Breaking Story
Well, it’s really the hardest thing to do. I have a writer friend who shared how he could spend six months "breaking story" and still not necessarily have it.
Normal. I said. I spent years and years breaking story on an original script which I finally wrote three years after I thought of it. There is no time limit to the process, no sundial to track the brightness of the imagination. Every story is unique, and has unique demands. Some will come quickly and form completely, some won't ever form at all. Why?
I suspect it has to do with some things I've learned along the way.
And what I have learned is this:
To break story completely you need three things. But to summarize, you need your 1) Big Idea, 2) The Bottle to catch that lighting in, and 3) the Weather. The storms, blue skies and thunderclouds in your hero’s mind. What is their emotional reality? Outgoing? Timid? Courageous? Cowardly? Whipsmart? Convinced they’re stupid? Over Confident? Self hating? This defines how they will approach any action in your story. And as you can imagine, every one of the adjectives above will approach a problem differently.
All three of these things can be charted out in various ways to help give you clarity, I won’t put all the boring details here.
In fact if you sign up for my newsletter I’ll send you a free eBook with these three in detail.
But all three are crucial and can’t be shrugged off. Assuming you have the first two under control, the third is the most important. The old adage in screenwriting in Hollywood is ‘It’s not the what, it’s the who.” That still holds true today.
We care about the people in the story, not just the clever dilemma you’ve hammered them into. Who do you have who is trying to move forwards? What change do they have to make to do so? And what situation forces them to move forward so they have to change? That is the heart of good storytelling, right there.
Why? Because it mirrors our own lives.
At every step of our lives we’ve had to engage in the world and enter situations we weren’t comfortable with and forced to learn as we go so many times we don’t think about it anymore. It starts in grade school and shifting to high school. Then high school and shifting to college or the work place. Then first job, first date, every gathering with new people. You get used to a situation with friends and authority then - bam - new rules - new authority - different friends. It happens through grade school and through your twenties. Then new complexities, families, children’s schools, workplace challenges and advancements. Speaking to 1000 people professionally or just filling the car up at a deserted gas station at night can equally fill people with anxiety, and both are legitimate. When we see how a character experience difficulties in different ways in a story we know who they are. And we’re with them. And when they are showing an emotional place that we have touched some aspect of, we connect with them. And we are on the journey with them.