Whenever I finish up working on\u00a0 a project I like to spend a little time just focusing on the learning process of the medium in storytelling.\u00a0 In comics that take a lot of forms.\u00a0 You could spend a lot of time learning to just draw better and you would be moving in the right direction.\u00a0 I decided that I needed to learn how to write better.\u00a0 Most importantly, I need to learn to understand story better.<\/p>\n
My first writing class really was when I was in college.\u00a0 I started meeting up with a small screenwriting group and this was where I first began to understand how you actually formulate a story.\u00a0 It stayed fairly high level, focusing on the basics of a three act structure.\u00a0 Admittedly that’s where my learning stayed.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
My buddy Will Terrell<\/a> recommended the book SAVE THE CAT<\/a> to me recently when I was discussing the challenges of pitching a book.\u00a0 I picked the book up on that premise alone figuring $10 was a small price to pay for the help it would provide.\u00a0 It has opened up a whole SLEW of things for me learning about stories.<\/p>\n I finally am start to see WHY a story works, not just know that it does.\u00a0 The good news is I have sort of intuitively done most of those things right in my stories (plenty of them wrong too).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You can download it here: Worksheet For Story Building<\/a> (right click and save)<\/p>\n It essentially combines the story structure<\/a> and pitching points that Blake Snyder presented in SAVE THE CAT and the character and theme structure as presented under the STORYMIND<\/a> theory as introduced to me by my friend Stephen McCranie.<\/a><\/p>\n As a writer I tend to care about theme and message A LOT!\u00a0 Without too much of a soap box being stood on, I am greatly bothered by much of the message media is giving viewers today.\u00a0 It’s bleak, fatalist and rather than celebrating the good things of life, it wallows in the bad.\u00a0 So a story with a message matters to me and often that is what drives me to tell it in the first place.\u00a0 I want to talk about something that is important.<\/p>\n The Storymind theory (or Dramatica theory) present a very effective and useful way of doing this. \u00a0 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.\u00a0 One of it’s most useful tools has been assigning characters a role in relation to that argument.
\n