Take into consideration what I wrote in the first part of this series before you begin to outline your story.
Before you begin, learn as much as you can about your protagonist and the people in your world. Know the tone of your show. Know, if there are any, the themes you want to convey.
Know that if you want to write something big, dumb, and loud. Know everything there is to know about your story, even things that won’t make it to the page.
Even if your world isn’t real, the more information you have, the more complete and real-looking it appears.
The characters’ depth and ability to connect with the audience will be enhanced by subtle details that inform them. You may be naturally drawn to characters, but the more effort you put into them, the more you’ll get out of them in the end.
So when you feel like you know an adequate number of about your reality, your characters, and the show
you need to make, you can start the illustrating system. Personally, I go about it by putting together a Word document, dividing the story into three acts with headings, and writing a brief paragraph to describe each scene. For me, this is what works.
Planning out the major story beats in advance is also helpful to me. To get a sense of where you’re going, you start with the breaks for the first and second acts, the middle, and the climax of the third act, and then fill in the rest. Once you have everything written down, you can look at the story to see if it all makes sense.
If you don’t give yourself a break and get too involved in a story, you may lose sight of flaws in the plot and other obvious issues.
When I take a few days off from it, I find that it helps a lot to look at it from a different perspective. If you don’t give yourself a break and get too involved in a story, you may lose sight of flaws in the plot and other obvious issues.
Take your time unless you have an unbelievable deadline. After creating your outline, thoroughly examine it.
It’s worth checking out South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s storytelling and structure system, which is based on the words “therefore” and “but.” As I mentioned in previous sections, you want to ensure that the story has clear stakes, that the protagonist is driving the action, that something stands in their way, and that there is a satisfying conclusion.
