The Literal Story Meets Inner Change

First, if you are not interested in linking up your stories this week and if you don't have another idea to write on, feel free to pop on over to Share a Pair of Stories for a straight-up lifestory writing prompt.

Okay, if you are here to link up your stories, let's review our progress so far.

1. We found the theme (or themes) that seems central or recurs often in our stories.
2. We discovered which other genre's characteristics our story shares.
3. We identified the places that our shorter stories should fill on a plot line of our larger story's genre.
4. We identified the inner change that our character makes during the course of our stories and started to put specific events to the changes.
5. We looked at the common components of inner change.

Today, we will correlate the plot points of our literal stories with the points and scenes of our inner changes.  I suggest putting each title on a note card so that you can move things around.  I suspect that you will be arranging things chronologically--in fact, I highly suggest it because this is the norm.

After you have arranged all of your cards, take a look at both of your story lines.  They should correlate well in three main ways:

• The exposition (beginning) should happen at the same temporal moment for both story lines.
• The climax should be the same or nearly the same.  If the climax of the literal story comes about as a result of the climax of your inner change, that's okay.  Likewise, if the climax of the literal story causes the climax of your inner change, that's okay too.
• They should resolve (or end) at the same time.

If these three points don't line up, you need to rearrange your story.

Once you have done all of your rearranging, write down your list of stories interspersed so that you no longer have two distinct stories of literal action and inner change.