The following is my experience entering the realm of story writing.

Context

When I started out to be a writer, I was intimidated and overwhelmed by having to worry about so many things (e.g., premise, theme, beats, hooks, acts, arc, etc.) to even start to consider story ideas.  For a while I could not even get started at writing anything; no ideas, no nothing.  I thought that perhaps I might be a failure at writing just because I could not even get started with an idea.

Then, while I was updating my web site blog one day, I ran across blog posts that I had written in story format.  I wrote these on my own before I had even started studying about story development.  Obviously, I did not know anything about story structure when I wrote the posts and yet they conformed to the basic elements of plot structure.

I was amazed at this happenstance and started thinking about why I had done what I did and if I could use this simplified approach in writing actual stories to get started at writing something (anything!).  I am writing this to share what I learned from analyzing what I had done.

Experience

What called my attention to what I had done in my blog post was the use of three parts to what I had written.  I had unconsciously use three-act structure to partition what I was writing.  It was just natural to what I had undertaken to write.  I had used headers of “Context”, “Experience”, and “Assessment” which I could clearly see corresponded to “Act 1: Setup”, “Act 2: Endeavor”, and “Act 3: Resolution”.  I suppose that other header titles could be used as well as the ones that I used.  The important thing is that a three-act structure had been used.

At first, I thought this was the extent of the correlation of what I had done with actual story structure.  However, when I tried to duplicate what I had done with another topic, it became clear that something else was needed as well.  I finally realized that the blog posts that I had written were about me and were written in the third person.

So, I tried again to duplicate what I had done in my blog posts, but this time I wrote using myself as the “protagonist” with third person pronouns.  It was like magic.  I was easily able to write another “story” using this approach of three-acts and a “protagonist”.

Using just “I” as the protagonist seemed a little restrictive, so I considered how this might be expanded to other protagonists.  The first thing that occurred to me is that I could just change the first-person pronouns to third-person pronouns and write a “story” about someone else.  From this it then became clear that any protagonist name could be used in place of the pronouns.  This opens the door to being able to write many “stories” about various protagonists based on this simplified approach.

With a little more reflection, brainstorming and writing, it also became apparent that this approach could be expanded gradually by the introduction of other plotting elements.  Over time in doing this, the result is the ability to write standardly plotted stories.

Assessment

This seemed to me a wonderful discovery that needed to be shared with others.  This story that I have just presented to you is an example of the simplified approach to story writing that I discovered.  The post that inspired this story is My Testimony (see the “Supernatural Experiences” section).  I hope that you find this approach useful to your entrance into story writing.

A thesis consists of a premise (defines plot), theme and synopsis (integrates premise and theme).  A few examples of story design theses are provided in the following.

Thesis List

• Avatar
• Die Hard
• Mr. Chips and the Mango-Tango Mother Ship
• The New World: A Story of Chaos Walking

Avatar

For information on Avatar see its Save The Cat! beat sheet.

Premise

Statement: Earthlings come to planet called Pandora to mine the planet’s Unobtanium, a mineral more valuable than anything of Earth, but the planet’s inhabitants, the Na’vi, stand in the way of their getting to it.  A battle-weary warrior is given a mission to be one of the Avatar drivers that are being used to address the problem and instead finds himself joining the Na’vi against the earthlings.

Goal: Earthlings have come to a planet called Pandora to mine the planet’s Unobtanium, a mineral more valuable than anything on Earth.

Conflict: The inhabitants of Pandora, the Na’vi, are in the way of their getting to it.

Protagonist: A battle-weary warrior is given a mission to join the team of Avatar drivers that are being used to address the Na’vi issue and instead finds himself joining with the Na’vi against the earthlings.

Theme

Statement: Belonging and purpose give meaning to our lives.

Exemplar: Jake Sully, the protagonist, is the theme exemplar and expresses the theme in the story as, “All I wanted in my sorry-ass life was a single thing worth fighting for.”

Synopsis

Setup: Jake is an Avatar driver who is not what you would expect for a mission to another world.  He is a battle-weary warrior that is confined to a wheelchair because he is paralyzed from the waist down.  He is a man who has lost much.  He is alone, unloved, without family and home.

Endeavor: Jake starts out to fulfill his new assignment which has gotten expanded to include spying on the Na’vi and reporting information to the military head of the operation.  As he interacts with the Na’vi he begins to feel close to them and their way of life.  He winds up marrying one of them.  When military action begins, he acts to protect the Na’vi against the superior earthling force.  The connection between Pandora inhabitants causes all to join the battle and defeat the earthling intrusion.

Resolution: Under the Mother Tree, Jake is transformed wholly into a Na’vi as his human spirit joins with his Avatar.  Jake at last has a people and a purpose.  He is home.

Die Hard

For information on Die Hard see The Kelworth Files’ beat sheet and the Screenplay How To beat sheet.

Premise

Statement: John McClane, officer of the NYPD, tries to save his wife Holly Gennaro and several others that were taken hostage by German terrorist Hans Gruber during a Christmas party at the Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles.

Goal: John McClane wants to win back his estranged wife, Holly.

Conflict: Having to run barefoot through broken glass; dodging machine gun fire; leaping into fifty-story elevator shafts.

Protagonist: John McClane an officer of the NYPD.

Mr. Chips and the
Mango-Tango Mother Ship

By Alice Hatcher

This story can be obtained free at The Lascaux Review.

Premise

Statement: A young woman with a troubled past and undergoing therapy, wants to leave this world and return to her home world via a Mother Ship with her cat, Mr. Chips, and fish, Lady Gaga, but the trouble is that she is not an alien and there is no Mother Ship or home world.

Theme

There does not appear to be a theme.  At least not one that involves an exemplar.  Marylou is pretty much the same at the end of the story as at the beginning and appears about to loop through a similar experience to the one she just left.

Synopsis

Setup: A young woman named Marylou with a troubled past and undergoing therapy thinks her husband cares more about watching sports games and video games than he does for her.  She has had enough and decides to leave.  She thinks that she is an alien from another world who has been placed on Earth to perform a mission.  She packs her things into her car along with her cat, Mr. Chips, and fish, Lady Gaga and heads out to meetup with the Mother Ship to take her back home.

Endeavor: Marylou drives out to the location where she thinks that the Mother Ship will arrive.  She waits and waits.  Eventually she realizes that the Mother Ship is not coming and considers killing Mr. Chips, Lady Gaga and herself.

Resolution: She tunes in a radio station that is playing Bruce Springsteen and gets caught up in the song.  She decides to have one last fling and sex before they go.  Outside a place called Eegee she meets a young man who strikes up a conversation with her.  She finds it to be a comfortable experience and feels that she has received what some call grace.  She thinks that the young man is a decent human being.  She hopes that he does not start to criticize her at least not right away.

The New World:
A Story of Chaos Walking

By Patrick Ness

This story can be obtained free on the web or Amazon.

Premise

Statement: A teenage girl and her parents who are part of a spaceship convoy to a New World take a scout ship and go ahead to the New World as an advanced landing party to explore and send back information to the convoy about what they find, but they run into a problem entering the atmosphere and crash land.

Statement: A teenage girl (protagonist) and her parents who are part of a spaceship convoy to a New World take a scout ship and go ahead to the New World as an advanced landing party to explore and send back information to the convoy about what they find (goal).  Things go wrong during the landing, the ship crashes, and the girl’s parents are killed leaving her to continue alone on the New World (conflict).

Theme

Statement: We need hope to move forward with life, because while living with hope is terrifying, living without hope is so much more terrifying.

Exemplar: The theme exemplar is the protagonist, Viola. Initially she doesn’t understand the need for hope. During the trip, her parents tell her about hope and demonstrate by their actions how hope keeps them going. When her parents die and the girl is left alone, she understands about hope and sets off into the New World hoping for the best.

Synopsis

Setup: A group of people in a convoy of spaceships are traveling to a new world in the hope of finding a new place to live.  A teenage girl and her parents are selected to take on a mission to be an advanced landing party to the new world and report what they find back to the convoy (inciting incident).  They leave the convoy and start for the New World (turning point 1).  Viola: The girl doesn’t want to be a part of the landing party and is tired of hearing about hope from her parents.

Endeavor: The family leaves the convoy and flies ahead to the new world.  As they approach the new world everything goes well, but when they enter the new world’s atmosphere things start to go very wrong (midpoint).  The ship makes banging noises it should not and the landing becomes imperiled.  Things get worse and the ship winds up crash landing on the new world.  Only the girl survives (turning point 2).  Viola: The girl observes her parents’ activities and the hope that they have for things to work out ok in various situations.

Resolution: The girl retrieve’s a gift from the wreckage that provides light and starts fires (climax).  She strikes out on her own into the New World.  Viola: The girl has learned about hope from her parents and their examples and she moves forward hoping for the best.

 

The following is a categorized list of truth theme statements created from information obtained from the Internet:

• https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Truth
• https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_truth.html

The acquired information has been organized into categories and a few notes of my own have been added before some of the themes which are list in bullets.

Truth Is True

Not being known does not stop truth from being true.  The universe is what it is and we are what we are quite independent of what we think and say about it.

• Truth draws strength from itself and not from the number of votes in its favor.
• Truth stands, even if there be no public support; it is self-sustained.
• An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Truth Masking

There is much error in the world today.  People lie both deliberately and through ignorance.  Effort is required to see through what comes to one; is it truth or error?

• The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

Truth Seeker

• There are very few lovers of truth, for truth’s sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so.

Truth Seeking

• Not being known doesn’t stop truth from being true.
• If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
• When the mind seeks truth, the truth it has read about in books, that “truth” is self-projected, for then the mind is merely in pursuit of the known, a more satisfactory known than the previous one. When the mind seeks truth, it is seeking its own self-projection, not truth.
• The search for truth is the most important work in the world; and the most dangerous.

Truth Acquisition

Acquiring truth requires identifying and evaluating propositions.  Therefore, truth acquisition comes from understanding gained from experience.  One can actively seek the truth or learn simply by existing and experiencing what occurs.

• Truth requires us to face the facts as they are, not to involve ourselves in self-deception; to refuse to think merely in slogans.
• Let us deal with the realities as they actually are, not as they might have been, and not as we wish they were. […] The truth doesn’t die.

Teaching Truth

• It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

Truth Criteria

How can one know if something is true?

• Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.
• Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
• Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.
• Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who say they find it.

Standing for Truth

• Tell the truth and fear no man.
• Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.

Conform to Truth

• Hell is truth seen too late—duty neglected in its season.
• Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.
• Yet ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Belief

• People never want to be told anything they do not already believe.
• Although a large group of men say something is so; that does not make it so.
• The opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.

Religious “Truth”

Christians believe certain things to be true by faith in those whose group they are members; this is not truth.

• Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
• It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope.