The Book That Transformed My Writing Career
And took me from failure to success
My first novel for children was rejected with cutting criticism. Apparently, the story I’d laboured over for so long had “a weak plot and a flat ending.” My agent agreed and kindly suggested that I continued writing non-fiction while I learned to create strong stories
Eager to master the skills I obviously lacked, I dived into the study of story structure. Before long, I had a good understanding of three act structure, inciting incidents and the hero’s journey. I could even analyse other people’s stories and tell you why they worked or why they didn’t. But I still couldn’t write my own.
The problem was that the authors of all those story structure books analysed stories someone else had created: Casablanca, Field of Dreams, Witness and many more. So those authors couldn’t talk about the thought processes that went into the creation of the stories they analysed. They couldn’t tell me how the stories developed in the writers’ heads. They couldn’t tell me whether characters had been changed to make the story stronger, and they couldn’t tell me if extra problems had been invented to keep the tension rising. And those were the things I needed to know.
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In despair, I tried following the advice from writers who said they developed their characters first and then started writing their book from the beginning to discover where those characters led them. That method was a complete failure for me. When I tried it, my characters all gave up in chapter 3 and wondered off, muttering about what a rubbish story they were in.
Then I discovered a book that finally provided the information I needed. How to Write for Animation differs from the story structure books I had read because its author, Jeffrey Scott, is a scriptwriter. As a result, he can describe the writing process from first hand experience, and he doesn’t need to use someone else’s Oscar winning script as an example. Instead, he uses an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that he wrote himself.
That choice may sound strange, but it’s what makes the book so valuable. His episode is so short that Jeffrey can share the entire process of creating it, from thinking of the original idea to developing the story beats, working out the scenes and creating the dialogue and description. Everything is there for you to see — the full list of beats, the entire scene outline and the entire script. You can really see the creative process at work.
Reading that book transformed my writing career. It showed me that I can work backwards and forwards as I develop the steps (beats) of a story instead of working from beginning to end. It showed me that I can think of the ending first and work backwards from there, putting in the events that need to happen to ensure that end makes sense. And it showed me that I can play around with different possibilities at the planning stage without having to do the massive rewrites required to make the same changes in a finished story.
Since then, I’ve had six animation scripts produced, written a 13 book children’s series that’s sold more than a million copies worldwide and created another children’s book series that’s been optioned for animation. I’ve also started writing books and articles to help other writers. But if I hadn’t read How to Write for Animation I might never have progressed beyond “a weak plot and a flat ending”.
A note from the author
If you enjoy my articles on writing, you may also enjoy Plots and Plotting: How to create stories that work. It’s the first in what I hope will become a series of jargon-free guides for writers, and it deals with the topic I found most difficult when I was starting out.
