Quantum Storytelling

When I first started writing, everything I saw around me looked like a roadblock to just getting the thing done.

One of the biggest roadblocks was that I didn’t just want to write randomly and “follow the muse” so to speak. I didn’t want write stories that only I would enjoy, and others would find difficult to engage or understand.

I’ve always felt that storytelling is a very social form of creativity in that your audience needs to buy into your story in order to accept it, and if they can’t buy into it, then they won’t be buying, period.

A few of the Hollywood storytelling formulas over the last few years have tried to engineer this buy-in of the audience through the use of concepts like mythic structure.

The methods are useful in some areas and less so in others. So I went on a quest, without fully realizing what I was questing for. Eventually, I realized that I was looking for the perfect story structure.

As I tried out various forms of structure and made a few shallow attempts at my own, it became clearer that I wasn’t so much looking for a prescription of how a story should be told every time, but that in fact I was actually looking for the best possible workflow that would allow me to tell my stories without having to think so hard about organization.

I eventually discovered that through my 10-sequence (stages, if you will) structure organized around the commercial-break dramatic payoffs of television — which I feel in their 12 minute build-up can be applied to any form of drama, including film and novels.

I was pulling from Vogler, and Siegel’s 9-Act, and Jeff Kitchen, and probably unknown to me dozens of other storytellers or “story fixers” behind the scenes in Hollywood over the past few decades.

But the point here is not to talk about my structure because that’s over and done with, and I’ve talked about it here so many times before.

The point here is that for me, structure was a roadblock among other roadblocks. It may have been my biggest one. What’s yours? Story isn’t something I feel can just be pooped out via the written word and massaged at some later point through the technical editing of the words and grammar to be made something special which will thrill people, excite them, move them, or yes, perhaps if I could be so idealistically lucky, make them cry.

There’s more to it than that, and to me it’s a little thing that has nothing to do with draft writing. Its name is Story Development, and I felt when I started and still now feel that it is one of the most important aspects of a story’s creation above and beyond the writing itself.

That said, if you can somehow manage to tackle the story development demon, you will find yourself with nothing else left to do except write.

There comes a point where hammering on your characters, plot, and themes reaches a point of diminishing returns, and you really don’t know how the product will come out until you just plunk your butt in the chair and write.

Some would suggest this sooner rather than later. I tend to go against the grain, the self-ascribed contrarian that I am, and lean towards the side of exhausting story development prior to writing. It’s like pre-production for movies and video games. If you want to be happy with your story, you should know what you’re doing before you write it.

But even I must admit there comes a time to Just Write, and it is after you can push the story development no further — at least not alone. And to be able to communicate that story to others, it has to be in a form they can read it. Which means you just have to write it. Blah blah, you can probably see where this is going.

I’m definitely in a deep writing phase right now, which is where I’m guessing I’ll find myself when the last legs of story development have fallen off due to over-use.

The point here is, for one, an explanation of why posts have been less frequent here at Quantum Storytelling. I have more to post about when I’m developing a story, less to post about when there’s nothing left to do but write.

But I also thought I could lend some words of encouragement. On the road to writing, there are many blocks. Some of them are legit, some of them not. If you can tell the difference between the legit and illegit ones, you will have a better idea of what you need to do to get your story in a good enough state to be written. Once you’ve done that, the only thing left to do is write.

Good luck removing your roadblocks, and I’ll see you on the other side.