Write a Great Plot 101

1. About the Course: When we think about writing a story, a lot of people have the tendency to sit down and start to write a series of events. Then this, then this, then this, and they're just rattling off events at their readers. But the truth is that listing a series of events is not the same thing as writing a plot. If you are writing a plot and you're really designing a story, you're not listing a series of events. You are designing an emotional experience for your reader. Think of the great stories you love. They are stories you're engaged with the character, but you are, sometimes you're afraid. Sometimes you have suspense. Sometimes you're happy and relieved. You're, you're doing this. Your emotions are up and then they're down. That's what you do when you're writing a plot. You're not just thinking of, okay, what happens to my character next? You're saying, Oh, I want my reader to feel a lot of suspense right here. Then I want my reader to be relaxed right here and here I want my reader to be sort of in-between. And I want them to be more tense in this scene and sort of tense in this scene, but not as intense as over here. There's a lot to think about when you do that. So when you're designing a plot, there are a number of things and features of that story and components that you want to make sure you've not only put into your story, but you've put in the right order. When you think about plotting this way, you end up not writing a story in which it's a, than this, then this, then this, then this, and that is key because very often what happens is if you're writing it, then this, then this, you're going to hit a point at which the than this doesn't come. And then you go. Okay, I was very excited about my story. I had a character I loved, and now I don't know what happens next. And it's this devastating point where you work on it and then you work on it and then you're not excited anymore and then you work on it less and then it ends up in the drawer and you don't finish your story. The sad part is that a lot of people end up thinking, I didn't have a good story. Know? You might have had a great story. You were going about it the wrong way. So you want to get a handle on your plot and the structure of plot and how it works. That's what this workshop is all about. This workshop is designed to give you overarching vision of what a plot is so that you don't make some of those mistakes. It is going to open you up to just what are the components? What are the things I need to be thinking about so that as I write my story, I don't get, I don't get stuck. And I have a sense of the vision that's going on. And I have a sense of the emotional range that I'm trying to create in the experience of the reader, we're going to examine suspense because suspense is critical, you want to make sure your reader is nervous at the time as you want them to be nervous. An event doesn't have suspense. If you don't pinpointed the right way. And he then has suspense because you've made me care about the character. And you have pointed your camera on the event in such a way that makes me go. I don't know what's going to happen. So you will want to design our suspense correctly because it is one of the key emotions we're trying to drive in our readers. We also want to look at how do we build to a climax because you have a lot of tension in your story, but the climax is the grand tension. So when you're designing your list, smaller tensions, you want to do it in such a way that it's going to build up to that great climax. We're going to look at the start of the story and the end of the story because you knew your readers only have so much time and if you don't grab them early on, they are not going to stick around. So looking at the start is so important, but so is the end. Because, you know, I don't know. I think most of us know the experience of reading a book and getting to the end. And we loved the book throughout. And then the end was so disappointing. We want to make sure that you're not doing that. We'll look at the components therefore of a really solid ending as well. Then how do we choose the essential action, the action that needs to be there. One of the biggest problems with the then this, then this, then this writing that happens is that you right in a lot of non essential action. And that weakens your story. The reader, everything you put in that story, the reader is going to say this is here for a reason and they want to know what it is. So if you put non-essential action in there, your reader is going to start to say, oh, that's important, I need to, that's important. And they're going to try to piece it in. And I know that if you put it in your story, you thought it was essential. But what we're going to look at is that actually there's a lot to think about in terms of deciding what is the central action in a story. We'll look at that as well. And then we're going to look at just some of the separations. And how do we structure stories. So chapters, what makes good chapters? How do I break this down? But also what are the different ways that I can structure my narrative? One of the reasons people get stuck with their plotting is that they are just thinking one event to the next instead of that grand structure. When I work with students on those stories and clients on their stories, we work on designing a foundation, putting up the beams, putting up the structure of a building. And then we put the brick on and then we put on the wallpaper and paint the walls and lay down some carpet. We have to start with the foundation, the main beams of the building. And that's what this is about. How do we look at stories and look at examples and figure out what is the structure. When you design the overarching structure, that frees you up to be more creative than you could be just listing a series of events because you're going to see where it's going. It is so freeing to go. Okay? I know these key points and I can write toward them. I know where I'm going and I'm excited and everything I'm doing has such purpose because I see where it's going. So that's what this workshop is going to be. 2. Foundations of Plot Building: We're going to be referencing numerous narratives as we go through this. I have chosen some novels, have chosen films, I have chosen plays. This course is applicable whether you want to write a novel, a play, a screenplay is short story. This course will absolutely be beneficial for you. Having said that, I am going to be addressing certain things that are more novel focused. And if you're writing screenplay or you're writing for this stage, those two art forms are special, they are unique. They are temporally based in a way that a novel isn't. By that, what I mean is you've got unlimited amount of time. I am expecting to sit in my seat and watch through. Because of that. Though, they have their own unique rules. I'm not getting into those rules here. That being said, all we're talking about with plot and story structure still really does apply. So this course is helpful for you in that way, but we will not be getting into specifics of screenplay in this class. It's very important when you're writing to consider your medium. So that's just something to keep in mind. I have a list on the class notes of the recommended readings and viewings. They are things we're talking about here. They're very strategically selected. So I really do recommend taking time to look at them. They're all very strong examples of storytelling in their respective mediums. So I highly recommend you are looking at them, but you don't have to have watched them or read them to benefit from what we're talking about today. Let's start with theory. Because every time you pick up a book on how to structure your story that actually has a root in, in theory. But it's helpful for us to understand what exactly is theory in general and why should we apply it? Because otherwise, it just ends up being these rules that are more or less floating around and we're sort of grabbing it, saying, I guess that I guess that I guess that I guess this is the way it's done because it's the way that people do it. Rather than sort of understanding the history of our medium. And when we understand the history of our medium, we are educated craftsmen and crafts women. And because of that, we are then able to say, Yes, I understand the general theory. I'm choosing to do this instead. If you don't know theory, you don't know, you're breaking from it. Just as Picasso chose to delve into cubism and chose to be abstract with his art, he very much knew how to draw classically. He knew the classic forms and he deviated from them purposefully. And so I want to teach you that purposeful deviation. The Western literary tradition that we think about has its roots in Aristotle. Now, I'm not going to get into Aristotle's poetics here, but he is the one who really put down to paper based on Greek tragedy. This idea of an inciting incident, it moves to a climax. And then as a quick Denham war ended over, That's Aristotle. That's been going on a very long time. But this idea of this theory, the reason that it came about, it wasn't that Aristotle sat down one day and said, I know how to make a story will have an inciting incident, a climax. And I know people who are creating stories, stories were happening and being made. What Aristotle did was examine these things and observe. This is what was successful with. A story. Theory was discovered through people making narratives. This is exactly the same with music. Music theory that we think of. If you play an instrument and your music teacher says, Okay, Sit down this as a measure, and these are beads, and this is a sprays and all that theory wasn't dreamt up. It was developed through Mozart and an artist like him, through their compositions, discovered these things. So that's so important to know that these were never random rules. These, these were things that were developed and were just successful and people recognized what emotion it engendered in its readers, in its listeners. So there's very much reason to take it quite seriously. Having said that, the problem with theory can often be that as writers, we read those rules and we say, but my, my narrative doesn't quite fit into that. That's not exactly what I versioned. And then we feel like we have to force our character to be a certain way. We have to force our events to be a certain way. And you don't, because most great literature has some theoretical roots. But that it totally deviates from it. Maybe here, maybe here, maybe here you don't know all kinds of different ways. So just keep that in your head and when you're reading and watching stories that you love, what you want to do is learn to read them like a writer, or watch them like a writer, which means getting a little bit metal on yourself. And rather than just reading a book and just going, Oh, yes, I'm having a really great time reading this. Do that the first time through, but read through again and say, I'm feeling a lot of tension right now. Why am I feeling tension right now or that scene was so emotional for me, it made me cry. Why did that scene make me cry? Why am I so emotional about this? That's how you learn theory. That's how you learn what works because you observe and you observe what's happening. That's how you will learn the unique things that you love about other people's artistry that you want to sort of appropriate and then develop your own style out of. So you've got to observe what you love rather than just sit there and say rule number one, rule number two, number three. So always keep in mind that everything we're going to be talking about today that's based in theory. These are guidelines, these are not rules. And we all know that you will use some and you'll break some. And that's what makes great literature. In the next video, I want to touch briefly on some of the different kinds of stories that exist just so that we can get a handle on what we're exactly talking about. 3. Types of Plots: Structure Options: There are a lot of different kinds of stories out there. Most of the time. The writing advice you will read, you will hear is geared toward a very Western literary tradition. Action-oriented, goal-oriented narrative. That's certainly true for much of what we will be looking at today. But it doesn't mean that all there is. So when we think about that action-oriented narrative, we think of something like Lord of the Rings, where we have Frodo who is set on a mission in the beginning to get rid of this ring. And then the climax is, is getting rid of the ring. And then we have a date and walk. Or Harry Potter who very early on we know it's a battle against Voldemort. And all through those books, all of the Harry Potter books were built into the great Voldemort battle, the battle quick Denham war. So that's that traditional story. But it's by no means every story. Some stories are more action-oriented like that. Some are more psychological, like a Jane Eyre, which certainly has action elements in it. But it's very much less about what's Jane going to do, what's Jane going to do next? It's much more about how does gene feel, how does she feel about. So that, that kind of a novel, you spend a lot more time up in a character's head. It's really worth thinking about whether your story is going to actually be something more cerebral like a Jane Eyre, as opposed to something more action-oriented like a Harry Potter. And when we say something is cerebral or action-oriented, that doesn't mean that when we watch a more cerebral story, that we're not wondering what the heroine is going to do next. We are, we're wondering what, what's Jane Eyre going to do now? It's just that we're thinking more in terms of her emotions and how she's feeling about things. Just as with Harry Potter, we absolutely know how he feels about things. But the beats and the story and the events are far more action oriented. It's important for you to think about what kind of novel you want to have upfront. Because that decision is going to affect what actions, what scenes you choose to have, as well as the structure of your story? Are you going to spend more time on exposition? Are you going to spend more time on action? Are you going to have more flashbacks, which would be more likely with something where you're spending more time up in the character's head. These are all those kinds of structural decisions that you want to think about. So oftentimes people want to just say, well, what's my point of view? It's more than that. You actually want to think about the kind of narrative that you want to have. There are also different kinds of stories in terms of structure. Linear Stories, which is what we'll be focusing on today, are one in which there is an inciting event which insights the next event and the next event and every, every event in your narrative is totally connected to the one before it and the one after it. So it's quite linear and its structure. But this is also not true of all successful stories. There are also sort of meandering wandering stories that are more episodic in nature, in which you could take event B and switch it with the event F. Necessarily going to matter all that much. You might have to tweak a finger here or there, but otherwise, it's not going to be a big deal. That's not so with linear. With linear, if you change something and event F, Guess what? Everything after F has to change and probably things before F have to change. You're going to change everything because it's all connected. But the meandering plots, which would be something like Homer's The Odyssey or even Alice in Wonderland. Great stories. So successful episodic don't follow this. Totally, don't follow a lot of these rules are different. They follow lots of them, but not all of them. They don't build in the same way. There is no massive climax in the Odyssey. And while Alice in Wonderland, there is connectivity there. It's still quite meandering. One way to tell is my plot, not necessarily episodic, but is my plot or what I'm thinking about trying to write one in which we have this traditional rising action. Falling action is how much does my character change? Because Alice doesn't change very much in her story. Odysseus doesn't change very much in his story. He's basically the same at the beginning and the end as is Alice. Alice just comes out the other end having had an experience. I love both of those stories so much. And so what you often hear as well, the character has to change. The character doesn't have to change. Most of the time the character will, especially in that traditional linear Western tradition. But he or she does not have to. It just means that the focus and the goal of your story is different. So I'm not going to get into detail on how to construct all of these deviations. But I want you to be aware of them because you need to know how you feel about that and what the general structure and goal of your stories before you start writing. Maybe you don't want to linear. And so it's important for you to understand variations and have a sense of what your goals are for the story that you are writing. In the next video, I want us to look at story and plot and consider how these two things are actually different. Why it's important for us to understand what those differences are and how we can avoid excessive, useless action in our narratives and keep our focus on solid, strong events throughout her stories. 4. Plot vs Story: The Critical Difference: Okay, Before we can talk about story and plot, we need to actually define what plot is. Now, I will say everybody has their own definitions for this. One book will say plot is this. And another book might say plot is that what's important is that you don't get bogged down with the semantics. People are going to have different terminologies for a lot of things we're talking about. So it is very likely and possible that if you read a lot or listened to a lot of people talk about story, it might very well say to yourself, well, that's not what Barbara said in her class on plotting. And yes, that might very well be true. So we all have some different terminologies, but I can tell you that the terms that we'll talk about here are pretty traditional. So just be aware that some people might talk about them differently. But what I want us to discuss is the difference between plot and the story itself. So plot is the sequence of events as you have designed them for the reader. So plot is going to say, I'm putting these events in a certain order. For a purpose. I want an emotional reaction from my reader. So that's I'm designing, I'm structuring this in a certain way. Plot as manipulative. When you're a writer, you are, it sounds terrible, but you're there to manipulate the reader. You want the reader to feel certain things. You are tweaking the story, you're not telling the reader some things that they really want to know. Or you're making something in a flashback, or you're revealing something at o, the reader had no idea because you want those emotions in your readers. So you are manipulating the events. That's plot. Story is just the linear events as they happened with none of the suspenseful moments of the flashbacks are all the sorts of narrative tweaks we make to get people to feel certain things, right? If I just sit there and I say to you, Oh, let me tell you about my day. I got up, I got dressed, I brushed my teeth, I went to my car, I drove to work. I got in a fender benders than I had to get the information from the individual. Then I got to work and my boss told me that I got a raise which kinda made my day better. And then I came home and had some supper and went to bed, right? That's a story. But it's not a plot. Because I didn't build your anticipation. I didn't withhold something back. I just told you and then the other thing, I told you a story, but I didn't develop a plot. And the reason that this is so important is just that you recognize that as a writer, you are there to manipulate. You want to think about what's my whole story? What are all the things that happen? But I might not necessarily include all those things. And how do I take the story that I have in my head and turn it into a plot. How do I take the sequence of events that I have in my head and make it as suspenseful, as engaging, as emotionally, just gravitational as possible. That's what it means to plot. So keep in mind that what you have in your head might very well be a story. But it's your job to then work it into a plot. 5. Choosing Only the Essential Action: One important note, because we are going to be talking a lot about events and actions when it comes to developing that plot, we have to remember that actions are not the same thing as activities. That you can word this loads of different ways. We're wording it this way. Actions are not the same thing as activities. And action has a purpose and it has a result. They are dramatic, they cause a reaction. An activity is the equivalent of narrative, busy work. It didn't have an impact, it doesn't really matter. I don't care if you have a big fight scene and if you think it's filled with action and two people are just duking it out. If that fight scene doesn't have a reaction that's necessary to the story, then it's an activity fight scene, but it's not a dramatic action fight scene. And you want to sponge away or the activity from your narrative and just keep action. So as you're going through this and as you learn all these structural components of your story and you start to plot your own narrative out. Or even as you assess other narratives, look to identify, is this a dramatic action or is this just busy work activity? You will find that even successful, very successful narratives, stories you love, they might very well have some activity in them that's not necessarily totally germane to the story. And one way that's can be interesting to see what events and actions are being most germane. And this is not totally true across the board by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one way to get a sense of it is to read a novel and then watch the film. Because most of the time that cannot include everything in the novel in the film. And you will see that where the filmmakers decided to cut, where they said, that's interesting, but it's really not germane to this. The focus of the story. That can be an interesting way to learn what is activity, what is action? Okay, So having laid all this groundwork, let's in the next video start to actually talk about the structure and the components that make up a great plot. 6. Structural Building Blocks: Structure is all about the ways in which writers arrange them materials. So just like a builder constructs a building that's made of several solid beams and central things, things you don't necessarily even see because they put brick and stone around it. So to, a writer has a structure in place around which he built everything. This is true of every art form and you can structure things in numerous ways. A painter might structure is painting based on physical composition, based on color. A sculptor might be looking at some more three-dimensional depth. Musicians certainly are dealing with beats and measures, and phrases, and themes and melodies. So there are a lot of different ways you can think about structuring your stories. Structure is going to include things like placement of events, balance of events, and how much we have one character or another where we place a certain characters. It's good to include themes and motifs and how you weave those into your story. It will include suspense and how you make that suspense. As likewise, it will include things like you're trying to model your writing off of certain forms like a letter or a memoir or something like that. All of those elements are the structure of your story. So when we think about a story structure, we kind of think about how, what are the changes that are going to be happening in my narrative. Because one of the tenants of storytelling for us is that it is all about change. Change is happening all the time. So when you're thinking about your story, say you have a framework in your head using what's my blueprint? What's my framework for this overarching story, right? Okay, so right now we're talking about really big beginning, climax and not smaller pieces, not scenes. So you're saying to yourself, there are all kinds of ways I can structure this. I might structure it in my head. It's a geographic thing and it's going to store it in a small hamlet, but it's going to end up in a big city. That's, that's, that's part of the structure. It certainly won't be all of it. But it's part of it. Again, as we look at structure, we are examining why an author arranges things in a certain way. Why is he doing that? To what effect? When it comes to looking at structure? We have two options for ourselves and we've touched on them already. We have formal structure, which is going to be based on your literary theory. We have actual structure, which is what we all actually do. So let's look at these. 7. Building Suspense and Releasing Tension: Okay, here we go. Formal structure. Let's get into some Aristotle. Among other people. What I'm about to say absolutely depends on the narrative itself. But in its broadest sense, a narrative is going to contain exposition, a complication, crisis, a climax, and resolution. All of these things from the exposition upward are part of one grand arc. That's all about building to attention and then releasing it. Within that, we're going to have lots of little tension and releases. So rather than thinking of our stories, having one nice little smooth arc line like you often see in storytelling. It's more like, let's just doing this constantly up and down and up and down till you get to a conclusion. You want to always keep in mind when you're writing and you're creating your scenes and your events and your, your plot. That it's not just a matter of saying then this, then this, then this, then this. You are here to manipulate emotion. And you do that by thinking in terms of tension and release. By thinking in terms of the emotions you want built, you're not going to have a happy narrative if you just keep ratcheting up the tension for your reader and you don't give them a cookie every now and then, they give, give me some release, give me some relief from this. So you want to think about, okay, my story is, and this, then this, then this, then this. But how am I going to do this? How am I going to create these tension and releases? I have to do that by telling some information, but then giving some resolution to that issue, moving on to the bigger issue, this is so, so, so important. You've got one big issue. That's the big issue. Frodo's got to get the ring to Mordor, throw it in. That the, that's the big one. But there are so many little ones in that, right? Because they haven't incident with the night riders and then they have to face the troll, they have to face the Orcs or Frodo's dealing with the ring sort of taking over his soul. There are all these tension release, tension, release. You're dealing with this author, your story. So don't just think about the events. Think about, well, this is going to happen. What are the changes I'm going to have take place? Then ended is so important that you're not just saying to yourself, what do I want to have happened? You're asking yourself, what do I want the reader to feel now about this? And what are the changes that are happening every step of the way. You will go from moments. For example, in Lord of the Rings, where Frodo is safe, to, where Frodo's in danger, where Frodo, it feels comforted and happy with his friends to where Frodo doesn't want to talk with his friends, to where Frodo thinks he knows who he is to her. Frodo is very conflicted about who he is because of the ring, and he knows without him to smuggle all kinds tensions out there. It's not a matter of safe versus not safe. Binary about it. Okay? Love, hate, happy, sad in life is not that simple. But you want to be thinking of all of the veritable horde of emotions that are going through as at any one given time. And your job is to select the most important emotions, the most important events and changes for every action that you want to have happen in your story. So that's all part of that grand arc. Now the exposition, the beginning. Let's just pull back here on exposition because people talk about it in two different ways. Often people will say, well, anything that's not dialogue is exposition. It's perfectly, perfectly legitimate. Definition of it. Exposition is filling us in. It sets up the story, it lays out the characters that gives us a backstory. It tells us things that are not going to happen through the action itself. Very often, it occurs at the beginning of a story because it sets things up. It sets up this setting, it sets up the characters. It's just giving us the lay of the land before we get into the action. That's more traditional than I would say modern stories that are often just jumping in the middle of the action. But traditionally that's why sometimes in writing books you will see the start of a narrative cold exposition. Because this idea of exposition being filling people in often is at the beginning. In truth, exposition can and will occur probably throughout your narrative as you're filling us in on certain things. That's all exposition. Exposition in the sense of this Aristotelian look at things, is that beginning laying the groundwork for your narrative before the conflicts, really we, before we shown the conflict to people. That's what that is. When the complication comes. That's when your plot really kicks in. Because complication is that's when you have your inciting incident that kicks into gear, everything that follows it. So you set up your story. You have your lay of the land, but then you have the complication. What's the complication happens? Everything that happens after it is because of it. And you'll have a series of complications. Build, build, build, build, build all the way up to a crisis. 8. Crisis and Climax: So then you have your crisis, which is the Greek word actually returning point. So the crisis is going to build a crisis now is the moment of greatest attention. It's not the climax. Although people tend to use them interchangeably. The crisis is this moment of intense tension is what we've been building towards this whole time. During the crisis, a character will make a decision or take an action that is done to resolve all the conflicts we've been building towards. And it's therefore the moment of greatest tension and uncertainty for the reader. Because it's the moment. What's he going to do? He's going to take an action. The climax resolves the conflict. It's where the central dramatic question of the story is answered. We'll Frodo throw the ring, it will Jane Eyre marry Mr. Rochester? We answered the dramatic question at the climax. It's the solution to the crisis that just preceded it. One way to recognize where the crisis falls in a narrative is that all of the actions after the crisis are more or less an acceptance of what happened at the point of crisis. For example, the crisis in Shakespeare's Hamlet is going to be Hamlet killing Claudius All the play. He's been trying to figure out how to kill Claudius. And at the climax, he does so and it's a quick end. After that, Dial M for Murder wishes a fun. It's so good. It's also a play, but the climax, and that is when the husband who's been plotting to kill his wife is found out after that. So if police come and pick them up and we're done, if you've never seen it, I just ruined the plot for you to watch it anyway, It's so good. It's not always so obvious. It's more obvious than something like Lord of the Rings. It's more obvious in something like Dial M for Murder. But in a psychological novel, like a Jane Eyre, it can be less obvious because Jane Eyre isn't necessarily, doesn't have that feeling of Jane taking action, taking action building, building, building. The climax in a Jane Eyre is where she has, she's had her second marriage proposal. She's debating whether she's going to accept it. But then she sort of supernaturally, here's Rochester calling for her and she ends up going to him. That's actually the climax. It's not a moment of high action. But as we talked about, some narratives aren't, some narratives like Jane Eyre up in her head. And so don't necessarily think that your climax has to be a moment of intense action. It doesn't. It's the moment where all the major thing we've been building toward his met and throughout Jane Eyre. That's about Jane's relationship with Mr. Rochester. And that big question of will these two people actually end up together? Not so when she makes that final decision to go back to him, That's that climax. Everything after that is just her seeing him again, seeing the state that he's in, and then them deciding to be together. One other option is that sometimes you might have a two-pronged climax to your narrative. This takes place in To Kill a Mockingbird and you can watch the film or read the book. I recommend both. Both are absolutely beautiful. Beautiful. I recommend both. But throughout that story you have scout and she's been wondering, who is Boo Radley. That's been a big question throughout the entire story. Seeing Boo and they've never seen him. But you also have the conflict of Bob Ewell, who has been very antagonistic to Scouts father Atticus, because Atticus is defending John Robinson, who was who barbules daughter accused John Robinson of raping her. And so Bob has been very antagonistic to Atticus and therefore to Atticus children's Scout and Jen. So when you get to the end of a story like To Kill a Mockingbird, the first piece of the climax is going to be where Bob Ewell attacks the kids and Boo Radley kills him. Because we've been building this tension all this time with Bob Ewell. We know he's dangerous. We know he's after them. We know he's threatened those children. So we know that Bob, you will, is a bad force in the narrative and we feel very unsettled about him. And so we can't end that story without knowing what's going to happen with Bob Ewell who just wouldn't feel safe. We wouldn't feel safe if we just got to the end and didn't know that. So when Boo Radley kills Bob Ewell, we have a piece, we know what's happened because of that. But the second part of that climax, we have to resolve the children's children's narrative of wanting to see Boo Radley. So you have that bit later on where Scout sees Boo hiding in the corner of the room and she's finally seen Boo Radley. And she finally realizes who Boo is. And it's so different than this sort of harsh character that she'd had imagined all throughout the story. So your narrative actually can have a two pronged climax, depending on the plots and subplots that are going on in your story. It's also important to think about this idea that you can have more than one climax, a sort of a scene. Again, Storytelling is not so hard wired that you have to have one thing that's called a climax. These terms we use to identify certain moments in a story, in a plot. But that doesn't mean that it has to be the only moment. It's just a way we identify a certain kind of moment. For example, to go back to Jane Eyre and I know if you haven't read it, some of this is lost on you. But, but the, the primary climax is toward the end where we hear Rochester calling her out in the ether as it were. Because most of the narrative, most of the plot through that middle portion has been all about this romance, this between the two of them. So that is the primary climax. But you also have this sort of mini climax when Jane Eyre goes to visit her aunt and her artist dying. Because from the very beginning of the story, I mean, the very beginning, jane has been unforgiving. She has said, I will never return to this home. I hate these people. And we've seen her throughout the novel be just proud and angry, quite frankly, and unforgiving. And in that climactic moment, it has her aunt who refuses to forgive her, even though questionably she doesn't necessarily need forgiving. And Jane is the one to ask for forgiveness if she has done offense, as well as to forgive her aunt regardless. And that's such a tremendous character. Change. It while it's not the climax, climax of the story, It's a climactic moment because so much hinges on it. And then after that moment you have is what begins to feel like a denim wall, although not quite. But it begins to feel that way because suddenly she has the money in the independence and the forgiving spirit, all of these things that she didn't have at the beginning, we see her have in that moment. So in some ways, Jane Eyre even has two climaxes. And Mike, My takeaway for you from this, if you've not watched Harry Potter, if you've not, Regina is well, read Jane Eyre because it's great. But it's just this idea, this don't feel so married to the climax. You can have more than one scene that really starts to bring about your resolutions. After that, you have your resolution, your dating war, that comes very quickly. It's where you type your loosens. It isn't very long because predominantly in a narrative. Once you've had your climax, it's a fairly quick ending. Again, this is not always true. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in fact, has a fairly long day anymore, because there are a lot of things that happen after Frodo gets rid of that ring, compare it to the rest of the book. It's short, but it is actually lengthier in that story that works for some people. It doesn't work for others. But again, there's no one-size-fits-all. These are all things that you can do with your narratives. Alright? Now that we've talked about the general, very broad term structure of a story. Let's talk briefly about the actual structures you're storing might have. 9. Deviating from Plot Building “Rules”: As we've mentioned, while these formal structures are time-tested and very sound, in reality, you will deviate from them frequently. That is why it is so important not to just memorize tenants storytelling, but to examine stories. I cannot say that enough. My one goal for you with this class, it is not that you go and plot your own narrative. Yet, although obviously I want you to do that, it's that you learn to be able to look at a narrative, read a story, watch a film, break it into its components and see how it works. You want to be that person, that Tinker who can look at a Watt, take it apart, see how it works, and put it back together. I want that for you with your stories. That's my aim of this course. To that end, I highly recommend that you go and you look at your plots and you see how they differ. I tried to give you a few examples of that with Jane Eyre and with To Kill a Mockingbird. But you will find in many cases where things just don't happen exactly this way. It doesn't necessarily just build up to an action-oriented climax at all. You might have sections that meander. You might have novels that really have these sort of episodic bits to them that you can pull out and that aren't necessarily there. And ask yourself when that happens. What's the effect on the story? Because you might say that actually it's a weak piece of that narrative that actually slowed that down because it was different here or that felt like it sped things up because it was this way. Or that's interesting. The inciting incident happened right away in that book, and it had this effect on me. And in this book, the inciting incident was six chapters in and it had this effect on me. So just understand that this is the broad frame work. Look for these things in the stories that you watch and read. But don't force the stories that you watch and read into this shell because they might not fit it. Likewise, with your own stories, understand, this is the grand arc. Don't force yourself into it. I say this carefully because I also don't want you to just think, well, I'll just break with all the rules and that doesn't have to be that way. Who you really want to know why you're breaking with it. Because these are time-tested. So it's okay to break with it, but just know why. If you've watched my other courses, you know that I absolutely believe that every event, every character trait, every single decision you make about your story, you have to know why you made that decision. So keep that in mind. Keep that at heart. Watch some narratives, read some books. Keeping this structure in your head and then see where they break from it and see where they adhere to it. And ask yourself, what is the emotional response engendered in the reader from structuring your story like this, what you want is a story has a cohesive, feels amazing, resolved to the reader ending. I caveat even that because a lot of stories, especially when you get into modern fiction, are very open-ended and they can be magnificent. So if you want an open-ended story again, that's fine, but know why you're doing it. Faulkner, great at this. Virginia Woolf also. But most of the time, if you want your readers to feel resolution and peace, you want to come to something that just feels solid and satisfying and makes you feel like you read this great book and wasn't it so good? Does nothing more unfortunate for a reader than to put in a bunch of time on a story and get to the end and just feel like, well that's not resolved or that's lame. Really. I mean, there are stories like that. One in particular that comes to mind for me not to be critical or anything like that. But Stephen King's it. I've never read the book because I tried to read the book when I was younger and I got a few pages and I was terrified. But I did see the film, not the new film, but the film that was done, I think in the seventies. And I mean, it was frightening and intense and intense and it tends. And then you got to the end and the climax. And I'm not going to ruin it. I'm just going to say, I got to the climax of that and I was totally disappointed. So you want something satisfying? I'm sorry to be critical of that. If you love that film, great, because everybody likes different things. But we want you to have a good solid ending. So before I get into breaking down this grand arc into even smaller pieces, I want us to take a moment to think about how do we make a satisfying ending? How do we utilize components so that it's satisfying and rewarding to the reader in the end, it is important for us to know this as we look at these building blocks because it totally influences the decisions we make about them. So let's look at that in the next video. 10. Ensuring Satisfying Endings: Two important things to note about creating a plot with great structure to it. You have to know where you're going and character is key. Let's look at both of these. You have to know where you're going. You are going to send yourself down a lot of rabbit holes and set yourself up to the very meandering plot in an unintentional way, not in the episodic way we were talking about with Alice in Wonderland or the Odyssey, but in a meandering way in which it's a narrative that's trying to be linear, but ends up just doing this and having a lack of purpose because you didn't know where you're going. You want to sit down and think to yourself before you start plotting everything out. What's my point a, what's my point B, and how am I going to get there? But you have to at least know where you're going if you have any hope at all of getting there. If you want to go to the store, you have to know the story, you're going to. Then you can say, well, I can take this route, I can take that route, I can get that way. I can go that way. But you've got to know where you want to go before you can do that. This doesn't mean that you will make changes, that you won't have a change of heart, but you really do want to know. Whereas your story ending up. I will be addressing this more a little later in this course on practically speaking, how you can go about discovering these things. Suffice to say it is important that you have a sense of where your story is going. Second thing, character. It's essential. I've already said it. Character and plot totally inextricably linked. All of the actions that take place in your narrative should be character-driven. Save the exception stories by enlarge. If you've got a traditional character-based narrative, all of the actions in your story needs to be character driven. This is so important. But what this means is that you have got to know who your character is because the actions your character takes will come out of who he or she is. You need to know who they are, what they think, why they would do the things that they would do. You've got to know all of that because that's what's going to determine your action. If you just say, well, my character is going to steal from this pizza shop. Well, who is your character? Why is he going to do that? What incited that? What is background that would make him do it? In what way is he going to do that? That is in keeping with who he is. You have to know who your character is. I have a whole course on this about writing a good character profile. That course is all about designing a character that pushes the narrative plot for it. I'm not going to get into it here, but I highly, highly recommend watching that because it entirely addresses what I'm talking about here when it comes to character. More often than not, you want a character with agency. You want a character who is making decisions, who is impacting the plot, as opposed to a more passive character in which the plot is just happening to her? Absolutely. If you have hopes of getting published, editors and agents are looking for this. If you want to do something different, that's totally fine. And there are great literary examples of it. To go back to Alice in Wonderland, Alice doesn't have a tremendous amount of agency. She has some, she does things, but it's more that things are happening to her. I adore Alice in Wonderland, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but she's less active. And that you feel that in the story, reading that story is a different experience. And certainly in the publishing world it's harder to get something like that published. Most of the time. The characters we get invested in, we're invested in because they're going to take action. We got what she going to do. And we're wondering that. So you want a character that's pushing the narrative forward. You want a character that's making decisions to that end. I also have another course that's all about conflicting values and emotions. That course is all about character decisions that drive the plot forward. So I'd recommend watching that one as well. The character profile course will help you build a character with plot driving characteristics. The course on conflicting emotions and values will help you take that character and then right, decisions and actions for them that our plot driving. So I recommend both of those. Lastly, story events have meaning because of character. You don't just want a story that you want an event with meaning. And what matters and means something to me is going to be different than what matters and means something to you. And so when you're thinking about your events and the changes that happen, be a change. I go from happy to sad. It goes from dark to light. Changes happen stories about change. Change is movement. When you have these events and these changes in your narrative, you have got to connect them to your character and saying what matters to them. The reader has to know why those events are meaningful. For example, it might go from sunny to cloudy outside. And I might not care because I'm working in my office building all day. But that same sunny, cloudy afternoon matters tremendously to the child who was hoping to go outside and play. And now that it's getting cloudy outside, it's looking like that event to the park that was going to be the highlight of the day is not going to happen. The first sunny to cloudy didn't matter much, but the second sunny to cloudy had meaning. So you want to make sure that the events that you're picking and choosing have meaning for your character. That's what's going to make the reader connect with it. The reader is not going to connect with the sunny to cloudy day. The reader is not going to connect with missing the bus unless your character cares about missing the bus, unless your character cares about that sunny or cloudy day. So you know your character, know who he or she is? No. Their traits, how they would react to things? No. The tensions and the things that matter to them. And make sure that the events in your story are connected to that. Alright, now that we understand the grand structure of a story on its most simple terms of intro conflict, climax, denim wall. Now that we understand that the actions and the decisions that we make should be character centric. Let's go ahead and drill down to even the smaller components of the stories that we will build. 11. Weaving Character Development into Plot: So one of the big things to keep in your head is this idea of plots. And plots are made up of events. And events mean meaningful change. And change is not meaningful unless it is attached to a character who is invested in those events and whom we are invested in. Let's say it again. Plots are about events and events are meaningful change. And change is not meaningful unless it is attached to a character who is invested in those events and whom we are invested in. This is what story and plot is all about. So at this point, what we've done is we've looked at this grand overarching idea of a, of a rising action to a climax to a denim wall. And it's this concept of tension and release. But as we've said, this tension and release is actually comprised of a lot of smaller moments of tension and release. And they get smaller and smaller. And it's truly quite helpful when you're trying to write your narrative to think of it in these terms, I actually, I think it helps break down something that is otherwise can seem so unwieldy. To actually think about taking your chunks and breaking them down into smaller pieces. So that's what we're about to look at is how you take this one very large tension release and break it into smaller segments of tension and release, which are then comprised of smallest segments of tension and release, etc. Why is it so important to do it this way? Because what writers can sometimes want to do is say, okay, this moment is the climax. I have to make this moment really big, really great. And so they put all their energy into trying to write an intense amount of power into this one scene that we call the climax or the crisis. But the truth is that that's seen. The power of it, the tension in it, the release provided by it. All of that intensity that gravitates toward the climactic moment of your novel doesn't come from you writing the intensity necessarily into that moment in particular, although of course you will want to do that in your own way. It comes because you have built up to that tension through the smaller moments of tension and release. Which is why a novel like Jane Eyre can have a climax in which the climactic moment is her hearing Rochester's voice out in the ether. That's not exactly Harry Potter and Voldemort want to want duking it out. That's a very quiet, quiet climax. But it's a powerful climax because it's everything that has built up to it. And so all of these smaller moments we're talking about all of these smaller and smaller and smaller segments of tension and release have to relate to that grander climax. They can't just be any tension and release you feel like they need to be tension and release that builds to the climactic tension and release. And just as we said, that stories and plots are made up of events. And events are change. Your arch. You're beginning to climax to dinner moi finish is all about a change. A very large change are several very large changes. Often a story doesn't have just one large change at the end it has several really significant changes, be those character changes or changes in, in the, the dynamic of the world or what have you, numerous changes. But they're the really big ones that you were looking at when you first design it. Well, just as an, all these tension and release moments need to relate to that climactic moment. So too, should we see the changes that are occurring throughout your events and throughout your increasingly smaller segments. Those changes should build up and relate to the larger changes of your overarching narrative. So all of these things need to tie together. We will be looking at an example of this. Stay, Stay tuned for it. Just put the point again that I want to make is we have this big arch. It's about tension and release. It's about a large change. Now we need to go in and fill all of these other things in so that, that climax and those changes are impactful. So let's begin with that. 12. Breaking a Plot into Manageable Sections: In this next section, you're going to hear me talk about terms, terms like events and beats and scenes and act. Don't get hung up on the terminology. The terms we're using a fairly standard don't get hung up on the terms. It's the idea of increasingly smallest segments and how do we utilize them? So first, let's just store it within the event. As we've said, an event in loss of character and it involves meaningful change. This is fairly standard. Think about your day. If your spouse to say were to say, How was your day? You might say something like, I got a raise or I didn't do well at my presentation or their traffic was bad and I was late. Look at all three of those things. All three of those things, they matter to you. Your financial well-being, being late for work, which could affect your financial well-being or not doing well in your presentation, which could also affect your financial well-being. Among other things, you're standing at the company, et cetera. All three of these things matter to you for your day, but all three are also a change. You had less money before your race than you did after you raise. You had hopes for your presentation and they were not so grand after your presentation. You were on time to work until you weren't. So all three of these things were changes that happened in your day. So any event, it's a natural thing, even when we look at our own lives to think of an event as being something that changes and that change matters to us to that end, when you are designing your narratives and you're thinking of the events that take place. It's not enough to think to yourself, okay? And then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. You have to say, so what? Why does this even matter? Why does it matter to my protagonist or my antagonist or to this character, to that character? You have to know why the event matters. And it can't just matter to the character. It has to matter to the character in the context of the story. So it has to be significant not only for the character, but it has to be significantly relevant to the story itself. When you think about what these changes can be, they can be all kinds of things. They can be going from happy to sad. They can be going from wealthy to pour. They can be something that's more values oriented, like being free versus being enslaved. Or you're standing up for what's right versus being cowardly. But they tend to be something of a binary in its most simplistic form. When you think about it, feel free to think broadly about the changes that might take place. And most scenes and events might have more than one change. It might go from sunny to cloudy in this scene. It might also be that in the scene, Marsha and Sandra go from being best friends to having the worst argument of their lives. So many changes can happen. There can be all sorts of things, but you need to understand and consider what those changes will be. But we have to go further. It's not enough just to have it change. Why does it change matter? A change matters because what it means is that there is something at stake in that event, in that scene. It doesn't match to me that it went from sunny to cloudy. If nothing is at stake, it is interesting to me when it goes from sunny to cloudy. If, as we mentioned earlier, a little boy was really planning on going to the port, and now it looks like it might not happen. Suddenly, his afternoon is at stake. So I care. So it's not enough just to have an event. It has to be an inventor for change, not any change and meaningful change in which something is at stake. Is it just his happiness stake, or is it spending time with his father and building that relationship that's at stake. What is at stake? And why does that thing that is at stake? How does that thing relate to your overarching grand narrative? It's got to be a building block that's going to get me a reader to feel maximum tension at your climactic and crisis. See if it's helpful. Think about tension and release and just story structure like this. Things shouldn't always be going well, but nor should they always be terrible. It's rather like a tennis match in which the ball is bouncing from one side to the other. So sometimes your protagonist has the upper hand and things look like they're going well and then, whoops, know now that looks like it's not going well over here. But then well, this thing's going well over here, so we're feeling better, but no, that's not going so hot over there. This is about the tension and release. Tension and release can be the reader going what's going to happen next, right? But if everything's going really well, we're not going to go over what's going to happen next. We might go. Okay, So the floor is going to fall out somewhere here. We're expecting something bad to happen, right? Because why would we read something in which it's all going to stay the same just as if something terrible is happening. We expect something to turn his way and go some somewhat, right? It doesn't mean that necessarily we go from total rainbows and sunshine to dark blooming, terrible. But it just means that there is a, there is an upper hand versus a non upper hand. It's sort of like, Well, we got through that, but now we have to deal with this. That is part of the tension and release that we're talking about. 13. Acts, Sequences, Scenes, Events, Beats: In screenplay writing, which are the terms that I want to use right now. Although these are also used in drama, and they can totally be used for narrative, for novels as well. But let's think about these smaller chunks. We've got the big grand narrative. Let's think about these chunks in ideas of acts. Sequences, scenes, events, beats, acts, sequences, scenes, events. And beats. Again, don't get hung up on the terminology. What you should observe here is that there's one large narrative and then we have the smaller segment. It has its own climax release that's an act. And then a smaller one. That's a sequence. A smaller one that is a scene. That scene is comprised of beats. So you can just see how many different layers of climax you have actually going on at one time. And act in this situation would be a series of sequences that builds to its own climax that results in a situational change or a values change. But an act would be one thing comprised of several sequences. A sequence is subsequently comprised of several scenes and beats, of course, make up a scene. Let's look at an example of this so that you have an idea. Joe has been working toward landing a big sale that could get him the promotion of a lifetime. But his son, whom he is not the sole caretaker for, has called him sick and wants to be picked up from school. So in our imaginary scene, he starts really excited. He's about to make this fabulous sales presentation. And he's been working really hard on it. And the financial reward could be phenomenal and he might get a raise and he would be more respected and he could move to that penthouse, the unwanted or whatever. He's excited. He's talked to his co-workers. They tell him he's got this. You're going to be great. Go you everybody's pumping themselves up. The phone rings. It's the school nurse. Your sound is very ill. Can it wait? Your son is very, very sick. He's been asking for you. I think it's serious. So now Joe is in his office. He's put the phone down. He's stressed. He's looking at his watch and he's knowing there's no way he can pick up his son and be back in time for the presentation. So let's just look at this scene. This would be a scene. What makes it a scene? Scene is going to be something that really takes place in one geographical area. Limited amount of time, generally speaking. So this is all taking place in Joe's office area. He might be moving around the office a little bit from his coworkers cubicle to wherever. But it's all one scene because we're all in this onetime moment in this one location. And that scene starts with the first beat being Joe. Just kind of in his office. Everything's going well. He's really good. It's coworkers coming in saying, Hey, we're going to do a really great job. Joe starts the scene upbeat, focused on work, prospective, better income and promising financial future and job future. Has a beat. He talks with his coworker, this gets an even more pumped up. So he's, he's riding even higher now, right? So then the next beat is going to be that the phone rings and he picks up that phone and he gets bad news. So now the beat has shifted. Joe's mood has shifted to one of concern. This isn't good. And depending on how you write it as Joan thinking more about his son or his job, but based on what I've said, it's his job. And now he's now we're seeing what his job is in jeopardy, whose job is in jeopardy? And as a reader were like, Whoa, okay, So there's a, there's a shift in that beat. And then Joe tries to see if he can make this work or whatnot. He's easy, can't make it work. He puts the phone down. Now he's standing in his office and he's tremendously stressed. So you can see in this scene, joe has gone from the happy, positive financial future, etc, to looking like there goes my sale, there goes my money, there goes my promotion. And I'm very stressed out and unhappy. All of that happened in that scene. So do you see the changes that made you want to think about what those changes are and these changes already they to Joe as a parent and Joe as a successful business person. So maybe the climax of the story is probably in some way going to ultimately relate to that if we build up enough of this conflict into our narratives. Now, this all gets into conflicting values and emotions of your characters when we talk about these changes that happen and these tension and releases that happened throughout your story. Again, everything's connected to character. This is all about your character's values and emotions. I've done a course on this about conflicting values and emotions. I definitely suggest you watch it because it's going to get into a lot of that. So I'm not going to talk about it at present here. 14. Literary Example, Part 1: What I'd like to do now is take a literary example, Jane Eyre, and look at how that story is broken down into smaller components. I am not at this point going to drill down to the level of sequences and scenes. There's so much we could say about sequences and scenes. And I want to keep this course a bit, a bit broader. What I want you to see in this is how you can take a novel and identify its sort of smaller units. This is part of the thing that I want you to be able to do so that you can then go to the stores you like and start to learn to identify where are these changes taking place? What are the acts, what are the blocks of tension, release of change in this story? And what you'll do when you do this and you're examining a piece of literature. Then when you're even designing your own, which we will get to is, you'll look at the overarching story. You'll say, Where's my climax? What is that? You get that much done. But then you want to look at it and say, okay, broadly, what are the, what are the broad ways we can separate this story out? This could be geographical, this could be time-based. So it's, well, it's his childhood, then his early years as a young man, and then he's an old man. There all kinds of ways a narrative might break itself down. Then from that you would go and break it down further. So let's just look at Jane Eyre. I want to give you a brief summary, brief summary of it. It is essentially the story of a young girl. She's an orphan. She lives at home with an art and cousins. They are terrible to her. They are terrible to her. And they're abusive. It's very bad situation. She's poor, she has nothing. Well, her aunt decides, she just can't take take Jane anymore. Jane is proud. Jane is hateful. She is angry. She is not exactly your Cinderella character who's just beaten up on by the step sisters. She, she's, she's a bitter, bitter little girl, but she's also a very imaginative little girl. She really has hopes for something that's better out there. So her aunt decides, we have to get rid of Jane, sends her off to a school called low wood. And Jane goes to low wood and finds that Live at low, it's not fun either. So she spends a lot of your young years at low wood and eventually she learns enough and becomes educated enough to be a teacher at that school. Eventually she really wants to leave lowered. So she obtains for herself a governor's position at house called Thorn field for the award of a gentleman named Mr. Rochester. And then we proceeded to what is a large segment of the book, which is her time at Thorn field. She enjoys teaching Adele her ward, Mr. Rochester's ward. She has companionship with some of the servants of the house where she did not have companionship before she meets Mr. Rochester and falls in love with him. And there are scenes where he has beautiful women as guests and that sort of sensor. It makes her feel plane and small. Ultimately these she discovers that Mr. Rochester loves her as well. They form this attachment now because they both know that they love each other. He eventually says he wants to marry her. Everything just looks like it's going well, but, you know, it can't go totally Well because there's so much left of the book, you know, something's about to happen. And it soon discovered I'm totally leaving so much out by the way. It's a long book, but it's discovered that in fact Rochester, It's already married. So he's basically trying to be a bigamist. And Jane is feeling betrayed and awful. And so she leaves one field. She then has no money, she has nothing. She ends up at the mercy of people in the home called Morehouse. And this gentleman is a missionary and he has two sisters. Well, it turns out jane realizes that they're very lovely people and she's actually related to the girls and their cousins. This gentleman, the missionary, proposes to Jane, and she's thinking about accepting until she hears Rochester's voice and sort of goes back to Thorn field. Thorn field has been burned down because Russia is just crazy ex-wife, burned it down and died. And so he's now blind. And oh, by the way, Jane discovered, after leaving foreign field to go into more house than actually her uncle left her tremendous amount of wealth and actually the wealthy woman, independent. And so she goes back, sees Rochester and now she's as independent, financially independent woman who has her love. And that's where the story ends. It's a Gothic. Gothic romance. So it's got a lot of dark moments and I've led to tremendous amount out, but that's the general summary of the book. So what I want to do just briefly is look at this. So for the case of Jane Eyre, what you can see if you look at the novel, is that one of the best ways you could break it down is by location. You could technically say, well, let's break it down into Jane's childhood and adulthood. But that doesn't quite get at it structurally. We have to look at the overarching thing here. The overarching story that we're looking at is that Jane goes from proud, unforgiving, angry, alone, poor, not independent, looking for escape, to ultimately a caring, compassionate, independent, loved, wealthy and sadder Budweiser woman. That's the big change that's happened once we have the climactic moments, that's where we end up. So that's the overarching narrative. Now, when we break this down and we say, well, how does this break down into smaller structures? What we see is that actually the author has designed this to be kind of broken down by location. So we started with childhood per ads home of her childhood called Gateshead. We then move to the school low would we then move to Thorn field where she's going. We then move to more house where she is embraced by the missionary and his sisters and eventually propose two. And then we move back to where Thorn field was, but is now burned down and we find Rochester living in a smaller home cold for indeed. There's a clear structure here. And within each of those we see changes in j. So for example, consider now again, the larger change in the narrative we're talking about. Let's drill down. And even if you haven't read it, this is okay. Let's just look at the first one. Let's look at Gateshead. Now at Gateshead, Jane is unloved. Beginning of just this segment. She's unloved. She's abused, she is not free. And she's very sad. But while she's there at Gateshead, that's when her aunt decides we're going to send this girl away. So what happens? Well, in this case, Jane is feeling unloved and at the end, she's still feeling unloved. But she goes from feeling completely in bondage and not free to sort of feeling like, well, I could get out from under my aunt. There's a hopefulness there. No matter what, even though she's met Mr. Brocklehurst, he's not very nice, and in which case, she's gone from sad to cautiously excited. Alright. So then we move, we take all those emotions that she had there and we move over to Thorn field, to the school. Now she was all of those things at the end. Well, what's going on at the start of the Thorn field section? Because you're allowed to add things and take away things. You don't have to just sort of pick your changes at seen one and then carry them all the way through to the climax. You don't have to do that. But Thorn field, now she's come and really from the beginning, it's not going well. So she enters the one field. Less educated. She had as a child. She is less socialized because she's been at home with her aunt, etc. She is unemployed. And she is totally dependent. By the end of that section. She is very much more educated to the point that she can get a governess position. She's a young woman now. She is far more socialized. She had found a friend in a young girl named Helen who died, which she's also therefore becomes a little bit more tender, sensitive, compassionate. She's been shown kindness. So she has found more kindness and herself. She is now employed. And she is there for more independent. So look at how just from the more head to form field we're starting to carry through in some of these threads carry through, but we sort of add threads. You sort of add different things that weren't there before we can, we can add and take away. Moving on now to Thorn field. Well, what's happening at Thorn field? She's happy. She's starting a new job. Yeah. We're good. She has a sense of purpose that she didn't have. She's going to take care of this young girl. She feels like she has a new home. She'd never really felt like she had a home, but she actually starts to settle in and feel like this can be a place. She's confident in a way she hasn't been before. She goes. She sort of stores having not had companionship. But now let's look at this one because it's not necessarily just an obvious this to this and this to this, because what happens, Let's go back. 15. Literary Example, Part 2: It is very happy at the start of a new job. She's excited by the end what this, by the end of her time at Thorn field, Rochester has totally lied to her and she leaves feeling disillusioned, betrayed, sad. So there's a real change of emotion. She started with a sense of purpose. I'm going to take care of this child. And then she had an increased sense of purpose and being a potential wife to Rochester to then leave and have no idea where she's going. She has no idea where she's going. And this is a high-impact moment because so much has built to it. We've had a lot of the book where she thought she knew what was going to happen. And now she doesn't she starts that same feeling like she's got a new home to now being totally without L. Again, this this really matters because when you think back to Morehouse, that was around town, that never felt like home as we think of home. Fluid-filled, never felt like home as we think of home, she gets too low and never felt like home as we think of hose is terrible school. Thorn field is the first time she feels like she's kind of settling into what might be a home. But now for the first time she's literally homeless. So you see how these themes of home and do you see how the changes of emotion and of situations that are happening end up becoming themes in the stories. Some of them, this idea of home or this idea of place with this idea of independence, these, these are becoming your themes. So when you start to look at changes that are happening, you have to say, well what, how does this relate thematically to the underlying themes of my narrative? When you are designing your narrative, you need to talk about things and think about beams and say, what do I want my beads to be? Those themes should be worked in to these binaries, to these tension releases and these changes in situations that are happening in your story. Going on, right? Let's look at the confidence one. She stores that section. Much more confident. Not like I'm so wonderful, but more confident perhaps that she's ever been. And she's feeling good about that until she falls in love with Rochester. Because then he asked his beautiful women come in and there has guests and she thinks that he loves them and it makes her feel plane and unloved. Because it goes from feeling confident about being a teacher to being not confident about being an attractive woman to then he proposes now she's confident about being an attractive woman to then being totally not confident about anything. It seems like because what did I know he lied to me, didn't think much of me and now I'm homeless and I have no idea what's going on. So in that case, sometimes you might have seen that really goes one to the other, but sometimes just within that section, she'll go off confident or not confident, competent, not competent doll and nuanced ways. That's okay. You can let that happen in your ACT or your scene. It's less likely to happen in a smaller chunk like a scene, but it's certainly might happen in a sequence or an act on one of these larger chunks. Likewise, the companionship, she starts there with no real companionship. She develops companionship with some of the people. She develops companionship with her ward. She develops companionship with Mr. Rochester, but then she again ends up with no companionship because she leaves. So there can be these switches suffice to say on Morehouse, more changes happen. And then you have your climactic moment, then you have your denim wall. And in that Dean and white for a Dean funding, we really see come to fruition the larger changes of the story that we are looking at. So what I want you to take away from that is just the idea of the variety of changes that you can have happened. The idea that changes don't necessarily have to be one to the other. They can be flexible, that they are connected to your themes. They are connected to your characters, wants and needs. I want to touch just briefly on an example of another way that a story might be broken down. Whereas Jane Eyre was broken down by location, has one of its larger entities that can then get smaller. Dial M for Murder, for example, can be broken down differently and you don't have to know the plot to appreciate this. In Dial M for Murder, your first section really would be the setup, just your introduction, your exposition, getting everything laid out. Then the second section would be where the husband articulates his desire to murder his wife and relates that whole plot and arranges that, then you could break it down into okay, now that that's been arranged, this section is just the murder attempt, which would be followed by the wife being accused of actually murdering the murderer. Doesn't this make you want to watch it? And hobos attempt to figure out what actually happened, which would be your longest section of the story, which would then result in the climax and just be followed by the realization that the husband is guilty, I'm taking him away. So you see how this one is just much more temporal in nature. And each of these sections, some will be longer than others. The murder section would be much shorter. You could say, actually, I think you could lump together the plot of the murder with the murder, that there's totally an argument to be made there. This can't be a location-based one because it's really all confined to this one apartment or condo, etcetera that they live in. But you could say, yeah, I would combine it there. Now, I choose not to combine it there because I see significant changes in tension and release that happens in just the scene where he's plotting it. And then this scene in which the murder event happens, that scene with the murder event has such serious changes from however short it is that segment has such significant changes that I see it as its own entity, but you might not. And that's okay. The point is to get in the habit of seeing how things can break down. And again, this matters because this is what's going to help you lot purposeful events. What can be so intimidating as a writer is to just say, Hey, I have events floating around in my head, but I don't know how to order them and I don't know if they matter. This is how you figure that out. You start at the big and you go Dao. Having looked at all of that, let's just touch briefly on how you set up your plot, how you sort of just get it started. This also is its own beast, so I want to keep it broad for this class, but we should address it. 16. Writing a Strong Beginning: In play writing, you will have two terms that are often spoken of, which is an inciting incident and a point of attack. And it's really worth us taking those terms and thinking about them. Very often, writers will be familiar with the idea of a, of an inciting incident, but not necessarily a point attack. And the differences between the two and the functions that they have and your story have significance. The inciting incident is an event that takes place before your story begins. It's the reason that the characters do some of the things that they do. Now, we'll want to know as readers what that inciting incident is that something you will want to reveal to us. And it's often revealed very close to the point of attack. But the incident itself is generally something that's already happened. This is different than the point of attack, which is an event or a series of events that are a response to your inciting incident. So let's, let's look at these now that we have these definitions, the inciting incident, again, is a major event that happens before your story begins. While the point of attack is an action or a short sequence of actions that's actually a response to the inciting incident. The point of attack is what sets the action for the rest of the story in motion. When it comes to an inciting incident, you want something strong and dramatic. It can help you, it can help you keep your focus as you're writing and result in a really dramatic climax. For the case of a play like Hamlet, the inciting incident would be that Hamlet's uncle has murdered his father and married his mother, and is now quite frankly out for Hamlet. None of that happens in the play. All of that's happened beforehand, but it's the inciting incident. So what's the point of attack? The point of attack is when the ghost of his father, CMS, and commissions Hamlet, go and kill Claudius, his uncle. That's the point of attack because that is the, that is the thing, the action which causes everything else that follows. Hamlet doesn't do anything else he does, except for the fact that his father came to him and revealed what the inciting incident was to his son, set it in motion. So in this case and the case of Hamlet, the inciting incident is revealed very close to the point of attack. It's actually nestled right there into the point of attack because the father is the one who tells him, hey, look, all this stuff happened and that's why I'm dead and that's why you have to do this and that. So inciting incident point of attack commissioned his son. Set the plot in motion. Let's look at another example. In Dial M for Murder, the inciting incident is the husband realizing of his wife's infidelity and that she, being the wealthy person in the relationship, might actually divorce him and take her money with her and he wants her money. And the lifestyle he is accustomed to. That's all the inciting incident. We learn about that. Again, very close to the point of attack. Point of attack being when he declares his intent to murder his wife to the gentlemen, he wants to have execute that plan. So he brings that gentlemen to his apartment, says Here's my plan. I want you to do this. That's how we we learned that. And so in the case of Dial M for Murder, we don't necessarily learn. He doesn't necessarily say, Well, I'm just really after her money. But we learn when we learn bits of that in different ways. But your point of attack, I want you to murder my wife sets the murder motion, which sets in motion the idea that the wife is accused of murder and the subsequent attempt to the bot to correct things and on and on we go. The point of attack is where that sets everything else in motion. But through the conversation and the revelation of the husband, we learned with the inciting incident was let's talk about placement. As I've mentioned very often, the point of attack is quite close to the inciting incident. Your readers want to know what caused the point of attack. Your readers want to know what caused the action that is therefore causing all of the other actions in the story. Most readers won't be content with a narrative in which the husband sits down with someone says, I want you to kill my wife. And we set the whole thing in motion and the whole story we're sitting there going, Why? Why did you want to do this? We want to know why. Now, there are reasons to delay that. For example, a mystery story, mysteries, very often we are watching something, we don't know why, but we expect it will be revealed to us at some point. And you do want to be careful about when you do that revealing because you don't want to try. The patients have ureters. You want to give them a cookie. So if you're not going to reveal the reasons the inciting incident fairly close to the point of attack. You need a reason for that and a plan for when you're going to do it that you think won't irritate your readers. In this next video, I want us to talk briefly about how do we choose the right moments. We've looked now at the grand structure. We've looked at this idea that, that grand structure is broken down into increasingly smaller ideas of tension and release. But within that, you still have to choose the moments, right? So let's look at that next. 17. Choosing What to Include in Your Story: Going back to the definitions, we talked about their story and there is plot and your story has far more things happening in it than you're ever going to put your plot and your story. Is that chronological listing. Now when you think about your character and the things that are happening in his life or her life as they relate to this plot. They're going to be more things than you can put in. So you have to be very selective about the scenes that you show. Without question. Every scene must have its own function, its own purpose. If you can't tell me the significance of that scene, it needs to go and each scene must be unique. For example, you might have two scenes that builds up a friendship, but I have to learn something different about that friendship in the first scene and the second scene, it can't just be that both scenes tell me. Yes, Sam and Joe are friends. I have to learn different nuances of those friendships. If you're going to give me two scenes that you think that's the purpose of them. Number two, every scene must follow and proceed, the one before it. This sounds so obvious, but it's critical. You can't just drop a scene it wherever you feel like it. What happened in Scene three is going to directly influence what happens in Scene four, which is going to influence what happens in C5. C5 gets its meaning in part by what happened in scene for and obviously in what happens in scenes Three, 21. But why did you put seen five after scene for, why didn't you put C five after seen three? Now you might say, well, that's just not chronological. That's why I didn't. But it's more than that. It's not just a chronology thing because as we've said, plot isn't necessarily chronological. And a scene could be a flashback, or a scene could be. This is an expository moment, right? You might be going along chronologically. But in this sequence, there is a scene that's more exposition in which I'm learning something about the history of Sam. Why did you put that there? You could have told me about the history of Sam in several places. You have to say, well, this scene of the history of sam matters because I set us up for it because of this other thing. It's all a little train and all your cars are attached. And if one car goes off the tracks, they all go off the tracks. You have to know why you're putting things in the order that you are. The reason you will put things in a certain order will be because of that tension release you're trying to build. Which means you have to know what tension releases you want, which means you have to know your characters. You will have some seeds that are sort of bigger scenes and other scenes you will have. It's that scene, It's that same, just the scenes that are quote unquote, more impactful. But as we mentioned earlier, those scenes are only impactful because you have made them relevant through this smaller seeds that have come before them. This is true of big moments in our lives. Think about a wedding. A wedding has a really big deal. People spent a lot of money on weddings. They gather their friends together. They put on beautiful clothes. They take lots of pictures. It's a big event, but it only lasts a few hours. And what made the wedding a big event wasn't the wedding. It was all of the love and all of the commitment and all of the sacrifice, all of these small moments of love that led up to it. That's what made the wedding important. When you think about your big seeds and your pivotal scenes, remember, don't try to cram the meaning into that scene. Make that seem meaningful because you built to it through all the smaller moments. That's what makes them impactful. In this next video, I would like us to touch just briefly on chapters and scenes because they're very often a lot of questions about is a chapter a scene or is it a chapter? How do I break that down? What's the function of chapters in my narrative? 18. Chapters and How to Use Them: Scenes and chapters, they are different. So let's review with a scene what makes it special. Scenes are more non-negotiable. And by that what I mean is that they have a distinct change. They are their own structural unit with their own conflict, their own goal, their own beginning, their own end, just as we talked about. So when you look and you sort of segment to seeing, you'll know what it is because you'll see the changes happening. You'll see It's own little mini, mini arc of climax denim. What? Chapters are more negotiable chapters. You can put something into a chapter for a lot of different reasons. Chapters, like paragraphs or sentences, have a lot to do with the pacing of your novel. They can help advance the plot. They can help keep the reader moving. Regions are far more intimidated when they see very, very long chapters, as opposed to when they see somewhat shortest chapters and they're like, okay, I have time for that. That's a manageable amount. I can handle it. That helps advance the plot just as in the same way when a reader picks up a book and all the paragraphs go on for a paragraph, go on for a page and a half or 2.5 pages as opposed to I see the paragraph. I see the paragraph. Those visual segments help keep your reader engaged. It's people, people like to know where the finish line for the moment is, and that helps them with that. In terms of pacing, shorter chapters just make the story move more at a clip. Longer chapters actually can make the pacing feel a bit slower. Novels themselves have an underlying rhythm to them. The chapters can really help set that, set that rhythm. But when it comes to defining those chapters for yourself, you just, you want to think about what are the cues you want to send to the reader. Sometimes a chapter will seem obvious because you'll say, Well, I have this good cliffhanger here, so let's end the chapter. But sometimes you might choose to have three sequences in a chapter. And some chapters, you might just want to have one scene. When you do that, you're, you're signaling something to the reader. When you give an entire scene to a chapter you're telling the reader, this is very important. Focus on this bogus. It's important, It's got its own chapter. And other times when you're combining several things into a chapter, you're not saying it's not important, but you're not drawing the magnifying glass to it in the same way. So it's a structure for yourself. There isn't a hard definition of it the way there might be more a scene. Just keep that in mind that as you're going and thinking about it. Think about the pacing and think about when would you like the reader to take a moment and breathe? Because that's what these visual cues do. When we end a paragraph. When we look at a paragraph, a paragraph is designed to be a thought. It's a thought chunk, and it's a thought segment. And when we get to the end of a paragraph, it's a moment to breathe, just like sometimes there's a story in one chapter. You might have a section and then there's just sort of a line break for a little bit and then it goes again. It's a pause. Where in your story do you want your readers to pause and reflect? And when you know that readers very often might read a chapter and put the book down and come back. Where do you think are good places for your reader to do that? Where do you get to a point in the chapter where you say, Hey, having read all of this, it's so dramatic. Why don't you take a breather and process that? I mean, really think about where you'd like those things as a reader and put your chapters there. Alright, in this next video, I want us to look at some practical application. We've talked about a lot of theory. We've talked about a lot of definitions. So in addition to the practical application we've already gone over, I just want to offer a few other pieces of advice on structuring your narrative and how do you navigate your way into a very dramatic, beautiful plot. 19. Best Practices & Practical Application: There are numerous ways that writers find their way to a story. There is no one right way. So everybody has their own methods. What I talk about here are just some suggestions and a lot of observations that I have made over my years working with creative writers. The first thing that I would like to talk about is this idea of plotting your whole novel out beforehand or discovering your plot and your characters as you go. Some riders love to plot it out. They have every scene on a SIM card in and outline somewhere. It's all mapped out. And then they sit down to the business of writing your story. This is a, this is a tactic used by some very, very successful authors today. Certainly not all of them. And it's one way to go about it. On the other side, the people who somewhat sort of know what their story is, but they discover things about your character as arriving. Many riders are going along and they say, gosh, I didn't know that James liked skiing. But it sort of comes out as you're writing. And if you're a writer, you probably know that experience of just sitting down and you're doing your writing and brainstorming. And it's an odd blend of you getting down your ideas, but also strangely having your ideas and your characters reveal themselves to you as you do that. It's a very odd sort of magical thing, but it's real. And so there's this idea that people don't necessarily want to plot the whole thing out because their story comes out of a discovery mode. So there are many different ways, but these are two extremes and I want to talk about the benefits of planning it all out is that you have this total cohesion that we've been talking about, this entire class. That idea of the large seen broken down into smaller, smaller, smaller. You plan all of that out. You're talking about something very tight. What it doesn't allow for you is the spontaneity that happens when you write and you let your things to be discovered. If you go the other way, it's going to be incredibly difficult for you to come up with something very tight and cohesive. Because it's also a spontaneous. I encourage people to allow for both. If you're someone who totally likes to plan it all out, go ahead. If you're someone who likes the spontaneous, I do encourage you to do a certain amount of planning while being open and aware that things are going to arise. If you do that, you absolutely have to be willing as character traits or events or things arise that you're going to then put into your story that you weren't planning on when you made your general outline. You need to be willing to then change every single thing that comes after that scene. Because as I've said before in this class and others, if you put a scene in and you think you can drop it in and not change anything after it. That seems useless. That scene only matters if everything else after it changes. So you want to be open to the spontaneous thing, you've got to be willing to make those changes as you go. I didn't fact, inserting that scene might affect things even that come before it. To that end, what we're talking about here, it's important to recognize that while we can talk about specific steps in writing as brainstorming, outlining, writing, rewriting, editing steps. Most of the time, you're engaged in more than one of those at any given time. Don't feel like you have to finish all of the outlining before you can start the writing. Or don't feel like you can't do some rewriting while you're doing some new writing. These steps overlap. That is part of what makes something very organic. So don't feel limited to one step at a time. When it comes to actually outlining this, there are numerous methodologies. I don't want to get in any of them into great detail, but some that I've seen used very often to great success. Our plot cards, SIM cards in which you just take note card used to make flashcards for your child. And you just scenes on them. And each scene would have the characters in the scene and the changes that are happening, its own mini tension, release, et cetera. Then you can lay those out. And one of the neat things about having on cards is you can sort of move things around and go, You know what, actually, I think that's better over there. And another really great option is scrivener software. There's a wonderful writing software called scrivener that actually even has its own little digital note card thing that you can move your note cards around. It's an investment and time to learn, but it's used by a lot of writers and it has a lot of really great export options for your, your manuscripts and things like that. So it's definitely worth looking at. Another option is just an outline. A lot of people really just like that visual outline. The key is to really do take the time to find and invest in the planning method that works for you, the one you'll use if you are not going to sit down and take the time to learn scrivener, then don't use that one. If you really like writing by hand than the note cards or more of your street. And if you like that visual outline that you can then make notes on top of do that. What's, what's important is you do find a method of organization that works for you that is worth doing. It's worth trying different ones to find out the one that is actually best for you. My final takeaway for you as writers. So much of what I've talked about here is about analyzing narratives. I cannot encourage you enough to take the time to read like a writer, to view like a writer, to start to learn to break these things down. But what this means for your own stories is really do when you're writing. Think about big change that you want to happen. Once you've done that. Start to think about how do I want to break this down? What might my architecture look like? And brainstorm different ways that, that architecture might look. If you have scenes in your head, you think that could be an interesting scene because it's very often happens. You'll, you'll have an idea for a story. You won't totally not everything, but you'll have a character you love, or you have some scenes with that character that seem compelling to you. Write those things down, see how they might fit in. If they seem compelling to you, then you need to ask yourself, why is that seem compelling to me? What's happening to that character in this situation. But very often we sort of know generally the plot that's in place. What's helpful to you is to look broadly and say, well, I know I'm doing this story about a man who gets stranded on an island and has to be Your has to survive. Start to look broadly and then say, well, there's, there's, these are the big changes that I want him to make. How am I going to achieve those big changes? Here are smaller emotional struggles that he's going to go through. Really think in terms of your character, if you will do that. If you'll start broad and slowly break it into smaller components, you'll discover your scenes or scenes will reveal themselves to you. It's also perfectly fine to just do some writing and see where it goes. If you're feeling stuck, take a moment. Brake figure out like go do some writing words, drawing you. It might reveal some things to you. What will probably happen is then you'll have to throw away everything you wrote. Because what you will have obtained from it is the seed, the idea, the revelation of o, this that now has to be worked into the structure of the story itself. It's so tempting for writers not taught to give things up. But the truth is that you just, I just think it's very hard to actually be a successful writer if you're not willing to trash a lot of what you've written. So be willing to do that exploratory writing. And then say, Okay, this is what I've learned from that. Now how do I work that into my architecture? That's what makes a great story, a great plot, is the willingness to not go with your first right, not go with your first words. Those words, the ones you feel like you're trashing, you're not trashing, they're not garbage. You had to write them to get to where you are, to get to the revelation that was their function. Now work them in, in the right way. Now that we've said all of that, let's take a moment and talk about the class resources for you for this course. 20. Final Thoughts and Class Worksheet: Before I get into my final comments and the class project, I want to thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this course, please leave a review. It's so helpful for me and it helps keep me making courses for you. I appreciate your views so much. I appreciate your time. I also encourage you to follow me on my other channels. I have a YouTube channel and also on Instagram as well as the website. So I do encourage you to go and look at all of those things if you'd like to keep in touch. Now onto the course project, you have four, you some very specific plot analysis questions. These questions can be used for your own writing or to analyze another piece of literature or a film. I highly recommend going through this. I recommend choosing a novel you totally, totally love, or a film or whatever, depending on the kind of writing you want it to do and answering these questions about it. And I encourage you to go through and try to map out and break down that story into its smallest segments. Break it down into its acts, into its sequences, into its scenes. This is a time consuming thing to do, but you will learn so much doing it. And in doing so, what you will also learn is how the authors and the rider's, you love do this because we all have different writers we love. So we've got to analyze those works. So do download those questions. Do go through it with works of art that you love. And then take those questions to your own stories, to your own plots, and see how answering those questions will help you write your story. I thank you so much for watching. This is such a pleasure to communicate with you and to be here providing these classes. It's such a joy. Thank you so much. I hope you're having a wonderful day and I wish you the very best of luck with your writing. By remember what we said. You are here to manipulate emotion. Darn it. Be really cool. I think this lady bird in my home, there isn't any bird. Glad it's not round to lighting is so different. Sorry about that. And it's really it's really worth a read on. So it's not enough just to have intense. They're going to my notes.