[crich70]

I've been reading over notes I took on Andrew Heath's video on writing a story in an hour and I think he boiled things down to basics not only for writing a short story but for the novel as well. I mean he breaks the process down into four parts:

Infancy- where you decide who your main character is.

Childhood- where you introduce the problem (and likely the character who will cause it).

Adolescence- Where you describe the main character's reaction to the problem, and

Adulthood- Where you show what the outcome of the story will be.

It occurred to me as I reviewed the notes I took that if you consider the 2nd-4th parts as a cycle and have several such problem/reaction/resolution cycles in mind (with the worst problem being at the last) that you could easily put together the structure of a longer work. Yesterday afternoon I laid out three potential short story/novel ideas using it. Just one four step list per idea at this point but isn't that how many books are written? By coming up with a basic character + problem + reaction + resolution chain and then filling in the spaces between til you have a detailed outline.