Spinning Tales
Writing a story is an incredibly intuitive and creative endeavor. Writing the outline for a story is not; it is an engineering problem - a puzzle with a solution - a foundation on which you can build the most outrageous- or realistic-, or funny-, or violent-, or fantastical dreamworld that will be your screenplay, novel, comic book, game etc. Tale Spinning is a simple method to solve this engineering problem.
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Run Forrest, Run!
Writing any type of story is time consuming and requires dedication and perseverance. Figuring out the structure should not be as hard. Writing an outline should be quick and fun and iterative - so that you can put your energy into your characters and their behavior and dialogue, the worlds that surround them and the situations they find themselves in. This is why I developed Tale Spinning; to make writing stories easier.
Keep it simple, stupid!
Tale Spinning is a simple method to write complex and thematically coherent outlines for stories. This method creates dynamic stories with satisfying endings through thematically- and intricately related characters. The method is based on the thesis that story cannot exist without conflict, and conflict comes solely from the actions of characters. In practice, this means that contrary to most other methods or story structure courses, Tale Spinning never approaches plot, character and theme separately. Every plot point is there to further character, and every character development is there to reveal THE theme. (This capitalization is not a formatting error - more on this later)
Tale Spinning can work for most mediums: movie screenplays, novels, comic books, TV episodes, video games, short stories, plays etc. However, having written, directed and edited feature films professionally for more than a decade, and being somewhat of a movie buff, makes it so I can most confidently talk about movie screenplays, and I will do so - a lot!
Short and Sweet
Keeping Tale Spinning short is part of its allure. Using this method, you can quickly iterate through story ideas to efficiently discover the most intriguing ones to move forward with, freeing up your time to spend on the most creative and original execution instead of outlining and structuring. All the while, you can trust where your story is going - as you will know how to build a proper foundation for your plot and characters.
A lot of experienced writers will find out that they have instinctively applied many of the structure rules and guidelines that make up this method in previous work. Great! Lean into that! That is your experience (reading, watching, writing etc.) and your talent guiding you. Tale Spinning is not a new story structure, it is just a new method to help you build original stories on top of those tried and tested structures. My hope is that after you make this method your own, you will understand why these patterns, that are clearly ingrained in all of us writers, work so well. I promise you that this will allow you to look for the boundaries of your story’s structure with confidence. Which in turn will allow you to add endless layers to your work. And it should be fun!
So let's not wait any longer and start at the beginning!