Story Trumps Structure
What do you think about that? Can you throw your ideas of structuring a story with a beginning, middle, and end and/or predetermined plot points and bake a cake instead? Have I lost you?
OK, so this story of yours/mine - should have these 5 essential ingredients:
Ingredient # 1: Orientation
Ingredient # 2: Crisis
Ingredient # 3: Escalation
Ingredient #4: Discovery
Ingredient #5: Change
And like baking a cake....
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We can all start out with the same basic story ingredients, but end up with a wonderful variation of the final product. Of course - like cake, if you leave an essential ingredient out, the cake falls flat. Granted - you can tell me that a "recipe" has a beginning, middle, and end. But, the choices you make with your ingredients are going to have a MUCH bigger impact on your cake/story than the fact that you can follow a recipe from point A. to point C.
Read the article. It explains these essential 5 ingredients much better than I can. And then tell me what you think? Go on ~ I'll wait. :)
Happy Writerly Wednesday!!
9 comments:
Love the cake reference. And depending upon who has the ingredients makes a huge different on the outcome.
The ingredients make sense.
Love it (and that cake photo is so cute)!
I like the wording for the 5 elements, it brings it home in a new way. Love the cake too. cute :O)
hi miss donea! wow! cool recipe for cooking up a neat story. you could use different ingredients and still get a good tasting cake.
...hugs from lenny
It's a basic description, but it does cover everything.
Yummy, cake.
Writing is juggling so many balls, structure being one of them. I started writing short stories to practice them all.
I guess I accept more variation in stories than I do in cakes. I prefer chocolate cake with chocolate icing, but I'll actually try anything.
Lee
Tossing It Out
I like how you compared it to baking a cake. I'm currently working through the three act structure to make scene notes for my next WIP. My advice would be to use such a structure to keep your story on track, but don't be afraid to break it!
Ellie Garratt
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