Story Grid

Default category for all Story Grid posts

Plot Driven or Character Driven?

Story Grid

What comes first when you set out to tell a Story? The kind of plot you want to tell or the lead character you have in mind? This question is the equivalent of that old debate about whether something is plot driven or character driven. The distinction is meaningless really as a character’s actions are… Read more »

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Content Genre: What are they? Why do they matter?

Story Grid

As we’ve reviewed over the last few weeks, the Structure and the Content genres in our Five-Leaf Genre Clover are intimately entwined. No matter how you slice it, Archplots and Miniplots require foundational quests. In turn, these quests require External conscious and/or Internal subconscious objects of desire. The ways in which the writer reveals those external and internal objects of desire is… Read more »

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Story Fuel

Story Grid

We’ve now taken a global look at Genre (1, 2, and 3) and dived deeper into the three Story structures and their relationships to the external and internal worlds of protagonists (1, 2, and 3). Hang in there, I almost fell asleep myself after writing that last sentence. When is this blathering going to get… Read more »

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How Stories Claim Lives

Story Grid

If Archplot is the structural backbone of the External Content Genres and Miniplot serves the Internal Content Genres (see Genre’s Five Leaf Clover), what’s the deal with the third structural genre, Antiplot? This is the kind of question a Story nerd like myself loves to noodle. It’s like asking a Pittsburgh Steeler fan to compare… Read more »

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The Inner War

Story Grid

While the Archplot is the stuff of tent pole action movies and master detective murder mysteries, Miniplot is most often associated with the literary Story culture. See The Autodidact’s Dilemma for more about the literary and commercial cultures in book publishing. The content genres most associated with Miniplot are the Internal ones—Status, Worldview, and Morality…. Read more »

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How Stories Save Lives

Story Grid

Moving on to the fourth leaf of our Five Leaf Genre Clover, let’s begin with Archplot, the classic Story structure, sometimes referred to as the “quest” narrative. In summary, it has the following qualities: In a consistent and cause/effect reality like the one we all inhabit in our everyday lives, Archplots feature a single active… Read more »

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Genre’s Five Leaf Clover

Story Grid

Genre is the one of the most difficult foundations of Story to wrap your mind around. There are so many theories and categorizations of genre that the editor/story student can easily fall into an intellectual whirlpool. I’ve been sucked in so many times by so many different ways to look at genres that my head… Read more »

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