Story Development
Photo by Karla Hernandezon Unsplash
(NOTE: I’m publishing this 2 minutes after midnight. This post is really for Jan 7.)
Gotta admit, it’s been damn tough to string coherent sentences together since last night’s attempted coup. Somehow I was able to muster up a bit of focus and work on my new pilot about a loner teenager who reluctantly starts a punk band to save his dad from dying. I’ve got a long way to go, but I’m chipping away at it everyday.
I plan on spending January/February developing the story, creating character sketches, and writing an outline - all in that order. I’ll spend about 2 weeks developing the story itself, addressing it from a variety of angles and POV. Then I’ll send about 2 weeks creating character sketches and crafting their individual stories. Lastly I’ll spend about 1 to 2 weeks on the outline. If I really focus on story and character development, the outline should be rather straightforward.
Going back to story development, here’s what I’ve done so far:
Sketched an overview of the protagonist by looking at the type of character this person is, what’s difficult about his life/what are his obstacles, what he does about the challenges, and what’s at stake. I wrote about 10 pages of material/notes for this part of the process.
Focused on the emotions that will anchor the story by connecting the protagonist’s actions with how this makes him or other character feel, which in turn informs his/their actions. Action leads to an emotion leads to an action leads to an emotion, etc. I wrote about 5 pages of notes that really give a sense of how the story could be experienced from an emotional perspective.
Dove into the protagonist’s character flaw and really thought about and wrote the flaw that the protagonist tries to keep hidden and what happens if/when that flaw gets exposed.
Synthesized the story into a premise/logline. I wrote a few bloglines for what I think this story is becoming. I always consider the logline a work in progress until I’m done with the script.
Expanded the world of the story by creating bloglines for each character. Basically I created about five loglines - one for each character that is connected to the protagonist. It forced me to look at my story concept from various points of view and think about what each character’s story is, what their arc could be in relation to the protagonist’s story and development.
Today I focused on the important complications that might occur in the pilot for the protagonist and the other characters. Like character loglines, this really helps me form the story concept into a fuller, more expansive world.
I still have a few more tasks/aspects I want to address before I write a complete story document detailing exactly what this story is, who the main character is, what they want, why the want it, who’s in their way, who will help, etc.
Today’s Accomplishments
Wrote about 10 pages of notes for new pilot examine potential complications that could be using the pilot.
Research managers for DADLY query campaign.
Wrote and published this blog post.
Tomorrow’s Tasks
Focus on synopsizing the story of my new pilot.
Write at least 3 shitty pages of my novella - gotta get back on track with this.
Research best-fit managers to query DADLY.
Write and post a blog post.
