Developing Story Ideas Read online

  Developing Story Ideas

  The vast majority of screenplay and writing books that focus on story development have little to say about the initial concept that inspired the piece. Developing Story Ideas: The Power and Purpose of Storytelling, Third Edition provides writers with ideational tools and resources to generate a wide variety of stories in a broad range of forms. Celebrated filmmaker and author Michael Rabiger demonstrates how to observe situations and themes in the writer’s own life experience, and use these as the basis for original storytelling.

  This new edition has been updated with chapters on dramatic analysis, adaptation, improvisation, and cast collaboration’s roles in story construction, as well as a companion website featuring further projects, class assignments, instructor resources, and more.

  Gain the practical tools and resources you need to spark your creativity and generate a wide variety of stories in a broad range of forms, including screenplays, documentaries, novels, short stories, and plays

  Through hands-on, step-by-step exercises and group and individual assignments, learn to use situations and themes from your own life experience, dreams, myth, and the news as the basis for character-driven storytelling; harness methods of screenplay format, dialogue, plot structure, and character development that will allow your stories to reach their fullest potential

  Michael Rabiger began in the cutting rooms of England’s Pinewood and Shepperton Studios, became an editor and BBC director of documentaries, and then specialized for many years in the US as a production and aesthetics educator. At Columbia College Chicago he was co-founder, then chair of the Film/Video Department, and established the Michael Rabiger Center for Documentary. He has directed or edited more than 35 films, given workshops in many countries, and led a multinational European workshop for CILECT. Additionally, he won the International Documentary Association’s Scholarship and Preservation Award, served as a Fulbright Specialist in South Africa, and became an honorary professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He is the author of Directing the Documentary, and the co-author of Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, both published by Focal Press and available in multiple languages.

  Developing Story Ideas

  The Power and Purpose of Storytelling

  Third Edition

  Michael Rabiger

  First published 2017

  by Routledge

  711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  and by Routledge

  2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

  Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

  © 2017 Michael Rabiger, Published by Focal Press. All Rights Reserved.

  The right of Michael Rabiger to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this title has been requested.

  ISBN: 978-1-138-95624-7 (hbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-138-95623-0 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-315665-22-1 (ebk)

  Typeset in Times New Roman

  by Apex CoVantage, LLC

  To my wife Nancy Mattei, with heartfelt thanks and admiration for our four decades of marriage, family life, and creative partnership.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I

  Overview

   1 Goals and Getting Started

   2 About the Creative Process

  Part II

  The Roots of Invention

   3 Finding Your Artistic Identity

   4 Autobiography and Influences

   5 Playing CLOSAT and Pitching Ideas

   6 Working from Life

  Part III

  Craft and Concepts of Drama

   7 Characters, Their Problems and Conflicts

   8 Developing Characters of Your Own

   9 Analyzing Drama

  10 Understanding Story Structure

  11 The Tools of Drama

  12 Giving Critical Feedback

  Part IV

  Writing Assignments

  13 Tale from Childhood

  14 Family Story

  15 A Myth, Legend, or Folktale Retold

  16 Dream Story

  17 Adapting a Short Story for the Screen

  18 Ten-Minute, News-Inspired Story

  19 Documentary Subject

  20 Thirty-Minute Original Fiction

  21 Feature Film

  Part V

  Creating Collaboratively

  22 Catalyzing Drama

  Part VI

  Developing as a Writer

  23 Artistic Identity and Career

  24 Story-Editing Your Outline

  25 Expanding to the Finished Product

  Index

  Introduction

  “Nothing is real until I have written about it.”1

  Writing is a matchless way to discover and express the currents in your life. This book will show you that you have a unique creative identity and a stock of your own moving stories to tell. Its guidance should be liberating and exhilarating, and you won’t have to face characters that refuse to come alive, plots that fizzle, or story ideas that seem derivative.

  Use this book solo as a self-help guide, as a classroom text, or as the inspirational core in an informal writers’ group. Its discussions and workout assignments will show you where to find the ideas you haven’t yet had. Along the way, you will become familiar with what a working writer feels, thinks, and does.

  This Book’s Goals

  All stories need a solid groundwork in ideation—that is, in strong core ideas. These, if they are to move people, must be rooted in the author’s personal, emotional experience. To this end, Developing Story Ideas takes the reader on a six-part writer’s journey:

  Part I: Overview: Introducing the book’s goals, approaching the creative process, and overcoming common impediments.

  Part II: The Roots of Invention: Assignments in observation, improvisation, and self-examination that help you discover the marks you carry and make a preliminary profile of your creative identity.

  Part III: Craft and Concepts of Drama: Introducing a range of concepts to help you develop strong characters, analyze how a scene is or isn’t working, assess a complete work for its outcome, and test a story idea and its prevailing point of view. How dramatic form works, how to strengthen weak story elements, and how to give and take constructive critical feedback.

  Part IV: Writing Assignments: Using a graduated range of writer’s resources, their subjects focus on autobiography, family tradition, dreams, myth, legend, news media, short story, and film assignments. Early projects focus on short works applicable to prose fiction, theatre, or journalism, while later ones encompass a full-length documentary subject and two pieces of original fiction. The short fiction assignment asks for a single point of view, the long-form feature film idea asks for two viewpoints. With each assignment is one or more student samples with a critical assessment for you to compare with your own impressions and criticism.

  Part V: Creating Collaboratively: Some of the most interesting contemporary film and th
eatre work comes from collaborative relationships. Two important experiments let you try their techniques for yourself.

  Part VI: Developing as a Writer: Revisiting your artistic identity with your body of work in hand and consolidating your sense of artistic preferences and direction. Techniques of advanced story-editing for you to use on your favorite outlines before regarding them as complete. The basics needed to begin turning any thoroughly tested idea outline into a screenplay, documentary proposal, stage play, or prose fiction or nonfiction piece.

  The origins of the book’s methods: My assumptions about human creativity and learning arise from two kinds of experience. One came from professional immersion in film—first as a film editor in feature films, then as a documentary director, mostly for the BBC. The other kind of experience, equally fascinating, came from three decades of international teaching. From this I learned not only how people absorb and master an art form but also that they can learn in months what takes literally years when you have to learn on the job, as I did.

  Assignments: Most people learn fastest and most enjoyably from making things, so there is a choice among fifty hands-on assignments. The observations you make from life lead to an improvisation game, one that stretches your intuition and strengthens your confidence. There are childhood- and family-based writing assignments, others drawing on oral or traditional story sources, and others still that involve memories and dreams. Improvisational games guide you into working intuitively with observation, imagery, memory, and other resources, and from this come story projects in brief outline form. This compact form makes group reading and discussion easy and allows the writer to make radical changes easily too.

  You will produce short fiction and reality-based stories, and the final assignments (in fiction and documentary film) guide you toward controlling point of view in your work. Subsequently you can develop any of your story outlines into literary prose, screenplays, theatre plays, radio scripts, and perhaps even stand-up comedy. Each narrative art, of course, has its own particular requirements, which are touched upon at the end.

  New in this edition: The book has received a root and branch overhaul, as well as some structural improvements. Part II: The Roots of Invention, in which I deal with understanding and defining one’s artistic identity, has been greatly expanded. It is a key concept in my whole approach to creativity, and one much appreciated by the book’s users. Part III, focusing on the craft and concepts of drama, now includes a more comprehensive “toolkit” to help you assess any part of any story in any medium. Included are methods to:

  Handle the roles of author, story-editor, presenter, audience member, or critic

  Develop characters

  Understand stereotypes and archetypes, as well as “flat” and “round” characters

  Identify the components of a scene, and assess and graph them as a dramatic arc

  Divide a work into the three-act structure

  Analyze any form of story for its effectiveness, meaning, and purpose

  Handle point of view in storytelling

  Chapter 22, Catalyzing Drama, is a new chapter on collaborative research and authorship methods. These lie behind “devised theatre,” and the distinguished cinema of Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, and Rick Linklater, among others. Two assignments offer fascinating collaborative experiments applicable to literary nonfiction as well as film.

  Thanks: Many good people have contributed to this book’s evolution. My thanks go to Cindy Keeling and Penny Weeden for their opinions on new sections, and to the faculty and students of Columbia College Chicago for three decades of incomparable dialogue. I also wish to thank Ruth Muller for the photo of her mother, Margaret Powell Lesser.

  I am indebted to the film department faculty at New York University for their discussions and friendship, in particular Lora Hays, George Stoney, and Marketa Kimbrell, who sadly are no longer with us. Thanks also to Ken Dancyger, Nick Tanis, and Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, who kindly invited me to NYU as a visiting teacher.

  I owe particular gratitude to my NYU students who generously permitted me to reproduce their writing. They came from France, Korea, Norway, Mexico, Britain, Canada, and of course the USA. Thank you, Michelle Arnove, Bryan Beasley, Leah Cho, Chris Darnley, Paul Flanagan, Angela Galean, Michael Hanttula, Margaret Harris, Kundong Lee, Louis Leterrier, Amanda McCormick, Alex Meilleur, Cynthia Merwath, Tatsuyo Ohno, Joy Park, Peter Riley, Trish Rosen, Vilka Tzouras, Sharmaine Webb, and Julie Werenskiold. Their hard work and infectious enthusiasm made our classes a joy, and there would literally be no book without them.

  Michael Rabiger

  Chicago, 2016

  Note

  1Quotation from Lois Deacon, author of Providence and Mr. Hardy (Hutchinson, 1966), remembered from a conversation.

  Part I

  Overview

  1 Goals and Getting Started

  Behind this book’s approach lie two key beliefs. One, that everyone has a writer inside trying to get out; the other, that creativity means first visualizing what you mean to create, then constructing the bridge necessary to get there. This book focuses on the visualizing, conceptual, or ideation stage of storytelling, a foundational stage largely ignored by most writing manuals, which deal mainly with achieving a professional finish. Such inattention to fundamentals leaves the novice like an architect struggling to correct faulty steelwork after the building has gone up.

  This book shows you how to tap into your own body of experience, how to present an initial story idea to an audience or readership, and how to make use of their critique as you go on to develop your story. It also provides a revised, expanded set of story analysis tools to help you edit and restructure with confidence and enjoyment.

  Because we deal in story fundamentals, this book asks that you write in brief outline form. Long-form work would overload writer and reader alike, and obscure what we seek to understand and develop.

  You can wade into the graduated writing assignments in Chapters 13–21 as soon as you like. Write solo in your own way and at your own pace, or use this book in an ad hoc writer’s group or a creative writing class. If you are the group leader or teacher, the book’s website (www.routledge.com/cw/rabiger) will help you plan a syllabus and discuss how best to handle your leadership role.

  Sidebars like this contain pertinent advice, instructions, or definitions. Key words are italicized in both the sidebar and the accompanying text. Use the Index to locate whatever else you need.

  Because I believe fervently in learning by doing, the assignments embody:

  Self-assessment exercises to help you find your artistic identity

  Ways to prime the creative process so you can eliminate writer’s block

  Enjoyable ways to value and make use of your formative experience

  Ways to use personal and communal resources that writers draw on

  Creative games and graphics

  Short, challenging writing assignments to develop essence, structure, and meaning

  Writing in brief outline form ready for a variety of outcomes (fiction, nonfiction, journalism, film, television, or theatre)

  Ways to give and take constructive critique

  Dramaturgical tools and terminology, often in easy-to-see sidebars

  Ways to work with others instead of compete with them

  Writing samples and accompanying critique to demonstrate creative criticism in action

  Encouragement to expand your favorite outlines into short story, novel, play, or cinema screenplay form

  If you are part of a class or writers’ group, your teacher/leader will adapt the work to their own experience and preferences. In most writing communities, practice and critique take place in an atmosphere of shared enthusiasm and friendship, so expect much valuable experience from interacting with your peers.

  Playing Roles

  Creating stories is intriguing because an author plays different roles, wears different hats, and strikes differing balances betw
een spontaneity and intellect:

  Author. This is the instinctive, intuitive, anarchic persona generating the raw material. In this mode, write down whatever you see, hear, or imagine without a second thought. Allow no limitations or procedures to interfere with your output—simply concentrate on setting down whatever your imagination produces.

  Presenter. Whether you pitch (orally present) a story idea to one person or twenty, you now assume an actor/showman role. Using active-voice, colorful language, take only a few minutes to outline the fundamentals of your plot and characters. From your audience’s body language and facial expressions you will know which parts do or don’t connect. By the end, you will sense where you need to make changes. Stand-up comedians do this nightly.

  When you pitch a story, you make a 3–5 minute oral presentation so the listener can envisage the characters, events, and purpose of your intended tale. People make pitches wherever judges must decide whose project merits support.

  Audience. Reactions by an audience to nascent ideas are a vital reality check, so your reactions are vital to anyone else’s idea or story. Listen and watch, closely and respectfully. Later you will articulate whatever feelings, thoughts, and reactions the presentation provoked.

  Critic. Offering constructive feedback means communicating a work’s effect back to its creator. List what you found effective, particularly what sprang alive in your mind’s eye. Respectfully suggest what you think might benefit from change or development. Good critics work from feelings and impressions and avoid intellectualizing. They address what they think the storyteller is trying to accomplish, and avoid talk of how they would handle the story themselves.

  All creative artists switch between roles, and playing only one at a time takes practice, self-control, and vigilance. When you are writing in Author mode, the Critic persona will try to break into your consciousness to belittle your efforts. When you are a Presenter receiving critical comments, the Author and Critic want to stand up and howl in your defense instead of listening. This would block you from absorbing valuable audience reactions. However, with practice and self-awareness you can learn to stay in the appropriate role and switch cleanly between them, leaving you with a real sense of achievement.