Mars Denar

My first real foray into organized approaches to story writing took the form of Paul Gulino's Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, which I stumbled on at my local library here in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. Apparently some former English teacher was really into stage and screen writing, because though books on writing short stories and novels are rare in the English stacks there, books on theatre and screen hang off them like shield-backed katydids off wheat in a dry summer. Anyway, it was clear that the screenwriting business had its act together when it came to structure.

In Part 3 (chapters 8 through 15) of Story Engineering, Larry Brooks continues to deliver on his promise to expose the nitty-gritty and give would-be authors guidance they can actually work with. In this section, though, there's no need to read, reread and reformulate. It's pretty well cut and dried, perhaps not least because, as Brooks points out more than once, most fiction writing guides focus very heavily, if not exclusively, on the topic of this section--character. The topic has been thoroughly plumbed before.

Calling assertions that character is plot and plot is character "grad school

After all that well-analogied hype, Brooks gives a one-page overview of his four elements and two skills, which are

1. Concept
2. Character
3. Theme
4. Structure
5. Scene execution
6. Writing voice

Concept is what Brooks calls premise, best couched in a what-if statement, the answer to which "leads to further 'what if?' questions in a branching and descending hierarchy", the "collective whole" of which becomes the story. [1]

The character is "a hero" whom "[w]e don’t need to like", but for whom "we do need to root." [2]

Theme is "what your story is illuminating about real life." [3]

Structure is " [w]hat comes