An Invitation: Story Nerds Book Group (Holly Schindler)

In addition to being the administrator at YAOTL, I'm also the administrator of an MG blog, Smack Dab in the Middle. One of my fellow bloggers there, Bobbi Miller, have been discussing putting together a craft group. The whole idea is to make it a bit like a critique group but instead of trading manuscripts, we get together to talk about issues of craft. What we're reading. What we're thinking about. Better ways to build stories. 

Here's the post Bobbi wrote for Smack Dab. She said it all so eloquently, I wanted to paste it in here verbatim. 

If you'd like to join us, we'd love to have you. Please use the email Bobbi mentions below:

Agatha Christie

You may have noticed that we at Smack Dab are a bit nerdy when it comes to story. We love taking deep dives into those story bits – theme, language, world-building, points of view, scene types, tropes and tone – that make a story timeless.

At the core of every story is character. Character drives the plot even as plot molds the character. The relationship between character and plot offers endless possibilities and opportunities.

If identifying these story bits is the first step, the second step is exploring how these bits are combined to create the story. Of course, easier said than done as these bits need to fit together cohesively. This implies there’s a certain universality to organizing some of these shapes and how they work.

But is there such a thing as a universal shape to stories? Every English student knows about Vonnegut’s theory of eight universal story shapes: Man in Hole and Boy Meets Girl, Rags to Riches and The Quest and so on.

 Except, did you know that Eastern storytelling doesn't rely on antagonists and has a twist rather than the usual sort of 45-degree angle leading up to the climax that's so prevalent in Western storytelling?  

Recognizing that there are no 'rules', just guidelines,  an ongoing popular form is genre-blending, in which a writer blends tropes and archetypes to effectively create new expressions of these old bits. In the same way that one could blend genres, why not bend story shapes in order to fit a character. So it stands to reason that one could blend and bend at once!

As long as the reshaped structure has these story ‘bits’, rebuilding the story shape is limited only by the imagination.

So the question becomes, what are these bits?

Join us as we explore and discuss craft books (or videos, podcasts, lectures and so on) to decipher these bits, and explore strategies that we can use in our own writing.  If you’d be interested , email Holly at  smackdab.middle@yahoo.com

  Abut the image: Agatha Christie was named "Best Writer of the Century" at the 2000 Boucheron World Mystery Convention. In 2018, Guinness Worlds Records listed Christie as the best-selling author of fiction of all time.  As of 2020, her novels had sold more than 2 billion copies in 44 languages.

For more information:

 Here’s an article to get you thinking, posted by Jane Friedman, Do stories have a universal shape? https://janefriedman.com/do-stories-have-a-universal-shape/

K.M. Weiland offers more insight: Story as Cosmology: Understanding Story as a Framework for Meaning https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/story-as-cosmology-framework-for-meaning/