Speaker 1: How am I going to turn whatever feeling or idea I have into a story?

Speaker 2: How are they doing that? What is the magic sauce? If I got in a car, the most beautiful car in the world, turn on the key, it doesn't work. I don't want the car. It's got to go. What makes the car go?

Speaker 3: That's a big question. That's a great question because that's at the core of everything.

Speaker 4: You have now this energy that's like just glowing inside of you to create.

Speaker 5: I just could not let it go. It was a story I had to tell.

Speaker 6: Start by understanding what elements it takes to have a story.

Speaker 5: But every story is really about a problem.

Speaker 1: Every story is about a character trying to accomplish something and having an obstacle. And what they do, what action they take in the face of the obstacles is your story.

Speaker 7: If you don't have those basic elements, and that's not the whole story, obviously, but if you don't have those basic elements, then really what is the story? You don't have a character to sort of be our vehicle through a series of events, and you don't have anything propelling them forward or driving them forward if they're not trying to achieve something. Every story creates a dramatic question.

Speaker 8: And the dramatic question is, will the person get what they want or not?

Speaker 6: And that's what holds us to the story. I am here because something is changing for them, and I now need to watch them to struggle through it, grow through it, whatever is going to happen on that journey. That's why I'm here.

Speaker 9: In other words, your protagonist goes through a series of experiences that lead to a transformation.

Speaker 8: Transformation in a story is a key element, and whether it comes through your main character or your main character changing everyone else, it doesn't matter. It's just that transformation is actually the purpose of the story. It's actually the purpose of the story because the reason we tell stories is to actually understand ourselves better. And that insight is a transformation for us.

Speaker 1: I believe any story is really about how a character trying to accomplish something runs into other people who either help or harm their intention.

Speaker 2: It's because characters have been in trouble, characters had a conflict, characters had to discover things about themselves that they didn't want to look at. Something happened.

Speaker 5: They, you know, that's what makes drama. They're kind of struggling, suffering, being punished by the situation they're in, the upside-down world they find themselves in, the problem or goal that they're trying to resolve, which they're an underdog and they're overmatched and the world is not giving them what they want.

Speaker 8: What are they doing to try to get it? How does that make them face something in themselves and how do they grow? And do they finally get this thing

Speaker 7: or do they get it in a way that they didn't expect? If we know what that character is trying to achieve, that gives us like a yardstick to measure is he succeeding or is he failing? Is he making progress or is he having setbacks, right? And that's that like push-pull of like hope and fear that we have when we're watching the movie is we're hoping that he makes progress and gets to his destination but we're fearing the worst. We're fearing all these obstacles are going to derail him or end up damaging him in some way.

Speaker 10: We don't want our heroes to resolve things easily. We want them to struggle. We want them to fight. We want them to show the strength that we wish we had or that we believe that we have.

Speaker 8: If somebody has a goal and they go after it and they get it, we're like, okay, the story's over.

Speaker 10: Their flaws can be just as important to that process as their strengths, in fact, probably more so because if they're put into something that's playing perfectly to their strengths then it's probably too easy for them. It's their flaws that make it interesting.

Speaker 8: It's so good to have a character that has a flaw because then they make mistakes, which creates more conflict and then they do things out of fear, which allows us to understand them more deeply.

Speaker 11: If your character doesn't have a flaw that they need to overcome, it's going to be difficult, I think, as a storyteller to figure out the journey that they need to go on to overcome that flaw.

Speaker 6: Whatever your idea is, it's probably the thing that's going to come to you first.

Speaker 5: I think the most important part of the process most writers bypass too quickly, which is selecting the idea and understanding what makes a viable idea.

Speaker 12: Every day you should be thinking about story ideas.

Speaker 13: Because there's some ideas you just come up with and throw it away. It's pretty good, but it's not great. But the ones that keep reoccurring are the ones that I feel like, okay, I've got to work on this. There's something here.

Speaker 12: They're out there all over the place. They're in newspaper articles. They're in conversations you hear with people at the coffee shop. They're on the radio.

Speaker 14: If I come up with one idea, that's one idea and it could be a terrible idea. If I come up with 100 ideas or 60 ideas or whatever, I can comb through and find the very best idea.

Speaker 15: And eventually, when you reach that, past the 10 or 12, 15, all the way up to 20, you'll start getting some really original ways because you forced yourself. And so that's what a writer needs to do. You've got to force yourself to go deeper in order to create some original writing.

Speaker 16: I think you know that it's working when you're like, you know, oh, I really want to keep, you know, I want to keep going. I want to know, I personally want to know what happens next.

Speaker 14: So I want to pick it apart first. I want to find all the flaws with whatever ideas the idea is and try to get past those flaws and remove them so that the idea is great.

Speaker 13: This is when you have a good idea. Not when people go, that's great. When they think about it for about three seconds and they go, oh, that's good. That's when you know it's actually connecting with people. So, you know, if you have an idea and you say that to 10 people and they kind of all go, ooh, or they ask you about it again later, you know it's a good idea. The first process is getting the log line down.

Speaker 17: What's a log line for your story? And that's just a really one sentence way to be able to encapsulate your plot. And in a way that's interesting, it makes people want to read your script. Boiling it down to a sentence that you can pitch to somebody, like, what's it about? And, you know, people get it right away.

Speaker 18: If I can, I come up with a log line and I kind of use that as my North Star. That way I remember, OK, it's always about this moment. That may change over time.

Speaker 19: OK, so how do we craft it?

Speaker 6: Every writer has to find their own process.

Speaker 1: The first important thing about your process is recognizing that it's yours, that there is not a right or wrong way. Some people write at night. Some people write in the day. Some people write in short bursts. Some people write in long extended bursts. There's no particular better or worse process. The important thing about a process is it's something that you can do relatively easily. For whatever reason, it works for you. And that means you have to spend time paying attention to yourself, trying different things and seeing which ones work and which ones don't work.

Speaker 6: You have to figure out what works well for you.

Speaker 1: It's always better to try and do some work and see how it goes. You'll never get to the place where you absolutely know that you can write and then you start writing. It's always a question of, let me try this, see what comes out.

Speaker 20: Do not care about doing anything wrong.

Speaker 18: Just spill your guts. There's an idea for something that I want to write. Great. What do I want to say? What's the theme? So I go there first.

Speaker 20: What do you want to write about? Like, what's your idea? And they probably have the idea.

Speaker 21: I usually have an idea or a concept or a story I kind of want to tell. And in writing it, I find the characters. I find the story.

Speaker 22: Give me three words about the story. It could be just three words. Revenge. Another word. So we'll start with those words. Then give me a character. What's the character's job? What does that person do? And what does that character want to do?

Speaker 8: I always like to break down what they want into two parts. Like, they have an emotional need, like to find love or connection or for revenge or power or whatever. And then there's a specific immediate goal that they pursue in the story that satisfies that emotional need.

Speaker 4: It usually just starts with one scene where I'll see that so crystal clear. It's one of my favorite moments of the creation process.

Speaker 23: When I'm starting to write, it's not coming from a starting place. It's coming from a scene I already had. So I write that scene out. The most vivid thing about what I think about this idea, I write that scene out without any... It doesn't have to fit anywhere. I don't know where this is. But I just see these characters doing this at some point.

Speaker 13: I don't want to know the whole story beat by beat by beat because I figure some things out along the way that I would have never thought of. Now, there's other times I've kind of thought the whole thing out almost, you know, in more, you know, bigger beats and bigger sections. But that's usually what I do is I know the first act, how it ends, what happens in the middle and then what happens at the end.

Speaker 6: For some people, they only need to know A, G, M and Z, right? I need to know A through Z. So my outlines are long. And people usually know what the end is. People usually kind of know what the setup is and they kind of know what the resolution is.

Speaker 2: Where's it ending? Where are we going?

Speaker 18: I know whether the ending is going to be happy or sad.

Speaker 2: And sometimes it has a happy ending where the character triumphs, learns to deal with it. And sometimes it has a tragic ending where the character is unable to deal with it.

Speaker 1: Eventually, something will end it. Either the end will be I don't get it or I do get it. And whatever they do that they had never tried before is how it ends. Because if they tried it before, it would end before.

Speaker 11: I think the way you start is so much more important because your end organically comes from your beginning.

Speaker 18: What I want to have them in and then I start them in the exact opposite in the very beginning. So I have two pieces that I need. I know I need an inciting incident, what sets them off on their journey.

Speaker 6: There has to be an inciting incident. Something has to come in and make change, cause problems, cause a goal that needs to be achieved. At the beginning of the story,

Speaker 8: your character may want something that they don't have, right? And they're just kind of living their life, but we get the sense that they want something that they don't have. And then there is this inciting incident or call to adventure where maybe they have the chance to get what they want, but it's like super scary.

Speaker 18: Then I need a midpoint. So kind of twist that happens in the middle. And then I need an all is lost moment. So I have those five points. And then from there, I go ahead and I start making beats. So knowing that I need to get to these five points, then I begin to create a beat sheet. And the beat sheet is literally just, okay, then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then they meet this person, and then this happens.

Speaker 1: Writing is a process of questions. There's a couple of things that I wish I could get tattooed on the inside of people's eyelids that they knew. Think in scenes, and writing is a process of questions. It's not a thing you have to fill out. It's not a form that you have to fit into. Writing is a question, is always a process of having something. It could be just, I want to write a Western, or I want to talk about how love hurts, or I want to talk about how love saved my life. Whatever it is that you start with, then you start to ask questions. How am I going to tell this story? Am I going to tell it through a character who gets it or a story who doesn't get it? Everything is going to be a choice. Every question that you ask, if you write down that question, how am I going to tell this story? Who is the main character? Everything is a question, and those questions are, who's it about? What do they want? Why can't they get it? What do they do about that? Why doesn't that work? How does it end? Those six questions basically will help you write anything.

Speaker 24: You should have already asked the questions, who is my hero? What is the hero's wound? What are they afraid of? What is their visible goal?

Speaker 8: All these questions that you set up in the story is really what holds us to the story. And so, you know, in setting up your character, you don't want to just tell us a bunch of stuff about the character. You know, maybe we see them do something and we go, that's weird, why are they doing that? And we keep wondering that until later we get the answer to that question as we start to fully understand kind of who this person is and why they are the way they are.

Speaker 24: Before you even start writing the words of the scene, you want to step back and as usual, my advice is ask questions.

Speaker 1: So how do you make a good scene work? Every time you ask a question and you get a specific answer, you're moving closer to writing a scene.

Speaker 10: The number one thing I think when it comes to scene work is clarity of goals and stakes. Clarity.

Speaker 8: Stakes are really important for characters because they create suspense and tension around the goal. Right? So if they don't achieve what they want to achieve, something terrible will happen. They will lose something.

Speaker 5: It's interesting how often writers tend to write scenes of characters kind of getting along and kind of having victories. And I usually say that, you know, in a story, the victories generally only come at the very end. If they come anywhere other than the very end, they're usually very short-lived and often overshadowed by the bigger problem that still demands resolution. Because what keeps the drama or the comedy moving is that sense of there's a problem. I'm trying to solve this problem. There's this goal. I'm trying to reach this goal.

Speaker 8: Each scene has to move the story forward and conflict will kind of ebb and flow, but there always has to be tension in the story.

Speaker 24: The next question you want to ask is, what does my character want in this scene? And does that desire, is that desire going to, or do they think it's going to move them closer to their goal or at least overcome an obstacle to achieving their goal? If the answer to that question is no, then the scene should be jettisoned. It's not serving the story because every scene has to move the character closer to their visible goal or force them to face an obstacle or anticipate an obstacle that they didn't know they were going to previously.

Speaker 18: Then I'll go back after a day and I'll start looking at it and I'll go back into each of these scenes and I make sure, like, are there nuances in there? Did I write too much? Is there too many words?

Speaker 4: You know, once you've looked at that scene and you kind of, all right, is the rest of the story starting to fall into place? Do I see what's going to be happening now in this story? And if the answer is yes, keep going.

Speaker 18: To make sure that it makes sense that based upon these beats or these scenes, this character is changing and they're making decisions and there's conflict and who's creating the conflict? And I start coming up with characters that can help to drive this protagonist one way or the other.

Speaker 6: And because every scene is supposed to be cause and effect, what happens in this scene is because of what happened in that scene. Then looking at that beat sheet lets you know, these are the scenes that I need to get to the next beat. And these are the scenes that I need to get to the next beat because you know that the point is I need to get from A to B to C to D to E, you know, whatever. It has to promise lots of conflict.

Speaker 24: The emotion of a movie and the emotion of any scene is primarily going to grow out of the conflict. If it's not the conflict being faced right then, it's the conflict that they are anticipating or occasionally that the audience is anticipating.

Speaker 8: There have to be those human feelings and desires and fears that we can relate to.

Speaker 2: If it's not coming out of here, it's not worth it. It's just imagination, which is good up to a point, but it has to have an emotional truth.

Speaker 11: In its simplest form, a story is the human experience.

Speaker 8: There's something in there that's scaring you and that's good.

Speaker 2: They don't care what your smartness, that's not important. They want the guts because that's what they want. That's what they pay for.

Speaker 3: For the writers to go through the process of exploring, excavating, pulling apart, looking at all the elements of a story that they know better than anybody else.

Speaker 1: Everything that you can do to put a little something down, to create a bit of something for your creativity to hang on to.

Speaker 19: I want people to just jump into it and write a story in 30 minutes and then kind of walk away and go, I can do it.

Speaker 20: And it's like, yeah, you can. Keep your voice. That's the most important thing. It's like, don't lose your voice. Don't lose your instincts, your childlike instincts for telling stories.

Speaker 2: As Gert just said, be brave, be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid. You got story to tell. You got story to tell.