This is what stories are for…to reassure us that we’ve made the right decision in our own lives or to help us recognize our mistakes, learn from them and find the courage to change.

When you edit your work, put each of your scenes under a microscope and see where you’ve turned your scenes and by what method you’ve done so. If they turn on action, action, action, action and you infrequently use revelation, guess what? The reader/audience will get frustrated. Your book or screenplay will seem “overly plotted, making it hard to

So the crisis choices in your Story cannot be easy, or we’ll fall asleep.

Sequence events can be summed up with phrases like “GETTING THE JOB” or “WINNING THE RACE” or “COURTING THE PRINCESS” or “FIRST KISS” or “BUYING THE HOUSE.”

We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our Story. We want to know what new Story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even – or perhaps especially – in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.2

What your choice of Inciting Incidents in every unit of Story (beat, scene, sequence, act, and global Story) must do is arouse a reaction by your protagonist.

Remember that the quest is most often a two front journey. There is the external quest for a conscious object of desire like justice or survival or companionship or a prize of some sort like the rave review or victory. Then there is the internal quest, the one the lead character doesn’t know he is in need of until a critical moment in the telling.

For example, the opposite of love may be hate, but there is something in between love and hate that is worse than love but less than hate. That in between is called indifference. And there is also something worse than hate. That something is what Robert McKee coined as the “negation of the negation.” And for the love/ hate spectrum, the negation of

The crisis is that point when the protagonist must do something.