Let’s steal a tool.
In TV writing, they use a tool called “breaking a story.” TV writers have to short-circuit their creativity sometimes because their deadlines come with producers and studios full of people. Those pressures change the motivation to get a story done.
TV writers are just as motivated to write good stories as any of the rest of us, so their tools are not in any way meant to circumvent the creative process. They can’t skip steps. They can sometimes shorten timelines.
“Breaking a story” is one of the short-circuiting tools they use. It’s a process of figuring out the key points in your story, and you do it to ensure that you have key points at all.
One of the big differences between a story and a series of events is the causal relationships between those events. Stories have them. So if you’re building a story, you need key turning points.
How you do it, right? The way you do it is you think through the stuff you want to have in your story.
Then you identify the spots between those events where the causal relationship happens. That is to say, it’s not just about one event following another one. Story happens when one event causes another one.
Those causal moments, where the causal event swings the story into the next level of tension, those are your key pivot points.
To do it, subject those points to a few tests:
Are those pivots motivated by character decisions?
Are they credible? Reasonable? These moments have to work within the framework you’ve established.
And does it have emotional resonance in line with the themes you’re chasing in the story?
You need enough of these pivotal points to carry from your first image to your moment of catharsis. You might have three. You might have five. You might have twenty. The point is it's a far simpler task to write out these reasonably-connected emotional "beats" than it is to write a whole story.
And when you identify those, you’ve “broken” your story. It works better than outlining stories because the results are less rigid.
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