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Feb 27

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Hollywood story coach reveals essential elements of great storytelling, part 2

Every great story has 10 essential elements, says story coach Michael Hauge. In yesterday’s post, I revealed the first five. To recap, a great story must have:

  • A hero with a goal who will carry the story forward.
  • A setup that shows his life before everything changed.
  • Scenes that create empathy with the reader.
  • An event or opportunity that pushes the story forward and creates a desire to change the status quo, and
  • A new situation that pushes the hero to solve an immediate problem. In the midst of this problem, a new element must emerge:

6. Outer motivation – a visible goal or finish line that the hero wants to accomplish by the end of the story. This goal must be within the hero’s power to accomplish. As a story coach, Hauge focuses on this element. This is a fundamental element to know in order to answer the question, “What is your story about?” In the movie, Gravity, the heroine’s goal was, “I want to get home.” This outer motivation should be easily expressed in a single sentence. The clearer you can be about the visible goal of the hero, the better. The movie, Lincoln was built on one clear goal: End slavery. This goal must drive the story line all the way to the climax.

Along the way, the next element will come into play: Read more

Feb 26

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Hollywood story coach reveals essential elements of great storytelling, part 1

You probably know the key elements of good storytelling and have even observed them in books and movies, but do you consciously use them in your own writing?

At a recent writer’s meetup in Las Vegas, Hollywood story coach Michael Hauge spoke about what makes a great story. He’s coached writers, producers, and directors on projects for actors, including Will Smith, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, and Morgan Freeman, as well as every major studio and network.

Hauge said there are 10 essential elements to great storytelling, and ultimately they’re the key points an agent or editor will want to know when you pitch your project. Here are the first five:

1. The story must have a hero or heroine. This main character – the protagonist — more than any other character, drives the story and has the potential to be heroic. The hero has a desire that propels the action.

2. The Setup. In the setup, you’ll introduce the hero living his everyday life before anything heroic happens. The movie Lone Survivor draws readers into the world of the characters before they go on their fatal mission. The first scenes show them interacting with family and dealing with daily life. In this world, you must use vivid details to, “create a movie in the mind of the reader,” Hauge said. This will amplify the readers’ emotion, and eliciting emotion is a core principle of successful stories.

Fiction novels and movies are “before and after pictures,” Hauge said. The setup is the “before picture.” Sometimes these scenes show how the hero is “stuck.”

While most movies and novels open with action already underway, it’s important early in the story to reveal what was happening before the action began. Read more

Feb 25

Use onomatopoeia to enhance your writing senses

In an earlier post, “Use all six senses to make your story come alive,” I write about the importance of using all our senses when creating a scene. Too often, writers rely on sight or visual cues in the scene and forget to include the other senses.

Touch, sound, taste, and smell are just as important as sight, yet are often overlooked.

What senses do you use the most in your writing?

Find out by taking a chapter and highlighting the five senses with five different colored markers or pencils. I did this recently and discovered that after sight, my most used sense was smell, then sound, then touch. I didn’t use taste at all in that particular chapter.

You don’t need to use every sense in every chapter but you do want your writing to come alive and varying the senses will help you reach this goal.

One way to play with sound is through onomatopoeia—words that imitate the sounds the words describe. We’ve all seen this device used in comic books or in cartoons: POW, WHAM, BAM, etc. But you can also invent word sounds to match anything you want. Read more

Feb 24

How Olympic athletes inspire me to be a better writer

Do you have what it takes to be a Olympic-level writer?

As I watched the Olympics for the past two weeks, I was inspired by the athletes’ performances — even the ones who didn’t win medals. It made me think about how the principles of winning as an Olympic-caliber athlete can be applied to winning as a writer.

To rise as a writer to the level of an Olympic athlete, follow the same practices and mindset.

Practice daily. Olympic gold medal ice dancers Meryl Davis and Charlie White started skating together at age 8 and practiced for 17 years before winning at Sochi. They practiced nearly every day and their story is the norm. To excel, you must put in the time, create a writing practice. Read more

Feb 20

How the Internet opens up new options for writers

The Internet and social media tools, including Facebook and Twitter are creating a new publishing and communication frontier for writers.

In this 12-minute TedTalk, author Andrew Fitzgerald explains how writers have more ways than ever to publish, experiment, and communicate with readers.

Feb 19

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How to create a metaphor practice, part 2

In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of starting a metaphor practice and gave one exercise for doing so (by using a template from a writer you admire). Below is another exercise to add to your metaphor or simile practice:

Make a List: Find a spot where you think a metaphor might work in a scene and write down the subject. Example: As I write my scenes, I can usually tell when a metaphor or simile will add spark to my page. In my last scene, I wanted a simile to describe how a house looked from the outside at night. So I wrote down the subject “house lit up.”  Read more

Feb 18

Poem making: five ideas for mixing the mystical and the conscious

This past weekend, a friend and I shared poems we’d written to see what we could learn from each other’s work. Reading our poems and talking about the subtext of them made me think about how writing poetry — from idea to finished poem — is about the magic of the subconscious melding with conscious craft decisions. But then I’m beginning to realize that all writing is ultimately that way.

Poems come to me in many forms, including: A purposeful exploration about a subject or person, a chance encounter that hits me in the chest, or an observation of two people interacting. Sometimes it can be hard to explain how one moment elicits a response or a “knowing” that I must record it in a poem.

If you’re looking for poetic inspiration, try these writing ideas:

1. Find a new format. Write a poem in the form of a personal ad.

2. Set limits. Constraints often fuel creativity. Think of an idea for a poem and then limit yourself to a set number of words to express it. Read more

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