Fix Your Internal Creative Marriage
For real creativity, get your conscious mind and your subconscious mind to work with each other, not against each other. Sonnet 116 Shakespeare (or perhaps [...]
Four Spheres of Conflict
A tool for giving your characters a range of obstacles to overcome, which gives your story more dramatic energy and your characters more depth. To [...]
Three Key Questions
Three key questions can help you shape your story, giving it substance, shape and a satisfying ending. Three Flavours of Narrative Narrative is shaped by one [...]
Weak Villain, Weak Hero
Weak villains make for weak heroes. That applies to the argument your story is telling as well. Powerful stories need powerful counterforces, across all arenas. Make your story earn [...]
The ‘So…, But…’ Chain
A simple, incisive, scalable test of your story logic. Causality and Meaning Story logic is crucial to understanding character. Story logic is built on causality [...]
Maintain the Conflidiction
Conflict is often said to be the essence of drama. But unresolved conflict lasts longer. Don’t Burn all your Fuel at Once Open conflict burns [...]
Duelling Aphorisms and Double-Sided Questions
How to design subplots that actively explore a story’s philosophical question. The Second Act Challenge Writing the second act of a story is often the writer’s biggest [...]
Don’t Explain, Reveal
Don’t explain your story, reveal it and let the audience work things out for themselves. Aleksey Popogrebiskiy’s 2010 film, “How I Ended This Summer”, opens with [...]
The Anatomy of a Beat
A detailed analysis of what happens inside a single, discrete moment, and how we understand it from outside. Having originally trained as an actor, [...]
