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Category Archives: Quick Tips
Success or Failure?
A story without a clear indication of success or failure is a failure with your readers or audience. You need to work out exactly how the audience will know the goal is achieved or not. This might seem obvious in … Continue reading
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Creating Extra Tension with Consequences
A goal is what the characters chase, but what chases the characters? The consequence doubles the dramatic tension in a story by providing a negative result if the goal is not achieved. Consequences may be emotional or logistic, but the … Continue reading
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Don’t Forget the Requirements!
The achievement or failure to achieve the goal is an important but short moment at the end of the story. So how is interest maintained over the course of the story? By the progress of the quest toward the … Continue reading
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Quick Tip: Characters’ Personal Goals
Personal Goals are the motivating reasons your characters care about and/or participate in the effort to achieve or prevent the overall goal. In other words, they see the main story goal as a means to an end, not as an … Continue reading
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Quick Tip: The Collective Goal
Some novice writers become so wrapped up in interesting events and bits of action that they forget to have a central unifying goal that gives purpose to all the other events that take place. This creates a plot without a … Continue reading
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Quick Tip: Flashbacks and Flash Forwards
There is a big difference between flashbacks where a character reminisces and flashbacks that simply transport an audience to an earlier time. If the characters are aware of the time shift, it affects their thinking, and is therefore part of … Continue reading
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Storytelling Technique: Out of Sequence Experiences
Changing Temporal Relationships: With this technique, the audience is unaware they are being presented things out of order. Such a story is the motion picture, Betrayal, with Ben Kingsley. The story opens and plays through the first act. We come … Continue reading
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