Do you want your friends to refer to you as “a good storyteller”? Do you want to be able to plot your books starting from a simple outline? Have you always hoped to write engaging stories? Then foundational storytelling is what you’ve been looking for.
I learned about foundational storytelling from a friend who explained it as a way to make sure people are interested in what you have to say, and it has served me well in that regard for thirty years. So let’s start with what foundational storytelling is and how it works in verbal communication settings. Stick with me here, this will make you more comfortable in casual conversations.
Foundational storytelling starts with the very basic outline of a story. Recently, a friend mentioned that they like Sangria. I replied “Me too. In fact I have a World Sangria Championships trophy on my desk and my red sangria recipe was used as the lyrics for a song that was in the top 40 on the dance charts.”
Both of these things are true. And they give an excellent opening for my conversation partner to ask about them without me providing any detail in case they aren’t interested. If they reply with “Oh, you’re much more serious about sangria than I am” then I can assume they don’t want to hear more about either of those stories involving my history with sangria and I won’t bore them with details.
Are you thinking that you would like me to explain these two interesting sangria related stories? If you are, then my hook worked on you. I laid out the foundation and let my friend decide whether they wanted to hear more. In this case, they did, and wanted to hear both stories. But I wasn’t going to tell them any more unless they asked. This avoids forcing people to listen to something they aren’t interested in, or taking up more than your space of a conversation. It says “Do you want to hear more about my interest in making sangria?” without actually asking the awkward question.
But it does even more than that. Because it allows the listener to choose which details they want to hear about. If they are a bartender, they might ask where the world championships of sangria were held because they’ve almost certainly never heard of it. If they are a fan of dance music, they might ask about the song and how my lyrics were featured in it. If they are a huge fan of sangria, they might ask for the recipe and about how I developed it.
So I have not only given the listener a chance to show me that they aren’t interested, but I have given them the chance to show what they are interested in. Some people will want to hear the whole story and ask for it immediately, while others will just want one or two details and giving them the whole story would have taken up more conversation space than it should. If you tend to ramble in your stories, a foundational approach will help.
The Snowflake Method
Writers sometimes refer to this part of the process as the snowflake method. This starts with a simple shape, usually a triangle, with your basic plot points on it. Then it builds out in complexity like a fractal (specifically a Koch fractal) until it becomes a novel length work. This is what we do with our blueprints and story builders in the genre guides. They give you the first step in the process of creating your story with a very broad overview of what will happen and who your characters are.
As with all writing advice, we offer this up only for you to try to see if it works for you. For some of you it will be useless. For others it will be the basis for all of your future writing. If you think it might work for you, try the following exercise.
Let’s write a horror novel. If you like, you can go to your genre in the genre guides and use the story builder to create a similar exercise. But we’ll build a horror novel here, starting with the story builder. Here’s what that looks like.
“Our hero (her name here) and (at least one other person’s name) are (doing something relatable and ordinary). But there is a (foreboding hint of a horrific thing) on a collision course with them. As they go on about their ordinary lives, the thing gets closer and scarier.
Eventually something happens to clue them in to the horrible thing, but they don’t know enough to take it truly seriously and can’t or won’t do what it takes to stop it until it is too late. When the characters see (Scary Thing 1) and eventually (More Scary Things) they realize that there is a problem.
Once the (horrific thing) reveals itself and the characters realize they are in big trouble, it may be too late and all appears lost. The horrific thing gets more and more clear to the reader and to the people it is stalking. While it looks nearly impossible, the main character has to (way of defeating or escaping the evil thing) and will likely suffer terribly before that happens.
In the end the world returns to normal, but the characters who have survived will never be the same.”
Now I’ll fill it in and we can get started.
Our hero Keisha and her classmates are headed to a student quiz competition. But there is a dark storm over the midwest plains as they ride west on the bus on a collision course with them. As they go on about their ordinary lives, the thing gets closer and scarier.
Eventually something happens to clue them in to the horrible thing, but they don’t know enough to take it truly seriously and can’t or won’t do what it takes to stop it until it is too late. When the characters see giant flying creatures in the clouds and eventually strange animals on the road they realize that there is a problem.
Once the storm from another dimension reveals itself and the characters realize they are in big trouble, it may be too late and all appears lost. The horrific thing gets more and more clear to the reader and to the people it is stalking. While it looks nearly impossible, the main character has to get them all to a farmhouse with a cellar and find a way to survive the night and will likely suffer terribly before that happens.
In the end the world returns to normal, but the characters who have survived will never be the same.
The Characters And Setting
Now we have a story outline that fits with the standard horror structure. There is almost no detail, but we have our foundation to start building on. Our next steps are simply to add information. Who are these people? Come up with a list of characters, but don’t flesh them out yet. One sentence descriptions will be fine.
What are their relationships to each other? One sentence for each will be fine too. Who is driving the bus? Are there teachers? How many? What is this quiz competition? Have they been there before? Where exactly are they and where is the competition?
Next we can fill in more details about the backstory of the villain, in this case a nightmarish storm that brings creatures from another dimension. What is that world like? Why are these creatures so nasty and bloodthirsty? And why are they so big? How did the storm happen? And why here?
The Plot
Now we can move on to filling in some action. It’s often easier to write the plot when you know the characters and their interactions. What causes them to stop the bus rather than try to push on through? Do they find the farmhouse right away? Is anyone there? Are their weapons and supplies? Do they see the cellar right away or only when they are desperate and the house is about to be overrun?
And how about the conclusion of our story? Do they simply survive? Are they rescued by the military? Do they find a way to get out of the storm? Maybe the farmers come home and save them. Or maybe the farmers come home and wonder why they were out in a storm when creatures like that are always in the storms because they are now in the alternate dimension.
Creating Scenes
If you like to write in-depth outlines, this might be where you start creating your scenes. A book might have fifty or a hundred scenes, and you can plan out the whole book using them if you like. I’ll start with a few examples here.
S1 – The kids are on the bus, excited to go to the competition and get a day off from school. Keisha is the leader and is super smart. The new kid from the big city, Kevin, is also very smart, but his tough upbringing gave him an attitude problem, which rears its head in the first scene. When Keisha sees a storm on the horizon, she tries to pull up the weather radar on her phone, but has no internet connection. She is sure there weren’t supposed to be any storms today (there’s your foreboding that tells readers something scary is coming).
S2 – The teachers, there are two of them, don’t get along. Ms. Hardaway is old-school and she doesn’t like any messing around. Mr. Camden is a fun teacher, the students like him, but he’s not a very responsible adult. They have a disagreement over assigned seats or letting the kids sit where they want. Camden wins and the students are ecstatic.
S3 – Keisha has enough internet to pull up the weather radar, and there are no storms in the area. She’s confused.
Keep Going
If we continue to build scenes this way, we could end up with a whole book plotted out and ready to write. Then we can just write a scene each day and a few months later we have the first draft of a novel. In fact, I like it and may get around to writing it some day. I wrote this article in two hours, including the story outline. Foundational Storytelling and the Snowflake Method are the only tools that make that possible for me. It just makes planning a story so easy.
Other benefits
Creating the book this way also gives you a great elevator pitch, since that is where you started. Writing your blurb will be easier when it comes time to publish, because you know exactly what the big overhead view of your book looks like and aren’t overly focused on details that readers don’t care about.
This method also helps keep you focused on your story and scenes that move the story forward. Some writers say that you should remove anything from your book that doesn’t move the story forward, but that depends on what you think moves the story and ends up bogging down into a discussion about whether backstory for characters or the description of a setting is important to the story. We don’t love it as a hard rule, but we understand why moving the story forward is important, and using the snowflake method will help keep you on that track.
The same way that the foundation storytelling approach will allow listeners to ask questions about what they are interested in when you are having a conversation, it will allow you to be the reader and ask questions as you fill in your outline. You’ll automatically be answering the questions readers will have and filling in your story with things that are important to the plot.
This approach is also great for writing to market, because you can start off with a plot structure that readers expect in your genre and make sure you are hitting all the important tropes and plot points before you even start writing.
Think about foundational storytelling and the snowflake method in your conversations and your writing for a few weeks. Whether it becomes your standard approach or not, it will affect how you tell stories and how you think about them.