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WorldCrafters Guild

Workshop:Why Bother With Structure?

Workshoppers:

Writing is the process of "Asking Yourself Questions" and the whole knack of turning out a story no matter what happens around you or to you (i.e. the difference between a professional and an amateur who might sell a few stories) is mastery of the systematic method of generating the next question.

That system depends on what I've been trying to teach folks on this workshop for 2 years (a lot of the most brilliant posts I've written are lost forever though -- so with time, I'll write even better ones). And that is simply STRUCTURE.

Story works or doesn't work both for the author and the reader because of STRUCTURE.

The characters "stop talking to you" when you blow the structure to smitherines.

The reader stops reading when you blow the structure to bits. When you fall off the conflict line or whatever your favorite personal mistake is.

Once you have fully internalized the universal STORY STRUCTURE, then you can look at any piece of writing and see what parts of the structure are unreticulated, vague, or distorted. You then ask the appropriate question about that part of the structure, and once you've verbalized the question, you usually KNOW the answer -- or can figure it out with much pacing.

BEYOND THAT -- I have an inventory of personal techniques I use to penetrate those mists -- a lot based on Tarot meditation. I use Tarot to teach writing -- but members of this workshop are largely non-Occult oriented, so I just leave that out here. I use ASTROLOGY to teach PLOTTING, but again, I leave that out here.

And meditation disciplines galore are in my bag of tricks. But that's a lifestyle thing not available to most people, and certainly not necessary to learn to tell a great story in a fascinating way.

So welcome aboard. Check out the FIRST YEAR SCHOOL on www.simegen.com/chanel  where previous Workshop posts are posted. I hope this recent thread on Stephen King will be summarized there.

(1999 comment: Those posts will be/have been moved to www.simegen.com/school/workshop -- which is where you are reading this right now --- once we've "gotten a round tuit"  (I know I had one here somewhere.)  JL