ScipTips 6: The All Important Triangle
A character based approach to detailed plotting
There’s a wonderful cartoon from Tom Gauld that depicts two heroes traveling overland on an adventure. One is reading from a book aloud: “We’ve had our ‘inciting incident’ and we’re on the ‘journey’ so it seem like we’ll be having a ‘crisis’ any minute now…” Their companion replies, “This quest was a lot more fun before you got that book on story structure.”
This cartoon illustrates beautifully what I felt like is wrong with a lot of writing advice I’ve gotten from various books and seminars. These events become like the poles you have to wind around in slalom skiing, and it often feels like the characters really have to stretch and slide to make sure they make one and don’t miss it and ski on downhill. In other words, their actions feel railroaded, sometimes to the point that their actions appear arbitrary and out of character as they are pulled and tugged in order to hit the marker.
But if plot arises from character, from the interaction of character, this problem goes away. So how do we do that.
Introducing…
