Melanie Anne Phillips

The  Master Storyteller Method  has four parts: Part One: Create A Story World What is a story world? Think: the world of Harry Potter or the Star Wars universe. Whether you are planning a single story or a whole series, creating a diverse and detailed story world will enrich and inform each story you draw from it. Part Two: Draw Out Your Storyline While a story world describes the environment, situation, and issues that will define your story, it is not a story itself. Drawing on this material, you will create a storyline for your Main Character / Protagonist that will begin with something that upsets the status quo, follows a quest (both personal and logistic) and concludes with a choice that will determine success or failure. Part Three: Incorporate Story Points Though your storyline may make sense and feel as it it touches all the bases, often a number of important story points may be missing, hidden behind the passion of your storytelling and vision. Here you...

Perhaps the greatest hurdle in writing is the attempt to bring structure to a story without putting your Muse in a straight jacket. Often structure is brought into the picture too soon, clamping your passion into an iron maiden that pierces it more deeply with every turn of a structural screw until it bleeds out entirely. In contrast, writing with purposeless abandon creates a jellyfish of a story: an amorphous blob of subject matter with no spine, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The  Master Storyteller Method  was designed to bring passion and structure together seamlessly, at the right place and the right time in the story development process. When first starting to write, our ideas usually come fast and furious. Many of them are little snippets: a notion for a line of dialog, a location in which some action will take place, the basic concept for a character, or perhaps a plot twist. Sometimes, we begin with no more than a period of history or a topic...