Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979; From 'The Moose'

"It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your passion for dead leaves."

I feel that my entire experience with reading Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility can be summed up in the sarcasm of that sentence.

There is nothing more hopeful than the delicate touch of rain amongst a thunderstorm of clouds.

the memory of a memory, Katie Maria

Passing Thoughts

I’m sat here at the kitchen countertop

my laptop on a chopping board

watching my mother's jam pot

simmer away the plums and sugar - 

I’m here to stop it boiling over.

It has already done it once 

the sticky pink liquid has become

stained glass on the hob cooker

it hasn’t reduced much

so I might be here just a little while longer

Writing Notes: The Story Circle

The Story Circle by Dan Harmon is a basic narrative structure that writers can use to structure and test their story ideas.

Telling stories is an inherently human thing, but how we structure the narrative separates a good story from a truly great one.

The Dan Harmon Story Circle describes the structure of a story in 3 acts and with 8 plot points, which are called steps.

When you have a protagonist who will progress through these, you have a basic character arc and the bare minimum of a story.

As a narrative structure, it is descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning it doesn’t tell you what to write, but how to tell the story.

The steps outline when the plot points occur and the order in which your hero completes their character development.

These 8 steps are:

You - A character is in their zone of comfort

Need - But they want something

Go! - So they enter an unfamiliar situation

Struggle - To which they have to adapt

Find - In order to get what they want

Suffer - Yet they have to make a sacrifice

Return - Before they return to their familiar situation

Change - Having changed fundamentally

The hero completes these steps in a circle in a clockwise direction, going from noon to midnight.

The top half of the circle and its two-quarters of the whole make up act one and act three, while the bottom half comprises the longer second act.

In their consecutive order, the Story Circle describes the 3 acts:

Act I: The order you know

Act II: Chaos (the upside-down)

Act III: The new order

Working with the Story Circle enables you to think about your main character and to plot from their emotional state.

The steps will automatically make your hero proactive as you focus on their motivation, their actions and the respective consequences.

Sources: 1 2 3 More On: Character Development, Plot Development

I am half finished, incomplete as the moon in it's phases, yet still I am curved into a crescent smiling at my shadowed half

D.L. Smith

Fallen angels are only humans in disguise, reincarnated to follow a new purpose - heal others in order to heal yourself.