5 Essential Storytelling Rules I Just Made Up

I'm getting this point out of the way first because despite having tickled it in other videos I just couldn't resist it's too darn important to me the properties of people and the properties of character have almost nothing to do with each other so here's a curveball I don't like sorkin's dialogue style at all the thing he's most known for I find is excessive quipping annoying and hard to believe yet this quote of his basically opened up my third fourth and fifth eyes as a writer so he must be forgiven in my Avatar video I explained

why I didn't have a problem with simple characters because the essence of a character was never to mimic the complexity of a human being characters are apparitions they are not fully fledged people and no matter how hard you try to make them so you will fail and thank God because it wouldn't work for the diversity of our lived experience is vast and jumbled we grow and change sure but we don't have perfectly paced 3x character arcs and there is just so much happening let me show you what I mean let's say I decide to take

my life and look at it through the lens of pick a theme loneliness and so I pick out all the moments in which loneliness is relevant and I arrange them into a chronological list of scenes divided into three acts and I write a movie about the theme of loneliness and I win the Oscar and I'm in the bathroom doing coke with Leo and he's like hey local congrats on the Oscar but I'm kind of confused and I'm like what for Leo and he's like well you said this was a movie about your life but your

family was only in it for a few minutes you skipped over most of your childhood and the majority of scenes were just you getting rejected by women in Boots that's not a complete picture of you I'm sorry man I just don't get it I'm like it's okay Leo let me break it down for you look basically characters are survival kits if you want to go out into the Wilderness of creativity being conquer some grand theme or concept you can't be hauling around every single one of your possessions you bring what's necessary you leave the rest

at home even those comfy slippers even that cool little doodad from the pawn shop feed him to the pig maximize your efficiency I had a mentor in high school who made me cut my scripts in half and then in half again it annoyed the out of me at the time but it was one of the most important lessons I ever learned about writing I would think to myself if I keep cutting off the fluff I'll never have a full feature film script I'll just keep ending up with short films and his voice would appear in

my head and remind me that a 20-page script where every character seen in line matters is vastly superior to a script that uses extraneous character details and irrelevant subplots to buff out its screen time under the guise of being more three-dimensional depth is not good for its own sake figure out which parts of your character's backstories are relevant to the story and burn the rest and might I add that not only are characters not real people their world is not the real world that we live in when you're trying to figure out if a plot

beat in your story Works don't ask yourself is this plausible or is this realistic ask yourself instead is this right does this make sense given what I've established about my world and the characters with whom I've populated it is this character's fate derived from random chaos that I as a writer have imposed upon them or is it a result of their own choices and the choices of their fellow characters Community doing here probably weird just kidding I don't have a problem with you guys but that's not to say I won't pick apart your methods respectfully

I know most you are like 14. sometimes I get really engrossed in an online community but I don't make my presence known in any way I just silently observe it like a caveman investigating a brush fire at some point I realized that my Instagram explore page was 99 pastel squares and Tumblr screenshots all hell bent on suffocating me with the term OC said many an aspiring writer everyone meet my character here is a complete description of their personality their icks their quirks their Hobbies their likes their dating habits and what you want to know how

they fit into the greater thematical of the story oh well the thing about that obviously I know some people just like to design characters and furnish them with traits and not thrust them into a greater story that's fine but many do and I think the online writing Community has failed to push those people in the right direction the discourse they're forced to participate in is basically oh my God I'm doing enemies to lovers here's a list of nine thousand times do you know what your story is about give me a log line what do you

mean you haven't thought of a plot yet what exactly do you think a plot is a pinball machine you can drop your fully formed characters into look at me look into my weary writer eyes do you want to make cool you certainly don't have to want that but if you do if you want to engineer the next hit series it's my opinion that you need to completely reevaluate the relationship between your characters and your plot so here's my writing process if it doesn't work for you that's cool there are many ways to arrive at one's

destination and speaking from experience the last thing I want anybody to do is take a stranger's writing advice as Divine Law but I'm going to share it on the off chance that you've been looking for a fresh perspective so step one what is your story about a premise a situation call it what you will in one sentence what are you writing about figure that out and then you move into step two what characters naturally belong in this situation I like to take all the possible perspectives one could have on the situation and boil each opinion

down to a single character and step 3 Define their relationships it's surprisingly easy if you have seven characters they might have varying degrees of trust in one another which characters would become friends given their perspectives which ones would become enemies wait enemies that's conflict now you have step four plot you have seven characters each with a unique angle on the situation that situation could be anything from a broken home to an Alien War but it doesn't matter because whatever it is your characters were custom made for it because you decided on the premise first around

this time you might find the protagonist emerging and you might not it's okay to not have a clear-cut protagonist all that matters is that you have relevant characters with relevant perspectives and since they themselves are so invested in the story they're gonna start making decisions look at them go they're fashioning up they're backstabbing wow those two are you'll notice that I have not mentioned my character's personalities yet that's because I think personalities usually develop as a result of the core motivations your personality think about what excites you what worries you is that just decoration no

it's tied to your soul it's tied to your core motivation in life and you already got core motivations worked out in step two baby so at least in my experience personality kind of just happens but bottom line if I fully develop a character and get attached before I even know how that character slots into the bigger picture it throws my writing process into complete chaos so take what you will from all that one is even more me specific than the last one it's a principle I've stood by through thick and thin and I don't expect

many people to agree with it but here it is anyway the horror genre is unique because it's almost always gauged by how the viewer feels it's a visceral type of entertainment I go into a horror movie wanting to feel the neurochemical sensation of fear I pay for that experience and I gauge how worthwhile it was based on how strong my physical and emotional response was and that logic can be applied all across the board drama did it make me cry action was I on the edge of my seat by all means chase that feeling of

immersion let your feelings be your Guiding Light so long as you don't go throwing around the O word what concerns me though is writing advice to the tune of how to make the audience cry it strikes me as kind of manipulative I just don't like when people talk about art that way I can't really put my finger on why but even stuff like make your character more relatable so people care it just feels really backwards to me I found so much more catharsis in focusing on the characters emotions letting them go on their Journeys and

not worrying about up the audience's expectations I can't let a force from Beyond the fourth wall influence my story it would almost feel like corruption but at the same time I want my art to be loved and if it weren't for my favorite stories moving me so deeply I'd have no motivation to write at all so there's that I think one of the Hallmarks of an insecure writer is their reluctance to let the dialogue do any work a lot of viewers and writers draw a line between talking and doing because obviously they're different one involves

saying things with your mouth hole the other one involves big action set pieces duh but really do you know what a legal trial is it's a bunch of humans standing in a room together saying words and depending on what words are said the fate of another human is decided sometimes that human is locked in a cage forever sometimes that human is killed but communication is so much more than an abstract plane we use to manage physical events it's transformative through the act of speaking we can Achieve Personal progress a conversation can be an emotional Journey

on the other side of which both parties emerge different language is the most advanced tool we have at our disposal and it's breadth as a medium of expression is unparalleled if a character is happy there are near infinite ways they could express their happiness their word choice and delivery their self-perception their perception of others all tell us specifics about them and if any line in your script could be said by any character well then you're probably not using the medium of verbal communication as effectively as you could be a conversation can be the climax of

a story a single word can hold immense narrative weight in the right context not to mention fully fleshed out stories that consist solely of people talking in rooms yeah welcome to narrative there's a lot of that and this brings me back to number three you can't deprive your audience of necessary conversations because you're worried too much talking would bore them it certainly might but that's their problem not yours if two characters are in a room together give them a meaningful interaction and if you can't think of anything they might say you might want to reevaluate

your cast and how well they serve the theme you can use dialogue as a litmus test to see how necessary a character really is and you can use it to Define existing physical events in the story and give them additional context show don't tell is for fifth grade book reports I am tired of being told by writing gurus that dialogue should only be used when absolutely necessary and don't sleep on the raw societal power words can have either at the ancient site of Opus the army of Alexander the Great turned on him and he won

them all back with tears in the rise by climbing onto a rock and saying the perfect combination of words words have shaped the course of history words have seated themselves so deeply in the collective consciousness of the human race that we Proclaim them to be the Commandments of God so do me a favor and think long and hard before you tell writer that their script is too wordy maybe it's you anyways earlier I mentioned that once you get your characters situated they might just start going at it and they might start doing things that you

didn't have in mind when you initially conceived your story idea there may be an urge to try and reach into the story to correct their courses back to the way you want it maybe a character you quite liked has become much darker and more unhealthy than you imagine maybe even a protagonist it's your story of course you can choose to strike your characters down with bolts of lightning or nudge them along in whatever way you see fit but just this once humor me and do none of that sit back with a cocktail hands 100 off

and see what paths your characters take you might find that without your protection one dies much sooner than expected you might find that a side character now free from your hierarchy of importance grows into a prominent main player and steals the show I've seen all these things happen and I genuinely believe that stories do write themselves sometimes oh but don't literally type anything yet yeah sorry I forgot to mention that all this is the outline phase sticky notes hundreds of sticky notes make a timeline keep things moving until that organic story emerges then crystallize it

into a draft I don't believe in right drunk edits sober put some actual thought into it get it right your first draft doesn't need to be depressing sludge and writing is so much more than scripting don't put yourself down for not pumping out page after page after page that time will come and finally opening up that blank document with a clear head and a plan is to me incalculably more satisfying than endlessly Drafting and redrafting until you go insane so that's my piece that's all five of my things I trust that you can tell when

I'm being hyperbolic but I do sincerely hope that you gain something of value from my rants or at least enjoyed them and then Leo's like listen man I'm just an actor wait wait no stop stop I have to say a thing I did not think the Avatar video would pop off in the way that it did I was about ready to just abandon the YouTube thing forever because it does take a long time to make those videos and anybody who's attempted it could agree with that but I just remember sitting there in bed that night

and watching all these positive comments come in and not being able to sleep because it was just making me so happy to see the reception that my video was getting so I just wanted to say thank you to everybody who watched that who liked who subscribed I had 16 Subs before I put that out and now I'm pushing 7 000 I believe so this has been a change and now I can't stop thinking of things to make videos about seeing avatar on Saturday and that'll be the next thing I talk about on this channel but

I don't just want to put out reviews quickly as I can I'm gonna let it simmer I want to think of something new to say but until then thanks for showing up and happy holidays [Music] foreign