The TV Writer on TV Writing
by Larry Brody
Over my years running various TV series I’ve been amazed at how many professional writers don’t understand the basics of good storytelling. In a nutshell, the trick to working out your plot is to always remember that the scenes must flow from and to each other in a progression that takes into account three different elements of audience appeal. As in, the scene progression must be logical, surprising, and climactic.
What this means is that everything that happens must grow out of what happened before. On one level, given the personalities of the characters and the situation they are in, each plot point must be inevitable. And on another level, these inevitable twists and turns mut be such that the reader or viewer could never have predicted them.
Sound paradoxical? Crazy? Let’s take a true crime example. The kind of thing that happens all too often in real life.