Story! Story! Story!

          I’m a pantser, in life and in writing. When left with no structure imposed on me, I tend to go with the flow. Like a river meandering through a valley, my attention, be it on words, people or tasks is captivated by what is close at hand. There is so much good to be had in living (and writing) this way. Magical moments are discovered and enjoyed. The world can telescope in a moment to a tiny piece of ground shared with a child fascinated with the bugs crawling in the dirt or forming a mud pie. A scene can burst forth with raw emotion flowing from my fingertips through the keyboard into my story. I can easily shift focus and responsibilities to help care for a sick friend or entertain a visiting one.

          As with all personality traits, my live-in-the-moment personality has a darker side. Yes, it allows me to fully enjoy each moment, but it it can also cause me to miss even better or more important moments. A loved one is devastated because I was so absorbed in a project I forgot an important date. A writing deadline comes and goes and I miss out in many ways. A needy friend doesn’t call because she doesn’t want to impose, so I never pick up on the need.

          In order to make sure I spent my time and focus on those things that truly matter to me, I had to impose some structure into my life. As I’ve written in other places, particularly in Free Spirited Routines, when routines and structure are imposed on my schedule, my life becomes more enjoyable, productive and fulfilling.

          In the same way, I had to learn and impose some structure into my stories. I have intuitively suspected that for over a year. I’ve reread and restudied various authors on how to create a story. Chris Vogler, Blake Snyder, Michael Hague, and more. All good teachers, with good advice. I learned from them, but never quite enough. I never quite grasped how to create that structure they seemed to indicate was so simple. Or if I did, I wasn’t sure how to put it into my stories.

          Then I stumbled onto Larry Brooks, StoryFix and “Story Structure Demystified.” Larry, in a clear and concise manner, tore away the mystery of how to create a story. His instructions on the 4 parts of a story, the need for particular milestones and plot points and specifics for each one illuminated my understanding. Or at least lifted the blackout curtains a little more.

          I’m still reading and rereading, studying and absorbing the lessons from his book “Story Structure Demystified” and his blog. His most recent blogs have been deconstructing “Shutter Island.” I learned much from reading “Story Structure Demystified,” but this deconstruction is helping me to understand on a much deeper level how to build a good story. The next step is to transfer this understanding to my own languishing novel.

          And that’s my focus for the last weeks of Anti-Procrastination Month. Rearrange, reassesses and reorganize the meandering events, characters and plot of my most troublesome fiction project. As I disassemble, rebuild and wrestle my own monstrosity of a novel into a Story, I’m sure I will grasp Larry’s lessons on an even deeper level. My personality and learning style being what it is, that hands-on experimenting is really the only way I can actually learn these lessons. Once I do, though, I expect that knowledge of Story Structure will be just the framework I need to keep my meandering, pantser self writing stories others want to read.