Okay, not quite the impact of M Night Shyamalan’s “I see dead people” (Sixth Sense), but my life is a bit tamer than that, admittedly. 🙂

But do you remember when I posted about ‘leveling up’ in your skills, just like a computer game (here). You know what? I think I might have just done it.

I’ve been writing a couple of short stories, polishing up some older ones and doing a new one. And what struck me was something interesting. I now see structure. It’s hard to describe exactly what that means. Before, I’d look at the story and see words, dialogue, sentences, all the little pieces that added up to a story. But not in the context of the building blocks of reader experience. Not with a sense of purpose for each paragraph, the ability to see why those pieces were there at that time.

Some of this may come with time and distance, looking at an older more story more clinically, but I don’t think that that’s all of it. I now tend to think of stories in terms of blocks of scenes, and how they might impact the reader’s experience in their order and purpose. I think that this is a critical advancement in moving the story telling to the next level (see being ‘god of your story’, as per here).

Now I look at work I’ve written and have a sense for what each paragraph is intending to do, and what lines are extraneous and can be cut, or shifted, or… whatever.

I see structure. This explanation may not help you at all (I am sure that I saw this type of post well before I actually felt this way).

But it makes me happy. 😀