The 8 Crucial Pillars of Story (Storytelling 101)

in this video I'm going to walk you through storytelling just like what is storytelling now everything I'm going to cover in this video is going to be useful for pretty much any kind of Storyteller right here at the nerdy novelist my focus is primarily on AI writers and a lot of AI Writers come to AI writing not knowing very much about storytelling in general they're just starting out and they need to learn and the thing is even if you're using AI to write you absolutely need to understand basic storytelling and whether you're writing novels screenplays

video game scripts the comic books anything that tells a story everything I'm going to cover today will help you with that and I highly recommend you stick to the end because every single piece of this is absolutely essential so to start off there are seven pillars of Storytelling so to start off there are eight pillars of Storytelling some people have more some people have less but I think it's fairly safe to say that each one of these plays an important role in the you know telling telling a good story overall the eight pillars are concept

plot character setting conflict theme your individual scenes and then your voice we're going to run through each of these really briefly here in this video so let's start with Concept my favorite idea of concept comes from Blake Snider's log line which you can read about in his phenomenal book save the cat I highly recommend anybody who wants to get into storytelling look up that book and read it but the log line is essentially you want to be able to boil your story down to something very simple which is what he calls the log line which

is someone usually your protagonist wants something which is the goal of the story and goes after it against Great odds and or obstacles which can be the antagonist or the main conflict that's the essence of a log line if you cannot boil your story down to that Core Essence then you probably need to start over you need to find a way to make it work with that Core Essence and then you have a good story now I will say a lot of people say the idea is not really that important right because in the hands

of a skilled writer any idea can work there's actually a great story about Jim Butcher author of the dren files where he was challenged on this idea he said any author can make any idea worked the idea can be anything it can be dumb but in the hands of a skilled author it can be made right and he was challenged on this and the person challenged him to say write a story about the Roman legion meets Pokemon which first of all I don't think that's actually that bad of an idea but he took that to

heart and actually created a series called the Codex aera series I believe that's what it's called and that series went on to be a bestseller for him and so ideas can come from anywhere and even though in the age of AI I do think ideas are going to be more important as we go along I will agree that execution is more important but that said you do want to be able to boil down your story to the core concept otherwise you're not going to see a lot of success all right let's move on to the

plot the plot is basically the what most people think about when they think about storytelling it's like what actually happens and I usually like to start with plot it's one of the easiest to learn because there are specific structures that people use and this is basically you know your character goes on an adventure right and and that's that's why I've got the image here of Mr Bilbo the hero goes on an adventure and then comes back changed that's the Core Essence of a plot something happens to disturb the Ordinary World of character now there are

a ton of different story structures but the one that is pretty much Universal in most stories is the threea structure this is just a really quick overview of the threea structure I'm not going to go through each of the points you see here but what happens with 3x structure is you basically have a rise and fall of action and it kind of escalates and then goes down and then escalates and then goes down and gets the your tension and suspense and everything gets higher and higher and higher until it climaxes and then it falls off

and and moves on from there act one is typically the act where we get to know all of the characters where we get to kind of understand the situation and it usually ends with something called the inciting incident which is that big thing that happens that brings the character onto the adventure and thrusts them into the action of SE of act two and act one usually takes place in about the first 25% of the story act two is the largest act and it's usually kind of a roller coaster of events things that happen to the

protect Agonist that get in the way of them achieving their goal and they try and they fail and they try and they fail and it's just a lot of back and forth from that and throughout the course of that they have to change a little bit so that they are no longer who they were at the beginning but by the end of act two they are a changed person usually for the better act three begins with the climax of the whole story which is where everything comes to a head and the hero either wins or

loses depending on the type of plot you're tell Ing and then there's something called the resolution that follows after that where everything's all the loose ends are kind of tied up often the hero kind of goes back to their uh their Ordinary World the place where they're kind of from and you can get a real sense of the change that has happened to them over the course of the story that is the basics of plot now there are a lot of different plot structures and I recommend looking these up they're all very similar in a

lot of ways but some to look at our save the cat beat sheet I've already mentioned save the cat it's a great book to read the hero's journey is another one the 24 chapter novel outline is one that I talk about a lot on this channel because it works really well with AI and follows the 3x structure very well very closely and then Dan Harmon's Story Circle is another one it's kind of an adaptation of the hero's journey the seven-point structure is another one that's also really good especially if you are a pancer or someone

who writes for by the seat of their pants rather than creating outlines ahead of time the seveno story structure might be one you want to look into because even if you right by the seat of your pants you still need to actually have structure you just don't have to plot it out ahead of time but you're going to need it eventually all right that brings us to character okay so character is is another and arguably more important than the plot depending on who you ask I see it as equally important as the plot i' I'd

say both you kind of need to have a good plot and good character to make it work but a character is really we're going to talk about it there's really three different types of character to be aware of the first is a positive Arc so you'll hear a lot of this stuff in storytelling about this idea of a character Arc so what is a character Arc well put simply it is a change that happens to your character so if you look at them at the beginning of your story and you look at them at the

end of their story they will be different by the end of the story that is a character Arc a positive Arc is the most common type of character Arc where at the beginning of the story the character has something that they kind of need to learn something they're not so good at flaw that they have and then by the end they have overcome that flaw and they are a better person so think Luke Skywalker Harry Potter basically all of the heroes of your all of your favorite Disney movies everything most stories are positive character arcs

but you do have some outliers for instance you can have negative character arcs which is the opposite obviously of a positive character Arc so some good examples of this are Walter White from Breaking Bad Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequels and several others you might also have villains inside your story that go through a kind of negative character Arc and while these stories are less common they can often be some of the most powerful uh stories out there when handled well but that's not the only thing you do also have flat character arcs now

didn't I say that character arcs are super important yes they are but there are instances of characters that have flat story arcs where they don't change For Better or Worse some good examples of this are James Bond Sherlock Holmes a lot of characters in Thrillers where each story they're kind of just the same person but there's a caveat to these I would argue that every story still needs to have an arc every story needs to have change that happens when you have a flat character Arc like this that doesn't mean that you don't have change

all it means is that instead of the main character being the one that arcs everyone else around them arcs so for instance in the first season of Ted lasso Ted lasso in the first season is a flat character they gave him an arc in later Seasons but in the first season he's a flat character he's this happy go-lucky super positive attitude coach who comes in and he doesn't really change over the course of the season but everybody else does because they are affected by the way he is paana is another good example of this I

know most people haven't seen the movie paana but you probably understand what I mean when I say paulana someone who's like super positive it's basically what Ted lasso is and she doesn't change but because of her influence everybody around them changes and that's the idea of a positive Arc Jack Reacher doesn't really change too much but everywhere he goes stuff happens right that's the idea behind a flat character Arc all right let's move on to setting so of course I had to bring in a map here of The Lord of the Rings one of the

most famous settings ever but setting isn't just for fantasy and science fiction certainly World building is a important thing in fantasy and science fiction to craft the setting but setting can be a lot more than that it can be you know real world settings and often if you write like historical fiction or something like that you have to do a lot of research into your settings and even if you're writing contemporary you need to understand the settings where your characters are going to be perhaps more so in contemporary because you might have readers that have

been there and know the places that you're talking about your setting plays an important role in the story because it shapes who the characters are to certain extent and a lot of people will actually say start with the setting because a character who grew up in 14th century France is going to act a lot differently than contemporary Southern America you see what I'm saying so make make sure you have your setting dialed in because it's going to affect the plot it's going to affect the characters quite dramatically additionally one piece of good advice that I've

always heard is that you should never have more than one scene in the exact same setting you can maybe have one scene in the same setting but the circumstances of the setting need to be different if you had one during day at daytime then the next scene should be nighttime and raining and that sort of thing this isn't this isn't universally true for instance the film 12 Angry Men takes place in one room the entire time but the mood of the room does shift a little bit and that's something that you want to keep in

mind with setting is that you want to consider the mood because that will affect your scene next up we have the concept of theme now theme is generally just like what is the message you are trying to get across to the reader what is the takeaway the change much like the character Arc that a character has what is the arc that you want the reader to have how do you want the them to be changed by the end of the book now you have to be careful with this because very often with theme it comes

across as a little bit preachy which is not the effect that you want to have because it will turn off the reader so if there's something that you really want to get across to the reader here's what you have to do you have to have multiple characters representing different sides and to do this you need to do it well you need to do your research you need to know how to argue the opposite of what you want to get across just as well as you could argue your own views on the subject because to do

anything less will make it seem like you're being preachy now don't get me wrong I'm not saying that you need to argue in favor of something you disagree with but I am saying that in order to do the job properly it needs to be explored from every angle you need to have different characters representing different viewpoints and then from that you're able to actually through the story come to a conclusion which will be a lot more powerful for the reader all right next up we have conflict now conflict I almost hesitated to put this in

because it's almost more of a thing that ties everything else together your setting should generate conflict your character should have conflict external and internal conflicts your plot especially should be driven by conflict every scene should have some kind of conflict if you do not have conflict then you do not have a good story people are not going to want to read it that's the entire point of Storytelling so because that is so important I'm giving it its own category here but keep in mind conflict is something you can talk about with every single one of

these pillars of Storytelling because it it belongs with each of them you do not have a story without conflict you have to have something going on and conflict can be all kinds of different types of conflict it could be personto person it could be person versus nature it can be person versus self all kinds of different things uh that it could be so just keep that in mind conflict super important then you have your scenes individual scenes and you can have some scenes that are positive some that are negative every scene must serve a purpose

you don't just a scene is not something that you just place in there to show what happened okay because for instance you're not actually going to show everything that happened unless you have a good reason to most people do not show their characters like going to the bathroom or their morning routine or every meal that they atat throughout the day because those are not important you want to focus only on scenes that are important and there is a little bit of an underlying structure to every single scene most importantly you want to make sure there

is conflict in the scene second you want to make sure something changes from the beginning of the scene to the end of the scene much like a story in itself in fact a scene is much like a microcosm of the overall story overall so by the beginning of the scene to the end of the scene you want to have some kind of change whether it's a positive change or a negative change something in the emotion needs to have changed and by the way if you're enjoying everything I'm talking about so far I wanted to let

you know that I have opened up my membership story hacker gold available for anyone who wants to sign up when you sign up you get a 14-day free trial plus a lot of freebies all of which you can just have immediately the most important of which I believe is a fine-tune model that will actually let you take air written text that is really like flowery and over the top and actually condense it into something that sounds a lot more natural and human sounding so if that's interesting to you definitely go check out my membership it's

available in the link below and I'll see you there but let's move on and talk about voice speaking of voice your voice is something that is often overhyped for uh many author authors a lot of people think oh you just have to find your voice and all of these things and it's this ethereal concept that doesn't really make a lot of sense to a lot of people certainly there are genres where having a distinctive style of voice is important certain literary genres and often comedic style genres think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy those require a

kind of special voice but for most commercial fiction whether you're writing mystery thriller romance or fantasy science fiction your voice is not that important your voice is instead a something a mechanism for character every character should kind of have their own voice they should sound differently they should sound distinct so that is really what we mean when we're talking about voices like what does the character sound like and if you're getting into their thoughts like do they think differently from others or do they all sound the same because they were all just written by the

same person it's one of the great struggles of being a writer is figure figuring out how to make every character sound distinct because you the author have a tendency to write everything in the same way because it's you right but you don't want to be just you you don't want you want every character to sound unique and I actually Envision a future where we'll be able to have fine-tune models that are trained on a specific character type so that every time you use that fine-tune model the character sounds a little bit different and you can

actually have a real distinction between characters like that I think that's going to be super cool coming into the future and that is why I'm giving away one of my fine tune models that I actually use in my membership so again go check that up if if you want there are however a couple of things that people talk about a lot to improve your voice because even if you aren't trying to do like a comedic novel like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or the great literary novel there are some ways to to do voice the

wrong way and these are particularly prevalent for newer writers so the most important one and probably the one that is talked about the most is called show don't tell and it's this concept that's really difficult for newer writers to get but once you've been writing long enough you'll finally at some point it'll click and it becomes much easier to identify moments when you are telling and you should be showing a simple example of this is instead of saying Jon was tired you say John took off his glasses rubbed his eyes and let out a deep

sigh doesn't that don't you see how that is you're actually showing him tired you're not telling the audience that they're that the JN is tired if you tell the audience that Jon is tired they have to take you at your word but if you show them by like taking off the glasses and sighing and rubbing his eyes and looking at his claw his watch and all of these things all of those things will show the audience and they don't need to take you at their word they can see it they they understand what it is

that's the basics behind show don't tell and it's one of the easiest Hallmarks of a a novice writer is that they are uh telling more than they should be showing so that is the basics of voice and That Just About Does it for storytelling 101 I hope this was useful and I know this was not so much about AI but if you want to see more videos like this one actually get into the principles of Storytelling I would really love to to know let me know in the comments because I would really love to make

more videos like this and Diving deeper into each of these Concepts so if that sounds good to you let me know I'll see you in the next video