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...

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...

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.

If a story is going to fail, it will do so first at the premise level. Anatomy of a Premise Line: How to Master Premise and Story Development for Writing Success is the only book of its kind to identify a seven-step development process that can be repeated and applied to any story idea. This process will save you time, money, and potentially months of wasted writing. So whether you are trying to write a feature screenplay, develop a television pilot, or just trying to figure out y...

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...

Middle management is hard, and if you're a middle manager, you already know that and you may be searching for all the help you can get to become more effective and successful in that role... in other words, to become an Exceptional Middle Manager.Are you striving to develop your management skills, to become exceptional at building high performing teams, developing strategies and setting goals, managing and coaching the people who report to you, managing vendors and supplie...

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...

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...

The reality of being an author today means that you can't do it all alone. The writing, designing, editing, publishing, and marketing of a book is no longer a one-man or one-woman show. Authors, if they want to put their best professional face forward, must now build a publishing team and rely on third party consultants to help them realize their dreams of publishing gold. But, most authors are not familiar with the challenges, pitfalls, and complexities of hiring third party consultants. ...

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...

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...