Universal Grammar of Story®: Game Book of Practical Exercises for Writers is the companion game to Universal Grammar of Story®: An Author's Guide to Writing for the Soul of the World, and the accompanying workbook.
The Universal Grammar of Story™ Game Book (only) guides writers in storytelling through playful, thought-provoking moves to create a surprising new story, reboot a lagging one, or even resurrect an oldie stuck long ago in writer's block. Game components are not included with the purchase of the game book alone but can be improvised by the player accordingly.
Players can keep total control of their story with strategic play or leave much to fate with the spin of a wheel. Levels of difficulty range from simple, straightforward play to intense challenge where stories emerge amid exceptional chaos. However, writers can dive in and create stories without having read the other two books.
The object of the game is to learn this revolutionary new mythopoetic writing method while creating a strong, balanced story in 46 moves that can be played with a chess-like strategy or left to chance with the spin of a wheel.
Step by step each move evolves the story by shaping its setting, environment, social order, plot, character chemistry, rhythm of timing, and moral underpinnings as well as many more attributes. Players can use these thought-provoking moves to create a new story, bring life back to a dragging one in process, or rescue one with hundreds abandoned long ago under the crush of writers' block.
The game can be played at anytime in the writing of a story: before, during, or even after a story is written.
It can be used:
· Before a single word hits the page.
· After some writing has been done but the story seems to stop.
· After hundreds of pages are written but the story just seems to go in circles.
· Returning to a story you gave up on years ago, but which will not give up on you.
· To bust out of any form of writer's block.
· To analyze what makes a well-loved story particularly strong.
· To find out why a box office flop flopped. Or
· To help another understand why a story is stuck in writer's block.
Universal Grammar of Story® is comprised of four foundational pillars: The Call to Write, the Nature of Language, The Core Narrative Theories, and the role of mythology and mystical philosophy in story telling. The game addresses the latter two pillars.
This body of wisdom evolves with writers over time becoming ever more multifaceted with maturity and life experience. Younger writers more interested in the nuts-and-bolts structure of writing found in the Cards. Older writers, even those just taking up their first story later in life, tend to be more interested in the fundamental philosophies found in character chemistry and how they play out in the Myth Moves/ Cards.
For novice writers (including those who have yet to set a word to paper) the game introduces fundamentals of how to get those words to stick to the paper and behave themselves. For the advanced career writer, the game reveals why those unwelcomed moments arrive when the story stubbornly goes on strike for no apparent reason.
Game components are not included with the purchase of the game book alone but can be improvised. The complete game box (ISBN 978-1-936262-06-9) includes game components along with the main book and workbook.
"Writing is not a choice. It is an instinct, an irresistible pursuit, an inescapable destiny," writes Hazel Denhart, Ed.D.For more than thirty years, she has taught storytellers across four continents - from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, the cafés of Berlin, and the jazz-filled nights of New Orleans. Wherever she has taught, she has found the same thing: beneath the surface of every culture's great stories runs a single, ancient architecture. From that discovery she created The Universal Grammar of Story(R), a mythopoetic method and philosophy that uncovers the deep, archetypal structures shared by every story we feel worthy of carrying forward into future generations.Dr. Denhart did not come to the written word easily. She learned to read in her late twenties - arriving at language not as a birthright but as something seized - and that hard-won literacy became the root of an enduring conviction: that it is never too late to claim one's voice. Her work draws Jungian depth psychology, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, mythology, and Aldous Huxley's articulation of perennial philosophy into a single current, carrying writers toward the symbolic and emotional sources where meaning is made.Her series of books on the Universal Grammar of Story is for writers who intuitively know that the world's most powerful stories rise from the depths of the collective unconscious far beyond the confines of reason. Beneath the logical scaffolding of literature, film, and myth is an animating mystery that sparks every story into being.A playwright, educator, and founder of The Invisible Press, Dr. Denhart is at work on her seven-volume series, Writing for the Soul of the World.
