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Wolf O'Rourc Oct 31, 2025 LAS VEGAS
Wolf O'Rourc Oct 31, 2025 LAS VEGAS
Storytelling fundamentally doesn't differ from building a castle with LEGOs. You can start with simple blocks, add more fancy elements, and then combine them in all kinds of ways that make the story better and better.
By optimizing the prose, major building blocks of a scene (Setting, Character, Emotions, Goal, Motivation, Conflict) and the overall story (World Building, Relationships, Themes, Story Structure, Character Arc, Stakes) you can lift your tall tale from good to great.
Learn by example from Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice, The Hunger Games, Star Wars, and others how to reach for the Storytelling Crown.
Part of the educational program presented by the HWG University (@hwguniversity3199) of the Henderson Writers Group, hosts of the annual Las Vegas Writers Conference.
#WritingTips #WriteTip #TellPowerfulStories #Storytelling #Screenwriting
Interview and Reading of CyberSpiracy on Dime Grinds, 2021 by Wolf O'Rourc
Transcript
Transcript
Courtesy of YouTube
0:00:07 Okay, then let's get started. Hello everybody. Reaching for the
0:00:13 storytelling crown by Wolf O'Rourc.
0:00:19 Now, and anything as complex as a story,
0:00:27 you're going to need to deal with different parts. And there's ways to do
0:00:33 that. It's not fundamentally different from using Lego blocks. Now, if you start out, you get the standard Lego
0:00:40 blocks. You can build square houses, rectangular houses. But if you go up,
0:00:46 you get more fancy pieces, round pieces, which you can build arches, towers. And
0:00:54 once you get that, if you connect the towers and the walls and the arches
0:01:02 in a planned way that you designed and thought about, you can build castles as
0:01:09 fancy as the castle from Sleeping Beauty that in its real incarnation, Norwestein
0:01:16 in Germany attracts millions of tourists a year.
0:01:22 And storytelling is fundamentally not any different.
0:01:27 You can start very simply with simple blocks and then add more fancy elements
0:01:33 and then combine them in all kinds of ways that makes the story better and
0:01:39 better. And that is the secret to understand how to broaden the audience
0:01:47 by judiciously combining different parts that attracts a ever wider and wider
0:01:54 audience. And you attract a wide enough audience, you have a bestseller and a great story. Now I emphasize this is
0:02:02 about storytelling. Storytelling fundamentally doesn't
0:02:08 change with the medium. Now we know Shakespeare wrote his stories as plays.
0:02:14 the Greeks did their stories in verses often accompanetent by Elra. And
0:02:20 then you can make movies out of all of those. Look at the Greek um mythology
0:02:25 movies. Look at all the Shakespeare movies. It's fundamentally about storytelling. The advantage of the film
0:02:33 industry is that they have so much money at stake that they spend a lot of time,
0:02:40 much more time than most novel writers thinking about what works best and they
0:02:48 do the audience research. They really know how this stuff works. And one thing
0:02:54 the big studios came up with, especially for blockbusters, is the four quadrant
0:03:00 approach. Whether we like it or not, there are differences in preverence
0:03:06 between men and women and older and younger. And
0:03:12 so based on their research, the film industry broke the audience
0:03:18 into four quadrants, female and male, above 35 and below 35.
0:03:24 And to get a blockbuster, you try to reach as many quadrants as you can. You
0:03:31 broaden the audience. You see that particularly well in
0:03:36 Jurassic Park, which happens to already have most of those elements, but they
0:03:43 they really emphasize it in the movie version. So you have an older woman, you
0:03:49 have a younger woman, you have an older male, you have a even older male than
0:03:55 that, you can at least in part reach the seniors and you had younger males.
0:04:01 And that gave that thing pretty much a four quadrant approach. And plus they
0:04:08 they catered kind of further by kind of trying to hint at a love story. since
0:04:14 the original book didn't have one, they kind of didn't play that out. But that is one way to do that, deal with that.
0:04:22 And you see that um in other blockbusters, Indiana Jones, Star Wars,
0:04:28 it doesn't matter because women tend to emphasize the feelings
0:04:35 more broadly speaking. Romance sells better with women. Men are
0:04:42 more actionoriented. So what the movie industry does with blockbusters and they're more formal
0:04:49 about subplots. So when the movie industry does a subplot, they label them
0:04:55 A, B, C, D based on the length of the subplot. So the main plot, which is
0:05:00 always the longest, is A. If the main plot is something actionoriented,
0:05:07 fantasy, thriller, and so on, that appeals more to men, the B story, the
0:05:14 main subplot will always be a romance because that appeals more to women.
0:05:20 Conversely, if the main story is a romance to draw
0:05:26 more male and this is predominantly geared towards date movies where the
0:05:31 woman may pick the movie and ask the man to go along or vice versa. So if the
0:05:37 main story is a romance, then the subplot is going to be something that may
0:05:43 attract men, you know, thriller, action, so on. It's all meant to broaden the
0:05:49 audience and you can apply the same principles to writing to novels to short
0:05:57 stories. You just try to add elements that appeal to different audiences.
0:06:03 Now for novels the building sorry
0:06:09 the building blocks start with writing that this thing should this that differs
0:06:15 from other forms of storytelling like movies that you can actually fiddle with
0:06:22 the words and make the story better that way. So
0:06:28 obviously the fundamental building block on a pros level is words and you
0:06:33 probably heard that you know use stronger verbs. You know use more
0:06:39 emotional verbs, use more emotional words in general, power words, things like that.
0:06:47 Vary the sentence structure, short sentences, long sentences.
0:06:52 vary the paragraph structure. use paragraphs to drive emotions. Like
0:06:59 you you probably if you've been in our critiques, you've probably heard that a lot that if the situation is tense, use
0:07:05 really short paragraphs and really short sentences with maybe even sentence
0:07:12 fragments because it tends to give the feel that things go faster. And I've
0:07:17 included here subtext, even though technically subtext isn't on the page,
0:07:24 but it's a form of writing because you're deliberately leaving stuff out that is unsaid that is implied by all
0:07:32 the other words around it. And so it's part of pros and judicious use of
0:07:38 subtext can again add an additional element to broaden the audience.
0:07:44 However, on a novel length story, there's only so
0:07:50 much you can do in that regard because particularly if you elevate the
0:07:57 words too much to appeal to more literate readers, you're going to start
0:08:04 losing readers on the other end who don't want that work that hard. Even
0:08:10 with an ebook, you don't want to constantly click on a word and look up what it actually means. So there is a
0:08:18 point of diminishing return to make the words the pros better.
0:08:25 And the dirty secret is you really don't have to.
0:08:31 If you look at some of the biggest blockbusters, they are actually very simply written.
0:08:39 The biggest example is probably Lord of the Rings. You know, people have done
0:08:46 analysis on these bestsellers and Lord of the Rings, 90%
0:08:53 90 in 10 sentences
0:08:59 have weak verbs in them. This is the opening two paragraphs
0:09:07 of the chapter one. Basically, arguably the most important paragraphs in the
0:09:14 whole story. There isn't one sentence in here that
0:09:20 doesn't have a wass in it as you can see. And all but one sentence have a had
0:09:28 in it. So, anybody who's been in our critiques know we try to rag on hats and
0:09:34 he does both. Now, in Tolken's defense,
0:09:40 he told these stories to his nieces and nephews and then wrote them down in the
0:09:47 language that he used for kids. No, they were like 9, 10, 11. It was his
0:09:53 publishers's idea to sell this as an adult book. And obviously they were
0:09:59 right and obviously the language still worked for adults. In addition, this is
0:10:05 how a lot of literature was written in the 50s and 60s. So he wasn't out of the
0:10:10 ordinary. So basically it didn't hurt Lord of the
0:10:15 Rings. Jane Austin came from a middleclass background which
0:10:22 of course was comparatively wealthy for her time period and she books were sold
0:10:29 to a more literate more moneyed crowd. So as you can see she used
0:10:36 more elevated verbs than talking did in her opening
0:10:41 acknowledge considered entering
0:10:47 but she also used a lot of in between and as you can see almost every
0:10:55 sentence has a be in it or been or an is. So again, not exactly what modern
0:11:02 editors would call great writing. Didn't stop it from becoming one of the most
0:11:09 popular romances ever and considered one of the greatest romances ever. And even
0:11:15 today, that hasn't changed. Here's the opening to the Hunger Games. Now, she
0:11:20 did cut down on the ises, but she and she also cut down on the
0:11:27 elevated words. There's only two in here. Curl, you can argue, and uh
0:11:36 um concerned. And the rest are simple verbs because she's writing for a young
0:11:42 adult audience. And again, they don't want to work that hard. So there's only
0:11:47 so much you can do with pros. And for most parts, it doesn't really matter.
0:11:55 You have to be good enough. No, you have to use enough words
0:12:04 that people don't think this is like a children's book.
0:12:09 You have to get the spelling right. You have to get the punctuation right. You
0:12:16 have to get the grammar right because screwing up any of those building blocks
0:12:23 will lose your audiences. They're going to be people that complain about it and
0:12:28 nowadays where they can write reviews and give you a one star, you don't want the reviews because hey, the guy can't
0:12:33 punctuate. Why should I read this book? But once you reach good enough,
0:12:41 it doesn't really help you getting to great on a novel because the words don't
0:12:46 matter enough. Now, in a poem, that's only one page wrong. In a flash fiction,
0:12:52 yeah, every word counts. But when you get to 80,000 re words, the readers will
0:12:59 forgive a lot if the story is good. And
0:13:04 that's why the talk is about storytelling because fundamentally the medium doesn't matter and the writing as
0:13:13 long as it's good enough is not going to change that.
0:13:19 At this point you need to go to fundamentals of storytelling
0:13:24 which are universal across formats. So we can use examples from film and from
0:13:30 Shakespeare's plays just the same because the storytelling format really
0:13:37 isn't that different. And you may have heard this before. the most popular
0:13:44 way to structure a novel, the threeact play, which I'm going to call four act
0:13:50 play because it's just wrong. It's not three acts. That's a relic of the way a
0:13:56 play work, but it for novels it's a fouract structure and for films it's a eight mini movies as taught at USC. So,
0:14:03 I'm just going to call it the 4X structure that follows different principles
0:14:08 because some people love words. Most people react to change because the
0:14:15 brain saves energy until something changes. This is fundamental to human beings.
0:14:23 And if you have a pet, particularly a dog or especially a cat, you will notice
0:14:30 most of the time they lie around doing nothing. Kind of dozing because animals
0:14:39 that came from the wild aren't going to really sleep. They're too scared that something will happen. But they will
0:14:45 shut down as much as they can until something happens. a noise that
0:14:51 frightens them, something moving that frightens them. The brain shuts down when it's not
0:14:59 needed for anything and only reacts until something changes. This is
0:15:07 fundamental. Doesn't matter what the medium is. You see this actually illustrated in this slide. The whole
0:15:14 point of bringing the points one by one is so that you can focus and the brain
0:15:21 wakes up every time because something changed and you can keep and you can
0:15:28 focus on what I'm saying and what you're seeing. And you may know that from
0:15:33 school. The teacher drones on in a steady voice and nothing happens. You
0:15:40 tend to drift off. It's the same if you have a presentation
0:15:47 that doesn't have slides where the author just stands still and talks in a
0:15:53 stra in a monotone voice, fingers cramped to the lect turn and nothing
0:16:00 changes. You tend to drift off. Good presentations, using your hands, using
0:16:06 slides is all about waking up the brain
0:16:11 and it works. This is how most people are. So if you want to broaden the
0:16:17 audience, you need to bring in change. put in as much different change as
0:16:25 possible because the brain will get used to things. If
0:16:33 the slides all look the same, if the effects are all the same, if the sound
0:16:38 doesn't vary enough, or if the sound keeps varying in the same way, it's not
0:16:44 going to help. Um, Tchaikovski,
0:16:51 one of the great Russian composers, had a bet with his friends that he
0:16:57 couldn't write a piece using only scales
0:17:02 because scales have a fixed pattern. They keep going with a spacing that even
0:17:10 the Greeks already knew would work. And it just keeps continuing. and his
0:17:18 friends were of the opinion, well, there isn't enough change. You can't make an engaging piece out of
0:17:25 it. Butchaikovski was an experienced composer. Of course, he didn't just use
0:17:32 the scales going in one direction. Yeah, that wouldn't work. He changed the
0:17:38 direction of the scales. Changed the scales he used. Made some
0:17:44 major, made some minor. He varied the
0:17:50 the volume. He varied the duration. So there are pieces in there where when
0:17:57 he wanted to stress it, he would really pull out the tone length. He used
0:18:03 different changes to make the piece so engaging that it's considered one of the
0:18:11 best pieces of his best ballet.
0:18:17 It's the grand party of the nutcrack cracker using nothing but scales because
0:18:24 he used different changes. This is just as important. And you look at Nano
0:18:30 Littlewood who's the founder of Writer Rebellion put it in more literary terms,
0:18:36 the clearer you can be on transformation, journey, and impact, the more powerful
0:18:44 your story will be from day one. So he looked at at least three different
0:18:51 areas that you should change to make the story better.
0:18:58 So what are the elements we can work with? Once you get beyond the pros,
0:19:04 you will get to the first building block of a story and that's the scene.
0:19:11 Notice I'm not talking chapters here. Chapters are a novelspecific
0:19:19 bookspecific way of subdividing the story which is mostly arbitrary. Anybody
0:19:25 who's been in our critique groups who's aged about should there be a scene change or chapter break here knows that
0:19:33 it's an arbitrary division. It really doesn't matter for storytelling in general. The scene is the basic building
0:19:39 block of story. By definition, every scene is a mini
0:19:46 story. You know, the shortest stories you can have are one scene
0:19:53 stories. So, they're basically interchangeable. All the novel does is string together
0:20:01 these mini stories into a longer story. What that means is anything I say about
0:20:09 the scene can be applied to the overarching story as well. It's just
0:20:15 done on a grander scale. That is good news for you pancers out there because
0:20:22 that means that
0:20:28 if you don't want to plot out your story, if you don't want to do a lot of
0:20:35 overarching work outline and so on, if you
0:20:41 optimize the every scene to the hilt
0:20:48 make the scene as great as possible. You can reach a bestseller status
0:20:56 just by optimizing the scenes and you don't have to worry about any of the
0:21:02 other stuff. Joe Bunting in his book he talks about just focusing
0:21:10 on three of the elements like Nino said before to optimize
0:21:17 out of the to optimize every scene and he says he's written multiple
0:21:23 bestsellers that way. Another one you can look at is Alice Sudlo at alysislo.com.
0:21:31 She uses the six plus two elements of story revision cheat sheet which you
0:21:37 can get from her website where she focuses on six different elements plus two more to optimize the scene and again
0:21:45 you don't have to do anything overarching you optimize every scene you can get a great story.
0:21:53 So the elements that are the most important that there's many more than what you see on the screen but the most
0:22:00 important are these six setting character emotions goal motivation and
0:22:06 conflict. And again if you are pants and you don't want to deal with all this stuff
0:22:12 only one element is really required because you can't have a story without a
0:22:19 setting. No matter what you do, there will always be a setting. If you're in
0:22:24 the vacuum of space, you iron out the space. If the setting isn't mentioned,
0:22:32 people will assume it's contemporary Earth. And in our case, it's contemporary USA. So, the setting is
0:22:40 always there. Everything else is optional.
0:22:45 Now, I can hear some of your brains going, "But what about the character?"
0:22:51 You don't need a character for story. Let's say you're writing a story about
0:22:59 the late bombardment period where meteorites
0:23:05 were crashing on Earth and basically destroying everything inside. You can do a very
0:23:11 interesting description of the meteorites coming down and exploding on
0:23:17 Earth and lava flowing everywhere. Unless you antromise
0:23:22 the meteorite, there is no character in there, but it's still a story. You know,
0:23:29 it probably qualifies more as a travel description, but it's still a story because there's something changing.
0:23:37 But yes, if you want to broaden the audience, you're going to have a character, probably multiple because
0:23:42 every character can pull in a different audience as you saw with the four quadrants. Now, you want to cover all
0:23:49 four quadrants, you need at least four different characters in your story in major roles. So, you every
0:23:56 different audiences can grab onto them. And that is for example the secret
0:24:04 behind groups like the Beatles which had four members but every member
0:24:12 had a different personality a different look and different audiences latched on to
0:24:19 each member. There were arguments about, you know, is John Lennon the more important of the four? Is Paul McCartney
0:24:27 the more important? Would they have been such a success without Ringo, who was
0:24:32 somehow considered a baby even though he was the oldest of the group? They broadened the audience that way in
0:24:39 a way a single performer can't. And it's the same concept here. You want the
0:24:45 audience to identify with the character. It helps if they are like them, look like them. So again, you want to include
0:24:52 people from different countries. you may have noticed a lot of blockbusters try to find an excuse nowadays to bring
0:25:00 in Chinese people because well there's four times more of them than the US. The
0:25:07 entire Chinese middle class is now bigger than the population of the US. So
0:25:13 even if you only appeal to the Chinese middle class, they have the money to spend on movie tickets, broadening the
0:25:19 audience. Um, again, you want to bring in emotions
0:25:24 if you can, particularly if you're trying to appeal to women because they
0:25:29 care more about the fields than men do. And it's the case. They tend to raise
0:25:37 children. and they have a different attachment, different relationships with with other human beings that are
0:25:44 based on emotions. So, you want to bring those in to broaden things out.
0:25:50 And you may have heard about the goal, motivation, conflict. These are more elevated principles that you don't
0:25:59 necessarily see on the page, but if they're there, they give that a that
0:26:05 story the extra kick. It's like the subtext. There is an audience that responds to that. So, the more elements
0:26:13 you can bring in, the more you can expand the audience and lift and level
0:26:19 up the story.
0:26:25 And those three elements, they basically drive the plot. And of course again for
0:26:32 particularly action movies the plot drives the story which appeals to a male
0:26:38 audience. You throw in the feels how the character feels inside which is part of
0:26:44 motivation but also the emotions separately. You throw in a be story that
0:26:51 is a romance and you've broadened the audience. So going back to what Nino said again,
0:27:00 Nino focuses on just three of these elements but with the same argument. You
0:27:06 want change in the transformation which is the change of the motivation. You
0:27:11 want change in the journey which is the change of the settings as as used here.
0:27:17 You want change in impact which again is the change in the goals and conflicts.
0:27:23 what happens actually. So everybody is basically saying here in so many words
0:27:31 use as many different elements as you can and change them across and within as
0:27:40 much as you can to get a better story.
0:27:45 And what the novel, the long story, long form story adds to that is, do you want
0:27:53 to do this across different scenes?
0:27:59 And you could just string together optimized scenes and get there, but for
0:28:06 a lot of genres, the sum is more is more than the parts.
0:28:14 In a thriller for or why mystery is the best one in mystery
0:28:22 generally the audience wants to solve the mystery.
0:28:27 You have to give them the logical chance to do so or they're going to get upset.
0:28:36 That is hard to do if the scenes don't have a relationship to each other. If
0:28:43 you can't connect the dots, it's even worse in thrillers because not
0:28:50 only may there be a mystery, there's a villain to fight and you have to defeat
0:28:56 the villain in a certain way. Now, most big
0:29:02 blockbusters, there isn't one. The villain has henchmen. And it's pretty
0:29:07 much a rule that the team of the protagonist has to fight
0:29:16 their way through all the henchmen, but the final must be the main
0:29:25 protagonist defeating the main villain. That's
0:29:30 pretty much a rule in film. And it works for a reason because the main
0:29:35 protagonist is the one that most people will latch on to. And if they don't have
0:29:41 the heroic moment against the top villain, it just doesn't feel the same. And in
0:29:49 thrillers, and particular in the subjandra, because horror is lumped under thriller, there's also the final
0:29:56 scare. The monster rears its head one last time
0:30:02 and the villain and the hero has to or the heroin has to stomp it into the
0:30:08 ground for good. If you don't include those elements, the
0:30:13 story is going to be poorer for it. And that's why you see it in pretty much
0:30:18 every blockbuster thriller or horror movie.
0:30:25 So you can't do that without connecting the dots. Even if you don't do it ahead
0:30:32 of time by plotting or with an outline, you know, a lot of pancers will do it in
0:30:38 reverse. Like Julia Quinn will write the last chapter first or at least the
0:30:44 climax. Not that anymore. So that's so that she knows what she's aiming at. so
0:30:49 that every chapter coming backwards
0:30:56 will build properly to lay the foundation to reach that climax. So you
0:31:02 do this with connections between the scenes and you do this if you can across
0:31:09 all the elements because again you want change in as many of these elements as
0:31:16 you can and you want them to connect across as many of these elements as you
0:31:22 can. Every change that you can add makes the story better. And that leads us to
0:31:28 the building blocks for the story which because the story and the scene are
0:31:34 interchangeable are of course the same but if you connect within the elements you get
0:31:42 bigger versions. So the bigger version of the setting is world building. Big
0:31:48 surprise. Bigger version of the character. The connections of characters
0:31:54 are relationships. If you connect the emotions
0:31:59 into a coherent hole, you'll get themes. And this goes back to what you may have
0:32:06 heard about plot. If you add a subplot,
0:32:13 it better go with or against the main plot. The idea there is that if you connect
0:32:20 stuff, if the connections aren't there, if they don't make sense, you're going
0:32:26 to start losing readers because they're they're going to be confused. So, just like you don't add a subplot that has
0:32:33 absolutely nothing to do with the story or the main protagonist,
0:32:38 you don't want to just string together emotions in a haphazardous way. You want
0:32:44 them to make sense across the story or the readers are going to get confused.
0:32:49 So that's why you do them in a theme that ensures that the emotions are
0:32:56 consistent across 80,000 words. You also want the goals to make sense
0:33:03 and build up. And that is what most of you know as story structure is. You have
0:33:10 the big overarching goal. Different characters may have additional
0:33:15 goals. And then within each scene, you want a goal for the scene because every
0:33:21 scene is a story. So if the story overall has a goal, you want every scene
0:33:26 to have the goal, but the goals should make sense. They should connect together
0:33:32 and build up to the big goal. Otherwise, the audience just gets confused.
0:33:39 Um the motivation ultimately turns into the character arc
0:33:44 because fundamentally on most journey type well inner inner journey
0:33:52 type stories. You want to flip
0:33:58 what drives the character from a fault, an inner wound, an inner belief that is
0:34:05 wrong to the opposite because the goal of the inner journey is for the
0:34:12 character to learn what they are doing wrong. So again, you can string these
0:34:17 together haphazardly, but it makes the story so much better if
0:34:23 you achieve this fundamental conversion. And the conflict, of course. Yeah, you
0:34:29 can throw in conflict left and right, have the
0:34:35 hero get punched out, have somebody pickpock a wallet,
0:34:42 uh, rain comes down and prevents the journey from continuing.
0:34:47 If the conflicts don't add up to a bigger overarching conflict, also known
0:34:55 as the stakes, the audience is going to go, "Huh?"
0:35:00 So, the point of all these connections is that they need to add up to something
0:35:06 bigger and the element should all be there. And if you look at old
0:35:12 screenwriting methods, which again the movie industry does this a lot more
0:35:19 um deliberate, you will see that you could use index cards where they had these different
0:35:26 things listed. Um in in some movie versions, they also list a value
0:35:34 um as one of these elements. And again, there's many others, but the main thing
0:35:41 was that on the index cards, at least one of these things had to change in
0:35:48 every scene, and ideally even more. And you will
0:35:53 still see that in screenwriting th software where they use these um
0:35:59 corkboards. They have placeholders or they have fields where you can
0:36:05 indicate which of these elements changes in these scene
0:36:10 and what the change is so that when you actually write out the screenplay you
0:36:16 don't forget. And it's basically a method of ensuring that something
0:36:23 changes in every scene because again without change the brain goes to sleep.
0:36:31 So what are examples of how you enforce this? Besides the corkboard,
0:36:38 the world building probably the biggest example there is maps. You look at fantasy books, there's
0:36:46 usually a map in the inside cover or comes with it.
0:36:52 But even if you're doing something modern, especially in this day and age of Google Maps,
0:36:58 you want to have a map of your settings.
0:37:04 you don't want people to get upset
0:37:09 because your transitions from location to location don't make sense.
0:37:15 Particularly if you're dealing with real cities, you know,
0:37:21 people can now respond on social media. People can re leave reviews. So you will
0:37:26 see that some authors even include on the copyright page or in the prefix that
0:37:34 look um for the sake of drama I've changed some of the time settings you
0:37:41 know because otherwise if you like write something like the drive from Las Vegas
0:37:49 airport to the Bellagio took five minutes you're going to get social media
0:37:55 posts and bad reviews tell you no, it isn't. So, it takes five minutes just to get out of the airport. You don't want
0:38:02 to get these things wrong and it helps basically to use maps as a foundation for that. And in the fantasy world, you
0:38:08 have more leeway, but it doesn't hurt to have a map so that you stay consistent.
0:38:16 character relations. You can just throw them together, but it is much better to
0:38:22 use archetypes to build these relationships because they all serve a purpose in the
0:38:28 story. And the more archetypes you can bring in, the more richer the story gets. Probably one of the best known
0:38:34 examples is Star Wars: A New Hope. Obi-Wan is obviously the mentor to Luke
0:38:40 and Darth Vader is the villain. And so by thinking about the archetypes that
0:38:47 you want to bring together which makes the relationship to the
0:38:53 secondary and minor characters better you can again level up the story. Uh
0:39:02 some people would argue that Darth Vader is more important to Star Wars than Luke and that's because that again is a
0:39:09 different audience that is more interested in people like that broadens the audience.
0:39:16 For themes there are all kinds of personality methods you can use. A very popular one is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator because the Myers-Briggs
0:39:24 forces you to pick one of 16 complete
0:39:30 personality types. So while the character has an inner wound, they will
0:39:35 have other dimensions to their character that you want to be consistent throughout the story. And if you haven't
0:39:42 thought about them, well, you may put together a character type that is inconsistent. So the inog tells you,
0:39:50 okay, this character has these four main um emotions, four main personality
0:39:56 traits, and this way you can make them consistent throughout the story. Again,
0:40:01 anything that is confusing will lose your audience.
0:40:08 The goal is probably one of the hardest
0:40:13 because every story has a structure. No, even if you don't think about it, every
0:40:19 story has a structure. The simplest story still has a structure. Short
0:40:26 story, flash fiction has a structure. It is there.
0:40:31 One of the shortest stories known dates back to almost well dates back to the
0:40:37 19th century. It's baby shoes
0:40:43 for sale, never born. six words, but it has it has the most
0:40:48 basic story structure, beginning, middle, and end. And in storytelling, these aren't just
0:40:56 divisions. The beginning is always what is often called the normal stage, baby
0:41:04 shoes, which basically the subtext is a baby was born.
0:41:11 The middle is the change because again, no story without change
0:41:16 for sale. Something happened. They're selling the baby shoes.
0:41:21 And then the end is the upside down world, the opposite of the normal world,
0:41:29 never used, which is again the subtext says the baby is no longer here.
0:41:37 So even the most simple story will have that. You better start with a state that
0:41:44 is known force a change that flips the state around.
0:41:52 And because the brain gets used to things and starts falling asleep, this
0:41:58 goes back again to what we discussed earlier. that change has to come
0:42:05 at a certain point in time and you don't have a lot of time for that. You
0:42:11 probably can't even get through a chapter without change before the brain falls asleep and the reader starts
0:42:18 drifting off. So even the old Greeks already way back
0:42:28 the threeact structure that it nowadays is the forex structure has elements of
0:42:34 pacing in it that ensure that the brain
0:42:39 gets enough stimulus in regular intervals. If you look at all these
0:42:47 four act or eight mini movie structures
0:42:52 have at the brakes and with at the midpoints
0:42:58 a required turning point or twist. Everybody calls it something different
0:43:04 but it is a major change that keeps the reader going. And if you go back to that
0:43:13 the scene is the same as a story, then even if you don't apply a scene
0:43:19 structure, it automatically has a beginning, a middle, and the end. And the beginning is the normal state for
0:43:28 the scene. Then the middle is the change and the end is
0:43:34 the upside down world. So again,
0:43:39 every scene is supposed to have a change. That means that in a novel strung
0:43:47 together by scenes, not only do you have the overarching structure with turning points, every
0:43:55 scene has a turning point if you do it right because it keeps the reader awake.
0:44:06 And the structure I use is the save the cat
0:44:11 structure which that is the major contribution of Blake Schneider in his
0:44:16 book save the cat. Now save the cat actually has nothing to do with structure. That term comes from the
0:44:23 movie world because again they think about this more and because they get
0:44:28 critiques professionally and it's done before the screenplay is often written
0:44:34 or while it's written with all the revisions to make sure that the screenplay is good enough. They came up
0:44:40 with all these terms that are short form that if you tell save the cat to an experienced screenwriter, he knows what
0:44:47 that means. You're missing a Save the Cat moment. It is a quick way
0:44:54 to get the audience to empathize with the main character,
0:45:02 the main protagonist, which is important if the main protagonist is really
0:45:07 flawed. You don't want them to be so unlikable
0:45:13 that the readers don't identify with them. And so, you throw in a save the
0:45:19 cat moment. very early. That is a show not tell way
0:45:26 to make the audience empathize with the main character. And if done right, the
0:45:31 audience doesn't even know what hit them. They suddenly kind of like these
0:45:38 characters and they don't know why. And you want to see that in action? The best one I know is the beginning of the
0:45:46 original Westside story because that movie opens with the Jets, basically the
0:45:54 gang that is bullying other kids on the playground and you really don't like
0:46:01 them at that point. And then they set up this 3second save the cat moment that is
0:46:08 so subtle you don't even know what hit you. And it is so short, there isn't really much happening. But suddenly,
0:46:14 they don't seem as bad anymore because they didn't bully this little
0:46:21 girl sitting around on the playground. You know, they could have, but they
0:46:27 didn't. So, these guys aren't all bad. And that's why that book has that name.
0:46:33 And it is a collection of tips how to make stories better, but it is
0:46:41 very short. It's only 200 pages. So there's basically a tip on almost every page. So that is a real good book to
0:46:49 learn storytelling from because it's quick and full of information. Now I've
0:46:55 read McKe's story which is twice as long and Blake Snder was a screenwriter. He
0:47:01 he says in the preface he didn't come up with most of these ideas. He learned them on the job. So they're practical
0:47:08 and usable. McKe's a professor. He writes like one and I've heard his interviews. He talks like one. Story is
0:47:16 a very tough read and I've read every damn page. So if you only read one book,
0:47:23 read Safe the Cat. Now Save the Cat because it's so short. Now McKe does
0:47:30 weave examples into story but if you didn't understand what he was trying to
0:47:36 say in the theory you know the examples don't necessarily help you but because
0:47:42 save the cat became so popular Blake Schneider shot another book after it where he goes to the movies and that's
0:47:48 basically all the examples where he applied Save the Cats beat sheet which
0:47:55 was his main original contribution to formalize the beat sheet and give it
0:48:01 cutesy names so you can remember what every point was for like the
0:48:08 fun and games or Dark Knights of the Lost Soul. So, not only do did you have
0:48:14 15 beats which is basically the turning points in the story
0:48:20 um or the required points in the story, you also could remember what they were
0:48:25 for. And then he did a third book where he extended the 15 beats,
0:48:32 especially with a fivepoint finale that makes the finale where the main
0:48:39 protagonist defeats the main villain better because you have additional
0:48:44 change, additional turning points. So, I use the extended save the cat beat sheet
0:48:50 because it has 21 points and every point is a chance for you to introduce more
0:48:56 change just to remember it. Plus, save the cat has kind of a
0:49:04 builtin timeline where he gives you guidelines where
0:49:09 every point should appear and it it ensures again good pacing for
0:49:14 a movie. But it works just as well for a novel. And if you find the screenwriting
0:49:22 version too far a field from what you want to do, one of the Save the Cat
0:49:28 instructors, because they teach this formally as courses, Jessica Broaddy wrote Saves the Cat
0:49:34 Writes a Novel. It's the Safe the Cat mythology applied to novel writing with
0:49:41 all the examples already built in. It's a little bit longer than the screenwriting version, but it is
0:49:48 directly applicable to novels. And that really teaches you a structure that
0:49:54 maximizes change. The only structure longer than that is Edson who teaches in
0:50:01 LA and again he teaches screenwriting and he has 23 points on his hero goal
0:50:07 sequence. But it's once you do the extended finale, the save the cat is
0:50:13 pretty much the same. You just want more opportunities to introduce change because it makes the story better. Then
0:50:21 the character arc, there are also different ones. I use the heroine's
0:50:26 journey because again as we discussed women tend to care more about the fields
0:50:34 and the hero's journey is mostly about action. So
0:50:42 when you extend the hero's journey to the heroine's journey, you add some scenes that introduce more feelings. So
0:50:51 again, you broaden the audience. So the heroine's journey is more broader than
0:50:58 the hero's journey. It broadens the audience and it's particularly of course I would say a must if you have a female
0:51:05 main protagonist because she is going to respond more along those lines than she does the
0:51:12 hero's journey. And finally, you probably know the most popular way
0:51:18 to deal with conflict is the tension curve that you have this rising curve, then the conflicts within the scenes or
0:51:28 the sequences. If you have conflict going across scenes,
0:51:33 spikes but then comes back down, spikes and comes back down, but the overall conflict keeps going up. And again, you
0:51:40 don't have to do any of this. you can just string together optimized scenes,
0:51:46 but particular with the tension curve and the story structure, if you adhere
0:51:53 to those relationships, drive the tension curve up,
0:51:59 um connect the goals so that you have
0:52:04 turning points that oppose the goals with the conflicts at regular intervals
0:52:11 and get the pacing right. You can lift even optimized scenes
0:52:17 to make the story really great.
0:52:22 Rich asked if if foreshadowing was a form of subtext.
0:52:30 I would say yes because if you do foreshadowing right, it's not on the nose on the page.
0:52:39 Yeah, good, good question. I don't know if Eric's question was
0:52:45 serious. When you were talking about the four act plays, he said, "What about foreplay?"
0:52:54 Well, uh, foreplay is important in particularly romances because again, you want to string out
0:53:01 the emotions as long as you can, you know. So, and and then of course if since
0:53:09 romance is mostly have a female audience, if you don't deliver foreplay, they will probably be disappointed.
0:53:16 I had never heard of of an Myers-Briggs. I
0:53:22 think that's how you pronounced it. What exactly is that? Neog is based on four main traits that
0:53:30 are each represented by a letter. And if you have four traits that can be combined with each other, you end up
0:53:37 with 16 personality types each with different
0:53:43 combinations of those four main traits. You can of course use any other
0:53:50 ones that are out there. There are so many. You want a well-rounded character
0:53:56 especially for the main characters. And all these methods insurers because
0:54:03 they they deal with different traits. You end up thinking about each of the
0:54:10 different traits that the character has. You know, Cyber Spirit, if you look at
0:54:15 Cowabunga, you know, she's fearful, but she's
0:54:23 also a mommy's girl. So she kind of likes to be pampered and
0:54:31 she sherks responsibility which is one of the se that's the actual theme of
0:54:38 cyber um furry where she has to grow up and she has to learn responsibility.
0:54:44 So you have like the the main reason for the guinea pig in there was so that
0:54:51 because she's alone for so much of the story, she actually has somebody to talk to. But the guinea pig kind of also
0:54:59 forced the theme of her growing up because since she carries the guinea pig
0:55:05 around throughout the story, she has to take care of the guinea pig and has to
0:55:10 start acting like an adult. So she learns responsibility. So, the guinea pig ended up being
0:55:16 actually the personification of the theme in addition to giving her
0:55:24 somebody to talk to so it doesn't all have to take place in her head. And the guinea pig ended up also helping solve
0:55:31 the case. So, you see how if if you introduce these elements and you try to
0:55:38 build these connections, you suddenly come up with plot points. Maybe they
0:55:43 were there beforehand, but it it really helps crystallize them
0:55:48 and suddenly it makes the story so much richer because now the theme and the plot
0:55:55 and in this case the story structure or the internal the internal structure
0:56:01 namely dialogue versus narrative was influenced by introducing this one
0:56:08 element that wasn't there before. And the enog is is similar. It makes you
0:56:15 think about the character in a whole and you may come up with plot points or
0:56:23 little scenes that you haven't thought of before because okay because she is a
0:56:28 mama's girl um well suddenly every interaction with
0:56:34 her mother is colored a certain way but it's consistent across the story and then it introduces all kind of elements.
0:56:41 Well, what if she's a mama's girl and she doesn't want to because she's also
0:56:49 fundamentally fearful? Well, she's kind of postponing getting a driver's license
0:56:55 because she doesn't have to because her mother will show for her around everywhere. And suddenly she has to
0:57:02 drive a car because the guy she's with is out of action and they need to flee
0:57:07 from the police. And suddenly you have a whole different new plot point that is
0:57:12 very exciting which you may have never thought about if you hadn't worked out that she's both a mama's girl and she's
0:57:19 fearful. Um she's also smart and so on. So it's the more you can think about these
0:57:26 elements beforehand, the more you can do with them. And
0:57:31 particularly now it is so easy cuz like the setting building a world there's a
0:57:39 lot of detail to work out. Character I use a threepage character sheet because
0:57:46 every aspect of the main character could influence something later on. And
0:57:53 you want to be consistent. You want to know like what is their favorite music
0:57:58 so you don't screw that up later that in one scene suddenly oh she likes rap
0:58:04 scene oh no she likes soft music romantic music um
0:58:12 and I would only fill out the character sheets for the main characters in total
0:58:17 because three pages is a lot nowadays you know AI may not be good at writing
0:58:24 emotional stuff, but it is fantastic at research. It can do research so much faster. So like Arthur and Cyber
0:58:30 Explosion, I had he's a Hong Kong Chinese who is a music promoter. And
0:58:37 then I filled out all the main points, his age and so on, and sent that over to
0:58:44 Geminy and said, "You fill out the rest of the form." and Germany did all the research that would have taken me hours,
0:58:51 looked up Chinese movies, particularly Hong Kong Chinese movies, looked up Hong
0:58:57 Kong Chinese m music and filled all this stuff out. And now if I needed to have
0:59:02 him deal with music, I already had a base of foundation to build on. And it
0:59:07 was done in seconds by AI. And the free version will do three pages in general.
0:59:13 So it's now so much easier to build
0:59:19 complete elements in all these things so that just for the story and each scene
0:59:26 it makes it better as those of you that have been in my readings know the music
0:59:32 how aabanga listens to influences the story line. It makes the story richer.
0:59:37 anything you can do. The more you flush out these elements, the more you can
0:59:42 enrich and level up the story and AI can really help you in that regard.
0:59:49 Have any sample beat sheets? Uh, particularly Save the Cat because they
0:59:56 teach classes and the beat sheet itself is copyrighted. You can find pretty much
1:00:02 an analysis of any blockbuster movie. Um,
1:00:08 so I was particularly interested in you said the a 21 beat sheet and like I've
1:00:14 I've created my own beat sheets based on the save the cat but they're not that long. They're not 21 beats.
1:00:21 Yeah, you you have to read the third book for I don't want to
1:00:27 um and you you can download Save the Cat from the web. Um I don't know if you
1:00:34 can download it. Well, you you can probably download the extended version, too. Um, because it's copyrighted,
1:00:41 technically, you're supposed to get it from the Safe the Cat um um site. The
1:00:48 second part is the application of this method to Pride and Prejudice.
1:00:57 And this is the character map for Pride and Prejudice. This is all the
1:01:02 characters or I should say all the main characters appearing
1:01:07 in each chapter represented by that color dot.
1:01:13 And the reason I picked Pride and Prejudice is because
1:01:19 romance by definition probably has the most complex story structure of any of the
1:01:26 main genres. Because romance by definition always has a main protagonist
1:01:33 and that means sorry for that that
1:01:39 you need to work out a lot of these elements across two characters.
1:01:46 So if you can understand how to do this, how to optimize a romance, you can
1:01:53 certainly go back to a simpler genre and apply the methods there because it
1:01:59 doesn't really get any more complex as you will see in Pride of Prejudice. And
1:02:05 it's generally considered one of the best romances around and certainly Jane Austin's best work.
1:02:12 And I've also included the beats on top. These are the save the cat beats listed
1:02:19 across you know um you can see debate their fun and games bad guys close in
1:02:25 dark nights of the lust. And if you use the chapter beginnings
1:02:31 to map out the beats, they fall within the Save the Cat or Blake Snider's
1:02:37 guidelines within 1%. So I am absolutely convinced that Jane
1:02:46 Austin read Save the Cat because this can't be coincidence that they align so
1:02:52 perfectly. Now I can't prove it. I have tried to contact her
1:02:59 and she doesn't respond. I guess it's asking too much for a 200 year old to
1:03:05 respond to emails. So, sorry, you'll have to take my word for it, but Pride
1:03:11 and Prejudice follow safe the cat to the hilt.
1:03:17 That just as an aside. So, again, there is a method behind this madness.
1:03:22 So this may look incredibly terrifying
1:03:27 but in the end it bl breaks down into simple elements. Fundamentally this is a
1:03:33 romance. So the main plot is a two-parter.
1:03:40 Now this idea of switching points of view every other chapters on that is a fairly
1:03:47 modern invention. Um Shakespeare did it in Romeo and Juliet, but he did it
1:03:54 pretty much on a almost act basis.
1:03:59 Jane Austin wrote with one exception the very first chapter
1:04:05 everything in Liz's point of view. Liz Bennett is the main protagonist and
1:04:12 everything is colored by her point of view. Now, Darcy, her love interest,
1:04:20 nevertheless, is a main protagonist, which means he has his own character arc. He has his
1:04:28 own goals, and he even has his own theme.
1:04:34 It's only surfaced indirectly, but Jane Austin had it completely worked out so
1:04:39 that everything is consistent. Liz finds all this out indirectly afterwards
1:04:46 because for most parts, as you can see, she doesn't interact with Darcy,
1:04:53 but it is there. And interestingly,
1:05:02 because Austin died so early, there are no memoirs of hers. She didn't leave any
1:05:10 notes. Most of the original manuscripts are lost. So everything we know about
1:05:16 the stories, we know from her family because she told them to her family as
1:05:21 entertainment beforehand and then later wrote them down. And so
1:05:28 unfortunately we don't know a lot of things but we know that Sense and Sensibility
1:05:34 and Pride and Prejudice were written either in parallel or Pride and
1:05:39 Prejudice was written first. It was probably her first manuscript,
1:05:45 but Sense and Sensibility was published first.
1:05:50 And we don't know why, but if you look at
1:05:56 she, we know from her family, she majorly revised what started out as
1:06:02 first impressions. And if you think of first impressions,
1:06:07 that just says prejudice. that doesn't deal with pride.
1:06:15 So it is possible that
1:06:21 Austin discovered the second
1:06:27 theme pride afterwards in her revisions.
1:06:33 And if you look at Pride and Prejudice is over 300 pages
1:06:41 long. That's pretty much a rule that you cannot fit 300 pages into a movie
1:06:47 adaption. So the best movie adaptions tend to be miniseries, multiple parts.
1:06:56 But there is one movie
1:07:01 that looks like this. If you compare that to that,
1:07:09 now this is a lot simpler. You can do this in less than two hours.
1:07:15 This is the main plot with a third
1:07:21 character, the antagonist that creates a love triangle.
1:07:27 This is the character map or the main character
1:07:33 map for Bridget Jones's diary, which is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice in
1:07:39 the modern area. So, it's absolutely possible that First Impressions had just
1:07:45 this storyline and that the publisher or Jane didn't
1:07:51 find it enough to sustain a novel.
1:07:56 And then once she got sense and sensibility edited, professionally edited and published,
1:08:03 she or the publisher then suggested how to change first impressions to make it
1:08:10 better. And it turned into pride and prejudice. And it's generally acknowledged
1:08:17 that the prejudice theme belongs to Jane. Now, her pride gets her too, but
1:08:24 fundamentally Jane is the character who jumps to first impressions. In fact, she uses that term in a discussion.
1:08:33 So, she's the one who misreads Darcy
1:08:38 and sets up the whole story because
1:08:43 she's prejudiced against him. And pride belongs to Darcy because he
1:08:51 has a higher social status. And Austin may have discovered it afterwards. Maybe Jane's editor
1:08:58 discovered it. And they changed the name to Pride and
1:09:03 Prejudice to show because it's a romance. There are two themes that both themes are represented. Now, this is all
1:09:09 conjecture because we don't know. We don't have the original manuscript of First Impressions. We don't know why
1:09:15 they made the changes. And there are of course other theories
1:09:21 for example that Pride and Prejudice was renamed to have the parallelism to sense and sensibilities. Now we don't know
1:09:28 could be either one but it is possible that this was the start and Jane or the
1:09:34 publisher wasn't happy with it so they significantly added to it. But if you
1:09:40 look at the fundamental um plot, you have
1:09:48 Liz and Darcy at odds of each other because otherwise you don't have a story if they immediately fall in love. But
1:09:55 then halfway through it changes to a red arrow going the other way signifying
1:10:01 that now they are falling in love. And to add complications, you have Wikam,
1:10:08 who is basically the villain to Darcy because he's trying to win Liz's heart
1:10:15 and who is initially, I mean, he's also the antagonist to Liz
1:10:23 because the character has to learn that she belongs to Darcy and that only works
1:10:28 if the villain of the story is also an antagonist. And I use these terms distinctly just to make to get clarity.
1:10:37 To me, a villain is just somebody who opposes one of the characters. But an
1:10:42 antagonist also forces that character to change.
1:10:48 And the equivalent to Wickham in Bridget Jones does force the character to
1:10:56 change. Now by definition in a welldeveloped
1:11:01 romance each protagonist is also the other's antagonist because the whole point is
1:11:09 they force the other character to change
1:11:14 to move away from the inner wound and move towards the other protagonist
1:11:21 so that both compromise to make the relationship work. So
1:11:27 that's why I say fundamentally a romance is so much more complicated than the other genres that if you can understand
1:11:34 this that there is already a antagonist to each protagonist and then you add
1:11:40 other antagonists to make the love triangle or add complications.
1:11:47 These are how you make the story better.
1:11:52 But in Austin's case,
1:11:58 because she starts with this, and you see there are these gaping holes in
1:12:04 Darcy's character map, because Austin
1:12:11 chose probably the hardest to execute tae possible, enemies to lovers.
1:12:20 and she sets up essentially I don't want to say mortal enemies but
1:12:25 close to that in chapter three during the meet cute
1:12:31 Darcy and his friends come to town and they first meet Liz and her family
1:12:40 at a country dance in chapter three
1:12:46 and the reason Jane And no, sorry. The reason list
1:12:51 represents prejudice is because she overhears
1:12:58 Darcy talking to his best friend Bingley who are both much higher in social
1:13:03 status than her about her and she misunderstands what is said, jumps to
1:13:10 conclusions and tells her family that she can stand Darcy and that she will
1:13:16 never dance with him, which that was fundamentally how young people got
1:13:22 acquainted in that time period. So effectively she says he's dead for me.
1:13:28 And how are you going to sustain a romance when the characters aren't
1:13:35 talking to each other in chapter three? You know,
1:13:41 and that is you think about it, it's like why would you even want to do this to yourself?
1:13:48 There are so many easier ways to pull off a romance, but that's what Austin
1:13:53 picked. And maybe she realized that this just wasn't enough because you
1:14:00 can see, for example, that Wiccan's plot barely fills in the holes. And what is
1:14:08 worse, and maybe she learned that from sense and sensibility sales,
1:14:14 um, we know that women care more about the feelings. That's why they like
1:14:20 romances better. But that means romance has to deliver feels. And you can't go
1:14:26 from chapter 3 to the midpoint, much less to the climax without feelings.
1:14:33 And then Austin
1:14:39 In hindsight, this looks like this is absolutely the best way to go, but you
1:14:44 know, you have to think about it first. Austin introduces a peril romance
1:14:53 that gets going at the same time with the same inciting incident, but actually
1:15:01 is consumed from the start. Bingley's.
1:15:07 Darcy's best friend, Bingley, falls majorly in love with Liz's best
1:15:14 friend and older sister, Jane, at the very same dance. He's smitten with her
1:15:20 right from the start. He asks her for the next two dances and then asks her
1:15:25 again and again. We are off to the races. Everybody's fe the fields are
1:15:32 there and because of the tight relationship
1:15:38 Liz is vicariously feeling the same thing. He even she even tells Jane how
1:15:44 happy she is for her and that things are going great. And that goes back to the
1:15:52 point that we've been discussing. You want these connections
1:15:57 as many and as tight as you can. Now you can say this is kind of
1:16:04 gratuitous. You know that Darcy is there with his best friend and oh
1:16:11 the best friend falls in love with Liz's best friend. How can that be? Okay, but
1:16:16 this is a story and you want the story to work and the tighter the connections,
1:16:23 the more they cross over, the better the story works. And then you can say this
1:16:29 is manipulation and this doesn't happen. It's a story. We are manipulating the
1:16:36 character's feelings. The whole story is based on manipulating the brain because
1:16:41 the brain wants change. So, I'm sorry. If you're writing stories, you have to
1:16:46 get used to that you're manipulating the audience. Movies do it all the time, but
1:16:51 that's why they are so great. So,
1:16:57 you see this especially in longunning television shows that go over seven
1:17:03 seasons. It It's almost a running joke.
1:17:09 in Star Trek, the original version, that if a landing party includes people in
1:17:16 red shirts, they're the first to get killed because like it or not, we don't care as
1:17:24 much about people we don't know than about people we do know. So to have
1:17:31 death of a major character be meaningful, people have to care about that
1:17:38 character. That means they need to know him the character. And that means the
1:17:43 author has to spend time introducing the character and making them likable, creating save the cat moments and all
1:17:49 that, which of course save the cat is manipulation too. So longunning series,
1:17:57 if you need instant death, if somebody gets shot and dies, it's usually an
1:18:02 unimportant unnamed character. But if it's something longer where there's a lot of suffering involved, like
1:18:08 poisoning, it doesn't matter how ridiculous the
1:18:14 coincidence may seem, it hits one of the main cast because people already care for them.
1:18:20 And so it has a completely different emotional value. So yes, this may seem totally gratuitous
1:18:29 and coincidental that the two best friends of the protagonists fall in love, but it allows
1:18:37 us, particularly in Liz's case, to vicariously live out those feelings. and
1:18:43 it gives the romance reader all the fields they want even though Liz isn't
1:18:49 talking to Darcy. Plus, it has a second
1:18:57 element that makes this whole thing work
1:19:02 because Liz and Jane are so close to each other. Of course, Liz finds out everything
1:19:10 about Bingley, but also since there wasn't much entertainment in those times, visitations were very common and
1:19:18 you don't visit strangers. But because Bingley wants to see Jane regularly,
1:19:25 either Liz has to be with Jane or Darcy has to be with Bingley because they're
1:19:32 friends. And so Liz is forced to interact with Darcy, which makes it
1:19:37 possible for her to change her mind about him. And it also gives Darcy more chances to
1:19:46 get over himself. Because what happens is
1:19:52 that Bingley asks Darcy why he isn't dancing with anybody.
1:19:59 And Darcy kind of makes excuses. And then Bingley, because he's already
1:20:06 danced with Jane, kind of pushes Darcy to ask Liz, the
1:20:12 next oldest of the daughters. And Darcy makes this
1:20:20 vague comment about Liz
1:20:26 that she finds insulting because she's with an earshot, but they don't know that. And that gets the whole prejudice
1:20:35 thing going. He says she finds her tolerable
1:20:44 but not enough to tempt him. Liz interprets that as he's calling her
1:20:52 ugly. But the vagueness and the choice of words suggests something else. And as we
1:21:00 find out at the around the midpoint, Darcy has an absolute crush on Liz.
1:21:08 But because he's so much higher socially than her and even Bingley,
1:21:17 he can't enter that relationship. His family won't let him.
1:21:24 And so, and he doesn't want to tell Bingley, who is technically social
1:21:30 inferior, that he has this crush on Liz. So he kind of avoids the question
1:21:37 with this vague answer, but that's not how Liz sees it. And that's the prejudice. In fact, there's even a
1:21:45 another theory that Darcy shows all the signs of high
1:21:52 functioning autism. Of course, autism wasn't known in that
1:21:58 time. that the term wasn't known and Jane wouldn't have known the term but
1:22:03 she have se might have seen this behavior in her contemporaries
1:22:08 in which case Darcy's refusal to ask women to dance
1:22:15 could just as well be interpreted that he's not socially inept he is terrified
1:22:21 of interacting with other people so he's terrified of
1:22:27 having women to dance. And when he finally does dance, ask Liz to dance, he
1:22:34 really has to get over himself. And you kind of see it in how Colin Frell plays
1:22:42 it in his version. Um, that seems to have been the theory they followed that
1:22:47 he he he avoids eye contact with other people in general. He's very abrupt. He
1:22:52 barely talks to other people because he he he can't handle social interactions.
1:22:59 He he just doesn't have that developed in his brain.
1:23:05 So if he's truly autistic, what we would right now call neurode divergent. Liz is
1:23:12 just totally off base, but she doesn't know it because she can't interpret his behavior. She thinks him prideful and
1:23:20 rude. So that's why she is prejudice and he is pride. But of course Darcy also has
1:23:28 prejudice in him because his pride basically in the social hierarchy forces
1:23:35 him to look down on Liz even though he doesn't know her either. And it's the interactions
1:23:42 while she is at the Bingley's that makes Darcy reconsider
1:23:48 because he has to engage with her and they kind of get into this intellectual sparring which shows her that she's
1:23:56 actually pretty smart and accomplished and Liz kind of downplays that in public. But he discovers, oh, we are
1:24:04 actually a good match. And that wouldn't have happened if this parallel love story didn't tie these characters so
1:24:12 closely together. But you still see gigantic holes here,
1:24:18 especially where the break comes because Darcy
1:24:23 can't get over his pride, his social status, and
1:24:29 because he doesn't want to accept his romance
1:24:35 with Liz because of the social status. He feels that his best friend shouldn't
1:24:40 be in the romance with Jane Isiza and he breaks them up. And you see that where
1:24:46 they turn close to the midpoint into antagonists again or in this case
1:24:53 just straight villains because Bingley doesn't actually change Jane and Jane doesn't change. So Bill Bingley now
1:25:00 becomes the villain. he's broken Jane's heart and Liz sets up this kind of
1:25:05 attempt to reconcile the two. But then Jane finds out, no, they really broke up
1:25:11 deliberately. This wasn't just an accident. And now both romances are off.
1:25:16 So now both romances are destroyed and we have all these white spaces. So what
1:25:22 does Jane do? Oh, by the way, in case this looks familiar,
1:25:28 yes, this is used in other stories, probably the best known going back to
1:25:33 our initial examples is Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is a fantasy.
1:25:39 Um, the fellowship that's trying to get the ring to Mordor very early on breaks
1:25:46 into four parts. So, by definition, at this point, because they're on foot,
1:25:51 they're separated, there are three subplots going on that
1:25:57 all have the same main goal, get the ring to Mordor. But by breaking up, the
1:26:04 nice thing is as characters die, as characters get
1:26:10 captured, because they're on foot, long journeys take a long time. They may
1:26:16 going be going through a dense forest. They may going through a desert where
1:26:22 nothing happens. When one group is just either impeded,
1:26:29 stopped or nothing is happening, talking can switch to another group and keep the
1:26:36 action going, keep the change going, keep the excitement going. So this
1:26:42 having two parallel plots instead of the blockbuster version of
1:26:49 having the be story being a romance, the beast story is a um
1:26:57 a parallel plot is used in Lord of the Rings. And those of you that have been
1:27:03 in my readings of 100 to1, that's exactly how that one works because the
1:27:12 main male character Calvin ends up in re-education, which is essentially
1:27:20 a reform school. At the beginning, there's very little
1:27:26 happening. He's going to boring classes. There is no external um danger because
1:27:32 he's essentially locked away. it's a thriller. You can't have
1:27:38 nothing happening. But that's no problem because during the inciting incident,
1:27:44 his mother attempts to free him by attacking a police officer and is immediately arrested
1:27:51 for um basically attacking a police officer. And as you probably know, uh,
1:27:57 if there's one thing police officers can't stand is if you attack one of their colleagues. So, she gets treated
1:28:04 really meanly in prison. She gets put in danger. And so, while Calvin is in
1:28:10 reform school with nothing happening, the thriller keeps getting going because
1:28:15 uh, Katy, the mother, goes from one danger into another. And once she is
1:28:22 released then Calvin's arc rams up. Calvin is in constant danger now. So
1:28:29 using parallel main plots is nothing new and can be applied to any genre.
1:28:38 So this has gotten Jane to this di Austin
1:28:43 to this diagram. But again she has to fill in all these empty space. So she
1:28:51 adds another plot. We are now up to a sea story.
1:28:58 And this one may look totally confusing, but that's because
1:29:06 there is a related possible F story going on
1:29:12 that involves Lady Catherine, but you can see the black dots. There's
1:29:18 very few of them. So some people may argue that this isn't a separate story
1:29:23 and should be treated as one plot. And in a sense, this is true
1:29:30 because, as it turns out, Colin is also introduced as a villain,
1:29:36 but the actual main villain is Lady Catherine,
1:29:41 which matters for the finale. And
1:29:47 because a main villain who doesn't have henchmen isn't a good main villain,
1:29:56 this whole opposition to Jane
1:30:01 on the pride side has a whole army of villains essentially a team Darcy led by
1:30:10 Lady Katherine. And that's why this slide is so complex. But fundamentally
1:30:16 this is one subplot or at most two. So the sea story is that Collins
1:30:25 and you can see that where Darcy is out of the picture, Collins immediately comes in.
1:30:31 Collins asks for Liz's hand. He wants to marry her. So when both the
1:30:39 A and B romance are starting to break down or didn't happen at all, we introduce a C romance
1:30:47 that now gives Liz a chance to show emotions.
1:30:52 But wait, there's more. Because we are in a romance, we already have two
1:30:59 parallel ones going on. So pretty much by convention, the sea story is supposed
1:31:06 to introduce a different genre and it does. It introduces a thriller
1:31:13 because it so happens that because of because the f Liz's family only has
1:31:20 daughters. She only has sisters and property was basically
1:31:28 mostly limited to men at that time. There's entailment
1:31:34 on Liz's father's estate that if he dies
1:31:40 it will go to a male heir which big surprise big coincidence
1:31:46 happens to be Collins. Now Austin does explain that in that Collins feels
1:31:52 because since he inherits the estate effectively the rest of Liz's family,
1:31:59 mother and the five daughters will be penniless. Collins wants to care for them by
1:32:07 marrying one of the daughters so that he has justification to use the estate
1:32:14 to spend on them. And that means now that Liz not only
1:32:23 faces a choice of the heart.
1:32:28 If she refuses Collins, he may out of spite plunge the family into poverty if Liss's
1:32:36 father dies or when he dies. Now, this is
1:32:42 somewhat gratuitous again, all these coincidents, but it makes the story better. So, Austin does that.
1:32:50 But it gets worse. Collins works for Lady Catherine.
1:33:00 He basically I mean Collins represents pride somewhat, but he has very low
1:33:06 social standing. But because Lady Catherine has the highest standing in
1:33:11 this whole story and Collins is basically depending on her whether
1:33:18 that he's really that proud of being associate with her or if she's just
1:33:24 basically giving her lip service because of his job. He keeps talking about Lady
1:33:30 Catherine and she mentions it. And Lady Catherine really
1:33:37 represents the pride part to the hill. She really ends up kind of looking down
1:33:44 on Liz and letting her know that. And Collins also kind of looks down on Liz.
1:33:50 And just to rub it in, Lady Catherine is
1:33:56 Darcy's aunt. Now, this is really I mean they they are
1:34:05 so far apart in their estates and where they are that it's unbelievable that
1:34:11 this should be the case. And Austin doesn't even bother explaining why
1:34:18 Collins is in the employee of Lady Katherine. It just is. But from a story
1:34:23 point, it is necessary because as we decided, Lady Katherine is the villain. She is even more proud than Darcy and
1:34:31 Darcy has to change at the end because that is his theme. So for Liz to defeat
1:34:37 the main villain, it has to be somebody else.
1:34:42 But how can she meet somebody with that high standing if she she isn't connect if Lady
1:34:49 Katherine is connected to Darcy? Liz will never be introduced to somebody like that. So you see that these
1:34:56 connections by they're necessary to be really tight to make a great story.
1:35:01 Yeah, they may be arbitrary capricious but they are
1:35:07 necessary to make the story work. And as we saw at the very beginning with the
1:35:13 pros and all that the audience will forgive a lot of that
1:35:20 if the story is good. In fact, movie people have found out that they can get
1:35:26 away with logic gaps galore if the story is so good because people just don't
1:35:32 remember why they are sitting in the theater what happened 15 minutes ago.
1:35:39 So there may be a major logic jump to make the story work and the audience
1:35:45 loved it anyways. And the best example in contemporary times is probably The
1:35:51 Martian. You know, Andy Weir posted The Martian, had help from people like NASA
1:35:59 to make sure he got everything right, but there was unfortunately nobody there who worked with planets to tell him that
1:36:08 the storm he concocted to make the whole story work can't exist on Mars because
1:36:14 Mars's atmosphere is too thin. There can't be a storm that knocks an antenna
1:36:21 off its place and sends it puncturing an
1:36:28 astronaut suit. So the accident that happened can't work. But it became a
1:36:34 bestseller anyways because the story was so gripping that nobody cared that it didn't work. So again, this may seem
1:36:41 gratuitous. This may seem like manipulations, but it works. We are here to entertain and this makes for an
1:36:48 entertaining story. So Liz turns Collins down cold which puts her at odds with
1:36:54 her mother which creates more conflict because her mother is now absolutely shocked and devastated that Liz would
1:37:01 put her and her sisters into poverty by turning down Mr. Collins
1:37:07 who now spite is probably going to kick them out anyways.
1:37:13 But it gets worse. Because Liz introduced Collins at a
1:37:18 dance to her second best friend, which is Charlotte, which is at the very
1:37:24 bottom. And again, Collins the day after. Now, Jane Austin
1:37:33 does concoct a reason for Collins to go
1:37:38 to the to Charlotte's family, but the day after Liz turns him down, Shalot tells
1:37:45 Liz or well, Liz finds out that Collins proposed to Shalot and she accepted
1:37:52 right away. So, more conflict for Liz. totally gratuitous. But yes, now Liz is
1:37:59 at odds with her best friend, her second best friend,
1:38:07 and she's starting to question her choices because Shalot basically defends her choices like, "You shouldn't have
1:38:13 turned it down. You know, I didn't think I would get such a good catch."
1:38:18 And again, because this is her best second best friend,
1:38:25 Lucas um sorry, Liz stays in contact with her, which forces
1:38:31 her to stay in contact with Collins and it is on one of the visits to Shalot
1:38:37 where Collins insists on introducing her to Lady Katherine. So now, even
1:38:43 though these are all unbelievable coincidences in the story, they are
1:38:49 cohesive because it now gives Liz a natural way
1:38:54 to meet the main villain, Lady Catherine, and have her really beat down on Liz repeatedly with her snobbery to
1:39:03 keep Darcy's theme going. And because
1:39:10 Liz has to interact with the Bingleys,
1:39:15 because of Jane's romance, it also brings her into constant contact
1:39:23 with Caroline, which is Bingley's sister, who is not only
1:39:30 more proud than Bingley himself, maybe as proud as Darcy, and looks down on
1:39:37 Liz, she also wants to marry Darcy herself.
1:39:44 So, not only does everybody in team Darcy on this slide
1:39:50 reinforce Darcy's theme of pride, Caroline is an additional villain
1:39:58 because she wants to take Darcy away from Liz. And you see that with all
1:40:04 those arrows. So you have the romance between Caroline and Darcy which is not
1:40:09 reciprocated by Darcy but she is a villain in that regard. You have the romance between
1:40:17 um Liz and Collins which turns into uh
1:40:24 conflict as you can see from the different colors at the end of the arrow. And all these people are tightly
1:40:31 connected. Liz is Shalot's best friend. Charlotte ends up marrying Collins.
1:40:36 Collins opposes Liz. Lacy Katherine is tightly connected to
1:40:42 Collins. And all that then plays out at the end
1:40:48 that when when Liz ends up defeating Lady Catherine in the final scale.
1:40:55 And this is all possible because of the tight connections across elements and
1:41:02 within the elements. And you can now see where the greatness is already showing.
1:41:09 But wait, there's more. Let's turn down Collins and we're not even at the midpoint yet. So, we need to keep the
1:41:17 romance going again. And that of course means
1:41:22 another story. And this is the subplot that you saw in
1:41:31 Bridget Jones diary and which may have been the only one in First
1:41:37 Impressions because this introduces a a love interest that Liz now falls for.
1:41:44 And so it sets up the love triangle. But wait, there's more.
1:41:50 Because Collins's thriller hasn't really played out. You can see
1:41:56 that Lady Catherine doesn't show up until almost the midpoint. Wickham is also a villain.
1:42:06 And Wikim is also an antagonist. So is Collins because again the antagonist
1:42:11 forces the main character to change. Collins and with his marrying of Shalot
1:42:20 forces Liz to think and reconsider her positions on marriage and love and all
1:42:27 that and Wickham does it even more and particularly Wickham because he lies to
1:42:35 her from the start pretends he's somebody else
1:42:40 also deals with the prejudice part. He really forces Liz to realize that she
1:42:48 jumps to conclusions too quickly. And this is particularly done with
1:42:54 another coincidence that just screams to high heaven. This may be the worst in it. So a regiment of soldiers comes into
1:43:03 town, gets quartered there for whatever reason, as was common in that time.
1:43:10 And one of Liz's family's associates
1:43:16 introduces her to Wickham, who is just some random soldier in this random
1:43:22 um regiment. And surprise, surprise,
1:43:28 Wickham used to be Darcy's best childhood friend. They had a falling out
1:43:33 and they're now bitter enemies. So there is this added thriller that
1:43:39 Wickham is really a scoundrel, a gambler, a really bad person, and he
1:43:45 knows Darcy. I mean, what is the likelihood of that? But without that, you wouldn't get all
1:43:52 the juicy parts that come after it. Again, the relationships of the main characters have to be tightly coupled to
1:44:00 maximize the story. So Wickham is a villain. He's antagonist
1:44:08 and he knows Darcy. Now we don't see that at
1:44:14 the beginning because right now all we're doing is keeping the love story going. Liz is enamored with um Wikim
1:44:23 because he is a con man. He knows how to do this. He really seduces Liz and it
1:44:31 works. And then interestingly,
1:44:36 it is Caroline who is the first to tip
1:44:43 Liz off that Wickham is not a good person. And she kind of dismisses it, but it
1:44:49 does make her think about maybe she's jumping to conclusions here. And this
1:44:55 also again makes for an interesting twist in that Caroline is actually a
1:45:01 villain and that may be one of the reasons that Liz doesn't trust her. So again, all this kind of comes together
1:45:08 in a juicy way,
1:45:13 but we this isn't really playing out as a thriller yet because none of this is
1:45:20 known. And then we get a major shocker at the
1:45:26 midpoint where Darcy suddenly tells Liz
1:45:32 that he's madly in love with her. He doesn't know why, which again kind of
1:45:38 points to autism in that he doesn't really have control of his emotions and
1:45:44 he's scared of them and he reacts scared toward other people because of that. But
1:45:50 again, it doesn't really matter. Darcy tells Liz in a quite insulting way that,
1:45:56 you know, against his better judgment, he needs to propose to her. And of
1:46:03 course, Liz is insulted. Um, and she hurls all kinds of things at
1:46:10 him, including that how badly he treated Mr. Wickham and that she would rather be
1:46:16 with Mr. wick him and he would go to hell. And
1:46:21 this occurs pretty much at the midpoint which is supposed to be a false victory.
1:46:28 So Liz has won. Her prejudice has prevailed. She feels good and smug about
1:46:35 herself and then it comes crashing down pretty
1:46:40 much the next chapter because Darcy is still in love with her.
1:46:47 He has gotten to know her better and he's already started to change. He's moved away from his pride otherwise he
1:46:54 wouldn't have proposed to her which was like an absolute no no in his social standing class.
1:47:01 and he has to protect her. So he feels compelled to tell her the truth about
1:47:08 Wickham. And of course it's done through a letter back then and he doesn't have point of view. So he tells Liz in gory
1:47:17 detail how bad Wickcham is that he seduces women to take advantage of her
1:47:22 and he nearly did it with Darcy's sister and he had to save her and that was his falling out with Vickim because he's
1:47:29 done it to other women before. That's why he was able to protect his sister and that guy is a scoundrel, a con man,
1:47:36 will break her heart and all that. And Liz's whole world comes apart because
1:47:41 not only does she realize that she misread Darcy, it's now obvious that she
1:47:47 completely misread Wickham and that she can't trust her own opinions because Caroline's already said so. And Darcy
1:47:55 just knows too many details to make this untrue. And so now
1:48:03 Liz's romance with Wickham comes to an end. But now she feels so embarrassed
1:48:12 about all the things she said about Darcy that she can't bring herself to
1:48:17 turn around and engage with him. So now all the romances are dead and we at the
1:48:23 midpoint. So what are we going to do about all that white space to the right?
1:48:28 Well, we introduce another subplot, of course,
1:48:34 and that is Lydia. Lydia is one of Jane Liz's sisters.
1:48:43 And Lydia is totally enared, Mr. Regiment. And once Liz dumps Wickham,
1:48:52 he sets his designs on Lydia. And that makes it especially bad because
1:48:59 Liz has this debate going on of, well, if Darcy is right and Wickham is so bad,
1:49:06 she should tell other people. But what if he's wrong? What am I misjudging that she's so confused now? She doesn't tell
1:49:12 other people. And it enables Wikam to seduce another woman. And of course,
1:49:19 again, this wouldn't be meaningful if we didn't care about this woman. So
1:49:26 Austin makes it Jane's younger sister who she's very protective of. And when
1:49:33 Wickham elopes with Lydia, it not only means he's about to ruin another woman,
1:49:41 it devastates Liz because she could have prevented it. And even worse, the
1:49:47 scandal will ruin any prospects of
1:49:54 the family getting their dories married and if Collins throws them out, they
1:49:59 will be end up in the poor house for sure. So again, these tight connections between the plots and the characters
1:50:05 just make everything better. Wickham has aloped
1:50:11 with with Lydia. They're on their way to get a green. They're already probably living in sin. And when all this comes
1:50:18 out, everything comes crashing down. We're heading or we are already at this
1:50:23 point practically at the all is lost point. And this and now it becomes
1:50:30 important that there is such a tight connection to Darcy and that Darcy is
1:50:37 also a protagonist because Liz, a being a woman, b her family being a country
1:50:45 squire with comparatively little means has absolutely no way to fix this
1:50:52 problem. It is not possible. Liz cannot defeat
1:50:59 the villains because she doesn't have the means.
1:51:04 But we need to she needs to the villains need to be vanquished for
1:51:09 this romance to happen. And this is possible because Darcy has
1:51:16 the means and he is also a protagonist. So, in a romance, you can
1:51:24 make the switch that you can't do in any other genre where one of the other protagonists
1:51:31 can defeat the villains and still make the story structure and work and make
1:51:39 the audience happy. But how is Darcy going to find out
1:51:45 that Lydia has eloped and that the fe family is about to be
1:51:51 ruined when Liz isn't talking to him. So Austin pulls another great
1:51:59 coincidence out of the hat. Um, of course, uh, Liz finds out. Liz
1:52:08 happens to be on a tour with one of her relatives
1:52:15 which happens to be in the county or next to the county where Darcy has his
1:52:21 estate. And because it is such a beautiful estate, they in fact go and
1:52:28 visit it. And the caretaker tells them, "No problem. Mr. Darcy has no problems
1:52:34 with it." And then we'll show you the estate. and he won't be here anyways. You're not a bother." And so Liz and her
1:52:42 relatives are there and Darcy happens to come back from his trip early and run
1:52:47 smack into Liz. Big surprise. Everything is awkward. But okay, the caretaker let
1:52:53 them in. And Darcy is actually happy to see Liz, but she is basically next door
1:52:59 to him. She's staying at an inn in his neighborhood.
1:53:07 And that means the family has to send Liz a post, a mail basically by Courier
1:53:14 that this scandal is about to break. And who walks in after Liz read the letter
1:53:21 but Darcy because he wanted to talk to her. And so he finds out about this
1:53:27 devastating news. And again, Darcy is either socially inep or autistic. He
1:53:33 doesn't know how to deal with it. He doesn't know how to comfort Liz. He just runs off without saying a word.
1:53:40 And Liz is devastated. Oh, he is now never he's never going to talk to me
1:53:46 again. Everything is over. I've lost everything. The family is ruined and
1:53:51 everything is just devastating. And Liz, of course, has to go home
1:53:56 because there's nothing. I mean, the family has to hold together. And the father is going on search of Wikim, but
1:54:04 he doesn't have the connections. He doesn't have the means. There's no way of him finding anything. But this
1:54:11 basically sets up that now Darcy, because he loves Liz and he has the
1:54:17 means, he is going to fix the problem. And of course, since it's all in Liz's
1:54:23 point of view, we don't find that out until much later where
1:54:30 Liz gets the news. And it turns out that basically
1:54:39 Darcy with his connections and knowing Whip since childhood manages to
1:54:46 find him basically bribes him to marry Lydia,
1:54:53 sets him up with an officer's commission so Lydia will be taken care of later.
1:55:01 and does all that without telling Liz and
1:55:06 even telling Lydia not to tell Liz because well he respects her position
1:55:14 and he doesn't want this to be the reason why she marries him.
1:55:21 But Lydia of course lets it slip and Liz now realizes
1:55:28 that effectively Darcy has done what in a romance is required is the grand
1:55:34 gesture. This is a show don't tell where the characters show each other that
1:55:42 they've overcome their inner flaw and changed
1:55:50 without saying it. No. So Darcy has shown that he's overcome his pride and
1:55:57 proposed to Liz and in fact that he loves her so much that he took care of
1:56:03 all this scandal and made it go away with a lot
1:56:09 of cost and a lot of effort and that he truly loves her. And so now Liz realizes
1:56:17 yes, he really does love her. And so she
1:56:22 now has to make her grand gesture. And so she changes. She overcomes her
1:56:27 prejudice. And next time they meet, she actually accepts his proposal. And incidentally,
1:56:36 Darcy because this is a double romance also fixes the romance that with Jane
1:56:43 and Bingley because it was Darcy with a lot of help from Caroline that talked
1:56:50 Bingley out of marrying Jane because again the social pride in the case of
1:56:56 Caroline of course she's his sister she's even more proud and so Darcy also now that he's changed
1:57:05 convinces Bingley, oh no, forget what I told you before. Mary Jane, and he in
1:57:10 fact brings Bingley back to Liz's
1:57:15 home so he can propose to Jane. And that of course also gives an excuse to
1:57:22 once Liz tells him that she knows of his grand gesture,
1:57:27 propose to her again and she accepts.
1:57:33 But there's still the main villain left, Lady Catherine. Darcy has executed the
1:57:38 five-point finale and effectively defeated Wickham and also defeated Collins because now it
1:57:46 doesn't matter that Collins might throw the family out because Darcy is so much
1:57:52 richer and he's promised Liz that he will take care of her family. So all the
1:57:59 daughters, all her sisters that aren't yet married will be taken care of by
1:58:04 Darcy no matter what. But there's still Lady Catherine left and she gets the
1:58:10 final scare because she is the main villain and Darcy obviously cannot defeat his own aunt. That just wouldn't
1:58:17 be proper. So Liz has to confront Lady Catherine. Now how do you do that?
1:58:24 Again, um kind of a coincidence. Lady Katherine somehow finds out through the
1:58:30 rumor mill that Darcy is going to propose to Liz. And instead of going to
1:58:35 Darcy and telling him you can't do this, she goes to Liz and tells her if you
1:58:42 accept that proposal, I'm basically going to make your life miserable. And Lady Katherine is a villain. Unlike
1:58:50 Collins, she doesn't force the protagonist to change. So Liz remains
1:58:55 steadfast and refuses to say that she won't marry Darcy, you know, and in fact
1:59:04 she pretty much has accepted the proposal. So she basically tells, "Hey, Katherine, no, not going to happen now.
1:59:11 You know, we we we are good together." So that's the final scare. The final
1:59:16 monster show the monster shows for the last time and is defeated by the protagonist. be fulfilled all the uh
1:59:25 requirements of the hero's journey and the modern story structure and all that. So all is left at this point is the
1:59:32 denom know the one chapter wrap up. Jane marries Bingley. Liz mares Darcy. Lydia
1:59:41 marries Lydia was already married to Wickham but she basically they move away
1:59:46 to where his regiment is dead is and everybody lives happily ever after.
1:59:53 So, and this is how you basically end up with that using all those elements,
2:00:00 building the connections and making all those relationships work. And you can
2:00:06 see again adding characters, changing settings,
2:00:11 adding themes, tying the emotions together in themes to begin with.
2:00:18 Goals in every character in every scene, conflict in every scene, goals building
2:00:24 on each other. The tension curve keep rising and subplots to hold all this
2:00:31 together that are tightly covered either working for or against the main plot.
2:00:37 makes for a very satisfying story and a great story
2:00:42 built from the story structures, little blocks all the way up to the castle. And
2:00:48 this is how you reach for the story clown.
2:00:54 So, any last questions about the castle?
2:00:59 And by the way, here are the resources um in a clickable form and I'll put them
2:01:07 in the handout when I post it on my website so you can get all the links
2:01:12 with a click and there's a couple missing that I forgot to put on there. Okay.
2:01:19 Okay. Good. Um there was only one other question in the chat and that was Diana wanted to know if Wickham was Hugh
2:01:26 Grant. That is correct. because Colin F was
2:01:32 reprising his role as Darcy. So the other love interest is Hugh Grant, which
2:01:38 is effectively Wickham because it's only the love triangle. See, Collins doesn't exist in this
2:01:45 story. That only leaves Hugh Grant as Wickham's
2:01:50 character. Now that the whole subplot with Lydia is missing because that character isn't
2:01:58 there either because again the movie cannot accommodate that many subplots in
2:02:03 in a um how long is Bridget Jones? Bridget Jones is 96 minutes. So it's a
2:02:10 classic short movie. It there just wasn't any time. So that just leaves the
2:02:16 original um short plot with just three characters.
2:02:23 Yes. Okay. I just watched Bridget Jones diary. It
2:02:29 is a good story. That's why I was like, hey, I think it needs to be Hugh Grant on the slide. Wickham.
2:02:38 Oh, and it is a good story for for 90 minutes, but you can't sustain 300 pages
2:02:46 that way. And in Bridget Go Jones, it wasn't a great story because there was
2:02:53 just not enough happening to make it great. But you can't do that in 90 2:03:00 minutes. They made three of those movies. Yeah. It's it's it's not bad, but it's
2:03:08 not great. And just like know Sense and Sensibility and and the other romances
2:03:15 are good, too. But Pride and Prejudice is considered great. It's considered her
2:03:21 best work and it's considered one of the best romances because it takes a bit more to make it great. And she made it
2:03:28 great by adding all these additional elements and combining them in the right way, you know.
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