Quantum Storytelling

Story –> Acts –> Sequences (A.K.A. Stages) –> Scenes –> Moments, for lack of a better word.

What is a moment? You know the writing is good when the writer doesn’t need a character to say anything, the actor can just do it through a look. You can write a look. And that would be a moment. Something inside of a scene, we’re talking the atomic structure of a scene. A smirk, a glance, a brief gimpse of action or description. A small movement that makes up the larger scene.

When I first begin developing a story, I’m starting at the highest level, the story level. “He goes here and does this, and then this happens.” This is the high level summary. Then I usually frame out the three acts, but I don’t pay particular attention to the 3-act structure because it’s so big and vague that it’s really not important til later on when you’ve got more of your story developed and can see whether the overall thing breathes in larger arcs the way it should.

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“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

-Henry Ford

One thing I love about being a media whore in my glutton of movie-watching, TV-watching, and game-playing is that I often find frames of reference for my own work. More often than not, examples I find of themes, characters, or settings I like are not useful to me because I want to copy their positive traits, but more because I want to avoid their negative ones.

It all goes back to Differentiate Or Die for me. Not just from a marketing standpoint, but a creative one as well. You do well to establish your creative properties not by figuring out how similar they should be to others in the same genre, but by figuring out how yours is going to be different.

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