Angie teaches math and daydreams a new film while Elizabeth gets a mammogram and considers character questions. In today’s episode, Elizabeth explores the epiphany she began to have on last week’s episode by asking Angie a lot of questions about balancing or toggling between chaos, intuition, planning, and structure. What is the relationship of character to action in a discovery draft and beyond? Is what we love about a discovery draft what means we can throw it away? Discovery v drafting. In responding, Angie explores her childhood boredom during chores that sparked her earliest fan fiction. They discuss how structure gives you a way to reapproach a vast and layered project like a book or screenplay. How to zero in on character and story. And the ways that list-making story development can create the magical discovery experience as well as blind drafting can. The planning process also brings in an element of focus that can be helpful to those who lack this. An outline can be incredibly vivid. Intuitive outlining can also get you through cliche ideas, dig deeper. They also touch on iterations in screenplays versus novels and the role the reader plays in co-creating a story. Angie talks about her experience translating a screenplay into a novel. Other topics include the value of time off between iterations, of simplifying and of fighting for windows of focus. Finally, Tony Robbins provides a window into emotional state when he cites a study that proves the power of sensate detail in creating emotion.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.