Monday, July 15, 2013

Story Stages

Read Proverbs 16-18

Proverbs 16:9 "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps."

Writers are the ones who give direction to our stories. We want the tale’s events to follow logically from one point to the next.

What happens in the first scene should cause what happens in the second scene, and so on. To help us come up with ideas for the plot, it helps to know the stages most stories follow.

The story starts with showing the characters’ normal world, but in the middle of dealing with a problem typical of their normal world. From there, the story requires an occurrence that rocks the protagonist’s normal world, the steps the hero takes to get things back to normal, the incident that proves the hero’s world will never be normal again, the steps the protagonist takes to create order out of this new chaos of a life, the moment the hero is ready to give up, the big battle with whatever is keeping the protagonist from reaching the goal, and the resolution that ties up loose ends and shows the protagonist in the new normal life.

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