Let’s rewind back to the beginning, not the start of our stories, not the plot, not the structure, not even the format, let’s go right back to what we believe about life. A bit of a heavy start, right? Maybe, but here’s the thing: stories are tales about how life works – they are life-affirming. Storytelling is the art of crafting narratives to convey a profound truth. Even if we aren’t aware of it, deep down in our stories, there will be a theme that teaches the audience an important lesson, perhaps subtly, or perhaps through the protagonist’s arc or actions. Our theme is what we’re really saying to the world with our story; it is our crisp and undiluted voice between the lines. The tricky bit can be identifying our theme and building on it in a life-affirming way.
“It’s theatre. It’s an interpretation of life. It can be truer than life itself.” – Valentine, Clouds of Sils Maria.
Now, considering moral affections is one thing; being able to build on that is another. If only mankind had been expressing easily digestible yet profound statements related to moral affections that we could just reference them at any time… you know?… Like proverbs?… And if only someone had listed a big bunch of moral affections categorised with inspiring proverbs to help writers hammer home their theme all out of the kindness of his little black heart… like I’ve done, right here.
Hit the Flaw
By identifying the message behind the theme, we establish the lesson shown, and thus, we can easily pinpoint the flaw our protagonist needs to overcome to win, the antithesis of our lesson. We learn from their arc, which starts with them having a misconception about how life works.
Here’s a list of 147 vices I’ve put together for you.
Get Plotting, You Little Devil You
Hopefully, assuming you've glanced through that list of moral affections, your imagination is already starting to dream up new ideas. However, hold your horses; we need to establish a premise and plot. Again, we don’t have to face a blank canvas here; there are sources out there to help us. For me, the one that works is The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, the full text of which is available here. By using one or more of these situations, we can easily piece together the mechanics of anything from a short story to a TV series.
Can I Get a Happy Ending?
Given that our theme needs to resonate with our story, we don’t necessarily need our protagonist to win to convey the lesson. There’s something a little sappy about neatly tied up happy endings, something that strikes us as disingenuous and not life-affirming at all. It could be said that winning is, well, kinda for losers.
There are four kinds of endings:
Happy – The protagonist wins, and their flaw is overcome.
Bittersweet – The protagonist overcomes their flaw but loses.
Cautionary – The protagonist wins but fails to overcome their flaw.
Tragic – The protagonist fails to overcome their flaw and also loses.
Each is just as effective at communicating the theme, but does so in different ways. The protagonist winning is irrelevant because their actions have proven a lesson we believe to be true. There is no wrong choice, but our ending should match our intended tone and have some bearing on the stakes at hand.
Our chosen ending also defines the protagonist’s character arc; they either go from flawed to enlightened or from flawed to further in the dark.
Personally, I like to come up with a rough version of each ending type for every story I write and then choose the one that I feel works best for the script. This is good practice, should you ever have a producer/executive feel your ending is too sappy or too much of a downer, and you need to come up with an alternative.
Lock n’ Load Your Logline
There’s a good chance that with just a little research and consideration of the above, we have enough to rough out our logline. Generally speaking, it seems the earlier we do this, the better. Loglines are pretty much impossible to write when we don’t have a grasp of our premise, but they’re a veritable delight when we’ve got things in order. By writing it down at this stage, we can revisit it periodically to ensure we’re staying on track.
My tip for writing loglines is to open a blank document and try to summarize the premise in around twenty-five words. I like to copy and paste my attempt over and over while making little tweaks. Too much stress is put on the intricacies of wording loglines when what really matters is the concept behind them. It’s also important to remember that we don’t need to summarize our entire story, including character flaws, theme, and ending, in our logline; we only need our premise and sometimes the stakes. It’s also fine to give away any unexpected twist if it’s core to the story.
Feel the Love
Now, you’re probably going to want some sort of love story within all this, and there’s nothing really more entertaining and goal-setting than that. It’s a good idea to think about where you want to go and what sort of love story fits. In many cases, the love story itself highlights the theme.
Think there’s only one kind. Think again! Here’s 23 love story types I’ve put together like some hormonal teenager.
TURN & BURN CONCEPT WORKSHEET ***************************** WHAT LIFE AFFIRMING LESSON IS BEING TAUGHT? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT PROVERB SUMS UP THIS LESSON? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT WILL BE THE PROTAGONIST'S FLAW? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT DRAMATIC SITUATION WILL THE PROTAGONIST BE IN? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT ARE THE STAKES? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT TYPE OF ENDING WILL THERE BE? ------------------------------------------------------------------------- STORY SUMMARY: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- LOGLINE: