When creating a story, the first step is defining why anyone would care about your story. To make people care about your story, you need to describe the following:
- A unique threat (the villain or problem)
- The hero’s goal
This short summary of your story must emphasize the do-or-die nature of the story such as “A New York cop must defeat an army of terrorists by himself in a skyscraper to save his wife.” Notice that this summary of “Die Hard” defines a a unique problem (an army of terrorists, by himself, in a skyscraper) and the hero’s goal (to save his wife).
What happens if you lack a unique problem? You probably won’t catch anyone’s attention. Telling people your story is about a man trying to reunite with his wife doesn’t sound very interesting because what are the problems getting in the way?
In “Die Hard”, those problems are terrorists. What if we got rid of terrorists and replaced them with space aliens? That would be different and fuels our imagination how a man might save his wife if she was abducted by aliens.
What if the man and woman get separated from each other by living a war zone? Now they both must survive and avoid soldiers and the usual hazards of war to find each other and reunite. This creates another type of interesting story because we want to know how the man and wife could possibly overcome this problem.
That’s the key to developing a summary or pitch of your story. Make the problem facing the hero seem nearly impossible to achieve because that’s what makes a story interesting. A man trying to reunite with his wife in a crowded bowling alley is far less exciting than a man trying to reunite with his wife in a skyscraper that’s been taken over by an army of terrorists.
The more impossible the obstacles facing the hero, the more compelling the story.
In comparison, the hero’s goal is rather trivial because it could be anything. In “Jurassic Park”, the big obstacles are rampaging dinosaurs but the hero’s goal is to save two children. Replace the two children with a wife, a parent in a wheelchair, or a baby in a stroller and the danger is still just as great and seemingly impossible to overcome.
The purpose of defining a hero’s goal is to make sure that the terrifying obstacles facing the hero actively work against the hero achieving their goal. In “Jurassic Park”, that goal is to save two children. In “Die Hard”, that goal is to save the hero’s wife.
Even in a romantic comedy like “Sleepless in Seattle”, the big goal is for the hero to find his true love, but the obstacles in the way are that the hero lives on the West Coast and his true love lives on the East Coast.
Everything conspires to keep the hero and his true love from finding each other until the very end. Because the obstacles to finding each other were so great, overcoming these obstacles creates a far greater emotional rush than if the hero and true love simply lived next to each other with nothing keeping them from getting to know each other.
Watch this scene from “”Sleepless in Seattle” to see how the constant problems of finding each other is finally overcome. Because the obstacles the hero and his true love had to overcome were so great, this creates an emotional triumph in the end.
So before you start writing, start by defining what your story is about in a single sentence. If you can’t create a visually exciting story idea in one sentence, you probably won’t be able to do it in a 120 page screenplay either.
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