Spring Intensive :: LARRY BROOKS morning session

LARRY BROOKS – Story Engineering & The Search For Story www.storyfix.com 

A romance is a little bit like a thriller because you are taking a ride, you know how it is going to end, but you want to live vicariously through the journey.

To write a book you have to know a massive amount of information. If you let it stay massive and chaotic, it is hard to keep it all straight. How you organize it may not be serving you. Habits may have become limiting belief systems. Many of us just sit down and write without acknowledging how we do things, so we cannot assess whether we are doing it efficiently.

At the end of the day when a writer has written a successful story, the book will line up with the principles.  6 categories help keep it organized.

Context setting questions ::

1.       What is the most important word in the realm of writing stories? Conflict (character, idea)

2.       What was the inspiring idea of your story? Trope – MOC, rekindled

3.       How will you process from that moment to the next step? Brainstorming, characterization

4.       Why were you interested enough to spend your time on this story? Characters

5.       What is your story about? Acknowledging love and compromise. Forgiveness and compromise.

6.       What is the concept of your story? Marriage of convenience. Rekindled love. What if the love of your life is marrying someone else? What if you have to ask a favor of the man who broke your heart?

7.       What is the most important moment in a story? Inciting incident.

8.       What is it about your book that will make the cut? Emotion

What makes romance different? Happily-ever-after, emotional resonance, two complete story arcs (romance & external)

Plot is the stage upon which characters are allowed to unfold.

Romance is a train that runs on the tracks of story.

are you a plotter or a panster?

Most writers begin their journey as readers, bringing that context to what they write. Readers experience as a passenger, the writer experiences the book as a pilot (writing the mss) who also has to build the plane (plotting the mss).

Are you writing in context to your experience as a reader or as a story architect? Are you searching for your story, building your story, or polishing your story? Do you think you can do more than one at a time? There is real value in understanding that your story isn’t optimized yet.