Writing a Story

Video Transcript

"In this segment we're going to cover how to write a story. Now you know your audience and you know your genre. What we are going to do now is go over a few of the ingredients to the story. Now they're not separate things, they're all a part of the story itself. Now you've got your story, and then the three main ingredients are the characters, the setting and the conflicts, and they all work together as a part of the story. Now if there were 100 different play writes watching this clip right now, all starting out on their play, they would still be at very different points in terms of a lot of these ingredients. They might have a couple of characters really well developed but not be totally sure of the setting. They might really know the plot, they might really know the story and not have the conflicts really developed a lot. What you have to do is look at all of these ingredients and see what might be lacking and fill in the blanks. Now I made up a very basic arbitrary story just to show you how it fits within these ingredients. So my story is about this young couple in their 20's who are always arguing and fighting. They're in a tragic auto accident and neither one of them make it so they end up in Purgatory. Now the play itself begins when they enter Purgatory. Now we have setting. O.k., let's say the setting, which is Purgatory, is going to be like a secretary's office and you have a water cooler and you have a door, that instead of leading to the boss's office, points up and the other side points down. Then we can skip back to character a little bit and go well who's going to be manning this office and there's so many possibilities you can have there. You can have a kind of a smart aleck stand up comedian type guy, you can have a businessman type person, you can have a very efficient secretary. How about if we choose a sweet, little old lady who's not judgmental at all with this couple and she's a little bit disorganized but she's running everything. Then to give it conflict, let's say that she has one pass that day in order to get, so she can get either the husband or the wife to the up door and the other has to go to the down door. So there we have all the elements and of course along the way we're going to need a lot more conflicts and one might be, that one ticket is expiring. So it gives them that urgency to decide who's going to take the door and again I may not know the ending. We know that the couple is going to come together and realize that they shouldn't have been doing all this bickering and whether they have to separate or whether they go on together, it's going to be a bittersweet ending. So it's important to have conflict and good conflict so it keeps the story moving along to a good climax. Now we all have our own approach to creating a story but I've come up with a process that can individualize that, so hopefully you'll be able to latch on to it and it will give you a real starting point and an understanding of the creating the story process. So think of you're sitting back having a glass of wine pondering your life and you're thinking about that time you got to the coffee house a little bit early and you just happened to open the paper and glance at the want ads. You called on this one job and you got it. You met a lot of your friends, you started a whole new career based on that one moment. You met your future spouse. You met that jerk of a boss they brought out from the East who ruined everything. All of these people and how that changed your life. Now you can't go back and change it but you think what if. What if you would have not opened that paper? What would your other job had been? At the job, what if your spouse would never have worked there? Who would you have ended up with then? Or then there was the time you were just going out to run that errand, you quick decided to grab that letter to mail, you get in your car, you're going down the street and you're in a car accident. You're thinking only if I wouldn't have grabbed that letter, I would have avoided the accident and all this extra hassle. So these feelings, what if, what if, what if, are the same feelings that are very effective when you approach creating a story. You can't go back as much as you imagine and think about what if you could have changed your life in certain areas, for the better, for the worse. You can't do that but now you have that chance and you have the chance to do that with your characters. You're going into their lives and you're making all sorts of changes. You're asking, what if here, what if, what if, what if, what if, all the way down the line and you're throwing conflicts at them. So now it's time to play God a little bit, throw some thunder bolts down there at your character and come up with an incredible story."