Developing Story Ideas

The Power and Purpose of Storytelling

Michael Rabiger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367242459
• eBook ISBN: 9781317351467
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The vast majority of screenplay and writing books that focus on story development have little to say about the initial concept that inspired the piece. Developing Story Ideas: The Power and Purpose of Storytelling, Third Edition provides writers with ideational tools and resources to generate a wide variety of stories in a broad range of forms. Celebrated filmmaker and author Michael Rabiger demonstrates how to observe situations and themes in the writer's own life experience, and use these as the basis for original storytelling.

This new edition has been updated with chapters on adaptation, improvisation, and cast collaboration's roles in story construction, as well as a companion website featuring further projects, class assignments, instructor resources, and more.

• Gain the practical tools and resources you need to spark your creativity and generate a wide variety of stories in a broad range of forms, including screenplays, documentaries, novels, short stories, and plays
• Through hands-on, step-by-step exercises and group and individual assignments, learn to use situations and themes from your own life experience, dreams, myth, and the news as the basis for character-driven storytelling; harness methods of screenplay format, dialogue, plot structure, and character development that will allow your stories to reach their fullest potential

Part I

Overview

1 Goals and Getting Started

Behind this book’s approach lie two key beliefs. One, that everyone has a writer inside trying to get out; the other, that creativity means first visualizing what you mean to create, then constructing the bridge necessary to get there. This book focuses on the visualizing, conceptual, or ideation stage of storytelling, a foundational stage largely ignored by most writing manuals, which deal mainly with achieving a professional finish. Such inattention to fundamentals leaves the novice like an architect struggling to correct faulty steelwork after the building has gone up.

This book shows you how to tap into your own body of experience, how to present an initial story idea to an audience or readership, and how to make use of their critique as you go on to develop your story. It also provides a revised, expanded set of story analysis tools to help you edit and restructure with confidence and enjoyment.

Because we deal in story fundamentals, this book asks that you write in brief outline form. Long-form work would overload writer and reader alike, and obscure what we seek to understand and develop.

You can wade into the graduated writing assignments in Chapters 13–21 as soon as you like. Write solo in your own way and at your own pace, or use this book in an ad hoc writer’s group or a creative writing class. If you are the group leader or teacher, the book’s website (www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger) will help you plan a syllabus and discuss how best to handle your leadership role.

Sidebars like this contain pertinent advice, instructions, or definitions. Key words are italicized in both the sidebar and the accompanying text. Use the Index to locate whatever else you need.

Because I believe fervently in learning by doing, the assignments embody:

• Self-assessment exercises to help you find your artistic identity
• Ways to prime the creative process so you can eliminate writer’s block
• Enjoyable ways to value and make use of your formative experience
• Ways to use personal and communal resources that writers draw on
• Creative games and graphics
• Short, challenging writing assignments to develop essence, structure, and meaning
• Writing in brief outline form ready for a variety of outcomes (fiction, nonfiction, journalism, film, television, or theatre)
• Ways to give and take constructive critique
• Dramaturgical tools and terminology, often in easy-to-see sidebars
• Ways to work with others instead of compete with them
• Writing samples and accompanying critique to demonstrate creative criticism in action
• Encouragement to expand your favorite outlines into short story, novel, play, or cinema screenplay form

If you are part of a class or writers’ group, your teacher/leader will adapt the work to their own experience and preferences. In most writing communities, practice and critique take place in an atmosphere of shared enthusiasm and friendship, so expect much valuable experience from interacting with your peers.

Playing Roles

Creating stories is intriguing because an author plays different roles, wears different hats, and strikes differing balances between spontaneity and intellect:

• Author. This is the instinctive, intuitive, anarchic persona generating the raw material. In this mode, write down whatever you see, hear, or imagine without a second thought. Allow no limitations or procedures to interfere with your output—simply concentrate on setting down whatever your imagination produces.
• Presenter. Whether you pitch (orally present) a story idea to one person or twenty, you now assume an actor/showman role. Using active-voice, colorful language, take only a few minutes to outline the fundamentals of your plot and characters. From your audience’s body language and facial expressions you will know which parts do or don’t connect. By the end, you will sense where you need to make changes. Stand-up comedians do this nightly.

When you pitch a story, you make a 3–5 minute oral presentation so the listener can envisage the characters, events, and purpose of your intended tale. People make pitches wherever judges must decide whose project merits support.

• Audience. Reactions by an audience to nascent ideas are a vital reality check, so your reactions are vital to anyone else’s idea or story. Listen and watch, closely and respectfully. Later you will articulate whatever feelings, thoughts, and reactions the presentation provoked.
• Critic. Offering constructive feedback means communicating a work’s effect back to its creator. List what you found effective, particularly what sprang alive in your mind’s eye. Respectfully suggest what you think might benefit from change or development. Good critics work from feelings and impressions and avoid intellectualizing. They address what they think the storyteller is trying to accomplish, and avoid talk of how they would handle the story themselves.

All creative artists switch between roles, and playing only one at a time takes practice, self-control, and vigilance. When you are writing in Author mode, the Critic persona will try to break into your consciousness to belittle your efforts. When you are a Presenter receiving critical comments, the Author and Critic want to stand up and howl in your defense instead of listening. This would block you from absorbing valuable audience reactions. However, with practice and self-awareness you can learn to stay in the appropriate role and switch cleanly between them, leaving you with a real sense of achievement.

You and Your Resources: Novice writers often humbly assume that nothing has happened to them worth writing about, and so they emulate the ideas and styles of favorite writers. But this is working from the outside inward and leads to paralysis.

You think you have nothing yet to write about? I disagree. Directly or indirectly, you have experienced victory, defeat, love, hate, being thrown out of Eden, death—everything. Thus, what you lack is not dramatic experience, but knowing how to recognize, value, and shape it.

A key lies in what Herman Melville called “the shock of recognition,” those moments of piercing clarity when a special truth or meaning has risen up to hit you between the eyes. This book shows where to look for these and what to do with them when you find them.

Other people are an important part of your resources. Classmates or other writers in a writers’ group are part of your support system, and you are part of theirs. It is important to get collective as well as individual responses to your work.

With collaboration in mind, the first assignment concerns role-playing and is an excellent icebreaker. One or two rounds of this assignment at each meeting will let each class member’s individuality emerge. Although described in a class setting, it can take place in practically any gathering or group.

Assignment 1–1: Who Am I?

A class member becomes the focus of the class’s attention as he or she impersonates someone especially important (the “model”) whose identity remains undisclosed.

• Step 1: When your turn comes, carry an object associated with your model, or wear an article reminiscent of his or her favorite clothing, and sit in front of the class ready to answer questions.
• Step 2: For perhaps ten minutes your audience poses probing questions to find out about you. Staying in character, you respond to their questions from your sense of your model’s history and in his or her mood and manner. The object is twofold:
  • That you “become” your model and answer truthfully and in character wherever the questioning leads.
  • That the audience finds out all they can and develops ideas about the model’s significance and relationship to you, the actor who reincarnates the model.
• Step 3: After ten to twenty minutes of interaction, the class leader calls “Cut,” and the interviewee now listens to a discussion in which the audience:
  • Collectively reviews their impressions,
  • Guesses at the kind of person portrayed, and
  • Decides the likely relationship between actor and model.

This exercise is excellent for group bonding, and can reveal unexpected depths in participants, no matter how inexperienced. One performance in a workshop I gave in Norway was electrifying: Svein, a man of around thirty, played a quiet, reticent woman whose life contained a traumatic secret. When “she” referred to “my son” we guessed he was playing his late mother, and the room seemed to fill with the gravity and sadness of her ghostly presence. Obliquely, his mother’s life-tragedy emerged: during Norway’s occupation in World War II, when Svein’s mother was a young single woman, she had fallen in love with a German officer. He was killed or otherwise lost to her, and afterward she was cruelly shunned as a collaborator. The experience left her scarred and stigmatized, and (as I privately guessed) her son too.

Few “Who Am I” exercises reach this haunting degree of authenticity, but most are intense and keep the class rapt. Usually a class can handle only one or two performances per meeting.

Ideation and Originality

Most writers agree that the single prerequisite to becoming a writer is to keep writing, no matter what. Talent is a myth in which few working writers believe. They will tell you that most ideas are initially banal and similar, and that one has to work incrementally and patiently toward originality. It’s not about going where no man hath trod, but rather about working tenaciously at realizing all aspects of an idea’s potential. Because so little is evident at the outset, many beginners hurry forward to write their “finished” version, thinking that problems will vanish during completion. They do vanish—but only from sight.

Ideation should include finding and developing all the events and ideas that underpin a creative endeavor. Like a building’s foundation, a good story idea must be singularly appropriate for what it must support.

To test how far any idea has evolved, pitch it to anyone who’ll listen. From the teller-and-audience experience, you will sense the next round of necessary improvements. Keep pushing: tenacity never goes unrewarded.

Writing in Outline Form

Nearly everything you write for this book’s assignments will be in scene-outline form, which is good for everyone. By concentrating on action and plot details, and leaving dialogue and mood-setting elements for a later stage, ideas stay compact, quick to read, and easy to modify. Outlines also make a great foundation for developing pitches.

As you learn ever more about the potential of your story idea, an outline is easily changed, and your improvements show up quickly and clearly. When several audiences find the whole of your outline uniformly promising and persuasive, you can turn to expanding it into a short story, novel, play, film—whatever narrative form you have in mind.

Identifying with the Main Character

Many beginners identify wholly with their protagonist, who just happens to share their age, gender, background, and outlook. This is dangerous because the writer is enclosed by the thoughts, feelings, and outlook of their protagonist and lacks critical distance. Inevitably, audiences see flaws in their work that the author cannot, and the author may take criticism as a personal attack.

How, then, to create a range of believable characters, people unlike yourself, when in life we never wholly enter another person’s reality? Whether you are a friend, relative, or bystander, you often sense other people’s interior feelings and motivations. To paraphrase the acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski, “There is no interior human state without its exterior manifestation.”² The actor’s job, and the writer’s too, is to discover those particular actions that open windows on a person’s heart and mind. Your job is to provide what encourages us to interpret what your characters feel and want, and to make us intuit their thoughts and motives. By creating characters we see more through their actions than their words, you endow them with truly revealing circumstances and behavior. Actions, they say, speak louder than words.

Jump-Starting the Imagination

Imagination, like an old car, does not work well from a cold start. It prefers jump-starting from examples and associations. This book’s practical assignments will show how naturally writing flows when...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• This Book’s Goals
• Note
• Part I Overview
• Part II The Roots of Invention
• Part III Craft and Concepts of Drama
• Part IV Writing Assignments
• Part V Creating Collaboratively
• Part VI Developing as a Writer
• Index