Our latest video chat, in which Mark almost disappears from the screen at times, and we talk about story structure, themes, titles, and a few other random things.
(Mark here — a little behind the scenes look at what we do — We generally come up with a topic for discussion and then just wing it. This conversation went down several paths as we went along. Hope you enjoy it. I was planning on writing a post to accompany this chat, but didn’t get to it yet. That will be coming separately at some point in the future.)
Writers Supporting Writers 
I think a lot of writers do engineer their stories using one blueprint or another — Hero’s Journey, Three Act, Seven Point Structure, Save the Cat!,( originally for screen plays but adopted for novels), to name some. Lester Dent has a written guide by word count for short stories. One of the authors on Youtube that I watch, Alexa Donne, always thinks about and describes her story elements in terms of three acts. It is, perhaps, a more clinical and analytical approach to story telling then yours, or indeed, mine. But it is an approach that clearly it works for some writers.
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Yes. And if it works, more power to them. By the way, I just finished Beneath the Lanterns. An enjoyable read. Well done!
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Thanks. Glad you liked it.
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For my first published novel, I used the W storyboarding method to structure it–but after the fact, not while I was writing it. I can’t write nonfiction using an outline either. I got a kick out of the comments about MFA fiction sounding all the same. Having come up through the fiction workshop method, I would say that there is a peer pressure phenomenon that happens, almost a form of group think that prompts writers to write to please the group.
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Everybody comes at this from different perspectives, with different skills and ideas about how to do this thing we call writing. If the MFA structure works for those who go through that, great! But … for me, it’s a formula no different than the formula for a mystery novel or other types of genres. And I get that a lot of people need formulas to write to. Guides. Paths. How to get from A to B to C in the writing of a story. If they find that and it works for them, great!! But part of writing for me, part of the creative process for me, is getting off the path and figuring it out in the bushes and trees and brambles that crowd that path.
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