What? Is it a holiday or something? It’s as if the world’s gone silent…leaving us to make up our own entertainment. Never fear — this is a challenge we have successfully faced our entire life.
We have been writing so long (since we held our first crayon, shunning stick figures and amorphous blobs representing houses and dogs for the foreign-to-our peers alphabet) that we sometimes forget the basic rule: stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Pretty much in that order, though the first rule of writing is that there are no rules for writing.
If you’ve spent your life with your nose stuck in a book, this structure and the underlying conflict it implies becomes part of your DNA. Or perhaps, since it harkens back to Aristotle, is already part of the human DNA, only dormant until shocked into existence by a particularly good story. We will know for sure when this whole genome thing is finally accomplished to everyone’s satisfaction.
Nothing about this should be particularly revelatory, but it’s a slow day and a gentle craft-oriented nudge never hurt anyone. Unless said nudge occured on the edge of a cliff, but how often does that happen?
- The Importance of Three-Act Storytelling (link via a friend who perplexingly doesn’t have a website)
