Craft Making it Marvelous: How to Use the MCU to Create Better Series with Tere Michaels

Writers pull ideas and details from everything they consume and experience, from movies and books to their own lives (and everything overheard in public!). Being a fan is sometimes two-fold for us – we experience the joy of the ride but we can also mine quality properties for a deeper understanding of our work.

The MCU™ is a sprawling piece of action theatre that uses expansive worldbuilding, time-honored archetypes, traditional and reworked tropes, carefully detailed emotional arcs, and continuity to tell its stories successfully.

How can we, as writers, take the lessons for ourselves, even if we don't write in that genre?

• What is the optimal “casting” for your series? Who are the characters who can best tell your story?
• What are the parameters of your world-building? How do they accommodate your plot and your characters?
• What is the plan? What is the payoff?
• What themes and motifs are repeated through your story or series in order to create a specific mood or lesson for your reader?
• And much more!

We will examine the emotional and plot arcs of several Marvel Universe characters (major and minor) in canon, and the macro/microelements of four of the movies (how they stand alone/how they fit into the larger picture) in order to extract the lessons that we can use in our own work.