I attended my first fiction workshop class of the quarter this week, spending the first few minutes following a prompt and creating a story. As a creative writing major, I have hoped that more of my classes would go on along the same pattern, but what the prompt was about caught my attention the most: write a story spine.
The story spine is what creates most plots in classic and modern books, as well as movies. All Disney movies follow this pattern as well. A story spine is a tool used to reveal and create the bare bones of a good story.
"Once upon a time..."
This is the beginning of the story. These words can be used or not, but the idea of this is to reveal the main character(s) and the setting of the story.
"And every day..."
After the characters and the setting is created, the idea of this sentence starter is to open the world that is created a little more and to show the readers what everyday life is like within the pages.
"Until one day..."
This sentence starter creates an arising conflict, which is essential for a strong plot. Something in the main character's world changes for the worst.
"And because of this..."
In order to solve the pivotal problem, the main character often embarks a quest. This is where the story transfers from the introduction into the main body of the story. This is where the quest and the climax of the story occurs.
"Until finally..."
This is where the moment of truth happens in the story. The quest is completed successfully.
"And ever since then..."
This sentence starter shows the closing scenes of the story. It is pretty much where the lines, "And they lived happily ever after" could be inserted.
In talking about the story spine, my professor used Disney's "The Incredibles" to demonstrate his point. As many of you may know, this is how the story goes, but along the lines of the story spine itself.
"Once upon a time there was a superhero named Mr. Incredible who was forced to live as an ordinary man in a society where superheroes were outlawed. Every day, he grew more and more frustrated with his stifling, boring life. But one day, he accepted a secret superhero job from a mysterious stranger. Because of that, he fell into a diabolical trap of this mysterious stranger who turned out to be Syndrome, a super villain with a long-time grudge against Mr. Incredible; Syndrome was able to capture and imprison him and could now put his master plan into motion by setting a giant, killer-robot loose on civilization. Until finally, Mr. Incredible escaped from his prison and foiled the villain by destroying the killer-robot. And ever since then, he was loved by all and able to be a superhero again." - Kenn Adams
