Case Study: A Concept on the Brink

These are my favorite posts — case studies from story evaluations that demonstrate how a great concept can easily turn into an underwhelming story… and how this process can spot it and turn it around.

Yes, it’s okay to learn from the pain of others.  Actually, from the resurrection of the stories of others.

This one is from my $35 Conceptual Kick-Start Analysis program.  I hope you’ll give it a read, because not only does it expose one of the most common traps killer concepts tend to stumble into, it’s also a sneak peak of the format of the evaluation itself.

You can read it here: Case Study.

Thanks go out to this author for enthusiastically agreeing to share it with us here on Storyfix.  Any comments you may have that have that contribute toward the continued development of the story are welcome.

Here are the main points I’d like you to notice:

- The realization that a concept is NOT necessarily the drama itself, but rather, the STAGE upon which the drama will unfold.  A situation, a setting, a speculative proposition.  The trick is to develop a a DRAMATIC STORY that unfolds UPON that stage, rather than being ABOUT the notion of the concept itself.

A huge difference, that.

- And then, to see that the dramatic story itself is NOT simply showing the character wandering through a strange new world, having adventures, experiencing the compelling nature of the conceptual situation/setting itself.  This is particularly true — and particularly frequent — in science fiction and fantasy stories, since that’s where alternate realities tend to proliferate.

Enjoy.  Hope you get something out of this.

*****

If you’d like to see how your concept and resulting story plan measure up to these criteria, click HERE for the $35 Conceptual Kick Start program, or HERE for the Amazing $100 Story Empowerment and Analysis Adventure, which goes deeper into the full architecture of your story plan.

Case Study: A Concept on the Brink is a post from: Larry Brooks at storyfix.com