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Excerpt from original post: Monday May 9, 2011
"World first, then Plot. This is the mantra I think is so important for developing an episodic series. The principle being that a series lives and dies by it’s dramatic sustainability and if you focus on plot before fully considering the rules, contexts and natural pressures of your story-world, you run the risk of writing your series into an unsustainable hole. A good series should become self perpetuating by the natural dramatic momentum generated by it’s story world. Get the Story World right and Plots should just flow…
So, then the question becomes How to build an effective story world, how to conceive and articulate that world and it’s natural dramatics? My Celtx Series Development Bible Template (which you can download here) lays out categories and an approach for constructing a series bible and a recent reading of an article about journalism info-graphics has me considering another useful tool as part of that kit - the Timeline.
In a previous post I broke down the important distinction between Settings, Contexts and Background: Setting is the here and now of the story world, it’s present. Contexts are the rules behaviors and cultural conditions of the story world at that Setting point. Background is how the world became as it is, what transpired to bring about the circumstances of the story’s here and now. Whilst there’s nothing revolutionary or rocket science about these definitions they are very useful for articulating a storyworld. And they also allow us to see the usefulness of a Timeline as a potential way to build and construct a compelling story world with enough fuel to sustain your series.
Defining the setting here and now of a storyworld becomes a more effective and sustainable dramatic vehicle if you can clearly articulate how the Here and Now came about, what events and circumstances transpired to bring the current situation Setting to bare?..."
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