Elements of Story which Make Great Book Chapters

Many have asked me how I choose what stories to include as chapters in my book Tanker Pilot. Based on the book The Secrets of Story by Matt Bird and The Hero's Two Journeys by Michael Hague, I developed a lit of six criteria to use as a frame work for evaluating a story and it’s subsequent inclusion in your book. Those criteria are:
1. Emotion: You always remember stories tied to emotions… Happy or sad, joyful or painful. Emotions sear the story in reader's brains.
2. Life or death moments or situations: Being in a situation knowing you may live or die grabs readers, particularly if you can convey this is why I survived.
3.Old Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) which did not work which created new TTPs because the situation or environments changed so drastically
4. Mental/Physical/Moral/Spiritual/Emotional conflict and the struggle to push through it. An example is the Vietnam air campaign restriction on destruction of Surface-to-Air Missile sites. US aircrews could NOT launch or drop on a North Vietnamese SAM site until it fired at you first. Hundreds of aircrew were KIA/MIA or POWs because of these restrictions. This mach two electronic arena created an entirely new arena of warfare: The Wild Weasels for the USAF and Iron Hand for the US Navy.
5. Movement from Old to New Realities are a great element of storytelling. The US Air Force air refueling community understood little about conventional air warfare from being stuck in the Strategic Air Command ideology of warfare. Ninety percent of SAC aircrews did NOT know how to read or breakout an Air Tasking Order which created the flying schedule because everything we needed to fly a nuclear mission was in our Combat Mission Folder can! None of us in the KC-135 flew Visual Flight Rules which is how air campaigns are flown… see and avoid by altitude and longitudinal separation.
6. Any story teaching and codifying leadership principles particularly under stressful conditions like combat. Stories of relationships, innovation, courage in intense situations are a great learning experience for your readers. Watching a CNN News Alert I knew our West Cell Duty station was about to get real busy. A Korean Air 747 crashed near 1 am on the island of Guam with hundreds presumed dead and survivors badly burned. The NTSB Go-Team had to be on Guam in less that 24 hours. How do you prepare, plan, and execute missions in such a situation?

A few words about the Hero’s Two Journeys… here is a link to a really good diagram on how this storytelling principle works:

https://medium.com/@jieailim/the-heros-2-journey-1bb20eb82de0

Study the Hero's Two Journeys and the Epiphany Bridge Script diagrams. A story you want to make into a chapter should follow those two formats. These two formats are what movies are made from!

Studying these two diagrams and reading Matt Bird's book The Secrets of Story will put you ahead of 80% of writers out there!

Видео Elements of Story which Make Great Book Chapters канала Lt Col Mark Hasara