Many writers believe once they have their basic plot points in place, their stories are destined to succeed. But many narratives fall flat between those plot points and lose their audience before the big finish. Engaging the audience and moving the story forward in every scene is the responsibility of the characters, not the plot. But while many books on the craft of writing state that characters need to be three dimensional and change, a beginning writer isn't always sure how to turn these rather abstract ideas into concrete craft on the page. Crafting the Character Arc offers a practical guide to character creation and development by expanding upon the concept of the character arc and creating a step-by-step guide for writers to ensure that their characters are dynamic and engaging. Using narrative examples from multiple platforms, including novels, films and games, this is the essential guide for helping writers create an active and well-defined character arc. Crafting The Character Arc is structured in three main parts. Part One covers the more traditional, basic approach to creating character, including personality traits, depth, secrets, goals versus emotional needs, active versus reactive protagonists, and dramatic functions. Part Two introduces the Major Dramatic Curve, a detailed pictorial representation of a character arc and its major elements: place of rest, inciting incident, rising action, crisis point, climax and falling action/resolution. Part Three offers practical applications of the Major Dramatic Curve. The writer is given guidance for using the curve to create a dynamic and engaging narrative work. Lastly, some variations in using the Major Dramatic Curve are explored and exceptions to the rules are addressed. Character Arcs are a critical part of every story making this guide applicable to multiple mediums: novels, short stories, films, TV, games, plays, and Web series.

Crafting the Character ARC

Humor & Entertainment

Jarvis, Jennie

Movies

Beating Windward Press, LLC

Leo joined AmeriCorps to do something important with his life. When his team is sent to rebuild St. Bernard Parish after Hurricane Katrina, he believes he’ll finally make a difference in the world. But while other teams do the “real” work of gutting and rebuilding houses, Leo is assigned to the camp newsletter. His friends Snave, Cirelle, and Davy have Equally unglamorous minor jobs in the kitchen and supply rooms. Only Kiley, the girl Leo pines after, spends her days saving “da parish” from ruin. Frustrated, Leo and his friends chafe against authority and each other in a town longing for renewal. They’re all looking for something. Or running from something. Often, both. Inspired by the author’s own experience in the aftermath of Katrina, The Parish is a graphic novel about growing up and the tug-of-war between selfishness and service. In keeping with that spirit, Beating Windward Press donates $1 from each copy sold to the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.

The Parish: An AmeriCorps Story

Comics & Graphic Novels

Smith, Joel

Graphic Novels

To counter-balance the latest education reform: STEM! STEM! STEM!, The Orange Island Arts Foundation presents our Spring issue of the Orange Island Review, a collection of poetry and artwork from high school students throughout the U.S. and edited entirely by a high school editorial staff. Here is a little Arts and Humanities to go with all that Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. STEAM! STEAM! STEAM! Also included, an interview with Inaugural poet Richard Blanco concerning the power of poetry on an interdisciplinary level, and the winners of the South Florida High School Poetry Contest. If you find yourself wondering about the relevance of verse in the age of the tweet, to take a peek at what this journal has to offer: a great read and insight on the ideas and concerns and "deep feels" of high-school students all over the country. And it does it far better than a flow chart ever could!.

ORANGE ISLAND REVIEW, Vol. 1, No. 1

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

"A Sky the Color of Chaos" chronicles M.J.'s perilous childhood during the turbulent rise and fall of Haiti's President-Priest - a time of nightly shootings, home invasions, robberies, and burning of former regime members in neighborhood streets. Haiti's rich culture and breathtaking beauty are contrasted not only with the terror in Port-au-Prince's streets, but also with the turmoil inside M.J.'s own home. Her father's hot-blooded nature and unpredictable moods amplify her fevered need to escape a home, and homeland, where random violence and bloodshed are commonplace.

A Sky the Color of Chaos

Biographies & Memoirs

Fievre, M.J.

Community & Culture

Down and out in America, with absurdity all the way. In the city of brotherly unemployment, Michael Vittinger shares an adjuncts' office far removed from any real or imagined full-time, tenure-track position. After more than a decade of teaching, Michael still lives paycheck-to-supermarket in a small studio apartment. Trapped between insomnia and omniphobia, Michael drifts into late-night, supermarket friendship with Auggie, an offensive pick-up artist, and Jonny November, a one-legged con man. Through their lessons on how to survive at the bottom rungs of Capitalism, Michael realizes the promise of working longer and harder to earn a position with health benefits and a 401k security blanket is nothing but a Ponzi scheme - a shell-game run by the Capitalist-Education Complex to fill the prerequisite teaching positions with cheap, disposable, contract labor. Unable to face such a precarious future, Michael joins Auggie and Jonny in a revenge-robbery plot in the hopes of justice for Auggie and a pile of cash for each of them. Aided by Michael's significantly younger girlfriend, and former student, they set out to murder and plunder Auggie's abusive stepfather, who stole Auggie's inheritance and never served time for beating and molesting him. An eccentric "guys gone bad to do good" book, "Auggie's Revenge" is both a comic literary novel and a gritty crime thriller from the writer of the award-winning "Fight for Your Long Day," America's major novel on the pay-per-course adjunct issue.

Auggie's Revenge

Kudera, Alex

Humor

In rural Oklahoma, near the end of World War II, seven-year-old Gracie Timmons watches her grandfather die after confronting a gang of moonshiners on their farm. Gracie has memories of her deceased mother, but only a photograph of a uniformed soldier for a father. With no more family to care for her, she is taken in by the dauntless spinster who owns the general store. Plagued by fear, guilt, shame and nightmares, Gracie regularly locks herself in her closet and prays for her father to come home and save her.
 Sergeant Aaron Timmons does return home at the end of WWII, but he is not the medal-adorned hero-soldier of Gracie's dreams. A prisoner for most for the war, Aaron endured the Battle of Bataan, the Bataan Death March, the Japanese Hell Ships and three years in the POW camps. Back home, he is jumpy and easily angered. In the upper drawer of his dresser, he keeps a stolen Bible and a row of small boxes he claims are coffins filled with dead soldiers. The town's people whisper he is a broken man because he has "fits," and "spells" and wets himself.
 Gracie and Aaron have nothing in common except nightmares of the dead, poetry--the good kind that rhymes--and Miss Redding, Gracie's teacher. As Aaron feuds with the gang of moonshiners who've set up on the family farm, Gracie learns to trust her troubled father's attempt at love and care.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

King, Joan

Literary

More Than You Think You Know follows three renegade women piloting the 44-foot luxury trawler Blackout through the Heartland Rivers from Chicago to the Gulf of Mexico. 
With her children grown and gone, Hailey can no longer stomach living with her abusive husband. In the middle of a boating trip, she steals a sailboat and ventures solo across Lake Michigan. In a Chicago harbor, she meets Robin, the chain-smoking divorcee, Captain of the 44-foot luxury trawler Blackout. When the Coast Guard broadcasts a radio alert for the stolen sailboat, Robin insists Hailey seek asylum and travel downriver with her. In Joliet, they take on Trish, a Las Vegas gold-digger who deserts her Sugar Daddy's yacht to join the crew and get out of Illinois.
Hailey, Robin, and Trish navigate the 1,300-mile-long series of rivers and locks through the Heartland Rivers, keeping weary eyes out for barges and Hailey's husband. With no sense of destination beyond Mobile Bay, they are on not one journey, but two: America's Great Loop and the search for their own place to be safe, to be happy, to be themselves.

More Than You Think You Know

Perkins, Cyndi

Genre Fiction

Guy Psycho and the Postmodernaires don't have the credit to outlast the week when an enigmatic billionaire offers them five million dollars for a private performance of their lounge act.
Somehow, that performance includes re-enacting an ancient Assyrian epic deep inside a mountain in Tennessee, in the sub-basement of a mountainside mansion that leads all the way to ancient Mesopotamia.
To escape, Guy and his bandmates must retrieve a rumored thirteenth tablet of Gilgamesh. If they don't, they can't spend the five million, and worse, they'll be 5,000 years early for their gig at the Sabre Room.

Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame

King, John.

we, animals

Oquendo, Nicole

"What is 'good' dialogue? Ask the question of a writer, reader, movie-goer or television binge-watcher, and you'll get a bunch of different responses. Good dialogue is quotable. Rapid-fire. Character-defining. Or even: 'Good dialogueCrackles'."Crafting and Revising Dialogue breaks down the art and science of creating impactful, believable dialogue.Dialogue plays a huge role in almost all storytelling mediums. From short, sharp interactions in novels, to witty one-liners in movies, to dramatic monologues in plays, these words spoken aloud give the audience a unique look into the character's world and state of mind. Fans repeat catchphrases of iconic movie characters and academics analyse the words of morally gray characters. Classics and contemporary works alike leave a lasting impression on their audiences.Being such an impactful part of the audience's experience, it goes without saying that robust dialogue writing skills are integral to a writer's game. Despite that, there's little guidance for writers hoping to refine dialogue.Allen Gorney, a successful author and instructor at Full Sail University, offers writers and actors a deeper understanding of the craft of dialogue. Analyzing classics such as Jane Eyre and offering his own examples such as Molly Carpenter, Esquire, Gorney breaks down effective dialogue in clear and accessible language. Authors, playwrights, and scriptwriters will also find actionable advice and exercises to improve their own work.

Crafting and Revising Dialogue

Gorney, Allen

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