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Let's pick up where we left off last time. And that was with a piece of generic advice, which was, namely, to just go your own way. And we haven't thought about that. The generic advice to just go your own way can be helpful, but it will undoubtedly change from one story to another. Now let's make that less abstract. When using narration to help you write something, it's a good idea to keep the following suggestions in mind. And these suggestions will be the focus of this episode, [in which] we're going to talk about stressing the story, and, lastly, remembering that a good story has conflict. Just those two focus points for this episode—there will be more in following episodes.
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But let's begin with stressing the story. Yeah, stress the story. The thesis is not the story you write about. But as the reason you have written it, the story is what you want to emphasize. So your sentences should reflect that. I mean, sometimes sometimes the thesis can be so clearly part of the story itself that you may not even need to express it directly. That might seem a tricky situation, but I think you'll find that if you work with this or let yourself be intuitive about it. It'll come more naturally than you think. Anyway, in any event, most of your words should be devoted to the telling of your story, not to lecturing and moralizing. Okay, yeah, perhaps this is a debatable point. Why should we not try to lecture why should we not try to moralize? No one's telling you not to lecture or moralize? The point here is to think about narration as a way of carrying ideas, instead of depending on the vehicle, or the driving power of the lecture and itself, or the moral thing in itself, what rhetorical event, I guess we're looking at narrative and narration as an independent function, not as some kind of not some kind of declaration of the superiority of narration. That's not what this is about. The reason that I'm kind of over explaining it here is because I really don't want you to get the wrong impression when I say that most of your words should be devoted to the telling of your story, not to lecturing and moralizing. So now let's look at an example of what we mean by this. One strategy you can use is this focus on the story by carrying his developmental movement through sequences of action slash feeling verbs, like doing or arguing, discovering, questioning, blundering, turning, complaining, concluding, striving, contending, and landing, all those Jerr ends, you know, you could also experiment with this, you could try the try fail, then sequence, that's all hyphenated try hyphen, fail hyphen, then it's a three stage movement. And it might look something like this, I wanted to work on my routine to build a better one, one that would be more useful and wouldn't hamper my days as much as whatever I had been doing. So I tried the typical first step, buying a planter to add structure to my time, I was genuinely excited about this endeavor. to tame the tin foil sees with this new sale, the little leather bound planner I picked up at the office supply store that lasted for less than a week. I failed. But then I had a conversation with my significant other and realized that taking the wrong approach to building a better routine. See, I thought if I simply had the right tools, it was as good as changed. Yeah, no, I was wrong. Let me explain. Did you hear it? You heard it right. The try failed, then sequence unfolding and that brief narrative. The try was the commitment to the change, bought the planner. The fail was the collapse of the commitment, the collapse, the dissolution of the change. And the then
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was the conversation that they that the narrator had with their so and this brought about the realization and led to the further end of the story, which we saw signaled by the phrase, let me explain. I don't think it would be too difficult to come up with your own schema for you know, Moving a story along. But that's really that's the point of this kind of movement, what it can do, it can help lead your story, from the standpoint of the writer, being guided by this kind of movement can relieve you of the pressure that can really often result from an alignment with the notion that what you were writing has to be perfected, and and at the moment of its unfolding, that's a lot of pressure in that scenario. And it's the kind of pressure that can suddenly rear itself into a burden, some obligation of not just making any judgments or decisions, not just moving forward or pressing forward. But feeling like or obligating yourself toward the judgments and decisions that you make having to be the perfect ones, the exact and perfect ones only after which can us then move on to the next bit. Here's the trouble with that. Here's the trouble with not finding relief from that kind of pressure. It'll get you stuck, stopped, and can even shut you down, the progress of your writing suddenly comes to an end. But that's not the kind of vision we want. It's not the kind of end that brings us or the reader or the writer to a sense of finality, provides no closure. It's just an open wounds, and then nothing. Or if you're lucky, it'll be a while before you can get moving again. And maybe you do. That is the hell of perfectionism. Trust me, when I say perfectionism is not the kind of master that you want. You do not want perfectionism guiding you. But I bring good news I do I bring good news. If you are one of those writers, like many of us, who sometimes finds their acts of writing, stalked by perfectionism, the predator, that is perfectionism. Certain strategies of narration can help you out that can cloak this feeling of trudging, and immovability. From being hunted, you don't have to be the deer. You don't have to be the prey, you can play a different game with different strategies and even make up your own. Also, the quote perfectness, in quote, standard setup, in a writing lesson or assignment may not be either appropriate or helpful, particularly if it's almost impossible to attain, perhaps because it's not even clear what forms perfection would take. So what next, even after you have figured out the key problem, or situation you're supposed story is escalating to, or has just passed through, you may still want to play with other approaches. So this movement approach allows you to move towards the development of the story and go beyond mere origin stories or little anecdotes. Okay, so I'm going to be a little frank here, to boil this down. What all of this is to say, figure out a way that will allow you to write down what happens because sometimes it's just best to write down what happens, you know, you can fix it later. You can fix it later. But if you don't have anything to fix, well, then you can't fix it. And, and that sense, twisted, though it may be. I guess it is perfect. I'm going to make a bold claim. I think that was a mic drop moment. Now picking the mic back up, we are brought to the next point of focus for this episode, which is this, remember that a good story has conflict. Remember that a good story has conflict. This is something you probably know. It's so pervasive, you know, and in a lot of the things that we watch or read,
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some critics would be prepared to argue that without conflict, it's impossible to have a story at all. Some critics would argue that, in any event, conflict is usually the starting point for readers interest. Conflict is usually the starting point for readers interest. Now, three patterns of conflict are the most common. Let's look at those. The first is conflict between people. So you went running in the park with a group of friends and while you were gasping for breath, one friend was driving you mad with lofty philosophical comments about appreciating the outdoors and feeling good about our bodies. The second is conflict between people and their environment. Examples of this could be like a social custom or prejudice not to equate the two just or a religious tradition. force of nature such as a hurricane, so on, whatever you want to be the environment if it's literal or abstract. So to continue our example, at the end of the trail, after you managed to survive the intolerably hot weather and a killer pebble, that it worked its way into one of your sneakers, your friends happily began to discuss a time and place for running the next day, you wanted to say, Never again. But the social pressure was too great to resist. And you went along with the crowd. Oh, man, that was kind of fun to play out the emotions clearly packaged into the narrative there. Alright, so those are the first two conflicts. I said, there's three. So what is the mysterious third, when the third is conflict within a person? That's conflicts within a person. I say that like it's an 800 number. That's one 800. Conflict co NFL ICT within a person dial now Time's running out. That was a subconscious pond, by the way, time running out talking about running anyway. So here we are, again, ending the example through the three narratives with the third one now, all through your running miseries, one side of you was calling the other side, a soft, and over civilized snob, simply incapable of appreciating the simple pleasures of life. Inner conflict, it's conflict within a person. And I guess that could be conflict within a group of people or a community, some larger framing of the concept of itself or whatever is meant by the word person. So now let me bring things to a close by coming to the final takeaway of this discussion about remembering that a good story has conflict. The final takeaway is this. It's become clear that a writer does not need to confine their story to only one kind of conflict.