The Mechanics Of A Good Story

There's a flip tonne of advice out there about how to write a damn good story, and most of it is terrible advice. Terrible. Garbage. And I've read a lot of it, or seen videos about a lot of it. It's bleak out there folks.

So I'm going to cut to the chase and quickly throw you some great story writing links. I'll then talk it over. I'm not an expert. Beware anyone who says they are an expert at writing. You'll see what I mean later.

First of all, this is the best, funniest and shortest resource I've found on writing and it's by Dan Harmon, the writer and creator of Community and the co-creator and writer of Rick and Morty.
http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit
Be sure to read at least the first two pages. It’s very good.

The second resource is even shorter. It’s a clip of Matt Stone and Trey Parker talking about their writing on South Park. Whether you like South Park or not, their story writing ability is impressive.

The key bit here is the simple idea of the “therefore or but” idea instead of “and then”.
If anyone has the rest of this, please share it.

This is a playlist of all the best videos I’ve found on Youtube to do with story:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2YkuHpV0u3WAt-vvbMH1mjIoUVNZ6zrj
Some of it more loosely to do with story and might not seem useful right now, but the obvious ones are good.

Those are the good links.

You may also want to read Joseph Campell’s : Hero With A Thousand Faces. It’s good, but long. And in terms of useful writing advice, I think Dan’s Story 101 covers it pretty well and in a more entertaining way.

There are also books that all the screenplay writers get and I’ve read a load of those too: Syd Field’s book, John Truby’s book. They’re not bad. If you have time, read them. At the very least you’ll get different perspectives on how to write.

There’s also a few masterclass lessons at www.masterclass.com. They are doing a membership system now so that you can have access to all classes for a year. I’ve only seen Aaron Sorkin’s one and some of Judy Blume’s lessons. While I respect Aaron’s writing a lot, particularly for “The Social Network”, I don’t think he’s a good teacher and, more importantly, he doesn’t seem to have a conscious method that he’s really aware of. I’m sure he has an unconscious method, but that’s not helpful to us is it. I’m not familiar with Judy’s work, but so far I’ve not taken much away from the course other than she seems to be a thoroughly lovely person.

If you have other resources you think helped you, please do let everyone know. I think these are the best I’ve found. There’s also some interesting talk about Stanley Kubrick’s writing methods that are touched on here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/3f91z6/nonsubmersible_units_structural_storytelling_via/

That’s all very well, but I come to story writing via some poor attempts to write screenplays in my youth, and then via games design, and I think there might be a different way into story writing that is a little more structured. This comes from watching hundreds of hours of concept artist talking about how they learnt to draw and paint and realising that it’s not a talent as much as it is a skill that can be learned with the right approach and plenty of practice. (I’ll write something about that another time)

One reason this has become more important recently is that I’ve been involved in evaluating texts and stories and wanted a more objective way of doing so that could be communicated effectively, rather than rely on subjective feelings about the text, or having conversations where the text is summarised as “good”, with little dissection of the various things that made it good, or less good.

In the next post I’ll start to go through the beginnings of the system I’m formulating. It’s not perfect, but it’s very helpful so far. I’d also encourage you to pick a simple story you like and think about what makes it better than other stories. When I next post, it would be good to talk it over with you and see if we can find some general principles we all agree on.

Until next time, Gadget.
Same bat time, same bat channel...