A World of Speculation

Scene analysis using Story

My next Story exercise (more about the short story I was working on yesterday): doing an in-depth analysis of the scene structure. I found that the story falls into three discrete scenes, focusing on the three levels of antagonism I talked about yesterday. Ask who...

Antagonism in Story

More applications of Story Today’s great revelation from Robert McKee: The principle of antagonism. Take a story value, any story value, e.g. Justice. What’s its opposite (he calls it the contradictory)? Injustice. Now think, it’s possible to have a...

A musical note

Congratulations to Cappella Romana on its $36,000 grant to fund three recordings. One is the Byzantine Divine Liturgy in English, scheduled for release next Christmas. For Christmas 2005 is Divine Liturgy and choral motets by Peter Michaelides. The third is music by...

Adaptation

I didn’t see Adaptation when it came out, because I thought it was some Invasion of the Body Snatchers freak fest. I’m not sure I would have gotten it at the time. After reading halfway through Robert McKee’s book, the movie makes sense. McKee is...

Postcard from Mars

I never thought I’d see the surface of Mars. I’ve read about it often enough in the SF dreams of the authors I’ve admired: Ray Bradbury’s rocket-strewn skies in The Martian Chronicles; C.S. Lewis’s intelligent and spiritual lifeforms; the...