A Story is a Promise Blog

I'd mentioned a band of energy around my skull and a friend asked for a fuller explanation. This explanation comes from my years of experiencing my energy body and what I did to effect changes to it. I was born with this awareness. I didn't know until my early twenties that others didn't share this experience. When you see Christian paintings with halos, the halos are symbolic of a band of energy that goes around the crown of the skull. Think of the spine as a 220 volt current, and the body 110. In the arms and legs you have a strong lines of current. Same for chest and back. The restrictions in the flow of energy in the body are a reflection of and embodiments of the patterns of thought on the mental landscape. The muscles tend to hold those restrictions, so when I did the bellows breathing, the muscles in my arm would spasm as that restricted flow opened up. Took a year of doing bellows breath 3 to 4 hours a day to open the various restrictions in energy flow ar...

The outsider is an enduring character type in fiction, TV series, and movies. There are many reasons for this. When an outsider arrives in a new environment, he or she upsets the current status quo. This naturally generates dramatic questions. What will be the outcome of this upset? Will the outsider replace a current leader? Change the direction of a group? Another form of this character type is someone within a group who changes. An example of this is S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders . The POV character is Ponyboy. He's a Greaser. Wears his hair long, carries a switch blade, and fights in rumbles with his gang against others, mainly SOCs, pronounced SOSHes. He's also a high school freshman who gets straight As. His family is a brother named Soda who has already dropped out of high school, and an older brother, Darry, who at 20 works two jobs to support his brothers after the death of their parents. Darry also yells at Ponyboy a great deal out of concern ...

A cornerstone of the a story is a promise concept is that a story creates movement and the movement transports an audience. Simply put, if a story isn't going somewhere from its opening lines, it fails to create the effect of a story. Plot often operates to set a story into motion around a central question and sub questions. Each chapter in a novel can be a clearly defined step along a plot line. It's a concrete way of understanding the ground a story is covering. A beginning of a novel also needs to set a story in motion. This can be subtle or obvious, but it needs to be done to convey meaning to the action. You resolve a plot, you fulfill a story's promise. In The Queen's Gambit , eight year old Beth's parents die in a car accident and she ends up in an orphanage. To keep the children docile, they are given tranquilizers. Beth is afraid and alone. She hides one tranquilizer a day to help her sleep at night. Noises at night were setting her mind racing. T...

Allen Esken's novel Nothing More Dangerous is set in the Ozarks in the early 70s. The main character is Boady, a 15 year old boy raised by a poor mother. Boady attends a nearby Catholic high school on a scholarship, but has no friends in a new school. His dream in life is to save enough money to flee his small town at 16. The initial thrust of the plot is that Boady hears the story of Lida Poe, a divorced colored woman accused of stealing money from the local manufacturing plant before disappearing. What happened is a clearly defined plot question. That same day, Boady overhears three seniors talking about dumping some pudding on the one colored freshman girl in the school. On an impulse, Boady trips the senior with the pudding and races away, managing to avoid a beat down in the moment. But he can't avoid the bullies before summer recess, and the leader makes him an offer. An African-American family is moving in to an old mansion across the gravel road from Boady'...

The use of mental illness in Allen Esken's The Life We Bury demonstrates it as a powerful technique to create drama. Joe, the novel's main character, has left a chaotic home to attend college. He works odd jobs as a bouncer to pay his tuition. His mother is untreated bi-polar and she self-medicates with alcohol. Joe also has a young, autistic brother that he has left behind to go to college. Except when his mother is arrested and he must either return home or take his brother to stay in his cramped college town apartment. When his mother is arrested, Joe simply tells his brother his mother is attending a meeting. Some of the meetings last for days, which the brother mostly accepts. And soon, the mother will put at risk Joe attending college, which Joe considers his best shot at creating a new, better life for himself. Eskens starts the novel with this sentence... 'I remember being pestered by a sense of dread as I walked to my car that day, pressed down by a wave...

Story editor Elizabeth Lyon speaks about writing with voice and style on this YouTube video. Elizabeth is an accomplished editor who has helped many writers get their work published by traditional publishers. She has traveled around the U.S. teaching workshops for many years.

This is the story of a woman who went on an incredible journey. Carolyn Fox was a single mother and lawyer haunted with grief and secrets, and facing her fiftieth birthday. She decided to change her life by facing her fears: she bought a Harley, packed it with a sleeping bag and tent, and set out to ride through all fifty states—alone! Soul Rider: About the Author Carolyn Fox started law school at forty-one, learned to ride a motorcycle at age forty-six, and obtained her private pilot license at sixty. She has also worked as a private investigator and served as a grant writer to help fund nonprofit organizations. She resides in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Praise for Soul Rider "In this inspiring memoir, Fox takes every woman who has longed to reconnect intimately with herself on an unbelievable ride." —Dawn Thompson, Portland Women Writers "Soul Rider is a lesson in how stepping out of your comfort zone and conquering your fear can lead you to the life that you are ...

In writing fiction, one of the guidelines about what to do or not do revolves around the prologue. I've heard agents say they won't read a prologue, they just start with chapter one. I've heard an agent say she'd only accept a prologue if it was separated by time from the opening chapter. A couple of things add to this understanding of the value (or lack of) a prologue. Many prologues by new writers are incredibly dull and tedious. They operate as an explanation of a story to follow. They are as un-dramatic as listening to someone recite dull facts in a monotone from behind a lectern. The underlying issue here is that the opening of a story (prologue or chapter one) should draw an audience into a story. A prologue written to explain a story is giving the audience information ahead of drawing in an audience to want to know more. It's a basic mistake in storytelling by struggling authors. All that said, prologues pop up in popular, traditionally-published fictio...