Two Sentence Stories

This is another excellent tip that I am stealing from Jim Butcher. The essential premise, is that every story can be broken down and summarized into two sentence, even the longest, most complicated works. The basic format looks like this, with the words in brackets being replaced by parts of the story.

[When something happens],[the protagonist(s)][pursues the overarching goal of the plot]. But will he/she/they succeed when [the antagonist(s)][pursues a goal contrary to the protagonist’s goal]?

The most notable feature of this structure is that the final sentence is completed with a question mark. Why a question mark? Because it simulates the basic suspense of the timeline and plot which will keep your readers turning the pages until the very end of the story. There should always be doubt that your protagonists will overcome the antagonists in the end. In some stories the protagonists are actually defeated (Alan Moore’s Watchmen is a fine example).

Sequels

I want to start with something basic, but something which many writers invariably don’t know about, and that is the sequel. For this I am indebted to Jim Butcher, and his blog here. I would suggest reading the whole thing, but I have a few notions I want to develop sequels differently than he does, although this post is mostly repetition.

All stories can be thought of as a line of bricks, which have been mortared together. The bricks are scenes (which you’ll hear me talk about often) and the mortar between two bricks is a sequel. Thus, quite obviously, sequels are the transition between two scenes in a story. However, simply calling them a transition, which I have seen people do before, doesn’t do sequels justice. In fact, I don’t particularly like the brick and mortar analogy, because in some works, the sequels are actually longer than the scenes are, but it will do for our purposes now.