Do you want to create "water cooler moments" in your stories? Do you want readers to talk about how they were riveted action and scenes in your work?
Action and Scenes: How To Move Your Stories Forward, Beat by Beat, the fifth volume of The Writing Code Series, provides a simple but detailed strategy for producing the moments that people remember in stories.
In Action and Scenes, we start by exploring how to create action. We identify the four key moments of action (the decision to act, hesitation before action, the moment of action, and the followthrough) and explain how to use speech is a form of action.
Then we turn our attention to constructions of whole scenes. We begin with the simple imperative to make every scene a complete drama, with beginning, middle, and end. Then we show how to start at the end to build the most coherent scene. Finally, we show how to use beats to create whole scenes.
Each chapter includes a case study from great stories, including Shakespeare's Macbeth and Othello Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Elizabeth Gilbert's"Lucky Jim," and the film "Casablanca."
Each chapter also includes exercises for you to master action and scenes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Euchner, a case writer at the Yale School of Management, is the creator of The Writing Code, the only comprehensive and brain-based system for mastering writing in all fields.
The author of acclaimed books on civil rights (Nobody Turn Me Around), baseball (The Last Nine Innings), urban politics (Playing the Field) and policy (Urban Policy Reconsidered, with Steve McGovern), Euchner has directed Harvard University's Rappaport Institute and taught writing at Yale.
Action and Scenes: How To Move Your Stories Forward, Beat by Beat, the fifth volume of The Writing Code Series, provides a simple but detailed strategy for producing the moments that people remember in stories.
In Action and Scenes, we start by exploring how to create action. We identify the four key moments of action (the decision to act, hesitation before action, the moment of action, and the followthrough) and explain how to use speech is a form of action.
Then we turn our attention to constructions of whole scenes. We begin with the simple imperative to make every scene a complete drama, with beginning, middle, and end. Then we show how to start at the end to build the most coherent scene. Finally, we show how to use beats to create whole scenes.
Each chapter includes a case study from great stories, including Shakespeare's Macbeth and Othello Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Elizabeth Gilbert's"Lucky Jim," and the film "Casablanca."
Each chapter also includes exercises for you to master action and scenes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Euchner, a case writer at the Yale School of Management, is the creator of The Writing Code, the only comprehensive and brain-based system for mastering writing in all fields.
The author of acclaimed books on civil rights (Nobody Turn Me Around), baseball (The Last Nine Innings), urban politics (Playing the Field) and policy (Urban Policy Reconsidered, with Steve McGovern), Euchner has directed Harvard University's Rappaport Institute and taught writing at Yale.
