invisible ink

Just discovered invisible ink blog blog about story.

The thing I'm remembering now is build your story around a point, or as aesop says a moral. He called it the armature of the story, the core that you hang the rest of it on.
"With King Midas, the storyteller wanted to teach people that some things were more important than money. What were his tasks as a writer? First, he had to create a character who was greedy. Then he needed to set up a situation wherein the character gets what he wants. Then he needed to turn this wish into something that would teach the character a lesson. Everything in this story is designed to make the writer’s point. This should be true of your work as well."

Also, we know the depth of someone's character when they are up against the wall. And it's really hard to grow as a person, basically you wait until it is more painful to not change then it is to change, which often is just about the point of emotional or physical death. So in other words, torture the hell out of your characters, because that's what it's going to take to make them grow and that's why we're watching them.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the 1st act. "“Tell them what you are going to tell them” part. That is act one. If your story’s point is that even a good man can be corrupted by power then your first act shows a good man without power. You must show that he is squeaky clean and even show him a situation where he could be corrupt and is not." Skipping the first act to get right to the meat of the story is like skipping the set up to get to the punchline, it doesn't work because their's no context.

"Subtext is all in the set-up. Once you establish that two characters hate each other, for instance, all you need to do is put them in the same room together and have them talk about the weather—the audience will do most of your work for you." He had the dialogue example of a mother pestering her daughter about a cold the daughter was getting over, and then gave the setup that the Daughter's husband had just died of AIDS and she had it but wasn't showing signs yet, and that totally colored how the dialogue plays.