Story Starter book

Writing a story isn’t easy. However, there’s a huge difference between novice writers and experienced writers. Experienced writers know what makes stories work from the beginning all the way to the end. Even if they don’t outline their entire story ahead of time, experienced writers subconsciously know the structure of stories so they can write confidently with a minimal waste of time.

Novices know little to nothing about story structure. As a result, they start writing with no clear idea where they’re going, what their story needs, or even how it might end. The end result is a chaotic mess that endless amounts of rewrites will likely never fix.

Which approach do you want to follow?

The purpose of “Story Starter: The 15-Minute Movie Workbook” is to provide guidelines and exercises to help you learn about the different aspects of story structure. The more you know about the common elements found in nearly every story, the sooner you can apply these same principles to help you write your story.

Stories are intricately connected elements that work together. If you don’t know what these story elements are, you’ll risk ignoring them and creating a much weakened story like a bridge that’s missing a supporting pillar.

Rather than try to write and plan your story at the same time (a common mistake of novices), it’s far better to plan your story in detail or broad strokes. This is usually where novices try making up their story and formatting it as a screenplay at the same time using a program like Final Draft.

Big mistake.

When you try to make up your story as you write and format it at the same time, you can’t help but create a sloppy story because you’re too distracted on formatting it to look nice. Once you’ve written anything down (even if it’s pure garbage), you’ll be much more reluctant to change anything later.

The point is that structure is the key ingredient to making writing faster and easier. Before you even touch your computer and screenwriting word processor, stop. Then focus all your time making up your story and writing it down in plain text.

After you capture your story as ordinary text, share your story with others, either by letting them read it or by telling your story for others to hear. When you can get feedback from others on what they think of your story, you’ll know which parts need improving and which parts are working.

This gradual process of creating your story (without trying to format it as a screenplay) lets you spend 100% of your time focused on making the best story possible. Once you know your story excites people, then you writing it as a screenplay will be much easier.

By knowing the elements of story structure, you can create richer and more creative story faster and easier than ever before.