WriterL member Lynda Ward has started a Yahoo group for studying and analyzing narrative themes in movies like Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Station Agent.
I tend to wonder: Who has the time? But I recall one winter afternoon when a certain duo left the office for 5 Mills Avenue to study Final Destination II (we couldn’t find the original) and ended up with a pretty decent read.
Ward’s description of the free group: “Writers who wish to practice narrative writing by analyzing the plots and subplots of popular movies with layered narratives, this is the group for you! We will analyze movies for their five main foci: the complicating factor, plot points, mid point shift, and resolution. Also topics of discussion will be imagery, symbolic substructure, negation of the negation, and so forth. Please join us especially if you have either read or attended Robert McKee’s “Story” book or seminar, or if you have read Jon Franklin’s “Writing for Story.” If you want to practice analyzing narratives in order to strengthen your own writing, please join us!”
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