Don't limit your fiction - LIBERATE IT All too often, following the ""rules"" of writing can constrict rather than inspire you. With Story Trumps Structure, you can shed those rules - about three-act structure, rising action, outlining, and more - to craft your most powerful, emotional, and gripping stories. Award-winning novelist Steven James explains how to trust the narrative process to make your story believable, compelling, and engaging, and debunks the common myths that hold writers back from creating their best work. Ditch your outline and learn to write organically. Set up promises for readers - and deliver on them. Discover how to craft a satisfying climax. Master the subtleties of characterisation. Add mind-blowing twists to your fiction. When you focus on what lies at the heart of story - tension, desire, crisis, escalation, struggle, discovery - rather than plot templates and formulas, you'll begin to break out of the box and write fiction that resonates with your readers. Story Trumps Structure will transform the way you think about stories and the way you write them, forever. | When you focus on what lies at the heart of story - tension, desire, crisis, escalation, struggle, discovery - rather than plot templates and formulas, you'll begin to break out of the box and write fiction that resonates with your readers. Story Trumps Structure will transform the way you think about stories and the way you write them, forever. | While it's true that structuring techniques can be helpful tools, formulaic approaches frequently send stories spiralling off in the wrong direction or handcuff the narrative flow. Stories become predictable, boxy, and cookie-cutter. The author believes that anything that gets in the way of the reader's engagement and emotional involvement in the story is not serving the reader. So, the number of acts, the type of characters, the symbolism, the mythic elements in the story, etc . . . should be determined by the narrative movement of the story, not the other way around. Because of this, the greatest storytellers will often break the ""rules"" of plot, characterization, or grammar in order to enrich their stories and raise them above the status quo. Story Trumps Structure will also debunk some of the common myths about story, such as the usefulness of three-act structure, the concepts of both ""plot-driven"" and ""character-driven"" stories (neither of which drives a story forward, only tension does), and the presupposition that readers need to ""suspend disbelief"" (they don't, they just need to retain the belief they have in the first place when the begin reading the story).
