Structure is valuable to creativity on a number of levels:

a) Short term goals (incremental productivity) produce more output than a “do your best” approach. With specific regard to creative writing, writing four pages a day completes a words-on-paper first draft screenplay in one month. A “do your best” or “waiting for inspiration” approach can take months or years. Witness the untold number of people with unfinished manuscripts under their beds.

b) Simply being prolific improves performance and quality. The single best creative product tends to appear at that point in the career when the creator is being most prolific.

c) Techniques such as separating creative from critical thinking increase the quality and quantity of the idea pool: they allow the production of a large number of ideas and a large number of diverse and novel ideas.

d) Sustained engagement in the endeavour increases the incidence and frequency of problem identification and thus the incidence and frequency of insight.

But before you use structure, you need to know WHAT TO WRITE. This is where the Hero’s Journey comes into its own. The Hero’s Journey is THE template upon which the most successful stories are based – ALL of the Academy Award winners (Best Film) of the past fifteen years (at least) are based upon it.

The Hero’s Journey allows you to construct a story from the ground up using at least 17 macro stages and more than 188 micro stages and gives the writer more structural elements than simply three or four acts, plot points, mid point and so on – it works because it attempts to tap into unconscious expectations the audience has regarding what a story is and how it should be told.

The Complete 188 stage Hero’s Journey and FREE 17 stage sample and other story structure templates can be found at http://www.managing-creativity.com/

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Kal Bishop, MBA

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You’re going to write a speech. And you’re scared to death. Sure, I know you’re not afraid of the speechmaking. Spouting it out is comparatively easy. In fact, it may be fun. But writing-ah! That is another story.

At the start let’s write this speech to Joe. We’ll pick out a typical Joe from your audience, a fellow who is a fairly good composite of the group. Then we’ll write our speech directly to Joe.

How do you think of the group to whom you’re going to talk? Perhaps you think of them as gentlemen and scholars. Again as brothers. Or maybe more familiarly as ‘you guys’ or ‘you lugs.’ But no matter how you have them pegged, there is one Joe among them who is a cross section of all of them.

Let’s put the words down on paper just as you would speak them to Joe. Write the word ‘Joe’ up there at the start of the first paragraph, put a comma behind it, and write:

Joe, as I stand up here on the platform tonight I can think of the time a few years ago when I met you in Kansas City. Remember, Joe? It was in that little restaurant with the blonde waitress. I still remember, Joe, what you said that night.

Would Joe and a group of Joes listen to a story like that? You know they would. And whenever you start off so closely to this Joe’s thoughts and interests, you are certain to get attention. Once I heard a speaker start a talk to a group of his dealers with, ‘Gentlemen and Chiselers.’ He smiled when he said it, of course, but the crowd roared. He was talking right down their alley. And all through the talk you could see that this man had thought of the Joes out in front of him when he was writing it to the one Joe who was a composite of the group. He wrote it just as he would talk to that Joe face to face. His talk was on the beam every minute.

Writing to Joe, you keep your talk on a conversational level. Sit him across the desk and talk to him as you write. You can’t go high-hat on a guy across the desk. You won’t get up in the blue sky, over his head, if you imagine he is right there talking to you, asking a question now and then. Putting in an argument occasionally. Adding a thought or two. No, you’ll keep down to earth where your talk belongs.

This goes for any kind of audience. All groups are made up of Joes. You may be talking to bankers, lawyers, merchant chiefs, rich men, poor men, beggar men, or thieves. But in each group there is an average Joe. Pick out that individual and write your speech to him.

By simply following this one piece of advice, you will be on the road to writing conquering your writers block, shoving nervousness aside and end up writing a great, audience captivating speech!

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