/lit/ - Literature

>What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense
>Ethica Thomistica by McInerny
>On Human Nature by Roger Scruton
>The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World by Hittenger
It's for a Natural Law class I'm taking for my theology degree

What do I need to read before jumping into Aquinas?

>>11880172
what he said >>11880346
>your method should be something you discover and hone throughout your career. It's personal.

As for me,
>How do you find your characters wants, needs, conflicts and motivations?
When my characters surprise me, I know that they'll surprise my audience. When they do something which provokes an emotional reaction from me, I know that it'll do so for my audience. Wants and needs are easy to figure out: everyone looks out for themselves, and everyone is on the lookout for privilege and an easy pay-out. Conflict comes from dealing with other humans who also want privilege and pay-out. Richness comes from the different ways that your individual characters express these hunts for privilege and pay-out.

>Do you start with a plot? How do you find the story?
The plot is to a story what a mannequin is to fashion: important placeholder that gets all the pieces in the right places, but its really just to get the audience to pay attention to the things that the artist put on the mannequin, rather than the mannequin itself. Virtually every story boils down to one of only a handful of plot structures, you don't need to get clever with the plot any more than you need to design clothes for a mannequin with four arms, It'll only make your story original for the wrong reasons. Plot is not the thing that keeps your audience flipping the pages: tension is the thing that does that.

>Do you begin with a story and work out the plot from that?
For me, it always starts with a character: I develop a character whose essence and spirit I sincerely love, with the understanding that the thing which makes them great is also the source of their flaws, so once I get a sense of what they need to overcome, the impact character, Antagonist, and plot all fall into place.

concepts I find helpful
>logline
If you can't describe your story in a long sentence/small paragraph, then you don't understand it well enough. If the logline of my novel is "an obsessed ship captain hunts a white whale until his hatred of the beast consumes him," or "a wine aficionado comes to terms with his own mediocrity over the course of a road trip through wine country,"or even something simpler like "Dinosaur theme park" or "school for wizards", then I can write a novel where every sentence is carefully spent reinforcing this one central idea, making for a cohesive and well-paced narrative
>theory
what is the creative admixture of the story you intend on telling? If you don't mix previously existing concepts, you have no way of knowing how fresh and original your story is. The easiest way to do with is with a "it's like" sentence, such as "Star Wars is like Buck Rogers meets Akira Kurosawa", or "Lord of the Rings is like a fairy tale, but for adults with mature, lofty themes"
>world building
Character behavior is what sticks in people's minds, but logical, consistent, intricate world-building is what will keep your super-fans raving about your story to all their friends

>the problem of evil
Why is this even a thing? Didn't Aquinas deal with this completely?

Hey 4chan. What wisdom have you picked up from your studies or life in general?

We all know that this is the real answer.