|
There are authors out there than have tried to achieve immortality for their stories by constantly recycling the 2nd-4th parts ... often not to anyone's satisfaction. But otherwise, yes, certain aspects of story telling can be generalised in such a fashion (just has they have been generalised in various other ways).
The other thing that made a lot of sense to me was something I read from Stephen Donaldson (paraphrasing here because I can't remember exactly where I read it): often an idea will sit dormant for a long time before another idea will along to complement it and generate the story.
It's this two (or more) ideas thing that seems to be important to my writing - because it is the working together, or working against each other, of these multiple ideas that provides the spark to make a story work (for me). Now that I know to look for it, I can see it in what I read of others too. Sometimes it's as simple as how "this problem" interacts with "this type of person", but other times it's how "this problem" complicates or solves "that problem". So, for me, the problem isn't so much finding a single story idea, it's finding its complement so that together the two (or more) stories say something interesting (to me).
And, of course, the old advice still holds: It doesn't really matter how to try to break it down, or what analogies you apply, eventually it comes down to putting ink on the paper or pixels on the screen. That's when you find out whether it's really going to work or not.
|