Episode 28: Stefan Emunds - The Origins of Story Outline

First Draft Friday: Conversations about author craft

Guest author Stefan Emunds discusses the origins of story outline.
A story is a dramatized virtual adventure.
Likely, in the earliest days of storytelling, people took real-life adventures, like raiding a village, surviving a storm, escaping a death trap, or abducting a woman of another clan, gilded those with dramatic devices, and told the tale at the campfire.
Joseph Campbell analyzed those stories, extracted the dramatic devices, categorized them, and put them in a sequence. That became the Hero’s Journey. But since the Hero’s Journey is an outline of dramatic devices, it doesn’t show what a story really is, neither does it reveal story dynamics.
If we want to write true-to-life stories, we need to take a wide step back, analyze the dynamics of real-life adventures, and emulate that.
This is an unedited chat loaded with questions and answers. Listen in! Then get your FREE handout here>https://authors.ai/first-draft-fridays/
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This is an unedited chat loaded with questions and answers. Listen in!
Did you know you can get an expert analysis of your novel in just minutes?
Get your book analyzed here > https://authors.ai/