79 results for BBT

What "Finding Nemo" Can Teach Us About Story Action

  From the WONDERFUL movie Finding Nemo Last week we took a break away from talking about the antagonist because I needed you guys to be able to see how fiction looks when broken down to its fundamental parts. All fiction can be boiled down to cause, effect, cause, effect, cause, effect. But, beyond that, …

Continue reading

Little Darlings & Why They Must Die..for Real

Almost any of us who decided one day to get serious about our writing, read Stephen King’s On Writing. Great book, if you haven’t read it. But one thing King tells us we writers must be willing to do, is that we must be willing to, “Kill the little darlings.” Now, King was not the …

Continue reading

Black Swan–Inner & Outer Demons

For the past several weeks, we have been talking about the antagonist. Whenever I blog about the antagonist, I always get, “Well, my character is the antagonist. She is her own worst enemy.” We have discussed this somewhat in an earlier blog. Virtually all protagonists, at the beginning of the story are their own worst …

Continue reading

"He is His Own Worst Enemy…"–Antagonist Part 2

Part of why I am writing this series on the antagonist is that most new writers don’t understand 1.) how vital the antagonist is, 2) how to properly use the antagonist and 3) often cannot spot an antagonist if he were dressed like a Vegas showgirl holding sparklers (okay, maybe that last one was just …

Continue reading

The Antagonist Part One–Introducing the Big Boss Troublemaker

Conflict is the core ingredient to fiction, even literary fiction. Conflict in any novel can have many faces and often you will hear this referred to as the antagonist. The antagonist is absolutely essential for fiction. He/she/it is the engine of your story. No engine, and no forward momentum. Like cars, plots need momentum or they …

Continue reading