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How Plot Differs from Story

(Excerpted from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters)

Before we even start to look at injury plots specifically, it’s worth taking a good strong look at what stories are overall. This definition applies not only to an injury story, but to all stories.

Ready? Here goes:

A plot is what happens – the outside events of the tale.

A story is the change a character undergoes when faced with mounting obstacles and the consequences of their own choices.

Shawn Coyne (The Story Grid) understands that there are always two tales, woven together to form a truly compelling story. There’s the External Plot, the events of the story. Then there’s the Internal Plot, the changes that the character undergoes. His chief example is the novel Silence of the Lambs, where the External Plot is a thriller – but the Internal Plot is about Clarice Starling’s disillusionment with her budding career at the FBI.

Lisa Cron (Story Genius) calls this second part the “third rail,” the part that our readers glom onto instantly, the emotional fire that gives your story oomph. This is the crux of storytelling.

In the end, we don’t care what happens.

In the end, we care how people behave and change.

Without the internal aspect of story construction, no one is going to care about your story. You can have the biggest, most epic battle in the history of storytelling. But unless we see how individual people are affected, it’s just cool words on a page – words that may dazzle us with their brilliant prose or wondrous events, but which fail to give us the emotional satisfaction we crave.

So whenever you construct a story – any part, any scene – you need to focus not on the events, but on how those events affect the characters. Ultimately the furniture can be as cool as can be, but we want to read about people (or people-like robots, aliens, sentient tacos, etc.).

Kurt Vonnegut taught that there are only six emotional arcs available in all of storytelling. Wikipedia describes a total of 36 plots available to storytellers. Yet from these simple and repetitive arcs can come the entire range of human emotion.

This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming Maim Your Characters, out September 4th, 2017 from Even Keel Press. If you’d like to read a 100-page sample of the book, click here. If you’d like to preorder signed print or digital copies of the book before 9/4/2017, or claim Executive Producer status of the upcoming Blood on the Page, click here.

xoxo, Samantha Keel

disclaimer

How Plot Differs from Story was originally published on ScriptMedicBlog.com

illinicoise

“But if you forget to reblog Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”

freshmoviequotes

Wicked City (1987)

inkys-resources

need refs/inspo for period clothing?

here you go:

Medieval (9th-15th century):

10th century and earlier

Romance (1000-1250)

11th century

12th century

13th century

more 13th century

14th century

more 14th

15th century

and more 15th century

Gothic (1150-1550)

Renaissance (1520-1650)

16th & 17th century

16th century

more 16th

Tudors (1500-1550)

more Tudors

Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)

Jacobean Era (1603-1625)

17th century

more 17th century

and again

and even more

this won’t stop

Baroque (1600-1750)

Georgian Period (1714-1830):

18th century

more 18th century

18th century women’s fashion

18th century men’s fashion

Rococo (1720-1770)

Classicism (1770-1790)

children 18th-19th century

Regency Preiod (1811-1820)/ Empire (1800-1820s):

1790-1820s

more stuff on regency and georgian era

even more

that’s not enough regency

and more

how is there so much

early 19th century men’s wear

early 19th century women’s wear

Victorian Period (1837-1901):

Romantic Era (1820-1840s)

Civil War Era/1850-1860s

1870-1890s

more victorian

Edwardian Period (1901-1910):

1900-1910s

Belle Epoque (1880-1910s)

more edwardian/belle époque

Modern:

1910s-1920s [Fashion between the World Wars]

1920s

more roaring 20s

so much 20s

1920s hairstyles

1930s

1930-1940s

1930-1950s

1950s

more 50s

1960s

1960-1970s

1980s

lots of periods in one spot/fashion through centuries:

here, here, and here is almost everything (and properly ordered)

also here with lots of historic fashion magazines

100 years of beauty (includes lots of other cultures too!)

historic fashion

costumes of antiquity

more historical clothing

history of fashion

more history of fashion

“vintage” clothing

historic costumes

children’s historical fashion/toys

details

historic wedding dresses

historic assecoires (hats, shoes…)

hats

masks

parasols

lots of embroidery/jewlery

it indeed is western/european centric, I’m sorry for that, but for other cultures I simply don’t have so many references

ALSO note that most of the pictures show historical clothing from the upper classes or more festive clothing of the lower/working class because normal working clothes wouldn’t survive for such a long time, and the clothes were often re-used over and over again!

daniel-oneiroi

Japanese period clothing + pointers Modern kimono on Ichiroya with approximate dates (Taisho, Showa, Meiji, Heisei)

natalieswood-deactivated2021100

may12324

When will Aphrodite let me kiss her 😳💖

uncannycyke

genuine question: do you feel as though writers put ororo being a mutant before her blackness? (Tbh I feel like they make her mutant first and black second but hey that’s just me)

i’m going to answer more generally about mutants of color vs the mutant metaphor because as someone who is not a black woman i don’t feel judging the way its written in regards to ororo in particular is my place?

i think the mutant metaphor is a backdrop for real identities. i think it’s more powerful and more important for people to see their real identities in characters and relate to mutants because of their mutant-ness being second. real identities always triumph over pretend ones.

for example, when it comes to my disability, i love seeing people like scott address his chronic pain. this is his most important identity –not a mutant one. when monet attacks bigoted protestors and brings up her muslim identity, there’s a real weight to that –the mutant metaphor doesn’t have that.

so yeah….i think making “mutant” any marginalized character’s primary identity erases what makes their characters so important and relevant. no one on planet earth is a mutant –we’re different races, lgbt, disabled, etc. seeing narratives reflect the real world while using the fictional world as a backdrop to do that is always more important.

i think with characters of color especially you get…troubling rhetoric when it comes to the mutant metaphor? and this is because the head writers on this series are always white men who can’t possibly understand what its like to grow up oppressed for your race. you get their real life cultures pushed aside for “mutant” shit and stuff like dani moonstar waxing poetic about how xavier taught her to be “so accepting” because she’s dating a white guy. like…it’s a huuuge failling on the books part to this day imo.

so yeah i’m generally in favor of talking more about real identities and using the mutant metaphor as a backdrop. i’m sure black readers will have their own, more meaningful analysis for ororo that i could never give though and i would love to hear it and learn!

the2dstagesfg

All the stages from Samurai Shodown V Special (Part 1)

browsethestacks

The DC Art Of Joe Kubert

shralpin

👀 that catch @cobeharmer https://instagr.am/p/CG6M70QJ0eY/ via http://shralpin.com

maxmarvel12345

The X-Men

Fan artist by: Bernie Gonzalez (AKA iwantmystery)

thehauntedrocket

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart

Art by Virgil Finlay

the2dstagesfg

“Airship” from Marvel vs Capcom 2

retronator

Top 10 of 10 years of Retronator

The 10th anniversary of Retronator (the blog) is coming up tomorrow!!! I’ll write a special post for the occasion then, but I thought it’d be interesting to see the most liked and reblogged posts I published on Retronator over these 10 years.

1. The United Pixels of America: 8-bit Map of the USA

January 2019, 18k notes

Compared to other top 10 posts that have been gathering notes for half a decade already, the feature of Danc3r’s detailed, animated map of the United States is pretty much a baby. Still, Tumblr did what Tumblr does best and showed that even in the post-NSFW-apocalypse years of 2019/2020, there are plenty of fans of gaming, art, and pixels (and USA) alive on the site.

2. Paul Robertson artist feature

October 2014, 17k notes

Speaking of the NSFW apocalypse, the feature of @probertson’s work didn’t make it past the nude filters. Even though nudity in art is allowed on tumblr and they’ve been very good at restoring wrongly tagged posts in the past, Paul’s boobies-filled artworks somehow didn’t get approved. So yeah, no link for this post.

3. No Bullshit Pixel Art Tutorial

March 2014, 14k notes

This tutorial tried to condense all the basics of how to get started with pixel art into just 7 images (and seven accompanying 10 sec videos). I later extended it into the Getting Started Guide and eventually turned into gameplay of my game Pixel Art Academy.

4. Fool artist feature

March 2015, 13k notes

There were times when Fool a.k.a. Yuriy Gusev didn’t need an introduction on the pixel art scene. But it’s not the 2000s anymore, so to all of you who haven’t come across his work yet, he’s one of the very best pixel artists of all time, period. Well worth exploring his work.

5. Waneella artist feature

July 2015, 12k notes

I wrote a longer article about @waneella to accompany this post in Retronator Magazine, where I covered her journey from spaghetti-legs Lost Vikings to emerging themes of city skylines that hinted at the magnificent urban illustrations we know Waneella by today.

6. Amplitude Problem

May 2015, 11k notes

@valenberg is well known for his cyberpunk pixel arts and the GIFs he did for YouTube videos of musician Amplitude Problem lended well to the GIF-loving Tumblr crowd. Just recently, Valenberg’s game VirtuaVerse came out, so definitely check that out.

7. Witchmarsh

May 2014, 9k notes

I posted about many pixel art games on this blog and the one that was shared the most was Inglenook’s @witchmarsh. It’s now been 6 years since its Kickstarter and we’re still patiently waiting for our beloved 1920s jazz-era RPG. Good things are worth waiting for! Also, their tumblr devlog is still actively updated, so good job guys.

8. The Last Night

October 2014, 7k notes

Second (and final) game on this list is The Last Night, the winning entry for the CyberPunkJam, made by brothers @timsoret and @adrien-soret. You might have heard about it … Well, at least the full game that went into development following the prototype’s very positive reception. Seeing the old GIFs now, it’s just crazy to think how far the art direction has been advanced (and I’m sure we haven’t seen anything yet as even the trailer is 3 years old by now).

9. Rocks

May 2017, 6k notes

Finally another post that’s not from what seems to be the 2014–2015 golden area of this blog. People like rocks, I guess, and the trio of tutorials—including one from the incredibly popular Pedro Medeiros of @studiominiboss—served some good knowledge on the topic.

10. Vierbit artist feature

February 2014, 6k notes

This is the post that started the whole Artist Feature series, so I guess I have Vierbit’s insanely gorgeous art style to blame for inspiring me to start actively posting about other artists on the blog. From that point on Retronator became less my personal portfolio/brainfart diary and more the journalistic-pixel-art-newspaper that it aspires to be today.