Pausing For You To Catch Up With Me Part IV

The last 3 Tuesdays, I've left you lists of 9 or 10 posts to read during the week. The first two lists were on Tarot, the Suits of Swords and Pentacles. Last week the list included 9 posts on how writers can use Astrology (without overtly mentioning it!).

All of these lists are about posts that open the topic of how to craft a Magic Realism genre story and make it realistic without the cliche ridden tools of modern Fantasy's version of "magic." PNR writers really need to absorb the import of these posts.

This week you can relax. There's only 6 to this series.

And these 6 posts grow out of two works on the craft of screenwriting by Blake Snyder (May He Rest In Peace). See blakesnyder.com for more on him and by him.

His first two books are titled SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES and they took Hollywood by storm.

These two interwoven works show you what a Beat Sheet is, and how to use it to craft a story whether it's a screenplay or a novel. They touch on why you should use a beat sheet, and give you the particular beat sheet Blake discovered by reverse engineering the biggest box-office hits.

When I read his books, I had recently taken a course in Kaballah (one of my all-time favorite topics!) and when I told Blake about the connection I saw, he was enthusiastically accepting of my view.

His discovery of this underlying skeleton behind the biggest hit movies is actually the real secret behind the best selling novels of our genre.

The reason his Beat Sheet works for film, TV, and novels indicates the reason these formats are on a converging path. And that same reason defines "Magic Realism" and why it works as a story genre.

You'd think, considering all my posts on this blog on Web 2.0 and Social networking, I'd say it was technology forcing the media of the fiction delivery system to converge.

But if you've read the posts in my Lists of Posts, you can see how it might be interpreted differently.

It is entirely possible, from the magical view of the universe, that technology exists to facilitate the convergence of these storytelling formats. Film, TV, Webisodes, books, e-books, animated, illustrated. To us readers, it is the story that's important, and the medium is just the vehicle to convey the story to us. We create vehicles suited to conveying the story we want. Do you think?

My 6 part discussion of Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet is posted as part of my professional Review column, ReReadable Books. Each part recommends several novels that illustrate the points made.

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2007/

Compare the dates to the dates on the posts in the Lists of posts from Tuesdays March 16, 23, and 30th on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com

On the left side of the page you can find a link to a list of all my columns archived on simegen.com since 1993.

Most of the later Review column entries are much shorter than my usual entries on this blog. So these 6 review columns taken together are probably no more than 2 blog entries worth of discussion. There's a good chance you've already read most of the books discussed, so you should have no trouble following the points I make.

If not, have fun finding interesting books to read!

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (current titles)
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ (full index)