One of the quickest and easiest ways to run out of ideas is to start making up your story as you go along. Eventually you’ll run out of ideas. One way to avoid this problem of running out of ideas is to rely on history. Remember, every story has a history that happened before the […]

Here’s a quick way to judge good and bad movies. In a bad movie, there’s no emotional change. There might be plenty of physical action but the hero mostly remains the same as he or she was at the beginning. In a good movie, there’s physical and emotional change. Physically, the hero is in a […]

If you look on Rotten Tomatoes, two highly rated movies this past summer are “Detroit” and “Dunkirk,” both of which are based on actual events. While “Dunkirk” was a financial success, “Detroit” was not. Yet if you watch both movies, you’ll notice something missing: Emotion. The best stories don’t just show interesting action, but also […]

Watch any bad movie and every scene will often seem completely independent of the other scenes to the point where if you took out the scene, the overall story wouldn’t be hurt because the scene had little to do with the overall story in the first place. Bad movies try to cram in irrelevant scenes […]

The best stories are when the hero changes. Typically the hero changes from living a dead end life of his or her own creation and becomes a better person and gains a better life by changing. In tragedies, the hero fails to change in the end, but in most stories, the hero does change in […]

Scenes aren’t individual items but part of a whole. Every scene must be part of the overall story or else there’s no point in having that scene. Watch deleted scenes of movies and you’ll see that the deleted scene adds nothing to the story. Just watch this deleted scene from Disney’s “Pinocchio” that explains where […]

In every good story, the hero has a fear that he or she hopes will never happen. That’s why you need to make sure that big fear actually does happen because it forces the hero to change and change is what every good story is all about. On a simple level, making the hero face […]

What makes a story particularly fascinating is when the hero gets him for herself trapped in an unsolvable dilemma created by the hero. In “Captain Underpants,” two kids hypnotize their principal to make him believe he’s Captain Underpants, a superhero. They do this because he’s threatening to separate them from class. So now the heroes […]