This is Story Fanatic, a collection of articles covering story structure and analysis for
creative writers. Published weekly.
Protagonist portrays our initiative, Antagonist our reticence to change. Reason is our intellect, Emotion our passion. Skeptic is our self-doubt, Sidekick our self-confidence. Finally, Guardian represents our conscience and the Contagonist is temptation.
So simple, yet so elegant.
Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) discusses his process:
I know exactly where I’m going beforehand. I know to the half page if I’m on or off target. I draw up charts before I do a script. I endlessly chart and re-chart a movie. Before I sit down to write, I have all the scenes listed, what happens in each scene, how many pages I anticipate each scene will take…
The rest of this excellent thought for the day can be read over at Go Into The Story. Personally I’ve always felt that if you’re writing for a purpose other than self-knowledge (like say, oh, I don’t know, a screenplay or something) than it follows that you should have some outline that organizes the things you want to say.
Though talking about colonoscopies, Daniel Kahneman, in his recent TED talk, explains the difference an ending can have towards a story’s meaning:
Your remembering self is a “story teller. What we keep from our experiences is a story.” To illustrate, Kahneman showed pain-over-time charts of two colonoscopy patients who reported the intensity of the pain they were experiencing each minute during a colonoscopy. One patient experienced severe pain for 10 minutes. The other experienced the same level of pain for 10 minutes, followed by gradually decreasing pain for an addition 10 minutes. When each patient was later asked to recall the experience, the first patient said his experience was more painful, even though he experienced less pain than the second patient. “The way that stories end matter.” The first patient’s pain was at its peak at the very end, so it made for a worse story.
Of course, screw up a story’s ending and it’ll feel to the audience as if you have shoved something up their backside.