Or maybe you've been doing it
WRONG all these years and that's why you're a reject! This theory is capitulated by
some people. (He looks like a nice guy,
Charles Deemer; maybe he's right.) Maybe you just need an orphan/ wanderer/ warrior/ martyr protagonist plus a beginning, middle and end. Funny, my novel has one character who is (nearly) all four of those things in an ordinary/extraordinary world. People should be banging down my door! Nah, never mind.
6 comments:
Archetypes to the left of me
Archetypes to the right of me
(half a league, half a league, half a league onward!)
"Thank you for your submission, but unfortunately we cannot use it." is on the back of the chart, in between WRITER and DEPRESSED PERSON, and right above Midlife Low Point.
I've always found people that sing the praises of diagrams and plot outlines are usually the driest, dullest writers.
Case in point: everything Michael Crichton wrote after "Jurassic Park".
The red in the diagram above is David Mamet's take on beginning-middle-end storytelling, and he's hardly a dull writer! Besides, we don't react to this, the skeleton, we react to the flesh put on the skeleton. Very boring stories can have perfect dramatic structure. Aristotle's theory, which is what this is, has worked for thousands of years. It's the language of storytelling in our culture.
This reminds me of the Archetype Villages from Shari S. Tepper's book "A Plague of Angels". One of the people who lives there is named Hero and he spends a lot of time declaiming.
"Very boring stories can have perfect dramatic structure."
Ummm ... okay. And that's a justification for following diagrams or plot outlines???
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