(“Regardless of genre, if a story can’t work in ten minutes, how will it work in one hundred and ten minutes? It won’t get better when it gets bigger,” he writes.) The characters, setting, voice, and language are all fleshed out after you’ve built your plot engine.Īs a writer and as a reader, I tend to be drawn to other, internal engines-“form engines” and “language engines.” McKee advocates writing short outlines of the plot beats first and only later adding the actual text of the work. In Robert McKee’s “screenwriter’s Bible” Story, he advocates creating a story around “the big-muscle movements of desire, forces of antagonism, turning points, spine, progression, crisis, climax- story seen from the inside out.” The plot is the engine of a McKee-esque story, the device at the core of the narrative that the machine is built around. I won’t dwell on these models, but I would like to quickly contrast how they (often) work in opposite ways. If you are the type of person to click on a craft essay on Lit Hub, then you know plenty about powering stories with plot and character. The External Engines of Plot and Character I’m interested in what devices-engines let’s call them, since surely the author is always the driver (even when they’re crashing their story into a ditch)-can supply power to the rest of story. My interest, as a writer and creative writing professor, is less in how we can analyze stories than in how writers can generate work. Couldn’t a story be driven by voice? Couldn’t setting have a turn at the wheel? character-driven binary has always made me wonder why those two aspects of fiction are the only ones allowed in the driver’s seat. Who would pay for a writing guide that said “lol who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” followed by 200 blank pages? Still, the plot-driven vs. It’s understandable that writing guides and craft classes are reductive. It’s hard, a little scary, yet ultimately thrilling.ĭespite this, there are countless articles that insist there are in fact only two methods of storytelling: plot-driven and character-driven. Instead, there are infinite paths in the dark woods of fiction leading to infinite types of stories. The hard thing about writing-or one of the hard things in the endless series of hard things about writing-is that there’s no one way to do it.
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