One of my favorite books on story structure is Your Book Starts Here by Mary Carroll Moore. I was fortunate to attend one of her writing workshops a few years back at NH Writer’s Day and it was amazing. Many of us have little trouble with story beginnings and endings, but when it comes to the middle…! It’s a challenge to keep the tension in a story strong enough so the reader will want to continue to turn the pages.
I’ll let Mary explain some helpful tips in this storyboard video.
During April, I’m participating in The A to Z Blogging Challenging, blogging 26 days of the month on writing topics while systematically moving through the alphabet. The goal is to develop a more regular blogging habit and network with other bloggers. Join us!
For today’s letter, H, I’m looking at my writer’s bookshelf – in particular, Joseph Campbell’s classic “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” Campbell, an American mythological researcher, discovered many common patterns in hero myths and stories from around the world. In college, we studied Campbell’s story structure through the Star Wars trilogy, so this structure is pretty ingrained in how I organize a book. George Lucas claims that Campbell’s monomyth was the inspiration for his groundbreaking films. Lucas also believes that Star Wars is such a popular saga because it taps into a timeless story-structure which has existed for thousands of years.
Book Covers 