducted by the agents of the Matrix, at which point Neo steps into his greatness and becomes “The One” by taking over the action and making a new plan: to rescue Morpheus by sacrificing himself.
It is a terrific way to show a huge character arc: Neo stepping into his destiny. And I would add that this is a common structural pattern for mythic journey stories – in Lord of the Rings, it's Gandalf who has the PLAN and drives the reluctant Frodo in the central story action until Frodo finally takes over the action himself.
Here’s another example. In the very funny romantic comedy It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep’s character Jane is the protagonist, but she doesn’t drive the action or have any particular plan of her own. It’s her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), who seduces her and at the end of the first act, proposes (in an extremely persuasive speech) that they continue this affair as a perfect solution to both their love troubles – it will fulfill their sexual and intimacy needs without disrupting the rest of their lives.
Jane decides at that point to go along with Jake’s plan (saying, “I forgot what a good lawyer you are”). In terms of action, she is essentially passive, letting the two men in her life court her (which results in bigger and bigger comic entanglements), but that makes for a more pronounced and satisfying character arc when she finally takes a stand and breaks off the affair with Jake for good, so she can finally move on with her life.
I would venture to guess that most of us know what it’s like to be swept up in a ripping good love entanglement, and can sympathize with Jane’s desire just to go with the passion of it without having to make any pesky practical decisions. It’s a perfectly fine – and natural – structure for a romantic comedy, as long as at that key juncture, the protagonist has the realization and balls – or ovaries – to take control of her own life again and make a stand for what she truly wants.
I give you these last two examples – hopefully – to show how helpful it can be to study the specific structure of stories that are similar to your own. As you can see from the above, the general writing rule that the protagonist drives the action may not apply to what you’re writing – and you might want to make a different choice that will better serve your own story. And that goes for any general writing rule.
QUESTIONS:
Have you identified the CENTRAL ACTION of your story? Do you know what the protagonist's and antagonist's PLANS are? At what point in your book does the reader have a clear idea of the protagonist’s PLAN? Is it stated aloud? Can you make it clearer than it is?
- Alex
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 13.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
Today I want to review what I've come to believe is the key to any second act, and really the whole key to story structure: The PLAN. If you're going to read any of my posts before Nanowrimo, this is probably the one!
You always hear that “Drama is conflict,” but when you think about it – what the hell does that mean, practically?
It’s actually much more true, and specific, to say that drama is the constant clashing of a hero/ine’s PLAN and an antagonist’s, or several antagonists’, PLANS.
In the first act of a story, the hero/ine is introduced, and that hero/ine either has or quickly develops a DESIRE. She might have a PROBLEM that needs to be solved, or someone or something she WANTS, or a bad situation that she needs to get out of, pronto.
Her reaction to that problem or situation is to formulate a PLAN, even if that plan is vague or even completely subconscious. But somewhere in there, there is a plan, and storytelling is usually easier if you have the hero/ine or someone else (maybe you, the author) state that plan clearly, so the audience or reader knows exactly what the expectation is.
And the protagonist’s plan (and the corresponding plan of the antagonist’s) actually drives the entire action of the second act. Stating the plan tells us what the CENTRAL ACTION of the story will be. So it’s critical to set up the plan by the end of Act One, or at the very beginning of Act Two, at the latest.
Let’s look at some examples of how plans work.
I’m going to start, improbably, with the actioner 2012, even though I thought it was a pretty terrible movie overall.
Now, I’m sure in a theater this movie delivered on its primary objective, which was a rollercoaster ride as only Hollywood special effects can provide. Whether we like it or not, there is obviously a massive worldwide audience for movies that are primarily about delivering pure sensation. Story isn’t important, nor, apparently, is basic logic. As long as people keep buying enough tickets to these movies to make them profitable, it’s the business of Hollywood to keep churning them out.
But in 2012, even in that rollercoaster ride of special effects and sensations, there was a clear central PLAN for an audience to hook into, a plan that drove the story. Without that plan, 2012 really would have been nothing but a chaos of special effects.
If you’ve seen this movie (and I know some of you have … ), there is a point in the first act where a truly over-the-top Woody Harrelson as an Art Bell-like conspiracy pirate radio commentator rants to protagonist John Cusack about having a map that shows the location of “spaceships” that the government is stocking to abandon planet when the prophesied end of the world commences.
Although Cusack doesn’t believe it at the time, this is the PLANT (sort of camouflaged by the fact that Woody is a nutjob), that gives the audience the idea of what the PLAN OF ACTION will be: Cusack will have to go back for the map in the midst of all the cataclysm, then somehow get his family to these “spaceships” in order for all of them to survive the end of the world.
The PLAN is reiterated, in dialogue, when Cusack gets back to his family and tells his ex-wife basically exactly what I just said above: “We’re going to go back to the nutjob with the map so that we can get to those spaceships and get off the planet before it collapses.”
And lo and behold, that’s exactly what happens; it’s not only Cusack’s PLAN, but the central action of the story, that can be summed up as a CENTRAL QUESTION: Will Cusack be able to get his family to the spaceships before the world ends?
Or put another way, the CENTRAL STORY ACTION is John Cusack getting his family to the spaceships before the world ends.
(Note the ticking clock, there, as well. And as if the end of the world weren’t enough, the movie also starts a literal “Twenty-nine minutes to the end of the world!” ticking computer clock at, yes, 29 minutes before the end of the movie. I must point out here that ticking clocks are dangerous because of the huge cliché factor. We all need to study structure to know what not to do, as well.)
And all this happens about the end of Act I. Remember that I said that it’s essential to have laid out the CENTRAL QUESTION and CENTRAL STORY ACTION by the end of Act I? But also at this point – or possibly just after the climax of Act I, in the very beginning of Act II – we need to know what the PLAN is. PLAN and CENTRAL QUESTION are integrally related, and I keep looking for ways to talk about it because this is such an important concept to master.
A reader/audience really needs to know what the overall PLAN is, even if they only get it in a subconscious way. Otherwise they are left floundering, wondering where the hell all of this is going.
In 2012, even in the midst of all the buildings crumbling and crevasses opening and fires booming and planes crashing, we understand on some level what is going on:
- What does the protagonist want? (OUTER DESIRE) To save his family.
- How is he going to do it? (PLAN) By getting the map from the nutjob and getting his family to the secret spaceships (that aren’t really spaceships).
- What’s standing in his way? (FORCES OF OPPOSITION) About a million natural disasters as the planet caves in, an evil politician who has put a billion dollar price tag on tickets for the spaceship, a Russian Mafioso who keeps being in the same place at the same time as Cusack, and sometimes ends up helping, and sometimes ends up hurting. (Was I the only one queased out by the way all the Russian characters were killed off, leaving only the most obnoxious kids on the planet?)
Here’s another example, from a much better movie:
At the end of the first sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (which is arguably two sequences in itself, first the action sequence in the cave in South America, then the university sequence back in the US), Indy has just finished teaching his archeology class when his mentor, Marcus, comes to meet him with a couple of government agents who have a job for him (CALL TO ADVENTURE). The agents explain that Hitler has become obsessed with collecting occult artifacts from all over the world, and is currently trying to find the legendary Lost Ark of the Covenant, which is rumored to make any army in possession of it invincible in battle.
So there’s the MACGUFFIN, the object that everyone wants, and the STAKES: if Hitler’s minions (THE ANTAGONISTS) get this Ark before Indy does, the Nazi army will be invincible.
And then Indy explains his PLAN to find the Ark: his old mentor, Abner Ravenwood, was an expert on the Ark and had an ancient Egyptian medallion on which was inscribed the instructions for using the medallion to find the hidden location of the Ark.
So after hearing the plan, we understand the entire OVERALL ACTION of the story: Indy is going to find Abner (his mentor) to get the medallion, then use the medallion to find the Ark before Hitler’s minions can get it.
And even though there are lots of twists along the way, that’s really it: the basic action of the story.
Generally, PLAN and CENTRAL STORY ACTION are really the same thing – the Central Action of the story is carrying out the specific Plan. And the CENTRAL QUESTION of the story can be generally stated as – “Will the Plan succeed?”
Again, the PLAN, CENTRAL QUESTION and CENTRAL STORY ACTION are almost always set up – and spelled out – by the end of the first act, although the specifics of the Plan may be spelled out right after the Act I Climax at the very beginning of Act II.
Can it be later? Well, anything’s possible, but the sooner a reader or audience understands the overall thrust of the story action, the sooner they can relax and let the story take them where it’s going to go. So much of storytelling is about you, the author, reassuring your reader or audience that you know what you’re doing, so they can sit back and let you drive.
Try taking a favorite movie or book (or two or three) and identifying the PLAN, CENTRAL STORY ACTION and CENTRAL QUESTION of them in a few sentences. Like this:
- In Inception, the PLAN is for the team of dream burglars to go into a corporate heir’s dreams to plant the idea of breaking up his father’s corporation. (So the CENTRAL ACTION is going into the corporate heir’s dream and planting the idea, and the CENTRAL QUESTION is: Will they succeed?)
- In Sense and Sensibility, the PLAN is for Marianne and Elinor to secure the family’s fortune and their own happiness by marrying well. (How are they going to do that? By the period’s equivalent of dating – which is the CENTRAL ACTION. Yes, dating is a PLAN! The CENTRAL QUESTION is: Will the sisters succeed in marrying well?)
- In The Proposal, Margaret’s PLAN is to learn enough about Andrew over the four-day weekend with his family to pass the INS marriage test so she won’t be deported. (The CENTRAL ACTION is going to Alaska to meet Andrew’s family and pretending to be married while they learn enough about each other to pass the test. The CENTRAL QUESTION is: Will they be able to successfully fake the marriage?
Now, try it with your own story!
- What does the protagonist WANT?
- How does s/he PLAN to do it?
- What and who is standing in his or her way?
For example, in my spooky thriller, Book of Shadows , here's the Act One set up: the protagonist, homicide detective Adam Garrett, is called on to investigate the murder of a college girl, which looks like a Satanic killing. Garrett and his partner make a quick arrest of a classmate of the girl's, a troubled Goth musician. But Garrett is not convinced of the boy's guilt, and when a practicing witch from nearby Salem insists the boy is innocent and there have been other murders, he is compelled to investigate further.
So Garrett’s PLAN and the CENTRAL ACTION of the story is to use the witch and her specialized knowledge of magical practices to investigate the murder on his own, all the while knowing that she is using him for her own purposes and may well be involved in the killing. The CENTRAL QUESTION is: will they catch the killer before s/he kills again – and/or kills Garrett (if the witch turns out to be the killer)?
- What does the protagonist WANT? To catch the killer before s/he kills again.
- How does he PLAN to do it? By using the witch and her specialized knowledge of magical practices to investigate further.
- What’s standing in his way? His own department, the killer, and possibly the witch herself. And if the witch is right … possibly even a demon.
It’s important to note that the Plan and Central Action of the story are not always driven by the protagonist. Usually, yes. But in The Matrix, it’s Neo’s mentor Morpheus who has the overall PLAN, which drives the central action right up until the end of the second act. The Plan is to recruit and train Neo, whom Morpheus believes is “The One” prophesied to destroy the Matrix. So that’s the action we see unfolding: Morpheus recruiting, deprogramming and training Neo, who is admittedly very cute, but essentially just following Morpheus’s orders for two thirds of the movie.
Does this weaken the structure of that film? Not at all. Morpheus drives the action until that crucial point, the Act Two Climax, when he is abducted by the agents of the Matrix, at which point Neo steps into his greatness and becomes “The One” by taking over the action and making a new plan: to rescue Morpheus by sacrificing himself.
It is a terrific way to show a huge character arc: Neo stepping into his destiny. And I would add that this is a common structural pattern for mythic journey stories – in Lord of the Rings, it's Gandalf who has the PLAN and drives the reluctant Frodo in the central story action until Frodo finally takes over the action himself.
Here’s another example. In the very funny romantic comedy It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep’s character Jane is the protagonist, but she doesn’t drive the action or have any particular plan of her own. It’s her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), who seduces her and at the end of the first act, proposes (in an extremely persuasive speech) that they continue this affair as a perfect solution to both their love troubles – it will fulfill their sexual and intimacy needs without disrupting the rest of their lives.
Jane decides at that point to go along with Jake’s plan (saying, “I forgot what a good lawyer you are”). In terms of action, she is essentially passive, letting the two men in her life court her (which results in bigger and bigger comic entanglements), but that makes for a more pronounced and satisfying character arc when she finally takes a stand and breaks off the affair with Jake for good, so she can finally move on with her life.
I would venture to guess that most of us know what it’s like to be swept up in a ripping good love entanglement, and can sympathize with Jane’s desire just to go with the passion of it without having to make any pesky practical decisions. It’s a perfectly fine – and natural – structure for a romantic comedy, as long as at that key juncture, the protagonist has the realization and balls – or ovaries – to take control of her own life again and make a stand for what she truly wants.
I give you these last two examples – hopefully – to show how helpful it can be to study the specific structure of stories that are similar to your own. As you can see from the above, the general writing rule that the protagonist drives the action may not apply to what you’re writing – and you might want to make a different choice that will better serve your own story. And that goes for any general writing rule.
QUESTIONS:
Have you identified the CENTRAL ACTION of your story? Do you know what the protagonist's and antagonist's PLANS are? At what point in your book does the reader have a clear idea of the protagonist’s PLAN? Is it stated aloud? Can you make it clearer than it is?
- Alex
=====================================================
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks. e format, just $3.99 and $2.99; print 13.99.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
October 25, 2015
Nanowrimo: Elements of Act One
by Alexandra Sokoloff
So now we've talked about basic filmic structure as it might be applied to novels, and you have your structure grid, and a grasp on how you're going to use index cards to brainstorm and lay out your story.
I don't know about you, but when I start a project, I know much, much, much more about the first act than any of the rest of it. I can see the mountains in the distance, but at first, I know much more about the basic set up and characters. So it makes sense to start at the beginning, and fill out the Elements of Act One.
What actually goes into a first act?
The first act of a movie (first 30 pages) or book (first 100 pages, approx.) is the SET UP. By the end of the first act you’re going to be introduced to all the major players of the story, the themes, the location, the visual image system, the conflicts, and especially the main conflict.
When you’re making up index cards, you can immediately make up several cards that will go in your first act column. You may or may not know what some of those scenes look like already, but either way, you know they’re all going to be there.
- Opening image
- Meet the hero or heroine
- Hero/ine’s inner and outer need
- Hero/ine's ghost or wound
- Hero/ine’s arc
- Inciting Incident/ Call to Adventure
- Meet the antagonist (and/or introduce a mystery, which is what you do when you’re going to keep your antagonist hidden to reveal at the end)
- State the theme/what’s the story about?
- Allies
- Mentor
- A mirror character (sometimes)
- Meet the Love interest (and please don't "Meet Cute")
- Plant/Reveal (or: Set ups and Payoffs)
- Hope/Fear (and Stakes)
- Time Clock (possibly. May not have one and may be revealed later in the story)
- Central Question
- Plan/Central Story Action (may not be introduced until early Act II)
- Sequence One climax
- Act One climax (or curtain, or culmination)
- Crossing the Threshold or Into the Special World (which we'll talk about later)
Yeah, it’s a lot! That’s why first acts are often the most revised and rewritten sections of the story. It’s also why it’s often the section most in need of cutting and condensing. The answer is usually combining scenes. All these things have to be done, but they all have to be done within such a limited time frame (and page frame) that you simply HAVE to make each scene work on multiple levels.
Let’s break these things down.
OPENING IMAGE:
Of course in a film you have an opening image by default, whether you plan to or not. It’s the first thing you see in the film. But good filmmakers will use that opening image to establish all kinds of things about the film – mood, tone, location, and especially theme. Think of the opening image of WITNESS – the serene and isolated calm of wind over a wheat field. It’s the world of the Amish – the non-violent, unhurried world into which city violence will soon be introduced. It’s a great contrast with the next image to come – the chaos and noise of the city. This is a great opening image because it also suggests the climax (which takes place in the grain silo – the villain is killed by the spill of grain as the townspeople keep him surrounded.
The opening image of THE USUAL SUSPECTS is a man taking a piss… a sly reference to Verbal and the whole movie “taking the piss” – as the British say - on (or out of) the audience.
The opening image of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is a dark, misty forest, through which Clarice is running as if in a dream.
Well, novelists, instead of (or in addition to) killing yourself trying to concoct a great first line, how about giving some thought to what your opening scene LOOKS like? It takes a lot of the pressure off that first page anxiety - because you're focused on conveying a powerful image that will intrigue and entice the reader into the book. What do we see? How does it make us feel?
Try it!
(I'll talk more about this in posts on VISUAL STORYTELLING.)
MEETING THE HERO/INE
Of course you’re going to devise an interesting, clever and evocative introduction to your main character. But there are a whole lot of structural things that you need to get across about your hero/ine from the very beginning. You have to know your character’s INNER AND OUTER DESIRES and how they conflict.
In fact, let’s just stop right there and talk about this crucial idea of
INNER AND OUTER DESIRE.
The first thing any acting student learns in terms of creating a character and building a scene is to ask the question: “What do I WANT?” - n every scene, and in the story overall. When I was directing plays (yeah, in one of my multiple past lives) and a scene was just lying dead on the stage, I could always get the actors to breathe life into it by getting them to clarify what they wanted in the scene and simply playing that want. This is something that starts in the writing, obviously, and should always be on the author’s mind, too: Who wants what in the scene, and how do those desires conflict? Who WINS in the scene?
But even before all that, one of the most important steps of creating a story, from the very beginning, is identifying the protagonist overall desire and need in the story. You also hear this called “internal” and “external” desire, and “want” and “deep need”, but it’s all the same thing. A strong main character will want something immediately, like to get that promotion, or to have sex with the love interest. But there’s something underneath that surface want that is really driving the character, and in good characters, those inner and outer desires are in conflict. Also, the character will KNOW that s/he wants that outer desire, but probably have very little idea that what she really needs is the inner desire.
One of the great examples of all time of inner and outer desire in conflict is in the George Bailey character in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. From the very beginning George wants to see the world, to do big things, design big buildings – all very male, external, explosive goals. But his deep need is to become a good man and community leader like his father, who does big things and fights big battles – but on a microcosm, in their tiny, “boring” little community of Bedford Falls, which George can’t wait to escape.
But every choice he actually makes in the story defers his external need to escape, and ties him closer to the community that he becomes the moral leader of, as he takes on his late father’s role and battles the town’s would-be dictator, Mr. Potter. George does not take on that role happily – he fights it every single step of the way, and resents it a good bit of the time. But it’s that conflict which makes George such a great character whom we emphasize with – it’s a story of how an ordinary man becomes a true hero.
In SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Clarice’s outer desire is for advancement in the FBI. And Harris conveys this desire in what is a brilliant storytelling trick: He has Dr. Lecter tell her so. “You’re sooooo ambitious, aren’t you?” He purrs. And “I’ll give you what you most desire, Clarice. Advancement.”
It’s brilliant because it makes Lecter all-knowing, but it also clearly spells out Clarice’s desire, which the audience/reader really does need to know to commit to the character and relax into the story. I’m a big believer in just spelling it out.
But what Clarice REALLY needs is not advancement. What she needs to save a lamb – the lamb that haunts her dreams, the lamb she hears screaming. In the story, the kidnapped senator’s daughter Catherine is the lamb, and Harris uses animal imagery to subtly evoke a lamb and the scene of the slaughter of the lambs that haunts Clarice.
And again, Lecter is the one who draws this deep need out of Clarice.
Also Clarice’s need and desire come into conflict: what she WANTS is advancement, but in order to save Catherine, she has to defy her superiors and jeopardize her graduation from the academy.
It’s usually true that the external desire will be a selfish want – something the protagonist wants for him or herself, and the inner need will be unselfish - something the protagonist comes to want for other people. This is a useful guideline because it clearly shows character growth.
But even in a romantic comedy, where the inner and outer desire might not be so deep, there can be a lot of meaning and change. In Romancing The Stone, Joan Wilder's obvious plot-driven outer desire is to save her sister - she's a good person and she's already got an unselfish drive. But she's also got a personal outer desire: for a great love with the man of her dreams, the one she keeps writing about.
But her inner need is to become the self-realized woman she is capable of being: the intrepid, independent, and loving woman she writes about. Through the course of the movie we see her becoming that woman before our eyes, and we see her flawed real-life man fall in love with her because of that independence and adventurousness. She gets her man by finding herself.
CHARACTER ARC
Closely entwined with the inner/outer desire lines is the ARC of the character (and this is important to think about from the very beginning of Act One, since you are devising the end of your story at the same time as you’re planning the beginning.)
The arc of the character is what the character learns during the course of the story, and how s/he changes because of it. It could be said that the arc of a character is almost always about the character realizing that s/he’s been obsessed with an outer goal or desire, when what she really needs to be whole, fulfilled, and lovable is (fill in the blank). On top of that a character will go from shy and repressed to a capable and respected leader, from selfish to altruistic, from pathological liar to a seeker of truth… and the bigger the change, the more impact the story will have, as long as you keep it believable.
So it’s essential to know where you want your character to end up. Once you know that, you can work backward to create a number of personal obstacles and external problems that are keeping that character from being everything s/he can be.
INCITING INCIDENT/CALL TO ADVENTURE
This is the event that starts the story and forces the hero/ine to react.
In JAWS, it happens on the first few pages of the book, and the first few minutes of the movie: the shark swims into the quiet bay and eats a swimmer. That’s the event that forces the hero, Sheriff Brody, to take action. (In mysteries and thrillers the first death is often the inciting incident – it’s so common that writers refer to it as “the corpse hits the floor”. In the case of JAWS, the corpse hits the ocean floor.)
In STAR WARS, Luke Skywalker finds the hologram of the captured Princess Leia pleading for help that she has hidden in the robot R2D2.
In CHINATOWN, a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray walks into Jake Gittes’ office and hires him to prove her husband is cheating on her. (In a detective story, the inciting incident is often the case that lands in the detective’s lap, or again, “the corpse hits the floor”.
In RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, the government guys come to Professor Indiana Jones and want to hire him to recover the lost Ark of the Covenant – before Hitler gets it.
In SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Clarice is called to FBI agent Crawford’s office, where he tells her he has “an interesting errand for her.”
In HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, an owl delivers Harry’s invitation to Hogwart’s School. (The Call to Adventure is very often a literal phone call, summons, knock on the door, or mailed invitation).
Each of these incidents propels the hero/ine into action. They must make a decision – to take the job, accept the task, answer the call. This is not an optional step for you, the writer – it is a crucial part of every story.
Joseph Campbell and Christopher Vogler detail another step here – THE REFUSAL OF THE CALL. The hero/ine is often reluctant to take that step into adventure and at first says no to the job. Let's face it - we all tend to resist change and the unknown, right? So much easier to just see what's on TV tonight.
In CHINATOWN, for example, Jake initially tries to talk “Mrs. Mulwray” out of pursuing the case. In HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE there’s a whole sequence of Harry’s uncle trying to prevent Harry from receiving his invitation to Hogwart’s school.
THE ANTAGONIST
The antagonist, opponent, villain deserves his/her own post - see here and here. For the purposes of this post I’ll just say, either you’ll be introducing the antagonist in the first act, or you’ll be introducing a mystery or problem or crisis that has actually been set in motion by the antagonist.
ALLIES
Also in the first act, you’ll set up most of the hero/ine’s allies – the sidekick, the roommate, the best friend, the love interest, the brother or sister.
MENTOR
Not all stories have mentors, and the mentor might not be introduced until some time in the second act.
LOVE INTEREST
Again, optional, but it's rare not to have one! This character generally plays a dual role: the love interest can also be the antagonist (in most love stories), an ally, a mentor, or the actual villain.
Obviously, meeting the love of your life is an extremely significant moment and it should be treated as such in your script or book. Unfortunately this usually translates into appalling "meet cute" scenes in which - more times than I can freaking count - the hero spills coffee on the heroine, or vice-versa, ruining her or his new suit just before that big job interview, so the heroine has an excuse to hate the hero even though he offers to pay for the suit. Or vice-versa.
I'm not going to go into my whole rant about "meet cute" right now, I'm just bringing it up as an example hoping you will cringe as much as I do and vow to do better. A lot better. As always, I suggest you make a list of your favorite meetings of soon-to-be lovers, and see what great storytellers do with the moment - whether it be comic, erotic, or downright bizarre.
HOPE/FEAR (STAKES)
Just as good storytellers will be sure to make it perfectly clear what the main character’s inner and outer desires are, these storytellers will also be very clear about what we HOPE and FEAR for the main character. This is one of the most dynamic storytelling tricks you can employ in your writing, in fact, because it engages your reader or audience fully in the action of the story.
Generally what we hope for the character is the same as her or his INNER NEED. We hope George Bailey will defeat Mr. Potter. We fear Potter will drive George and his family into ruin (and George possibly to suicide). Our fear for the character should be the absolute worst case scenario: in a drama, mystery or thriller we’re talking madness, suicide, death, ruin. In a comedy or romance the stakes are more likely the loss of love.
Our awareness of the stakes may grow along with the main character’s growing awareness, but it most stories there are clues to the bigger picture right from the beginning
STATEMENT OF THEME:
A reader or audience will get restless if they don’t have a good idea of what the story is within the first five (I’d even say three) minutes of a movie, or the first twenty pages of a book. Sometimes it’s enough to have just a sense of the central conflict. But often good storytellers will make it perfectly clear what the theme of the story is, and very early on in the story. In the first act of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, George is impatient to leave pokey little Bedford Falls and go out in the world to “do big things”. George’s father tells him that in their own small way, he feels they ARE doing big things at the Building and Loan; they’re satisfying one of the most basic needs of human beings by helping them own their own homes. This is a lovely statement of the theme of the movie: that it’s the ordinary, seemingly mundane acts that we do every day that add up to a heroic life.
FIRST ACT CLIMAX/CENTRAL QUESTION:
We talked about sequence and act climaxes last week – that an act climax will have a reversal, revelation, and often a setpiece and/or change of location set piece that spins the story into the second act. What we didn’t talk about is the idea of the central question of the story.
I will be didactic here and say that by the end of the first act you MUST have given your reader or audience everything they need to know about what the story is going to be about: what kind of story it is, who the hero/ine and antagonist (or mystery) are, and what the main conflict is going to be. It’s useful to think of the story a posing a central question: Will Clarice get Lecter to give her the information she need to catch Buffalo Bill before he kills again? Will Sheriff Brody’s team be able to kill the shark before it kills again (and in time to save the tourist season?) Will the crew of the Nostromo be able to catch and kill that alien before it kills them?
(All right, those are some bloody examples, but that’s me.)
It’s the question on which the entire action of the story hinges.
Here’s an interesting structural paradigm to consider. In a lot of stories, the central question is actually answered in the second act climax, and the answer is often: No.
What’s the second act climax of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS?
(Hint: it’s the one scene/setpiece that EVERYONE remembers, and Clarice has nothing to do with it.)
Right – Lecter escapes. Well, what does that have to do with our heroine?
It means that Lecter will NOT be helping her catch Buffalo Bill. In fact, in the movie, when she gets the phone call that Lecter has escaped, she says aloud, “Catherine’s dead.”
Because Clarice thinks that she needs Lecter to save Catherine. But Lecter, like the great mentor he is, has TAUGHT Clarice enough that she can catch Buffalo Bill and save Catherine herself (okay, with help from the teaching of her other mentor, Crawford).
Ingenious storytelling, there, which is why I keep returning to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS for my story structure examples.
Obviously your ASSIGNMENT is to create index cards for the first act, all the while of course making index cards for other parts of your story as they occur to you.
And if you don't know what one of your elements is yet, like the opening image, or the call to adventure, then I strongly suggest that you just write a card that says OPENING IMAGE. And one for CALL TO ADVENTURE, and pin it up there on your structure grid in approximately the right place. Our creative minds are so very eager to do this work for us that if you just acknowledge that you need a scene like that, your subconscious will jump right to work and figure one out for you. I swear. It is one of the great miracles of writing.
- Alex
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I strongly recommend that you watch at least one, or much better, three of the films I break down in the workbooks, following along with my notes.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here, including a first act breakdown of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
October 19, 2015
Nanowrimo Prep: Story Elements for Brainstorming Index Cards
by Alexandra Sokoloff
Now we've covered the Three-Act, Eight Sequence Structure and you've seen how you can lay those sequences out on a story structure grid, and how to use index cards for brainstorming your plot.
So on to what we REALLY need: a cheat sheet for brainstorming.
Below is a general Story Elements Checklist, so you have a whole overview of scenes and story elements that appear in each act, of pretty much any story, to help you flesh out your story to the end.
In the next two weeks, you can put together an outline of your own story very quickly by using the list below and the Index Cards and Structure Grid. You can also print out this list as a general roadmap as you're writing next month.
When you start out brainstorming index cards, you can make cards for all of the elements below, even if you have no idea what those scenes might look like, because with only one or two exceptions (which I've noted below), these are scenes and elements that are going to appear in your story no matter what genre you're writing in.
Even better - they're almost certainly going to appear in the Act in which I've listed them below. There are exceptions, of course, but those are rare.
It's okay if there are holes, right now! Write in what you know. I'm a big believer that just asking the question will get your subconscious working on the perfect answer. Write out the card in the most general sense today, and you may well wake up with the perfect scene tomorrow morning.
Once you've got the cards in rough place on your structure grid, then try putting your story in order in a simple outline.
You don't have to follow the outline exactly, or at all! But while you're writing next month, you'll have it as a roadmap to pull out and remind you where your story is going, when you inevitably get lost in the pure creativity of a first draft.
We'll talk about these elements in depth in the next couple of weeks.
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STORY ELEMENTS CHECKLIST FOR GENERATING INDEX CARDS
ACT ONE
* Opening image
* Meet the hero or heroine in the ordinary world
* Hero/ine’s inner and outer desire.
* Hero/ine's ghost or wound
* Hero/ine’s arc -
* Inciting Incident/Call to Adventure
* Meet the antagonist (and/or introduce a mystery, which is what you do when you’re going to keep your antagonist hidden to reveal at the end)
* State the theme/what’s the story about?
* Allies
* Mentor (possibly. You may not have one or s/he may be revealed later in the story).
* Love interest (probably)
* Plant/Reveal (or: Set ups and Payoffs)
* Hope/Fear (and Stakes)
* Time Clock (possibly. May not have one or may be revealed later in the story)
* Sequence One climax
* Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action
* Act One climax
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT TWO, PART ONE
* Crossing the Threshold/ Into the Special World (may occur in Act One)
* Threshold Guardian/Guardian at the Gate (possibly)
* Hero/ine’s Plan
* Antagonist’s Plan
* Training Sequence (possibly)
* Series of Tests
-
* Picking up new Allies
* Assembling the Team (possibly)
* Attacks by the Antagonist (whether or not the Hero/ine recognizes these as coming from the antagonist)
* In a detective story, Questioning Witnesses, Lining Up and Eliminating Suspects, Following Clues.
*Bonding with Allies
THE MIDPOINT
* Completely changes the game
* Locks the hero/ine into a situation or action
* Can be a huge revelation
* Can be a huge defeat
* Can be a “now it’s personal” loss
* Can be sex at 60 – the lovers finally get together, only to open up a whole new world of problems
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT TWO, PART TWO
* Recalibrating – after the shock or defeat of the game-changer in the midpoint, the hero/ine must Revamp The Plan and try a New Mode of Attack.
* Escalating Actions/ Obsessive Drive
* Hard Choices and Crossing The Line (immoral actions by the main character to get what s/he wants)
* Loss of Key Allies (possibly because of the hero/ine’s obsessive actions, possibly through death or injury by the antagonist).
* A Ticking Clock (can happen anywhere in the story)
* Reversals and Revelations/Twists.
* The Long Dark Night of the Soul and/or Visit to Death (also known as: All Is Lost)
* In a romance or romantic comedy, the All Is Lost moment is often a The Lover Makes A Stand scene
THE SECOND ACT CLIMAX
* Often can be a final revelation before the end game: the knowledge of who the opponent really is
* Answers the Central Question
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT THREE
The third act is basically the Final Battle and Resolution. It can often be one continuous sequence – the chase and confrontation, or confrontation and chase. There may be a final preparation for battle, or it might be done on the fly. Either here or in the last part of the second act the hero will make a new, FINAL PLAN, based on the new information and revelations of the second act.
The essence of a third act is the final showdown between protagonist and antagonist. It is often divided into two sequences:
1. Getting there (Storming the Castle)
2. The final battle itself
* Thematic Location - often a visual and literal representation of the Hero/ine’s Greatest Nightmare
* The protagonist’s character change
* The antagonist’s character change (if any)
* Possibly ally/allies’ character changes and/or gaining of desire
* Possibly a huge final reversal or reveal (twist), or even a whole series of payoffs that you’ve been saving (as in Back to the Future and It’s A Wonderful Life)
* RESOLUTION: A glimpse into the New Way of Life that the hero/ine will be living after this whole ordeal and all s/he’s learned from it.
* Closing Image
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, I'd also like to remind everyone that this is a basic, GENERAL list. There are story elements specific to whatever kind of story you're writing, and the best way to get familiar with what those are is to do the story breakdowns on three (at least) movies or books that are similar to the KIND of story you're writing.
I strongly recommend that you watch at least one, or much better, three of the films I break down in the workbooks, following along with my notes.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
Now we've covered the Three-Act, Eight Sequence Structure and you've seen how you can lay those sequences out on a story structure grid, and how to use index cards for brainstorming your plot.
So on to what we REALLY need: a cheat sheet for brainstorming.
Below is a general Story Elements Checklist, so you have a whole overview of scenes and story elements that appear in each act, of pretty much any story, to help you flesh out your story to the end.
In the next two weeks, you can put together an outline of your own story very quickly by using the list below and the Index Cards and Structure Grid. You can also print out this list as a general roadmap as you're writing next month.
When you start out brainstorming index cards, you can make cards for all of the elements below, even if you have no idea what those scenes might look like, because with only one or two exceptions (which I've noted below), these are scenes and elements that are going to appear in your story no matter what genre you're writing in.
Even better - they're almost certainly going to appear in the Act in which I've listed them below. There are exceptions, of course, but those are rare.
It's okay if there are holes, right now! Write in what you know. I'm a big believer that just asking the question will get your subconscious working on the perfect answer. Write out the card in the most general sense today, and you may well wake up with the perfect scene tomorrow morning.
Once you've got the cards in rough place on your structure grid, then try putting your story in order in a simple outline.
You don't have to follow the outline exactly, or at all! But while you're writing next month, you'll have it as a roadmap to pull out and remind you where your story is going, when you inevitably get lost in the pure creativity of a first draft.
We'll talk about these elements in depth in the next couple of weeks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
STORY ELEMENTS CHECKLIST FOR GENERATING INDEX CARDS
ACT ONE
* Opening image
* Meet the hero or heroine in the ordinary world
* Hero/ine’s inner and outer desire.
* Hero/ine's ghost or wound
* Hero/ine’s arc -
* Inciting Incident/Call to Adventure
* Meet the antagonist (and/or introduce a mystery, which is what you do when you’re going to keep your antagonist hidden to reveal at the end)
* State the theme/what’s the story about?
* Allies
* Mentor (possibly. You may not have one or s/he may be revealed later in the story).
* Love interest (probably)
* Plant/Reveal (or: Set ups and Payoffs)
* Hope/Fear (and Stakes)
* Time Clock (possibly. May not have one or may be revealed later in the story)
* Sequence One climax
* Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action
* Act One climax
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT TWO, PART ONE
* Crossing the Threshold/ Into the Special World (may occur in Act One)
* Threshold Guardian/Guardian at the Gate (possibly)
* Hero/ine’s Plan
* Antagonist’s Plan
* Training Sequence (possibly)
* Series of Tests
-
* Picking up new Allies
* Assembling the Team (possibly)
* Attacks by the Antagonist (whether or not the Hero/ine recognizes these as coming from the antagonist)
* In a detective story, Questioning Witnesses, Lining Up and Eliminating Suspects, Following Clues.
*Bonding with Allies
THE MIDPOINT
* Completely changes the game
* Locks the hero/ine into a situation or action
* Can be a huge revelation
* Can be a huge defeat
* Can be a “now it’s personal” loss
* Can be sex at 60 – the lovers finally get together, only to open up a whole new world of problems
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT TWO, PART TWO
* Recalibrating – after the shock or defeat of the game-changer in the midpoint, the hero/ine must Revamp The Plan and try a New Mode of Attack.
* Escalating Actions/ Obsessive Drive
* Hard Choices and Crossing The Line (immoral actions by the main character to get what s/he wants)
* Loss of Key Allies (possibly because of the hero/ine’s obsessive actions, possibly through death or injury by the antagonist).
* A Ticking Clock (can happen anywhere in the story)
* Reversals and Revelations/Twists.
* The Long Dark Night of the Soul and/or Visit to Death (also known as: All Is Lost)
* In a romance or romantic comedy, the All Is Lost moment is often a The Lover Makes A Stand scene
THE SECOND ACT CLIMAX
* Often can be a final revelation before the end game: the knowledge of who the opponent really is
* Answers the Central Question
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ACT THREE
The third act is basically the Final Battle and Resolution. It can often be one continuous sequence – the chase and confrontation, or confrontation and chase. There may be a final preparation for battle, or it might be done on the fly. Either here or in the last part of the second act the hero will make a new, FINAL PLAN, based on the new information and revelations of the second act.
The essence of a third act is the final showdown between protagonist and antagonist. It is often divided into two sequences:
1. Getting there (Storming the Castle)
2. The final battle itself
* Thematic Location - often a visual and literal representation of the Hero/ine’s Greatest Nightmare
* The protagonist’s character change
* The antagonist’s character change (if any)
* Possibly ally/allies’ character changes and/or gaining of desire
* Possibly a huge final reversal or reveal (twist), or even a whole series of payoffs that you’ve been saving (as in Back to the Future and It’s A Wonderful Life)
* RESOLUTION: A glimpse into the New Way of Life that the hero/ine will be living after this whole ordeal and all s/he’s learned from it.
* Closing Image
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, I'd also like to remind everyone that this is a basic, GENERAL list. There are story elements specific to whatever kind of story you're writing, and the best way to get familiar with what those are is to do the story breakdowns on three (at least) movies or books that are similar to the KIND of story you're writing.
I strongly recommend that you watch at least one, or much better, three of the films I break down in the workbooks, following along with my notes.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
October 14, 2015
Nanowrimo Prep: The Index Card Method and Story Structure Grid
THE INDEX CARD METHOD
by Alexandra Sokoloff
It's just half a month to Nanowrimo. Are you REALLY ready to write?
If you're not 100% sure what your story is (and who ever is?), here's a fun brainstorming method that I absolutely guarantee will get you closer to understanding the story you want to write.
It's number one structuring tool of most screenwriters I know. I have no idea how I would write without it.
Get a corkboard or a sheet of cardboard - or even butcher paper - big enough to lay out your index cards in either four vertical columns of 10-15 cards, or eight vertical columns of 5-8 cards, depending on whether you want to see your story laid out in four acts or eight sequences. You can draw lines on the corkboard to make a grid of spaces the size of index cards if you’re very neat (I’m not) – or just pin a few marker cards up to structure your space. I find the tri-fold boards that kids use for science projects just perfect in size and they come pre-folded in exactly three acts of the right size! Just a few dollars at any Office Max or Staples.
Write Act One at the top of the first column, Act Two: 1 at the top of the second (or third if you’re doing eight columns), Act Two: 2 at the top of the third (or fifth), Act Three at the top of the fourth (or seventh).
Now write Act One Climax at the bottom of column one, Midpoint Climax at the bottom of column two, Act Two Climax at the bottom of column three, and Climax at the very end. If you already know what those scenes are, then write a short description of them on the grid. These are scenes that you know you MUST have in your story, in those places - whether or not you know what they are right now.
And now also label the beginning and end of where eight sequences will go. (In other words, you’re dividing your corkboard into eight sections – either four long columns with two sections each, or eight shorter columns).
Here's what it looks like on a trifold board:
So you have your structure grid in front of you.
What you will start to do now is brainstorm scenes, and that you do with the index cards.
Get yourself a pack of index cards. You can also use Post-Its, and the truly OCD among us use colored Post-Its to identify various subplots by color, but I find having to make those kinds of decisions just fritzes my brain. I like cards because they’re more durable and I can spread them out on the floor for me to crawl around and for the cats to walk over; it somehow feels less like work that way. Everyone has their own method - experiment and find what works best for you.
A movie has about 40 to 60 scenes (a drama more like 40, an action movie more like 60), every scene goes on one card. Now, if you’re structuring a novel this way, you may be doubling or tripling the scene count, but for me, the chapter count remains exactly the same: forty to sixty chapters to a book.
So count yourself out 40-60 index cards. That's your book! You can actually hold it in your hand. Pretty cool, right?
This is the fun part, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. All you do at first is write down all the scenes you know about your story, one scene per card (just one or two lines describing each scene - it can be as simple as - "Hero and heroine meet" or - "Meet the antagonist".) You don’t have to put them in order yet, but if you know where they go, or approximately where they go, you can just pin them on your board in approximately the right place. You can always move them around. And just like with a puzzle, once you have some scenes in place, you will naturally start to build other scenes around them.
I love the cards because they are such an overview. You can stick a bunch of vaguely related scenes together in a clump, rearrange one or two, and suddenly see a perfect progression of an entire sequence. You can throw away cards that aren’t working, or make several cards with the same scene and try them in different parts of your story board.
You will find it is often shockingly fast and simple to structure a whole story this way.
And this eight-sequence structure translates easily to novels. And you might have an extra sequence or two per act, but I think that in most cases you’ll find that the number of sequences is not out of proportion to this formula. With a book you can have anything from 250 pages to 1000 (well, you can go that long only if you’re a mega-bestseller!), so the length of a sequence and the number of sequences is more variable. But an average book these days is between 300 and 400 pages, and since the recession, publishers are actually asking their authors to keep their books on the short side, to save production costs, so why not shoot for that to begin with?
I write books of about 350-400 pages (print pages), and I find my sequences are about 50 pages, getting shorter as I near the end. But I might also have three sequences of around 30 pages in an act that is 100 pages long. You have more leeway in a novel, but the structure remains pretty much the same.
In the next few posts we’ll talk about how to plug various obligatory scenes into this formula to make the structuring go even more quickly – key scenes that you’ll find in nearly all stories, like opening image, closing image, introduction of hero, inner and outer desire, stating the theme, call to adventure/inciting incident, introduction of allies, love interest, mentor, opponent, hero’s and opponent’s plans, plants and reveals, setpieces, training sequence, dark night of the soul, sex at sixty, hero’s arc, moral decision, etc.
And for those of you who are reeling in horror at the idea of a formula… it’s just a way of analyzing dramatic structure. No matter how you create a story yourself, chances are it will organically follow this flow. Think of the human body: human beings (with very few exceptions) have the exact same skeleton underneath all the complicated flesh and muscles and nerves and coloring and neurons and emotions and essences that make up a human being. No two alike… and yet a skeleton is a skeleton; it’s the foundation of a human being.
And structure is the foundation of a story.
ASSIGNMENTS:
-- Make two blank structure grids, one for the movie you have chosen from your master list to analyze, and one for your WIP (Work In Progress). You can just do a structure grid on a piece of paper for the movie you’ve chosen to analyze, but also do a large corkboard or cardboard structure grid for your WIP. You can fill out one structure grid while you watch the movie you’ve chosen.
-- Get a pack of index cards or Post Its and write down all the scenes you know about your story, and where possible, pin them onto your WIP structure grid in approximately the place they will occur.
If you are already well into your first draft, then by all means, keep writing forward, too – I don’t want you to stop your momentum. Use whatever is useful about what I’m talking about here, but also keep moving.
And if you have a completed draft and are starting a revision, a structure grid is a perfect tool to help you identify weak spots and build on what you have for a rewrite. Put your story on cards and watch how quickly you start to rearrange things that aren’t working!
Now, let me be clear. When you’re brainstorming with your index cards and you suddenly have a full-blown idea for a scene, or your characters start talking to you, then of course you should drop everything and write out the scene, see where it goes. Always write when you have a hot flash. I mean – you know what I mean. Write when you’re hot.
Ideally I will always be working on four piles of material, or tracks, at once:
1. The index cards I'm brainstorming and arranging on my structure grid.
2. A notebook of random scenes, dialogue, character descriptions that are coming to me as I'm outlining, and that I can start to put in chronological order as this notebook gets bigger.
3. An expanded on-paper (or in Word) story outline that I'm compiling as I order my index cards on the structure grid.
4. A collage book of visual images that I'm pulling from magazines that give me the characters, the locations, the colors and moods of my story (we will talk about Visual Storytelling soon.)
In the beginning of a project you will probably be going back and forth between all of those tracks as you build your story. Really this is my favorite part of the writing process – building the world – which is probably part of why I stay so long on it myself. But by the time I start my first draft I have so much of the story already that it’s not anywhere near the intimidating experience it would be if I hadn’t done all that prep work.
At some point (and a deadline has a lot to do with exactly when this point comes!) I feel I know the shape of the story well enough to start that first draft. Because I come from theater, I think of my first draft as a blocking draft. When you direct a play, the first rehearsals are for blocking – which means simply getting the actors up on their feet and moving them through the play on the stage so everyone can see and feel and understand the whole shape of it. That’s what a first draft is to me, and when I start to write a first draft I just bash through it from beginning to end. It’s the most grueling part of writing, and takes the longest, but writing the whole thing out, even in the most sketchy way, from start to finish, is the best way I know to actually guarantee that you will finish a book or a script.
Everything after that initial draft is frosting – it’s seven million times easier to rewrite than to get something onto a blank page.
Then I do layer after layer after layer – different drafts for suspense, for character, sensory drafts, emotional drafts – each concentrating on a different aspect that I want to hone in the story – until the clock runs out and I have to turn the whole thing in.
But that’s my process. You have to find your own. If outlining is cramping your style, then you’re probably a “pantser” – not my favorite word, but common book jargon for a person who writes best by the seat of her pants. And if you’re a pantser, the methods I’ve been talking about have probably already made you so uncomfortable that I can’t believe you’re still here!
Still, I don’t think it hurts to read about these things. I maintain that pantsers have an intuitive knowledge of story structure – we all do, really, from having read so many books and having seen so many movies. I feel more comfortable with this rather left-brained and concrete process because I write intricate plots with twists and subplots I have to work out in advance, and also because I simply wouldn’t ever work as a screenwriter if I wasn’t able to walk into a conference room and tell the executives and producers and director the entire story, beginning to end. It’s part of the job.
But I can’t say this enough: WHATEVER WORKS. Literally. Whatever. If it’s getting the job done, you’re golden.
Next up - a list of essential story elements that will help you brainstorm your index cards.
- Alex
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in the workbooks.:
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
by Alexandra Sokoloff
It's just half a month to Nanowrimo. Are you REALLY ready to write?
If you're not 100% sure what your story is (and who ever is?), here's a fun brainstorming method that I absolutely guarantee will get you closer to understanding the story you want to write.
It's number one structuring tool of most screenwriters I know. I have no idea how I would write without it.
Get a corkboard or a sheet of cardboard - or even butcher paper - big enough to lay out your index cards in either four vertical columns of 10-15 cards, or eight vertical columns of 5-8 cards, depending on whether you want to see your story laid out in four acts or eight sequences. You can draw lines on the corkboard to make a grid of spaces the size of index cards if you’re very neat (I’m not) – or just pin a few marker cards up to structure your space. I find the tri-fold boards that kids use for science projects just perfect in size and they come pre-folded in exactly three acts of the right size! Just a few dollars at any Office Max or Staples.
Write Act One at the top of the first column, Act Two: 1 at the top of the second (or third if you’re doing eight columns), Act Two: 2 at the top of the third (or fifth), Act Three at the top of the fourth (or seventh).
Now write Act One Climax at the bottom of column one, Midpoint Climax at the bottom of column two, Act Two Climax at the bottom of column three, and Climax at the very end. If you already know what those scenes are, then write a short description of them on the grid. These are scenes that you know you MUST have in your story, in those places - whether or not you know what they are right now.
And now also label the beginning and end of where eight sequences will go. (In other words, you’re dividing your corkboard into eight sections – either four long columns with two sections each, or eight shorter columns).
Here's what it looks like on a trifold board:
So you have your structure grid in front of you.
What you will start to do now is brainstorm scenes, and that you do with the index cards.
Get yourself a pack of index cards. You can also use Post-Its, and the truly OCD among us use colored Post-Its to identify various subplots by color, but I find having to make those kinds of decisions just fritzes my brain. I like cards because they’re more durable and I can spread them out on the floor for me to crawl around and for the cats to walk over; it somehow feels less like work that way. Everyone has their own method - experiment and find what works best for you.
A movie has about 40 to 60 scenes (a drama more like 40, an action movie more like 60), every scene goes on one card. Now, if you’re structuring a novel this way, you may be doubling or tripling the scene count, but for me, the chapter count remains exactly the same: forty to sixty chapters to a book.
So count yourself out 40-60 index cards. That's your book! You can actually hold it in your hand. Pretty cool, right?
This is the fun part, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. All you do at first is write down all the scenes you know about your story, one scene per card (just one or two lines describing each scene - it can be as simple as - "Hero and heroine meet" or - "Meet the antagonist".) You don’t have to put them in order yet, but if you know where they go, or approximately where they go, you can just pin them on your board in approximately the right place. You can always move them around. And just like with a puzzle, once you have some scenes in place, you will naturally start to build other scenes around them.
I love the cards because they are such an overview. You can stick a bunch of vaguely related scenes together in a clump, rearrange one or two, and suddenly see a perfect progression of an entire sequence. You can throw away cards that aren’t working, or make several cards with the same scene and try them in different parts of your story board.
You will find it is often shockingly fast and simple to structure a whole story this way.
And this eight-sequence structure translates easily to novels. And you might have an extra sequence or two per act, but I think that in most cases you’ll find that the number of sequences is not out of proportion to this formula. With a book you can have anything from 250 pages to 1000 (well, you can go that long only if you’re a mega-bestseller!), so the length of a sequence and the number of sequences is more variable. But an average book these days is between 300 and 400 pages, and since the recession, publishers are actually asking their authors to keep their books on the short side, to save production costs, so why not shoot for that to begin with?
I write books of about 350-400 pages (print pages), and I find my sequences are about 50 pages, getting shorter as I near the end. But I might also have three sequences of around 30 pages in an act that is 100 pages long. You have more leeway in a novel, but the structure remains pretty much the same.
In the next few posts we’ll talk about how to plug various obligatory scenes into this formula to make the structuring go even more quickly – key scenes that you’ll find in nearly all stories, like opening image, closing image, introduction of hero, inner and outer desire, stating the theme, call to adventure/inciting incident, introduction of allies, love interest, mentor, opponent, hero’s and opponent’s plans, plants and reveals, setpieces, training sequence, dark night of the soul, sex at sixty, hero’s arc, moral decision, etc.
And for those of you who are reeling in horror at the idea of a formula… it’s just a way of analyzing dramatic structure. No matter how you create a story yourself, chances are it will organically follow this flow. Think of the human body: human beings (with very few exceptions) have the exact same skeleton underneath all the complicated flesh and muscles and nerves and coloring and neurons and emotions and essences that make up a human being. No two alike… and yet a skeleton is a skeleton; it’s the foundation of a human being.
And structure is the foundation of a story.
ASSIGNMENTS:
-- Make two blank structure grids, one for the movie you have chosen from your master list to analyze, and one for your WIP (Work In Progress). You can just do a structure grid on a piece of paper for the movie you’ve chosen to analyze, but also do a large corkboard or cardboard structure grid for your WIP. You can fill out one structure grid while you watch the movie you’ve chosen.
-- Get a pack of index cards or Post Its and write down all the scenes you know about your story, and where possible, pin them onto your WIP structure grid in approximately the place they will occur.
If you are already well into your first draft, then by all means, keep writing forward, too – I don’t want you to stop your momentum. Use whatever is useful about what I’m talking about here, but also keep moving.
And if you have a completed draft and are starting a revision, a structure grid is a perfect tool to help you identify weak spots and build on what you have for a rewrite. Put your story on cards and watch how quickly you start to rearrange things that aren’t working!
Now, let me be clear. When you’re brainstorming with your index cards and you suddenly have a full-blown idea for a scene, or your characters start talking to you, then of course you should drop everything and write out the scene, see where it goes. Always write when you have a hot flash. I mean – you know what I mean. Write when you’re hot.
Ideally I will always be working on four piles of material, or tracks, at once:
1. The index cards I'm brainstorming and arranging on my structure grid.
2. A notebook of random scenes, dialogue, character descriptions that are coming to me as I'm outlining, and that I can start to put in chronological order as this notebook gets bigger.
3. An expanded on-paper (or in Word) story outline that I'm compiling as I order my index cards on the structure grid.
4. A collage book of visual images that I'm pulling from magazines that give me the characters, the locations, the colors and moods of my story (we will talk about Visual Storytelling soon.)
In the beginning of a project you will probably be going back and forth between all of those tracks as you build your story. Really this is my favorite part of the writing process – building the world – which is probably part of why I stay so long on it myself. But by the time I start my first draft I have so much of the story already that it’s not anywhere near the intimidating experience it would be if I hadn’t done all that prep work.
At some point (and a deadline has a lot to do with exactly when this point comes!) I feel I know the shape of the story well enough to start that first draft. Because I come from theater, I think of my first draft as a blocking draft. When you direct a play, the first rehearsals are for blocking – which means simply getting the actors up on their feet and moving them through the play on the stage so everyone can see and feel and understand the whole shape of it. That’s what a first draft is to me, and when I start to write a first draft I just bash through it from beginning to end. It’s the most grueling part of writing, and takes the longest, but writing the whole thing out, even in the most sketchy way, from start to finish, is the best way I know to actually guarantee that you will finish a book or a script.
Everything after that initial draft is frosting – it’s seven million times easier to rewrite than to get something onto a blank page.
Then I do layer after layer after layer – different drafts for suspense, for character, sensory drafts, emotional drafts – each concentrating on a different aspect that I want to hone in the story – until the clock runs out and I have to turn the whole thing in.
But that’s my process. You have to find your own. If outlining is cramping your style, then you’re probably a “pantser” – not my favorite word, but common book jargon for a person who writes best by the seat of her pants. And if you’re a pantser, the methods I’ve been talking about have probably already made you so uncomfortable that I can’t believe you’re still here!
Still, I don’t think it hurts to read about these things. I maintain that pantsers have an intuitive knowledge of story structure – we all do, really, from having read so many books and having seen so many movies. I feel more comfortable with this rather left-brained and concrete process because I write intricate plots with twists and subplots I have to work out in advance, and also because I simply wouldn’t ever work as a screenwriter if I wasn’t able to walk into a conference room and tell the executives and producers and director the entire story, beginning to end. It’s part of the job.
But I can’t say this enough: WHATEVER WORKS. Literally. Whatever. If it’s getting the job done, you’re golden.
Next up - a list of essential story elements that will help you brainstorm your index cards.
- Alex
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in the workbooks.:
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
October 10, 2015
Nanowrimo: Give them Climaxes!
That woke everyone up this morning, didn't it?
I'm at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, paneling, signing, doing interviews and of course, catching up with friends in the bar. This morning I moderated a panel called "Keep it Moving: Pace in Mysteries and Thrillers." We were discussing tricks of pacing and suspense, and I think I'll just continue that discussion here, with one of THE most important techniques of pacing I know.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you're already familiar with the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure. But I still have to fill new readers in, so bear with me, or skip ahead!
There is a rhythm to dramatic storytelling, just as there’s a rhythm to every other pleasurable experience in life, and the technical requirements of film and television have codified this rhythm into a structure so specific that you actually already know what I’m about to say in this post, even if you’ve never heard it said this way before or consciously thought about it. And what’s more, your reader or audience knows this rhythm, too, and unconsciously EXPECTS it - in books, which have picked up on that rhythm and evolved along with movies and television. Which means if you’re not delivering this rhythm, your reader or audience is going to start worrying that something’s not right, and you have a real chance of losing them.
You don’t want to do that!
So today we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite subject. You know it’s true! What’s not to like about a climax?
Early playwrights (and I’m talking really early, starting thousands of years ago in the Golden Age of Greece) were forced to develop the three-act structure of dramatic writing because of intermissions (or intervals). Think about it. If you’re going to let your audience out for a break a third of the way through your play, you need to make sure you get them back into the theater to see the rest of the play, right? After all, there are so many other things a person could be doing on a Saturday night….
So the three acts of theater are based on the idea of building each act to a CLIMAX: a cliffhanger scene that spins the action of the play in such an interesting direction that the audience is going to want to hurry back into the theater at the warning chime to see WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. Many plays break at the middle, so the Midpoint Climax is equally important.
This climactic rhythm was in operation for literally thousands of years before film and television came along and the need for story climaxes became even more, um, urgent. Not just because life was faster paced in the 20th century, but again, because of the technical requirements of film and television.
In a two-hour movie, you have not three climaxes, but seven, because film is based on an eight-sequence structure.
The eight-sequence structure evolved from the early days of film when movies were divided into reels (physical film reels), each holding about 10-15 minutes of film. The projectionist had to manually change each reel as it finished, so early screenwriters incorporated this rhythm into their writing, developing sequences that lasted exactly the length of a reel and built to a cliffhanger climax, so that in that short break that the projectionist was scrambling to get the new reel on, the audience was in breathless anticipation of “What happens next?” - instead of getting pissed off that the movie just stopped right in the middle of a crucial scene. (If you get hold of scripts for older movies, pre-1950’s, you can find SEQUENCE 1, SEQUENCE 2, etc, as headings at the start of each new sequence.)
Modern films still follow that same storytelling rhythm, because that rhythm was locked in by television - with its even more rigid technical requirements of having to break every fifteen minutes for a commercial. Which meant writers had to build to a climax every 15 minutes, to get audiences to tune back in to their show after the commercial instead of changing the channel.
So what does this mean to you, the novelist or screenwriter?
It means that you need to be aware that your reader or audience is going to expect a climax every 15 minutes in a movie - which translates to every 50 pages or so in a book. Books have more variation in length, obviously, so you can adjust proportionately, but for a 400-page book, you’re looking at climaxing every 50 pages, with the bigger climaxes coming around p. 100 (Act I Climax), p. 200 (Midpoint Climax), p. 300 (Act II Climax), and somewhere close to the end. Also be aware that for a shorter movie or book, you may have only six sequences.
If you put that structure on a grid, it looks like this:
Looking at that grid, you can see that what I started out in this article calling the three-act structure has evolved into something that is actually a four-act structure: four segments of approximately equal length (30 minutes or 100 pages), with Act II containing two segments (60 minutes or 200 pages, total). That’s because Act II is about conflict and complications. While plays tend to have a longer Act I, because Act I is about setting up character and relationships, the middle acts of films have become longer so that the movies can show off what film does best: action and conflict. And books have picked up on that rhythm and evolved along with movies and television, so that books also tend to have a long, two-part Act II as well.
You don’t have to be exact about this (unless you’re writing for television, in which case you better be acutely aware of when you have to hit that climax!). But you do need to realize that if you’re not building to some kind of climax in approximately that rhythm, your reader or audience is going to start getting impatient, and you risk losing them.
Once you understand this basic structure, you can see how useful it is to think of each sequence of your story building to a climax. Your biggest scenes will tend to be these climaxes, and if you can fit those scenes onto the grid, then you already have a really solid set of tentpoles that you can build your story around.
So here’s the challenge: Start watching movies and television shows specifically looking for the climaxes. Use the clock on your phone or the counter on your DVD player to check where these climaxes are coming. It won’t take long at all for you to be able to identify climactic scenes.
Your next task is to figure out what makes them climactic!
I can give you a few hints. The most important thing is that the action of your story ASKS A QUESTION that the audience wants to know the answer to. But climaxes also tend to be SETPIECE scenes (think of the trailer scenes from movies, the big scenes that everyone talks about after the movie).
And what goes into a great setpiece scene?
Well, that’s another post, isn’t it?
- Alex
---------------------------------------------------------------------
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in the workbooks.:
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)
- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
I'm at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, paneling, signing, doing interviews and of course, catching up with friends in the bar. This morning I moderated a panel called "Keep it Moving: Pace in Mysteries and Thrillers." We were discussing tricks of pacing and suspense, and I think I'll just continue that discussion here, with one of THE most important techniques of pacing I know.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, you're already familiar with the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure. But I still have to fill new readers in, so bear with me, or skip ahead!
There is a rhythm to dramatic storytelling, just as there’s a rhythm to every other pleasurable experience in life, and the technical requirements of film and television have codified this rhythm into a structure so specific that you actually already know what I’m about to say in this post, even if you’ve never heard it said this way before or consciously thought about it. And what’s more, your reader or audience knows this rhythm, too, and unconsciously EXPECTS it - in books, which have picked up on that rhythm and evolved along with movies and television. Which means if you’re not delivering this rhythm, your reader or audience is going to start worrying that something’s not right, and you have a real chance of losing them.
You don’t want to do that!
So today we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite subject. You know it’s true! What’s not to like about a climax?
Early playwrights (and I’m talking really early, starting thousands of years ago in the Golden Age of Greece) were forced to develop the three-act structure of dramatic writing because of intermissions (or intervals). Think about it. If you’re going to let your audience out for a break a third of the way through your play, you need to make sure you get them back into the theater to see the rest of the play, right? After all, there are so many other things a person could be doing on a Saturday night….
So the three acts of theater are based on the idea of building each act to a CLIMAX: a cliffhanger scene that spins the action of the play in such an interesting direction that the audience is going to want to hurry back into the theater at the warning chime to see WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. Many plays break at the middle, so the Midpoint Climax is equally important.
This climactic rhythm was in operation for literally thousands of years before film and television came along and the need for story climaxes became even more, um, urgent. Not just because life was faster paced in the 20th century, but again, because of the technical requirements of film and television.
In a two-hour movie, you have not three climaxes, but seven, because film is based on an eight-sequence structure.
The eight-sequence structure evolved from the early days of film when movies were divided into reels (physical film reels), each holding about 10-15 minutes of film. The projectionist had to manually change each reel as it finished, so early screenwriters incorporated this rhythm into their writing, developing sequences that lasted exactly the length of a reel and built to a cliffhanger climax, so that in that short break that the projectionist was scrambling to get the new reel on, the audience was in breathless anticipation of “What happens next?” - instead of getting pissed off that the movie just stopped right in the middle of a crucial scene. (If you get hold of scripts for older movies, pre-1950’s, you can find SEQUENCE 1, SEQUENCE 2, etc, as headings at the start of each new sequence.)
Modern films still follow that same storytelling rhythm, because that rhythm was locked in by television - with its even more rigid technical requirements of having to break every fifteen minutes for a commercial. Which meant writers had to build to a climax every 15 minutes, to get audiences to tune back in to their show after the commercial instead of changing the channel.
So what does this mean to you, the novelist or screenwriter?
It means that you need to be aware that your reader or audience is going to expect a climax every 15 minutes in a movie - which translates to every 50 pages or so in a book. Books have more variation in length, obviously, so you can adjust proportionately, but for a 400-page book, you’re looking at climaxing every 50 pages, with the bigger climaxes coming around p. 100 (Act I Climax), p. 200 (Midpoint Climax), p. 300 (Act II Climax), and somewhere close to the end. Also be aware that for a shorter movie or book, you may have only six sequences.
If you put that structure on a grid, it looks like this:
Looking at that grid, you can see that what I started out in this article calling the three-act structure has evolved into something that is actually a four-act structure: four segments of approximately equal length (30 minutes or 100 pages), with Act II containing two segments (60 minutes or 200 pages, total). That’s because Act II is about conflict and complications. While plays tend to have a longer Act I, because Act I is about setting up character and relationships, the middle acts of films have become longer so that the movies can show off what film does best: action and conflict. And books have picked up on that rhythm and evolved along with movies and television, so that books also tend to have a long, two-part Act II as well.
You don’t have to be exact about this (unless you’re writing for television, in which case you better be acutely aware of when you have to hit that climax!). But you do need to realize that if you’re not building to some kind of climax in approximately that rhythm, your reader or audience is going to start getting impatient, and you risk losing them.
Once you understand this basic structure, you can see how useful it is to think of each sequence of your story building to a climax. Your biggest scenes will tend to be these climaxes, and if you can fit those scenes onto the grid, then you already have a really solid set of tentpoles that you can build your story around.
So here’s the challenge: Start watching movies and television shows specifically looking for the climaxes. Use the clock on your phone or the counter on your DVD player to check where these climaxes are coming. It won’t take long at all for you to be able to identify climactic scenes.
Your next task is to figure out what makes them climactic!
I can give you a few hints. The most important thing is that the action of your story ASKS A QUESTION that the audience wants to know the answer to. But climaxes also tend to be SETPIECE scenes (think of the trailer scenes from movies, the big scenes that everyone talks about after the movie).
And what goes into a great setpiece scene?
Well, that’s another post, isn’t it?
- Alex
---------------------------------------------------------------------
All the information on this blog and more, including full story structure breakdowns of various movies, is available in the workbooks.:
STEALING HOLLYWOOD
This new workbook updates all the text in the first Screenwriting Tricks for Authors ebook with all the many tricks I’ve learned over my last few years of writing and teaching—and doubles the material of the first book, as well as adding six more full story breakdowns.
STEALING HOLLYWOOD ebook $3.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD US print $14.99
STEALING HOLLYWOOD print, all countries
WRITING LOVE
Writing Love is a shorter version of the workbook, using examples from love stories, romantic suspense, and romantic comedy - available in e formats for just $2.99.
- Smashwords (includes online viewing and pdf file)- Amazon/Kindle
- Barnes & Noble/Nook
- Amazon UK
- Amazon DE
---------------------
You can also sign up to get free movie breakdowns here:
Get free Story Structure extras and movie breakdowns
October 4, 2015
$1.99 Sale: Huntress Moon series, Books 1, 2 & 3!!
Amazon.US has dropped the price of HUNTRESS MOON, BLOOD MOON and COLD MOON to just $1.99 each for the entire month of October. Celebrate Halloween with a spooky binge read!
Huntress: Amazon US: $1.99 Blood Moon: Amazon US: $1.99 Cold Moon: Amazon US: $1.99
The Huntress/FBI Thrillers
Special Agent Matthew Roarke thought he knew what evil was. He was wrong.
FBI Special Agent Roarke is closing in on a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious young woman who was present at each scene of a years-long string of “accidents” and murders, and who may well be that most rare of killers… a female serial.
His hunt for her will take him across three states, and force him to question everything he knows about evil and justice.
-------
Book 1 of Thriller Award-winning author Alexandra Sokoloff’s Huntress/FBI Thrillers, Huntress Moon, became a #1 Amazon mystery/thriller bestseller and was nominated for a Thriller Award for Best E Book Original Novel.
Told in continuous, serial format like True Detective and The Killing, and utilizing the intricate psychological/forensic procedure of Criminal Minds, the Huntress series sets a cast of complex FBI investigators in pursuit of an unforgettable female suspect who has been called “a female Dexter.” The story combines nail-biting suspense and a twisting mystery plot with deadly erotic tension, and has garnered hundreds of rave reviews from readers who find themselves sympathizing with its haunted male lead and unexpectedly empathizing with its highly unusual killer.
For thousands of years women have been the victims. Isn’t it time someone turned the tables?
--------
"This interstate manhunt has plenty of thrills... Sokoloff's choice to present both Roarke's and the killer's perspectives helps keep the drama taut and the pages flying." -- Kirkus Reviews
“Who you know: Agatha Christie, Gillian Flynn, Mary Higgins Clark. Who you should be reading: Alexandra Sokoloff.” -- Huffington Post Books
Huntress: Amazon US: $1.99 Blood Moon: Amazon US: $1.99 Cold Moon: Amazon US: $1.99
The Huntress/FBI Thrillers
Special Agent Matthew Roarke thought he knew what evil was. He was wrong.
FBI Special Agent Roarke is closing in on a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious young woman who was present at each scene of a years-long string of “accidents” and murders, and who may well be that most rare of killers… a female serial.
His hunt for her will take him across three states, and force him to question everything he knows about evil and justice.
-------
Book 1 of Thriller Award-winning author Alexandra Sokoloff’s Huntress/FBI Thrillers, Huntress Moon, became a #1 Amazon mystery/thriller bestseller and was nominated for a Thriller Award for Best E Book Original Novel.
Told in continuous, serial format like True Detective and The Killing, and utilizing the intricate psychological/forensic procedure of Criminal Minds, the Huntress series sets a cast of complex FBI investigators in pursuit of an unforgettable female suspect who has been called “a female Dexter.” The story combines nail-biting suspense and a twisting mystery plot with deadly erotic tension, and has garnered hundreds of rave reviews from readers who find themselves sympathizing with its haunted male lead and unexpectedly empathizing with its highly unusual killer.
For thousands of years women have been the victims. Isn’t it time someone turned the tables?
--------
"This interstate manhunt has plenty of thrills... Sokoloff's choice to present both Roarke's and the killer's perspectives helps keep the drama taut and the pages flying." -- Kirkus Reviews
“Who you know: Agatha Christie, Gillian Flynn, Mary Higgins Clark. Who you should be reading: Alexandra Sokoloff.” -- Huffington Post Books
