All the story experts talk about it. Screenwriters, novelists, short story writers—everyone—speaks about the importance of writing stories with a moral core, having characters who are flawed, creating heroes and heroines with relatable human foibles. But few if any of these experts talk about how to pull these things off in practice. The fact is, stories that lack a moral premise deliver flat, one dimensional, and passive characters—and dull stories. Learning how to create stories with a m...

It's 1981. Ross Ryan leaves Texas to pursue ski bum dreams. He joins a cast of outlandish characters that work and run fictional Elk Valley Ranch near Winter Park, Colorado modeled after Snow Mountain Ranch. They are seasonal staffers willing to postpone careers and take menial jobs to live and ski among the wealthy in the Rocky Mountains.The peons of paradise are survivors of the disco decade and careen into the 80s with a vengeance. Self-centered baby boomers flourish. Conspicuou...

This book offers a unique approach to storytelling, connecting the Enneagram system with classic story principles of character development, plot, and story structure to provide a seven-step methodology to achieve rapid story development. Using the nine core personality styles underlying all human thought, feeling, and action, it provides the tools needed to understand and leverage the Enneagram-Story Connection for writing success.Author Jeff Lyons starts with the basics of the Enn...

London—Today— "Jacks" are being killed across the city by a female serial killer with an almost supernatural ability to stay hidden. When Jack Tate, an emotionally bleak Detective Sergeant, is called in to investigate the brutal killings, he teams with Mae, an intellectual wannabe-detective, and Albert, Mae's packrat psychic father, to unravel the killer's taunting clues, until the devastating truths behind the killings force Jack into a dark revelation that is centuries o...

Narrative pace can make or break the reading experience, but few people describe what real pace is or how you can achieve it. Most just discuss writing, style, and sentence structure, but pacing in any story is so much more than that. This e-book gives a clear explanation of pacing and then shows you how to achieve a solid commercial pace for any story, thus assuring reader engagement and more book sales—engaged readers buy more books.

This is a comprehensive glossary of terms, definitions, and story development constructs used across the entire Storygeeks ecosystem of books: Anatomy of a Premise Line, Rapid Story Development, and the Rapid Story Development ebook series. This is an invaluable resource for anyone learning the various story development processes and methodologies used by Storygeeks in all its classes, workshops, and webinars.

Ira Blechman waits for a train to take him home, the last train he will ever take on the last night of his miserable, schlubby life. He has a plan. It's all worked out. In less than an hour, by his own hand, he will leave this Earth better off for the going. Funny thing about plans is . . . they unravel. For Ira, the unraveling starts with a strange train he's never seen; the train's only passenger, an even stranger woman, out-of-time and between worlds who knows him better than he knows h...

Bliss was modeled after the north Texas town of Lewisville. The hilarious characters readers meet throughout the book can be found in "Everytown, USA." The rural hamlet that is Bliss sits in mesquite-infested fields about 30-miles north of Dallas.Disenchanted residents of the big city flock to Bliss in the early eighties to escape the congestion and frustration of living in a burgeoning metroplex. The traffic nightmare of commuters clogging I-95 on their way to and from jobs in Dal...

The world of how-to creative writing is filled with quick fixes, flavor-of-the-month techniques, and fortune cookie wisdom. This e-book has compiled the top ten creative writing myths that may writers accept as gospel, and then describes each of the myths to show you that they are not just innocent memes, but rather destructive and potentially derailing traps that can cripple your writing and stunt you as a creative person. This book does not just expose the top myths, it also offers pract...

There are few topics in the field of story development that are less discussed than how to develop stories with large casts. Stories with large casts of characters pose specific challenges to writers and require particular skill sets and tools if they are going to contribute to the telling of a story, rather than detract. Alas, most writers have no clue how even to begin writing multiple-character, stories and so they fall back on the only advice "out there" in the consensus writing commun...

Hank Marvin was Jeff Lyon's great uncle and his grandmother Stella's twin brother. Hank and Stella lived in the small town of Willow Springs, Missouri where they were born in a small house across from the Baptist Church Jeff's grandparents attended until they passed.As a boy growing up in Irving, Texas the tiny hamlet in the Ozarks where Hank lived on a hardscrabble 80-acre spread was fascinating. The holiday visits to Jeff's grandparents' home in "Willa" were fun and festive, but ...

Emily Lyons survived a bomb detonated by Eric Robert Rudolph in Birmingham, Alabama on Jan 29th, 1998. Rudolph was on the FBI's Top Ten for over five years with a reward of one million dollars. The manhunt cost $30 million. Emily sustained extensive injuries, including the loss of her eye. This book is about the attack, but there is so much more - love and hate, life and death, joy and sorrow. Most of all, it is about survival. Tragic events do not make a person special. Life knocks everyb...