Whenever I finish up working on a project I like to spend a little time just focusing on the learning process of the medium in storytelling. In comics that take a lot of forms. You could spend a lot of time learning to just draw better and you would be moving in the right direction. I decided that I needed to learn how to write better. Most importantly, I need to learn to understand story better.
My first writing class really was when I was in college. I started meeting up with a small screenwriting group and this was where I first began to understand how you actually formulate a story. It stayed fairly high level, focusing on the basics of a three act structure. Admittedly that’s where my learning stayed. The funny thing is I could tell you what I loved about a story, but I couldn’t tell you how you make those things come together.
My buddy Will Terrell recommended the book SAVE THE CAT to me recently when I was discussing the challenges of pitching a book. I picked the book up on that premise alone figuring $10 was a small price to pay for the help it would provide. It has opened up a whole SLEW of things for me learning about stories.
I finally am start to see WHY a story works, not just know that it does. The good news is I have sort of intuitively done most of those things right in my stories (plenty of them wrong too).
I have ended up pulling tools together from two separate resources to put together a worksheet for building stories and I wanted to share it with you all as well.
You can download it here: Worksheet For Story Building (right click and save)
It essentially combines the story structure and pitching points that Blake Snyder presented in SAVE THE CAT and the character and theme structure as presented under the STORYMIND theory as introduced to me by my friend Stephen McCranie.
As a writer I tend to care about theme and message A LOT! Without too much of a soap box being stood on, I am greatly bothered by much of the message media is giving viewers today. It’s bleak, fatalist and rather than celebrating the good things of life, it wallows in the bad. So a story with a message matters to me and often that is what drives me to tell it in the first place. I want to talk about something that is important.
The Storymind theory (or Dramatica theory) present a very effective and useful way of doing this. It is a theory that basically presents a story as an argument in the mind to arrive at a conclusion as it relates to your theme. One of it’s most useful tools has been assigning characters a role in relation to that argument.
There is a lot to cover here, but if you are interested in it you should take some time and delve into their extensive video series.
As I have been writing the script for Kevin and the Light of Destiny, I have been working hard to bring what I have learned from both tools and make a better, more effective story. It’s getting close to being readable and I look forward to the feedback from my critique group.
As for the worksheet I have made, I would encourage you to try and work through the whole thing (minus the one pager synopsis portion, that’s more of a pitching thing) before you jump into writing. Getting a road map to your destination in a simple format is much more efficient and helpful than while writing it. Because I promise, the rewrites present enough problems (most of them fueled by not figuring this stuff out first.)
On the ADAMSVILLE front I am quite close to knowing what the fate of that book will be. In the next month or so I should be able to share more, but plans for book 2 have been put on hold until I can get those things figured out and start writing the script.
I hope this tool is helpful!