Your First Book in Story Development

Before writing characters, before writing scenes, before worrying about your act breaks, you have to first know you have a story that will work.

Tell Me Your Story

That is what this book is all about: you working through your story with me, as I guide you through a seven-step process that will transform your story from an idea into a story premise, a premise line, and then into a synopsis that can be used to develop a full-fledged screenplay worthy of any serious producer or production company. Even if you don’t know what terms like story premise, premise line, and synopsis mean, that’s okay, because it will all be explained along the way.

It is probably a safe assumption to make that at this point in your growth as a writer this is not your first book on “how to write.” You have no doubt been exposed to various story gurus, writing teachers, and how-to books and have learned terms like premise line, log line, inciting incident, midpoint complication, story beat, opponent, hero’s journey, story structure, and many more. The story zoo is crowded and noisy, with many competing voices, systems, and methodologies, such as Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat series, Christopher Vogler’s Hero’s Journey, Syd Field’s three-act structure, or Michael Hague’s six-stage plot—to name just a few.

What you are going to learn in this book is different. It is a foundational process, “The 7-Step Premise Development Process,” that comes before all of these other systems and methodologies. You will be learning the most basic and fundamental story development process that every screenwriter (or novelist) needs to learn, i.e., how to discover whether or not you have a story that will work before you write a page of script or prose, and then how to develop that story idea into a tool (premise line) that can support the entire writing process. Once you master this process, then any other development tools or systems you use—which I encourage you to do—will work all the more powerfully in support of your story. But, first things first: tell me your story.

Story Comes First—Writing Comes Second

For many, story development sounds like part of the writing process; it is not. I have found this one mistaken belief to be at the core of almost every failed script or novel—screenwriters who write scripts that fall short all have one thing in common: they began writing pages before they really knew their story. Believing that developing the story is equivalent to developing the script implies that the writing of pages as early as possible is not only logical, but that it is natural, good, and sensible. Especially if the screenwriter is under a deadline, who has time to hold back? Get to work!

Fighting this tendency to forge ahead and write, write, write is at the heart of this book and at the heart of the “7-Step Premise Development Process.” If you learn nothing else from this experience, at least take away the new belief that you will increase your chances of writing a good story if, after coming up with your killer idea, you just take a deep breath and resist the urge to write pages. A writer’s instinct to write first and develop as they go is an impulse responsible for leading more writers into the story woods than any other behavior. The impulse is fueled from the misconception that story development is scriptwriting. This fallacy originates from the sad reality that story development is not a skill most writers are taught: not in film school, not in MFA programs, and not even in the midst of the story consulting zoo that has sprung up around the entertainment industry as a whole. Yes, there are talented and dedicated writers who teach, and who have a natural ability in the area of story development, but as a basic skill set supported by the industry itself, and by the educational institutions that feed the creative pool of writing talent that will create product for the entertainment industry in the future—no, story development is a woefully lacking craft skill.

This is why I say that this book is your first book in story development: because almost everything you’ve been exposed to at this point has not been about story development so much as about the nuts and bolts of how to physically write a screenplay, or “beat” out a story, or structure a scene, or write great dialogue, or create a story world, or the myriad other writing-related functions required to write a solid screenplay. Even if you are a seasoned screenwriter, chances are pretty good that separating the storytelling function from the writing function is not an activity you would consider worthwhile, or advisable.

But until you as a screenwriter, or novelist, can approach your work story-first, rather than writing-first, real story development will be elusive and the script development process will be fraught with false starts, missteps, and frustrating excursions into the writing wilderness. Executing proper story development before you start writing pages is an essential first step to producing a screenplay that will survive the rigors of the overall development gauntlet that is sure to come. And successful development begins with the screenwriter knowing why the job of storytelling is not the same as the job of writing. Understanding the distinction between storytelling and writing is critical for understanding why story development is not synonymous with screenwriting (or novel writing, or playwriting, etc.). If you approach one as an expression of the other then you will always get caught up in the details of writing at the expense of story. I will illustrate how this happens in the next chapter, but this is the key: you should not begin writing your script or novel until you have the story premise solidly in hand in the form of a premise line.

Storytelling and Writing Are Not the Same Thing

Stories have nothing to do with writing. When I say this to participants in a workshop or to a room full of producers, the reaction is either blank stares, rolling of eyes and snickers, or cocked heads and perked up ears (like when dogs hear something they can’t recognize). I hope for the last one, because this at least demonstrates some humility and curiosity on the parts of the listeners. But the point is still the point: stories don’t need writers. Stories can be danced, painted, sculpted, mimed, spoken, sung, and none of these vehicles for conveying a story have to be anywhere near a pencil, pen, paper, or word processor to work the magic of storytelling.

Think about it: stories predate written language and constitute the primordial method we humans used to communicate. Oral history and the handing down of oral tradition is the first form of how we told our stories. The painting of stories, as magnificently illustrated in the El Castillo Cave along Spain’s Cantabrian Sea coast, dates back more than 48,800 years—the oldest examples of human storytelling in Europe—besting the previous title-holder, France’s Chauvet cave paintings, by more than four thousand years. But, we don’t have to go back forty millennia to prove the point. Even today, there are many ethnic minorities throughout the world who possess stronger spoken versus written traditions, preferring to use oral histories, myths, epics, songs, and visual arts and crafts to hand down their cultural memes and stories. Stories don’t need writers; they only need storytellers. Stories can be written, but they don’t have to be.

The function of storytelling is to teach ourselves about what it means to be human..

Contrast this to writing. Writing is all about language. It is about how you use syntax, grammar, rhetoric, and the tools of language to convey emotion, thought, and the experience of a moment or idea. Writing is one of the vehicles that can carry a story, and it does so using the rhythms and musicality of words, clauses, and phrases in the form of prose or poetry. Writing has its own forms, none of which directly relate to the need or requirement of telling a story. It just so happens that writing is second only to the power of oral storytelling, but writing is not storytelling; it is only one way to tell a story.

Writing and storytelling require two different talents and two different craft skill sets. Most creative people who use the writing form to tell stories are good with the writing function, but weak with the story function. We see this even in famous writers: Charles Dickens was strong with both, Marcel Proust was mesmerizing as a writer and weak as a storyteller, Hemingway was strong with both, Stephen King is impressive with both, Flannery O’Conner was unsurpassed in both, William Faulkner was magical as a writer and middling as a storyteller, Cormac McCarthy is masterful with both, and this list can go on and on. Whether you agree with my literary assessments or not, the phenomenon of having writing and storytelling being concurrently present in the same writer is a rare occurrence, relatively speaking. And of the two talents or craft skills (writing vs. storytelling), it is almost always the story skill that is out of balance. Writing a screenplay needs to be as engaging and as “literate” as any novel. Script readers are the first line of defense in the entertainment industry. Newbie screenwriters often make the mistake of writing their first-draft script to be “seen,” rather than to be read. If you want to get a script in the pipeline toward development, you have to get past the gatekeepers, and that means wowing them with a great read.

The 7-Step Premise Development Process

Producing a great read means first creating a great story. That is what premise development is all about, and that is what this book has as its focus. “The 7-Step Premise Development Process” is designed to give you a repeatable, reliable, and validated methodology for consistently producing stories that will have narrative legs and survive the overall development process. I cannot promise that every story idea you have will survive the process, once you master it. Indeed, I have worked with many writers and producers who have worked through this practice and come out the other end realizing their story was not able to stand on its own. Initially upset, perhaps, but every one of them was grateful for learning sooner than later that they were running after the wrong story bauble.

So to that end, the “The 7-Step Premise Development Process” contains the following steps:

• Step 1: Determine if you have a story or a situation.
• Step 2: Map the Invisible Structure to the “Anatomy of a Premise Line” template.
• Step 3: Develop the first pass of the premise line.
• Step 4: Determine if the premise is soft or high concept.
• Step 5: Develop the log line.
• Step 6: Finalize premise line.
• Step 7: Test the premise and log lines.

In part two of this book, you will walk through all of these steps in detail using one of your story ideas—perhaps the one you used for the first exercise—guided by the supplied worksheets and case studies. But, before you dive into this work, we have to build a common ground, a solid foundation from which we can leap into the hard work of breaking out a working story premise and uncovering the story you want to tell. This means that we have to define some basic concepts, set up some agreed-upon terminology and development jargon, and build a conceptual framework that can act as an armature to support the premise development process as a whole. We will lay the following groundwork in this first part of the book:

• Premise
• Invisible Structure
• Visible Structure
• Premise Line
• Story / Character / Plot
• Moral Premise

The following chapters will build on these six foundation stones, and challenge many common assumptions and consensus viewpoints about the screenwriting process. Try to keep a balanced frame of mind so that any preconceived judgments and beliefs you may hold don’t rob you of an experience that might otherwise open your mind and give you a new creative perspective to explore in your own artistic process.