Writing / Storytelling Posts

A beat sheet is a terrific tool for planning your story. From Larry Brooks of Storyfix.com:

A beat sheet – as in, the beat of each story point — is a list of short, bulleted descriptions about each scene in your story. It could be stated that if you have 60 scenes, then you could create a beat sheet with 60 entries that describes the mission, or the content, or both, for each of those scenes.

Each entry on the beat sheet describes what the scene does in context to story exposition. It explains why it is there.

I’ve started using beat sheets to work out all my stories. I also use a form of beat sheet to plan each comic, more or less, panel by panel. It’s by far the best and most efficient way to block out the pacing of the story BEFORE you spend the time writing out a full draft. I also use a similar method when writing copy for clients and it saves SO much time and frustration.

I tend to use just a simple outliner tool, like OmniOutliner or the built-in outliner of Scrivener, or occasionally the outline view in Word for compatibility’s sake.

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Storytelling to the beat of a different drummer

Jon August shares another very educational scriptcast. This one is supposed to be on writing better dialogue, but it’s actually a great example of how to make an okay scene into something that’s good.

The 19-minute vid is a bit daunting at first especially when you realize you’re going to be watching someone type and read aloud in a nearly monotone voice, but I soon found myself riveted by what was being done to this scene.

Inspiring stuff.

Writing better dialogue from John August on Vimeo.

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Writing better dialogue

Avi Solomon interviews technical writer and science fiction author, Ted Chiang for BoingBoing.

A pretty interesting q&a.

Could you give a walk-through of your writing process?

In general, if there’s an idea I’m interested in, I usually think about that for a long time and write down my speculations or just ideas about how it could become a story, but I don’t actually start writing the story itself until I know how the story ends. Typically the first part of the story that I write is the very ending, either the last paragraph of the story or a paragraph near the end. Once I have the destination in mind then I can build the rest of the story around that or build the rest of the story in such a way as to lead up to that. Usually the second thing I write is the opening of the story and then I write the rest of the story in almost random order. I just keep writing scenes until I’ve connected the beginning and the end. I write the key scenes or what I think of as the landmark scenes first, and then I just fill in backwards and forwards.

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Ted Chiang on writing

Jon August has a great tip for solving scene and character problems. He calls it “writing off the page”:

If you’re having a hard time finding a character’s voice, get him talking about something unrelated to the scene at hand.

Let your hero knock back a beer with his college roommate. Have your corporate spy meet-cute a potential suitor at a ski lodge. Pick situations that couldn’t possibly fit in your actual movie. You just want to get your character talking so that you can eavesdrop.

I use this technique for busting through a stuck scene, or just trying to find the right key notes to hit in a scene.

Most recently, while working through an upcoming scene for The Winchcombe, I sat the two characters down in a room, gave them the topic I needed them to get through, and just had them start talking to each other.

I didn’t worry about anything like fitting the dialogue in a panel, or inefficient things like repeating phrases. I just had them go over the topic I wanted them to work through. And eventually, after about three pages of dialogue between the two of them, I figured out everything I needed about the scene.

I didn’t even need to refer back to this short document when I wrote the actual scene. I just knew how it was going to go.

Very helpful technique.

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