#this could help you to plan better your story

“THE BASICS OF STORY PLANNING” is based in a screenwriting seminar by Dany Campo, A writer of cinema and advertising, analyst of scripts for movie producers and also independent producers and finally a scriptwriting teacher in various colleges and on his Youtube channel, and also by a seminar I gave in the writing Discord server “Whisper Of Words”.

This seminar will focus on the basics of story planning and the elements that conforms it.

Now, how can this help you improve your writing? Aren’t these too obvious? Well, it’s no secret that these things are known to most but not for everyone, and it’s so easy to make a mistake in one of the essential elements that can it make your work hard to understand or less attractive to spectators in search of a juicy story. Which is why I believe it’s important to master the basic knowledge to understand your work, since these elements are what your story is trulyabout

Two thousand years ago, there was a man called Aristotle, whom you’ve probably already heard of, who asked himself some the questions we are making ourselves today: Why are there stories that endure time and others that are forgotten? Why are people attracted to these that are still remembered today?

To find the answers to these questions, he did a field research, studying the stories that had endured time until then, two thousand years ago. THE POETICS was product of this investigation, one of the first essays about narrative.  He discovered that many of these stories had a series of  common elements that can be resumed in the following.

• There was a character, whom he called hero, with a goal and a dream.
• The hero  does things to reach his dream.
• And on the way to achieve his goal, difficulties, obstacles appear which then created a conflict for the hero and the spectator. This conflict was what defined the center of the story.

To briefly explain this theory, the first act serves to understand the protagonist and the goals he wanted to accomplish, the second act has to do with what they do to face the obstacles that’s on their way and finally, the third act in which they overcomes the obstacles, the protagonist goes towards the culmination of his journey and the “achievement” of their goal.

A clear division of the story. The approach/statement, the development and the outcome.  A clue to this theory in proportion is that the second act is the double of the first and the last. It means that while the 1st and 3rd act could be 25%, the middle act will be 50%. It is important to note that these measurements will not be always exact as they just are a reference.

Now, other forms to tell a story have appeared throughout history such as the Dramatica Act Structure, Michael Hauge’s “Six Stage Plot Structure”, John Truby’s “Twenty-two Building Blocks” and Freytag’s Pyramid “Five-Act Structure”; but so far, this has been the most rentable and effective way to tell a story as it has been demonstrated for thousands of years and is still being used today. But of course, it also depends on the writer rather than just the theory alone.

The three-act theory was constantly reformulated as the time went on, especially when the industry of cinema came to be, and it ended in a quote which will help us to build everything and the most important of this seminar.

Do not forget it.

Someone wants something with intensity and finds obstacles to get it.

This quote alone resumes the core of a story and its respective elements that facilitates story planning for both plotters and pantsers. To have a better understanding of the key sentence of this seminar, it could be explained like the following:

A protagonist is someone who does things to achieve his goal for a reason; the conflict is when we face two options: a bad one and a worst one. And finally, once the conflict is overcomed and a solution is found, it must be put on practice and achieve the goal, leading to the conclusion of the story.

As I established previously, there are other methods to plan a story but this is one of the most basic and known ways to do so, and thus, you are not obliged to strictly follow a certain method.

“It depends on the storyteller who needs to know how to apply the knowledge they have acquired rather than just the theory itself.”

The upcoming posts will explain in detail all the elements contained in the quote: the protagonist, the goal, the motivation, the conflict and the ending; the 5 basic elements in story planning.