Join Molly and Daryll Lynne as they workshop some of the writing challenges they have faced in the last week.
Characterization, conflict, and compressing every detail into perfectly plotted places might make story building feel like trying to weave a tapestry with a million loose ends. In this week’s episode of Sentence to Paragraph, Daryll Lynne aids Molly in her quest to plan out her story structure by focusing on the “interesting, hot points of the story” located within each scene -letting the scene do the work of telling the story! Listen below, on Podomatic, or iTunes.
“Look at all of the levels of conflict . . . and all of its iterations . . . and where characters are emotionally at the beginning of the scene and the end of the scene. . . Is your character feeling the same way leaving the scene as they did coming in? Then maybe the scene didn’t quite do enough work.”
Daryll Lynne Evans
Podcast Highlights:
- Daryll Lynne uses the “find your island” metaphor to describe how she isolates the most important pieces of the story and then connects them to increase the continuity of the plot
- Molly shares her discoveries with foreshadowing and how revision allows her to explore moments in her writing that are related and connect them over the course of many chapters
- Perhaps we’ve been too divergent with the “pantser” versus “plotter” dichotomy and Molly suggests ways to reenvision this kind of black and white thinking – can we both discover our story through “pantser” writing while also staying true to the story structure?
- We revisit the screen-writing technique “card-plotting” and explore how it is helpful in drawing out the most important details
- By the end of the episode, Molly confesses that she feels like she is really ready to graduate from plotting problems class