It was dark as night in Malcolm’s bedroom when he woke, startled by a half-heard sound. It was a sound that hung in Malcolm’s head, existing partly in the dream and partly in the real world without committing to either. He looked at the window. Not a hint of morning light peeked from around the edges of the shade. It was too early to get up, way too early, which could only mean that he was being visited. The blue digits of his alarm clock strobed brightly, pulsated, as his eyes tried to adjust. Transitions from dream to waking were a gray area of experience, leaving a confusion of what was true and what wasn’t. He tried to remember what had roused him from sleep and his nightmares, but that took more energy than he had. The thought faded as fast as his memory of his dreams.
It was the uncertainty of perception that confused Malcolm, the sensation of being hopelessly surrounded by darkness and of being in a room which pervaded with the sudden and jarring silence that comes only to someone who has woken from a nightmare just before death, but is not yet ready to open his eyes and find out if he really was just dreaming. In his dream, whatever it was he had been fighting was pouncing on him, but he usually slept through the scene of his own death.

His first coherent thought of the day was tinged with paranoia. What caused him to wake? He’d heard a sound, it had just come back to him, or maybe the telepathic perception of movement in the room, but now that he was more awake, he was sure it was definitely something external to the dream itself. His eyes were still heavy, groggy, desiring to remain closed, forcing him back under to delta wave, rapid eye movement and more nightmares.

#

The next time he woke up, he was tangled in the covers, could feel the sheet wrapped around his leg, and snaking up his chest into his clenched hand. He was acting out his dreams again, another fitful surrender to the subconscious. He thought it was just moments since he’d last found wakefulness, but couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t move.

He forced his eyes open. The sun must have been just rising above the horizon, a small amount of blue light slipped in around the shade. Even this dim light was shockingly painful, unexpected, lambent.

He wondered if he was waking in a dream within a dream, and scanned the room for clues. He couldn’t tell. Had he left his shirt draped like that over his dresser, or was that a shrouded figure?

He forced his eyes open. This time the sun must have been just rising above the horizon, a small amount of blue light slipped in around the shade. Even this dim light was painful, unexpected, lambent.

He took in what information he could without moving. There was no need to alert anything that shouldn’t be in the room if he could avoid it. It was unnatural for him to wake up like this, he knew something wasn’t right. He couldn’t move no matter how hard he tried. He pushed hard, his heart started beating faster under the strain of his exertions, and hearing the rapid dull thud in his head, he got nervous, which made it beat even faster.

Then a half-heard sound came from across the room, like the sound of his cat, its claws looking for a blood fix. It couldn’t have been the cat. The cat never left the front room, and had died years ago. Malcolm blinked and grunted. Had he woken up before today? Or were those in dreams?

The sound came again, just at the edge of perception. It had woken him before, too. It was real. His confusion told him to be wary, but something kept him from knowing quite why.

Early morning noises always made him suspicious. Human intruders don’t come into apartments like Malcolm’s. It had to be something far worse. The urge to sleep was much greater than if he’d woken up early and was still drowsy, it was unnatural, and impossible to resist. It silently eased any fear he had, comforted him, lulled him into forgetting why he was suddenly awake. His joints were stiff, his motor responses resisted his desire to turn, to find a position that wouldn’t knot his muscles by the time the alarm goes off, every thought fell to sleep.

The sensation worked against him, he tried to push his arm off his chest but it exhausted every effort of his whole body, and he couldn’t even be sure if it had moved at all. The notion that this was just a hypnagogic delusion occurred to him, but he dismissed the thought even before it completed itself.

He just wanted to sleep, an artificial instinct told him all was safe. Just go to sleep. Just go to sleep. Over and over, they lulled him, gained strength of effect in the incantation. Just go back to sleep.

He knew then that something was wrong, he fought to stay awake, despite the overwhelming desire to return to the false safety of night, trying to hear what had woken him. The room remained silent, pushed him back over the edge to fall back to sleep.

He was just out of a sleep cycle enough to be relieved that he didn’t slip back into his dream.

Then he heard more sounds, and a half-felt tug came at the blankets near his feet, then a movement on his chest, the sensation of something with no weight pouncing. He awoke again, this time suddenly fully aware, and eye to eye with a Mara. Malcolm could only barely make out its form in the low light. The glow of its eyes faintly illuminated Malcolm’s face. The illumination was like a candle, traveling only those few inches before being lost in the darkness.

Malcolm shuddered in surprise, his body convulsed, every muscle fired once in unison trying to break free of the Mara’s hold, and the Mara uttered a singularly unimpressive squeak of surprise. Prey never moved that much when under its control. The prey never moved at all. The little creature closed in anyway, feeling confidence in its powers.

Another warning sign it ignored: Malcolm continued to stare directly into its eyes.

The Mara went on with its feeding, sensing that the prey had already moved into the first stage of fear: awareness. It wrapped its tiny hand around Malcolm’s throat, ready to feed.

Malcolm was alert now, and saw through the deception, saw it for what it was. Malcolm’s perception was this: a small, translucent green creature, knee high at best, large bright yellow insect-like eyes, a large round head supported on a tiny body, strangling him softly with delicate hands more befitting something out of a cartoon than a predator. What the Mara thought Malcolm saw was this: desiccated flesh stretched taught over a huge frame, claws long enough to go all the way through, tattered black skin stretched over bone wings, spiky gray hair covering its body. Or maybe just eyes, large and glowing red, a body unreliably outlined by dark perched above the prey. Or maybe two figures in the room, lights outside the window, the abduction psychodrama.

The Mara realized then that something wasn’t happening that it was expecting, the energy rush of feeding wasn’t coming. The thought that something was wrong broke through its primal thought process a very brief moment before it was too late. Malcolm knitted his brow, and reached up. Now it was the Mara panicking, now it was the Mara being strangled. Now it was the Mara that was screaming and tumbling through the air, striking the wall, falling to the ground, and now it was Malcolm feeling only drowsy and angered, and knowing he wouldn’t get back to sleep.

The Mara ran through its instinctual devices, wondering what it had done wrong, but then it saw its prey rise and look directly at it. It wasn’t the time for learning processes. It was the time for survival. It looked for a way out of the situation, but no ideas were forthcoming. The thought occurred to it to flee, but as this thought flashed through consciousness like an uncertain leap into fog, it found Malcolm standing overhead, impassible. The cornered Mara geared up the fiercest responses it could muster.

Malcolm recoiled his leg and kicked the Mara, his foot striking with a satisfying thud that felt as if this creature had a measurable mass. This always troubled Malcolm, how they had no weight but still could be felt and handled, were just as deadly as anything anyone else could see. The physics of the phenomena was something Malcolm had only just begun to study.

The Mara doubled over and moaned. The first kick hadn’t satisfied Malcolm’s frustration, and so he kicked again, and again for good measure. He hesitated a moment as the creature, still only half-seen by morning light, tried to recover.

As he recoiled his leg for another strike, Malcolm decided he could not take out enough frustration on the little Mara to salve himself, and so he picked it up again by the throat and carried it, kicking and protesting like a petulant child, its little hands prying at Malcolm’s grip. Malcolm walked it determinedly down the hall, turning left into the kitchen, his eyes landing on the coffee maker on his counter.

The little glass pot waited to fulfill its purpose in life, and it gave Malcolm a new thought on this early morning, a thought of his curse, a thought of his ability, his own personal stigmata, and how it just cost him another morning’s sleep. And a thought of coffee. How much of a relief it would be to wake up to a simple cup of coffee without something like this happening. It didn’t seem like it would be too much to ask.

Malcolm paused here, holding the Mara, flipped the switch on the coffee maker. The light came on reassuringly. He waited for a promising gurgle, and then continued to his back door.

As Malcolm opened the door, the Mara screamed loudly, a sharp and piercing cry that cut especially deeply in the auditory nerve this early in the morning. It was like a demonic dog whistle, and Malcolm was the only one who could hear it. This made him want to kill it even more. He dropped it to the stoop, as nonchalantly as if he were putting out a cat. The Mara began to writhe, rolling on its back, kicking and turning, but it was too late. Its figure began to dissipate and disintegrate in the sunlight as it got to its feet. It ran for the open door, but it had already mostly disappeared, only its legs were running, then only its calves and feet, then only its left foot stepped on the threshold of his apartment before also disappearing into a vapor. Malcolm stepped away, back inside, to his cereal, coffee and newspaper.

The cereal he chose from a systematic filing order in his pantry was the same cereal he’d been eating every Tuesday since he was seven: Cap’n Crunch. He removed the milk from the refrigerator and a bowl from the cupboard. He opened the jug of milk and poured, but only a small trickle came out.

So now Malcolm was awake, and had almost consumed a light breakfast. He sat down to record it in his journal.

June 24th, 2003: Woke up early this morning. I had no choice. A Mara was trying to strangle me. Mara feed on fear and helplessness, then leave you bewildered and seemingly untouched, leaving you to wonder if it all really happened.
Awareness. You must be aware of something to fear it. Prey is never afraid of the hunter hidden perfectly behind the dark undergrowth. Fear is part of the hunt, and the prey must see the hunter, hear the hunter, smell the hunter to fear it.
When you feed on fear, apprehension is the appetizer.
This is how a Mara feeds: First the Mara lets you know its there by making a slight sound, drawing attention, letting you imagine the worst; a hostage mind running through its worst case scenarios is its playground. It is nocturnal and has learned you are more susceptible to horrific imaginings if it strikes at night. You create your own image, confront the menagerie of your nightmares, making the prey complicit in its own predation.
Most prey visualizes a much larger creature, its own natural predator, or visualize simulacra over other things in the room, giving common objects a form that is anything but small and impish or familiar. Usually it appears huge, frightful, or numerous.
You’re paralyzed before it touches you. Your heart starts pumping faster, supplying blood to muscles that cannot move. Some victims might fall prey to a heart attack right here, ruining the meal for the Mara. The Mara needs a captive and alert prey. Only then will the Mara reveal itself.
In the end they’re only a nuisance, a weak species, almost never fatal. I don’t even need to cast a spell to kill them, which was good, because I had no pen and paper handy. Since they are so prone to nocturnal hunting, they have an intolerance to sunlight. If they were more common, or deadly, I’d keep a sun lamp on my night stand. As it was, my weapon was just below the horizon.
I killed it, of course.
I don’t really mind Mara attacks, not like the bigger demons, but it’s a damn ugly thing to wake up to. I also ran out of milk.

These are the notes for a podcast I’m preparing about writing called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group. When it’s ready, it will be available through here and mindofbryan.com.

The question comes out about outlining a lot from beginning writers, and advice from pros is kind of spotty, and sometimes not all that helpful. I want to give some guidance and some ideas for you.

We can break writers into two different groups, or create a spectrum between these two points. Some writers are completely organic, and some are completely structured. There isn’t anything wrong with either. It’s just an individual way of working. The organic writer has no plan in mind when writing commences, and the path of the piece is discovered in the writing process. The structured writer comes up with a kernel, and may do some early exploration but tends towards finding a plot quickly, creating an outline and writing the way through. I have a tendency to feel that these are two words for the same thing in some ways, but we’ll get to that.

My word of warning is this: if you want to experiment with organic writing and you are a structured writer, you might want to pick a short subject to start with. Any sort of writing is a skill and it takes work to develop not just the skill, but the confidence to push through. A case in point from my own life was in the original writing sessions for The Hidden. We were writing television scripts, and each was 60+ pages of script, which can equate to 75 pages of novella. One of the better episodes was written by Dan Haracz, and he wrote in a very structured way, we talked out the story, had an outline and scene breakdown, and things maybe changed somewhere in the middle, but the structure was viewed as flexible and it all worked out. His next episode he decided to try to let it grow organically, and it fell apart. He wasn’t used to dealing with ideas in disparate parts of the timeline, couldn’t organize thoughts, and just kind of lost the story. I still remember the story, and have it in my head, and will write it soon. I think the failure was that he wasn’t used to writing in this manner, and so organization became an issue, but also that he didn’t have the confidence that he could push through.

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very organic on most of my short stories. I know at the very most if I take a wrong turn, I’m going to lose 5,000 words, which for me could be a couple days, could be a couple hours. I heard one writer talking recently and he said he writes organically, and the most he’s ever had to throw out was 90,000 words. Gulp. But we have a lesson to be learned here. Don’t be afraid to write the wrong words, or the wrong story. I have had times where I knew a story was wrong, but it wouldn’t go away until I had it written out. The wrong story was a block to the right one. Beginning writers are generally afraid to set down the wrong thing, or to throw away stuff they’ve set down. Pro writers will tell you that this is quite common, an accepted part of the trade. Don’t fear it. Every word that you write makes you a better writer. Every word you don’t write puts you farther from being a good writer.

Now, I have a lot of stories floating around in my head, and they all get worked on constantly, and so the organic portion of my process happens without paper and computer. I take notes as things happen, but mostly I wait until a story is ready to be written before I write it. With as many stories as I have, that is possible. A younger writer might not have that, and so the process is much more on paper.

With longer projects, I definitely outline. I start at the beginning and usually have a good idea of where things are going from beginning to end. In fact, a lot of the time, I can’t even outline fast enough for my head. My outlines are a list of scenes with occasional bits of dialog. The descriptions may be 20-250 words, more if they have pieces of what I think will be finished text. For my next book, I think that for an expected 1000+ pages, my outline is going to be 200 pages on its own. I remember mentioning that to a friend, who was currently working on his largest project, twenty five comic pages. It blew him away.

I really consider this my first draft. My friends who are writers can’t even make heads or tails out of it, but it all makes sense to me. When I write my first attempt at a finished product, I don’t look at this as a rigid outline at all. Sometimes scenes merge, sometimes they drop out, sometimes they move. I keep a mind on it being an organic story with real characters who don’t necessarily act as they were expected in the outline phase. This is a fear of organic writers, that the outline will force them into a plot that is not natural. If we remember that the outline is mutable, we lose that worry. We can keep asking ourselves “what would this character do next?” but it might be rephrased, “is this really what this character does next?”

I often hear the questions, “I have a middle and no beginning or end, what do I do?” or “I have a world and a few scenes and characters, but I don’t know what to do with them.” My suggestion is to arrange what you have, either in a file or if you prefer to work more concretely, on note cards, and try to write the scene in either direction. As that question, where does this go? How do these link up? What does this character do next? What led to this scene? When we come up with ideas for books, the first plot points we come up with are the big ones. I’m going to use Star Wars as an example, since it is one of the most universal cultural events that is worth analyzing. I’m going to put money on the notion that Lucas didn’t get a great idea about picking two robots out of a line-up, in particular one that can speak to moisture vaporators, and the rest of the story came from that point. It is a mundane scene that serves only to get the droids to Luke. I’m guessing Lucas started with points like the Death Star blowing up and rescue of Leia, and then filled in between.

Now, it seems to me that most beginning writers don’t think about structure, and this is because they don’t teach structure in a lot of classes. We all remember, probably, the rising structure of the story. We start with an inciting incident, build it slowly, but with certain acceleration to a climax, and then have a slight denouement. It looks something like one delta wave cycle, or maybe a saw wave. I think this is one structure, and the most basic. It works for short pieces, and in larger pieces, on a whole. If we look at a famous story, the first Star Wars movie, we start with the inciting incident—Leia’s ship being boarded. Then we drop to this small unwitting desert planet, and rise to the inevitable big battle that blows up the Death Star. There are other climax points, though. We rise in tension until Dantooine is blown up. Then we hit the first climax, the fight in the prison block. The escape is another little climax, and then we get to the big battle.

I think there are other structures. My next book is based on a spiral, or more to the point, a fractal, and The Hidden is also. The first sequences in these books are a microscale version of the rest of the book. In the Hidden Malcolm wakes up, finds he is being attacked by a demon. He discovers what is happening, has a brief confrontation and then  dispatches the offender. Then the story moves on, and the pattern repeats a couple times on an ever grander scale. In Inside, my next book, Michael has an art showing, his sister comes in with trouble, his parents come to visit, the protest happens outside, the showing is infiltrated and attacked, with some innocent people caught in the crossfire, and we are all left standing wondering why this has to happen. This expands into a plot where similar events happen as the conflict grows and the stakes get higher until the final climax of the book.

In part two of this article, I’ll cover several other structures in writing from various mediums that can be applied to any type of narrative writing.

This is part 3 in my essays on writing. These will be on a podcast called The Compulsive Writer’s Support Group starting November-ish. You’ll be able to get links to it from here, as well as my site, www.mindofbryan.com.

We can look at other structures from other Mediums as well when we think about giving structure to our pieces. If you have an idea and you have no idea of how to structure it, we can think about things in acts. Giving just this much structure might give the organic writer some better concept of how to outline without interfering with their organic process.

One of my degrees is in theatre, and I’m quite glad I did it, because the intense work of analyzing character and creating movements from words on a page is what gave me a good understanding of character, voice and motivation. Theatre has a number of structures, from Beats to acts.
A beat is the smallest structural unit of theatre. The story goes that when modern acting method was brought over to England and the United States by Stanislavski, he wanted to say “bit” but in his thick Russian, it came out as “Beat” and the term stuck. I believe this is a significant structural element that can be used in constructing a book as well. If we write a conversation, any kind of dialogue, we can think of turning points. Any turning point represents a beat. These points can be moments where advantage is gained or lost, information is imparted, a character loses it, or calms down. The entry of a new character almost always signifies a beat change, as does the exit. When we look at a conversation, we should look at beats, and if things feel aimless, often that is a sign that we wrote a conversation without thinking about the structure of it, likely we spouted a lot of information without thinking about what it meant to either of the characters that said it. Exposition is tough, especially when you have a lot of it, and you feel like you have two people just spouting it off without any real reason for it. We can change that by giving them a reason to say it, give each of them a stake in it.

Every beat has a beginning, and a turn. These are my terms, so you might not find them in any other places. Beats can be long or short. The centerpiece of a beat is a motivation, which literally comes down to what is this character trying to accomplish right now? When the answer to that question changes, you have a new beat. These beats are what give a story momentum and direction. If you look at a conversation, and it feels flat, it is probably worth looking at it, and breaking it down to points where the conversation turns. If it doesn’t turn, or more importantly, turn enough times, it may not be an important conversation, and maybe you could do without it.

If there is crucial plot information, you’re probably going to have to work it, to find points where significant development can happen. We as writers can very easily get lost in information, and thinking about what has to make it to the page to get the plot moving, while forgetting about developing our characters for a scene. Thinking about breaking these scenes into beats is maybe the best way to inject that development back in. Sometimes, a beat breaks with a pause. You know that five minute lull? That is a break in a beat where the author hasn’t written the next beat yet, and that can be a great way to develop a character. If there are pauses while nothing happens, it can indicate contemplation, boredom, any number of isms that make a character tick. Somebody who is socially awkward might let this pauses drop without thinking about it, others may use it as a tool to force the other character into saying something in the uncomfortable silence.

When you string together enough beats, you get a scene. Some plays have scenes, and some don’t. Some just have action for an act and then more for another act, and one of the main elements that will dictate this is setting. One setting, one scene is often the rule. Shakespeare moves things around quite a bit, and so he writes scenes. In Waiting for Godot, Becket has a tree as a setting, and there are no breaks in action, though there are a lot of beats.

Scenes are very much like what we have in our books, screenplays or other writing projects. They represent fairly major actions and movements of the story, and may be spelled out, or may be interpreted by the director. Scenes are more widely used at this point in film and books, but scenes are used extensively in theatre with origins before the mid 20th century.
Common act divisions in theatre are two act, three act, and five act. In a two act play, we look for dichotomy, an equality to the acts in terms of action and emotion. There should be a rise and a fall if the play is a tragedy, or a set-up and denouement if it is a comedy. One of the most perplexing examples of the two act structure is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. In it, two men stand by a tree waiting for Godot to arrive, and just when you think they must be the two lowest men on the world’s totem pole, two more men arrive, one a slave, and you find just how low we can go. In the second act, the same thing happens.

Two acts, if they are sufficient, can make a large work, but I’m not sure I could make a novel out of two acts. I think this might be a structural experiment for a novella.

I’ve covered three act structure in the section on film structure. Let’s move straight to a five act structure.

The most prominent examples of a five act structure are the plays of William Shakespeare. Five acts, each with multiple scenes, make for a very long play, but in Shakespeare’s time, theatre was an afternoon event that took advantage of daylight. The theatre, like now, would make money based on sales of seats, but also the groundlings selling refreshments, and so long shows meant more money. There is a very strong structure in this that makes a lot of sense for all forms of writing. Since I have just written a story based on Hamlet, I’ll use that work as an example. The basic breakdowns and title of the acts are coined by Gustav Freytag, a 19th century critic. He has created this graphic to help you think about this structure.

(Image is from wikipedia.)

The first act is exposition. Normally we associate exposition with heavy-handed telling, and not showing. In the case of Hamlet, there is a long bit of history to learn, a lot of characters and plots at work, a lot of relationships to establish, and actions are already setting themselves in motion. As you can see this isn’t all about exposition in the modern sense of the word, plots are moving forward even as we look backward.

In act I of Hamlet, we are first confronted with wary guards who see the ghost of Hamlet’s father. We then see Claudius and Gertrude in a procession, moving forward in their lives, while Hamlet is held back with grief. Hamlet is then told by the guards and friend about seeing his father’s ghost. We get a brief scene of Polonius doddering about his son going to college, and beginning the plot to play matchmaker between his daughter Ophelia and Hamlet. Hamlet spends a night on the guard and meets with his father’s ghost, who reveals his murder to the prince, but Hamlet is unsure of the truth of the ghost.

Act two is defined as Rising Action. The stakes go up, the conflict becomes more complicated, obstacles fall in the path of the hero. This is the act where the going gets tough. In Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius try to avert war with Norway. Hamlet decides to feign madness to keep his intentions secret. In response, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are called to help Claudius and Gertrude see through the ruse.

Act three is the climax or the turning point. I believe that Freytag had a different perspective on climax than we do in a modern sense of the word. Turning Point is the better term in a modern context. While in act two, Hamlet seeks confirmation of what the ghost says, in act three, the tip of the pyramid, the action gains momentum, and the inevitable downward fall begins. In this act, Ophelia is sent to court Hamlet, a troupe of players arrives, and Hamlet lays out his trap. The turning point of the whole play is when Claudius sees the play, and his reaction confirms the ghost’s story.

If we want to think of a similar act in a comedy, we can think of Much Ado about Nothing, where (name) falsely accuses Hero of having slept around. At this turning point, this play could very easily have become a tragedy. The whole event is kind of like the part of the date movie where the two people who are falling in love have the fight and break up and feel miserable. If Shakespeare had felt like it, he could have made a very dark little story out of it, but instead we have a wedding at the end.

In act 4, the action falls. When we say falls, we don’t mean slows down, draws to a close, anything like that. In classical terms, rise means an elevation in the tone of a story. It bears some relation to why Dante’s Divine Comedy is called a comedy. It isn’t because it is funny. It’s because the general motion of the story is upward both spiritually (going from the condemned to the blessed) and metaphysically (Hell is down, Heaven is up). In the case of Hamlet, the action is down. Polonius is killed behind the curtain, Ophelia goes mad and drowns, and Hamlet is judged to be insane and sent off to England to be killed, with his friends there to make sure it happens.

Act five is resolution. Hamlet returns, having been attacked by pirates, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dispatched. We find out about Ophelia’s funeral, and Hamlet is welcomed back to court. Claudius sets up the duel, and fixes it with poison when is then shared around to all the most important people in court. Then everybody dies.

This is a very rough overview. I hope you can see how the action of the play fits into the structure.
For a beginning writer, what often happens is that you have a character, or a plot, but halfway though you get lost, and the story never gets completed. If you look at the story that you have, and think about it in terms of these five acts, or four or three, as in the other sections, you have an advantage to getting it done.

So going into writing your project, or maybe into Nanowrimo, you may have an idea of your character and your conflict. You introduce your conflict in the first act. If you just start writing here hoping you will be able to work it out as you go, you may lose your way. Instead, before you set down any words, give it some thought. It is likely that you can come up with several plot points that fit one of these acts, and give you a quick throughline to your story.

I’m working on a story right now that is set in a post-apocalypse Boston. It’s a short story, so the acts may simply become scenes, but who knows at this point. The story is kind of nascent, and I’d like it to be larger. My character is a reporter who is told to go maybe to New York to report on something. In act one, she gets her assignment, and suits up. In act two, she meets mushroom farmers in the big dig tunnels. They are a perfect environment for mushrooms, and it is after the apocalypse, so they need some survival niche. As it turns out, they are actually cannibals, and Pickman, a survival artist who lives alone above ground, rescues her.

In act three, Pickman brings her to his studio. He paints very unusual demons. Suddenly, she sees movement. He gets his guns, and kills a creature that is his next painting. I know, very Lovecraftian, but I’m intending to use it as a fun reference, not quite a main story point, and New England’s apocalypse is essentially an old sin and witchcraft gone amok kind of apocalypse.

In act four, it turns out he needs a mate as any good survivalist does, and she’s tops on his list. She must escape from him, but he has all the guns.

In act five she escapes and finds her assignment.

This is my first line of thinking on this story, and it isn’t great, but it is a structure I could write, and is further along than I was five minutes ago. In fact, I could see this as a very episodic story, and so there will likely be many of these bits as she pursues her main story, and so maybe this is just the first part of a much larger story. Or I could take it in any number of direction. Point is, I got here by thinking of some events in relation to overall points in the structure.

Next we’ll look at a teleplay four act structure, and I might finish off with Aristotle’s Poetics just for the fun of it.

Instructionslistsandnotes.com is a new literary blog featuring creative or found Instructions, Lists and Notes. I'd like to invite everyone to head there for some fun and perhaps submit.

The inspiration of this site came from literary works and chance discoveries that provided unexpected and not very obvious insights.

My biggest inspiration for Instructions was Julio Cortazar’s Instructions. Here is an example:

Instructions on How to Cry

Putting the reasons for crying aside for the moment, we might concentrate on the correct way to cry, which, being understood, means a weeping that doesn’t turn into a big commotion nor proves and affront to the smile with its parallel and dull similarity. The average everyday weeping consists of a general contraction of the face and a spasmodic sound accompanied by tears and mucus, this last towards the end, since the cry ends when one energetically blows one’s nose.

In order to cry, steer the emotion toward yourself, and if this proves impossible owing to the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered with ants or those gulfs in the straits of Magellan into which no one sails ever.

Coming to the weeping itself, cover the face decorously, using both hands, palms inwards. Children are to cry with the sleeve of the dress or shirt pressed against the face, preferably in the corner of a room. Average duration of the cry, three minutes.

Other good bits of instructions include Kelly Link’s instructions on how to get to Hades using the London Underground, or just about anything that you may get in a cheap product from China.

Inspiration for lists can come from the usual top ten list, a shopping list, or when you remember the things your grandmother told you when you were little and she was still alive.

In terms of Notes, I’m very inspired by William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say”:

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Other examples might include silly emails from work, a sign announcing a warning with terrible grammar, or an excuse letter you found in a shoebox that your mother wrote for why you didn’t finish your homework in third grade.