1. Fiction and Parts of Plot

2. The best advice
“Act I, get your guy up a tree. Act II, throw rocks at him. Act III, get your guy outta the tree.”
- Julius Epstein

3. Kurt Vonnegut

4. Story as a Journey
Character is someone capable of change. Story is the process of that change.
A Theme (a deep message or truth) should be present in your story.
You can write in different genres (tell me some different ones), but all fiction has the same plot stages, uses imagery, usually has dialogue, etc.

5. Questions to help Where does your protagonist want to go?
What does he/she desire?
What are the obstacles encountered?
What does he/she do to overcome these obstacles? (What decisions are made?)
Is the goal reached? How does the character change?

6. Story as a Power Struggle
We can also look at the story focusing on conflict, crisis, and resolution. (Think beginning, middle, and end.)
You have to remember: only trouble is interesting.
The pattern of trouble and the effort to overcome it is repeated in every story on a larger or smaller scale.

7. Nature of the Power Struggle
In the conflict-crisis-resolution model, story is seen as a power struggle between two nearly equal forces: protagonist and antagonist.
The antagonist represents the obstacles to the protagonist’s desires and may be another human being or some other force – nature, the self, society, and so forth.

8. Keep it going.
It is important that the protagonist and antagonist are nearly equal in strength. Our uncertainty about the end is what keeps us reading and we want to be kept in suspense.

9. The Plot Diagram

10. Exposition

11. Rising Action

12. Climax

13. Falling Action

14. Resolution

16. Tips for Revising Change the beginning? Perfect the first sentence
Rearrange Action
Read Dialogue aloud
Look at your hard copy visually
Sympathetic Characters?
Point of View Consistency
Check every scene…and trim!
Choose a great title…should relate to the Theme
Annnd….your story should have a Theme