The Successful Novelist - Lesson Three

Plot
- high concept: an intriguing one-liner description of your story, such as Alien being a Haunted house in outer space
- in a high concept story, the plot controls the character
- EM Forester: A story is based on the progression of time. A plot is a more sophisticated form of narrative and is based on causality.
- If it is in a story we say "and then?'
- If it is in a plot we ask "why?"
- insist on knowing your character's true motivations
- characters control the plot
- properly motivated, their fears and desires set events in motion and cause the plot to proceed to a satisfying, inevitable end
- at climax, reversal and recognition occur in an ideal plot
   - where reversal means the events abruptly go in the opposite direction
   - where recognition means the protagonist achieves an important self-discovery, not always pleasant
   - sometimes the reversal causes the recognition or the reverse
   - the character experiences a change, learns something to overcome a flaw
- without conflict, no plot can be interesting, you don't have a plot
- when you understand a person's motives, we are sympathetic to that person, sympathy causes interest
- narrative's unified field theory = a quest and obstacles
  - to turn the story into a plot add motive to conflict, what matters if the conviction with which the two forces compete with each other
- plot = conflict + motivation

The Successful Novelist - Lesson Two

Getting Focused
- Morrell finds plot outlines restrictive
- an alternate is to have a written conversation with yourself to help focus what you want to do
- in the end, you can use that conversation to build your outline
- don't get discouraged with your ideas as familiarity breed contempt
- plot outlines put too much emphasis on the surface of events and not enough on their thematic and emotional significance
- writing is the point, while all of your thinking and talking has been going on if you talk to friends and family about the idea, not a lot of writing gets done
- the ability to write is a perishable skill
- the written conversation should take several weeks to write and amount to roughly 20 single-spaced pages
- remember to keep asking the most important questions: Why is this idea interesting to me? Why would I want to spend a year or more working on it?
- it's a self-analytic quest to create a story and you learn as much about yourself s you do about your work, growing as a person as well as a writer

The Successful Novelist - First Day in Class

I'm currently reading The Successful Novelist by David Morrell and wanted to share any tidbits as I read it.

From the prologue, First Day in Class:

When he was seventeen, Morrell wrote to the writer of a TV show called Route 66 and told him that he wanted to be a writer just like him. The writer replied with the following advice:

• write, write, write and keep writing
• find other people who write and trade ideas with them
• critique one another's work
• send out your stuff, but don't get discouraged
• keep writing
• it's just that simple, and that terribly difficult

And Morrell's further advice includes:

• desire alone doesn't get you to be a published novelist.
• learn about writing by analyzing great novels
• discover how the experts achieved their effects
• the only reason to write a novel is that if it grabs you and doesn't let you go until you put it down on paper
• write a story you feel passionate about and write it well