Deconstructing Avatar – The Final Act

The stories we write are like life itself. I’m not referring to how they reflect life – which they absolutely should do – or how poignantly you’ve rendered a character and how powerful your themes may be. No, I’m talking now about structure and exposition.  About what happens.  The way we close out our lives […]

Deconstructing Avatar – The Second Half of Act II

A closer look at the third quartile of a two million dollar home run story. Since the last post a reader got in touch to share his opinion of Avatar, story-wise.  Not so good.  Which prompts me to clarify, and to seize the teachable moment. I’m not qualitatively endorsing the entertainment merits of Avatar.  That’s […]

Deconstructing Avatar: Act II (The First Half Up to the Mid-Point)

Avatar is a clinic on story structure.  Every element is right where it’s supposed to be, which is both a relief and a revelation.  The relief is for me – imagine my disappointment if I’d have gotten halfway through this deconstruction only to find the film is a structural mess.  The revelation is for all […]

Deconstructing Avatar – The Second Half of the First Act

An Analysis of a Two Billion Dollar Story in Context to Accepted Structural Modeling In the first post in this series we analyzed the first 19 of the 30 scenes that comprise Avatar’s opening act, or in novelist terms, Part 1 of the story.  If you’re doing that math, you’ve already red-flagged this, and are […]

Deconstructing Avatar – Part 1 of the Story

An Analysis of a Two Billion Dollar Story in Context to Accepted Structural Modeling Allow me to open with what this is, and what it isn’t.  Actually, the other way around is better. What this isn’t is a sequential description of the movie on a scene-by-scene basis.  For that you can simply go see the […]

Deconstructing Avatar – A Quick Friday Preview

My wife’s gonna kill me. After sitting at the computer yesterday for six hours proofing my new characterization ebook (coming next week, or thereabouts), I owe her better.  She’s become my much appreciated typo Nazi, and when you see a typo here (which you do, and all too frequently), it’s because I’ve written the post […]