Table of Contents
The Major Components of Story
Three components comprise the plot:
– Character emotional development
– Dramatic action
– Thematic significance
At the very least, stories demonstrate a character changing, and at the most profound level, altering. This capacity for expansion displays significance. Meaning is a reflection of reality. A story’s thematic relevance reveals what all the words in each scene add up to. At its best, a narrative’s relevance connects each reader and audience member to a moment of clarity about our shared relationship to a larger picture via a larger complex of thoughts and interactions that exist outside the story.
What is a Story’s Plot?
Plot refers to how the events of a story directly affect the protagonist. Characters are always emotionally influenced by the events of the plot in the best-written stories. Dramatic action transforms characters in excellent novels. This change imparts significance to a story. For example, each occurrence in Harper Lee’s fifty-year-old Southern classic “To Kill a Mockingbird” influences Scout’s growth and development as she learns to walk in someone else’s shoes.
You (and your character) must determine what she is prepared to sacrifice in order to accomplish her objective. This is where the plot for the character’s emotional development begins. The dramatic action plot is comprised of the exact acts taken by the character to accomplish her goal. The protagonist character’s individual passion and goals will be connected to a larger, more transformative universal theme, and you’ve begun a thematic narrative. When dramatic action gradually alters the character, the story acquires thematic significance.
The Plot and Story Structure’s Consistency
Writing creatively is an art form. Numerous writers aspire to be liberated from self-imposed constraints. However, too much freedom can frequently lead you to roam endlessly without bringing your story to a sense of clarity and resolution. Too much freedom goes against your goal of crafting an engrossing story from beginning to end.
Every story begins with a character desiring something. They are structured around dramatic events and conclude with the character undergoing transformation. The writer is free to do whatever within the Story’s expansions and contractions. However—and this is a very large but—only within the context of the Story’s structure. Structure is the arena in which magic occurs.
If you’re unsure if your story is largely character-driven, action-driven, or a combination of the two, use the plot to explore the opening and closing scenes of your novel. The story is defined as action-driven by an external, high-action, and dramatic climax near the story’s conclusion. If, at the conclusion, the character employs newly acquired abilities, resources, and knowledge to defeat her greatest adversary, something she was unable to achieve at the beginning of the story, your story is almost certainly character-driven. If your character undergoes transformation during a high-action climax, your novel is most likely a hybrid of the two plot forms.
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Animost – Vietnam 3D Animation Studio
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Reference Sources:
- Animation World Network: https://www.awn.com/
- Cartoon Brew – Technology: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech
- Befores & Afters – Visual effects and animation journalist: https://beforesandafters.com/
- Bloomberg News: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/
- Insider: https://www.insider.com/
- Plot Whisperer: https://plotwhisperer.blogspot.com/