2015 Willamette Writers Conference

The task of a novelist or screenwriter is to tell a story so riveting that it will hold a reader’s attention for hundreds of pages or a viewer’s attention for several hours in a theater. This requires an intimate knowledge of your characters and thorough understanding of plot, the sequence of events that take readers from beginning to end. Your structure will reveal the protagonist’s struggles to solve problems and achieve goals. This in turn brings emotions to life and explains the importance of what a character is trying to achieve and what stands in his way. These events won’t hang together without a compelling structure that underlies the whole—the essential scenes that every story needs to create drive, tension, conflict, climax, and resolution. We’ll illustrate and come to understand the anchor scenes needed in fiction and film: Inciting Incident, First Plot Point, Mid-point Reversal, Point of No Return, Dark night of the Soul, Climax, and Resolution. We’ll discuss how the protagonist stars in these scenes, how they’re emotionally-charged, build the plot, and illustrate character growth. By the end of the workshop participants will have outlined these crucial scenes and know how change is the basis for scene writing.