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Narratives Response 01

The 5 Essential Story Ingredients

I feel like that in general, a professional way of storytelling is taking an ordinary routine, and reconstructing it into certain dramatic pattern. "Communication is the creation of messages. " said by Em Griffin in the book A First Look at Communication Theory. "The content and form of a text are usually constructed, invented, planned, crafted, constituted, selected , or adopted by the communicator." Here we can tell that the author is taking part as a communicator, as well as a publisher of information. By putting a routine into the pattern of Orientation - Crisis - Escalation - Discovery - Change, the author is making the routine more literarily compelling and dramatic. It is like cooking a meal follow the recipe, when you have all the ingredients, you still have to put them in the right order. Otherwise it won't taste or look great to the customers.

Four Ingredients of Story: Plot

"The plot is the action of a story. It drives a story forward. When a story is well plotted, it’s hard to put down."

It is interesting for a beginner like me to analyze the ingredients of a story separately. What is the settings of the character? What is the pattern it follows? What are the plots that keep driving the story forward? As a reader, I actually cannot notice any of these ingredients, but enjoy the reading experience as a whole. When the role reverses, I'm having the freedom of creating something, as well as the constraints of certain rules.

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