THE STORY SPOT

The time has come to chase other dreams.
Our thanks to you, our readers, fans, followers, and especially commenters.
My thanks to Sarah Dodd, Leonard Chang, Sara St.Onge, and Jeff Renfroe for lending their brilliance.
Collected here, for you, are topics covering the “essentials of story” and more. Many of these also happen to be some of our most popular posts.
We hope these are helpful to you as you create and collaborate on your own stories.
Thank you for visiting. Enjoy!
diane j wright
founder & managing editor, THE STORY SPOT

STORY BASICS

• The Logline: Your New Best Friend
• Five Ways to Tame Your Logline
• Outlines, Treatments, & Pitches
• Drama! Dramatize. Dramatic.
• Plot vs. Story
• Ground Rules: Set Them Early
• Breaking the Rules: When. How. Why.
• Characters for an Epic Tale
• Special Guest: Michael Hauge on the Prologue
• Focus on the Protagonist
• Is Your Hero Sympathetic and What the Heck Does That Mean?
• Creating a Formidable Antagonist
• “More on Villians” on What It’s Like
• Throughline & 2nd Act Sag
• Special Guest: Author Blake Snyder on The Midpoint
• Endings Make the Best Beginnings
• Suspension of Disbelief
• Characters Everyone Loves to Hate
• Gestures Illustrated
• Creating Emotion. There IS a Better Way

CREATIVITY & THE PROCESS

• New Writers! Be Unafraid! 10 Tips for Diving In
• Children Are Brilliant. Weren’t You?
• Your First 10 Scripts
• Cory Doctorow’s Tips for Finishing Your Writing Projects
• Writer’s Block Busters
• Five Tips for a Killer Rewrite
• Breaking It Down: Improving Your Scripts
• Story Consulting 101
• Collaboration: Five Ways to Make It Work
• Five Ways to Hone Your Focus in the New Year
• Special Guest: Jim Cirile on Your Agent Relationship

THE BIZ

• How to Be a Script Reader and Give Great Coverage
• Back to Basics: The Query Letter
• Before You Send That Query
• Indie Scripts vs. Studio Scripts
• Story in Memoir
• Story Dwelling: The Emotional Future of Video Gaming

There’s more to explore. Start with our SPOT ON menu in the sidebar.

Author Christina Baker Kline (Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be) did us the great favour of transcribing a recent interview with director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic) in which he offers storytelling wisdom that is simple but oh so true:

It’s always about the characters and about how those characters express something that the audience is feeling.  So it has to have some universality to it, having to do with relationships, whether it’s male-female, parent-child, whatever it is. And then you have to take them on a journey. And then you have to make it excruciating somehow.

Like that? Sounds so simple, no? Need a hand getting started? Try this: Is Your Hero Sympathetic and What the Heck Does That Mean?

And by the way, you can catch up on Ms. Kline’s latest right here on THE STORY SPOT: she’s now part of our Literati (updated live as bloggers post–if you don’t see her now, try again later.) Click through to read more and subscribe.

Read “The Essential Elements of Storytelling … according to James Cameron” on Christina Baker Kline’s blog, “A Writing Life”
Watch James Cameron interviewed by Charlie Rose

Pardon us for saying but this is bloody brilliant. Beat Sheet Central is author, screenwriter, and director Nicholas Jarecki’s site where he collects breakdowns — *beat sheets* — of movies and tv episodes for your free learning pleasure.

Often when I’m writing a film or teleplay, I like to go back and look at movies and TV shows in similar genres and see how they are constructed. The point of this site is to collect beat sheets for every movie and TV episode, generated by you, the users, by watching the pieces and writing down exactly what happens.

An excellent companion site to one of our most popular posts: “Breaking It Down: Improving Your Scripts.” So get to work and when you’ve finished, why not contribute your own beat sheet?

(Novelists and memoirists, don’t go thinking you have a Get Out of Jail Free card. Nope. Learning to “beat out” your lengthier stories is every bit as beneficial. Bonus: if you can do it for a film, you can do it for a book.)

If you haven’t heard, ScriptFrenzy month is nigh: April 1-30, 2010.

Whether you’re playing along or not, here’s a bit of sage advice for all writers from Greg Marcks–as posted on the ScriptFrenzy site.

I don’t have ten tips, or five tips, or even three tips. I can only give you one tip: Please, for the love of all that is holy, know your story before you start writing.

This is so much more difficult than it sounds. I always thought writing was exploratory, an attempt to exorcise a subconscious theme I was wrestling with. While this approach can work for short stories or short film scripts, it becomes unwieldy and time-consuming when tackling feature screenplays or novels.

BEFORE you type FADE IN:, plan the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Don’t know where to start? Try these on for size:

• The Logline: Your New Best Friend – A good start when you have an idea but don’t know what to do next.
• New Writers! Be Unafraid! 10 Tips for Diving In – For a bit of inspiration as you begin.
• Endings Make the Best Beginnings – Finding your story, all of your story.

Don’t take our word for it, take Greg’s. Read the full post, “KNOW YOUR STORY by Greg Marcks” at ScriptFrenzy.org. And while you’re at it, pony up for the privilege. Donations to the wonder that is ScriptFrenzy can be made through The Office of Letters and Light.

Now here’s something interesting in the world of interactive storytelling. Crushing It is a comedy series/soap unfolding right now, in real time, on Twitter. How’s that, you say? Series Creator Jill Golick has dreamed into reality a setting, characters, and a hijinks-fraught storyline then turned them loose on Twitter for one week only.

“Think of this as an improv performance on the virtual stage of the Internet,” they say. We’ll think of it as brilliant. Screenwriters play the wedding-stressed characters and the audience fills in the rest.
What are you waiting for? Jump in!

CRUSHING IT
February 1 to February 5th, 2010
Only on Twitter
http://twitter.com/crushingitstory/crushing-it-story/
#cistory

Screenwriter Jill Golick’s Blog: “Running with My Eyes Closed“