Sunday 9 December 2007

A New Template

It just goes to show that I often learn as much form my students, if not more so, than they do from me.
I’ve noticed that some of their pieces of work, and my own as well, lack a firm structure, though there is a structure there and the pieces are often well written. One of the first edits, anyway, has to be making sure the shape of the piece is sound.
Having faced this problem quite often now with my students, I am convinced that one can be quite mathematical with this. There has to be that inciting incident, growing complications – three main ones regardless of size of text, a crisis, a climax, a poke just as it looks as if the resolution is about to be reached, and all of these have a precise position in the text. I am going to create a spreadsheet to use against all future stories and novels.
This may be a step towards finding the golden section in writing.

4 comments:

Fiona said...

This post sounds oddly familiar... I'm sure you told us this in class today! =D

Fiona said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Gill James said...

Probably did. But actually, I've worked to this pattern for a while but have only just thought of making a template associated with word / page count.

Fiona said...

It's a very interesting idea... I'll be looking forward to seeing how it turns out :)