Tag Archives: character

The Art of Storytelling and Developing Your Voice as a Writer

Storytelling is the key to good fiction. What is storytelling? It is the way you tell a story. A story is not merely a plot plus characters. If you give ten writers the same plot and characters, you will end up with ten wildly different stories (of varying levels of quality). That is where the talent of storytelling enters the equation. You can have a compelling plot and interesting characters, but if you don’t have a skilled storyteller to deliver those elements you’re not going to have a good story. It is not just a matter of being able to compose grammatically clean prose—ChatGPT can do that. Good storytelling is composing the story, from sentence to sentence, in a compelling way.

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The Success of Succession

Since Succession premiered in 2018, I repeatedly heard so many people I respect say how great the show was, but I hesitated to start watching. It wasn’t that I doubted them; I was just waiting to find the time to dive in. (Too much content.) With the final season airing this year, I thought it would be a good time to catch up before the finale. Part of the reason I hesitated to start Succession was fear of getting absorbed in yet another series that would go on indefinitely—or get canceled prematurely. Knowing there was an end in sight allowed me to begin. Long story short, it turns out all those people were right: Succession is a great show. It is highly dramatic with surprising twists and turns, but it is also extremely funny—funnier than most sitcoms, full of classic one-liners. It ranks up there with The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad as one of the top television series of all time.

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Why the End of a Story Matters Most

Storytellers often defend their work that is criticized for a poor ending (cough-cough LOST) by claiming that the story or plot didn’t really matter—it was about the characters all along. This is a cop-out. The most important part of any story is the STORY, not the characters, and a story is not a story without “The End.”

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Story = Plot + Idea + Character + Emotion

A story is most powerful and memorable when tethered to an emotional reaction. People become emotional when something negative happens to someone they care about. That’s why you will never forget traumatic events involving close family members, whereas a story about an acquaintance from years ago may easily slip your mind. Likewise, you will struggle to remember anything from a history test you studied for twenty years ago. With no emotional connection to those events, they did not get stored as lasting memories.

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Tenet & Movies That Make You Think

Tenet is Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious film conceptually to date, which is saying something considering he made Memento, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar. Without spoilers, Tenet involves time travel, but it is a unique version of time travel—perhaps the most inventive form of time travel I’ve ever seen in a movie—and the most complex.

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