Story Nerds: Plot Whispering
You may remember that a few of us gather on occasion to take a deeper dive into the ‘bits’ of story-making – causal chains, theme, language, world-building and setting, points of view, scene types, tropes and tone – to explore how these bits relate and/or connect in order to create a more immersive experience for the reader. Along the way, we’ve explored the possibility of bending traditional story shapes into exciting genre-blends. And the question we’ve asked ourselves, is there such a thing as a universal story shape? Martha Alderson, in her book The Plot Whisperer: Secrets of Story Structure Any Writer Can Master , offers some particularly interesting insights, suggesting that the energy of the Universal Story flows through three phases: Comfort and Separation Resistance and Struggle Transformation and Return Phase is the important word. A phase is a period in a series of events. In project management, a phase refers to a specific, managea...
