What is the Story Development Process with the Fabula Deck?
The most common conception of what it means to be a writer might call up romantic notions of Ernest Hemingway typing away on an Underwood typewriter looking out his window at the coast, or someone in the back corner of a rustic New York City coffee shop scribbling away in their leather-bound notebook. You may be forgiven. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution and its aesthetic support ideology, modernism, the narrative portrayed of a creative writer was that of the vagabond turned genius, but to create today’s hit films, books, and graphic novels, writers utilize a story development process that allows them to work individually or in teams and to come up with better stories as a result. In this article, I’ll talk about the story development process with the Fabula Deck.
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What is the Fabula Deck?
Fabula is a 42-deck set of prompts focused on the stages of character and story development. The process, like a film, is broken down into assets – or pre-story elements like characters, environments, mood inspiration, and props.
The second stage helps writers develop the thru line and motivations of each character to develop timing and interactions. It helps to answer the question “Why do these characters find themselves together in this environment at this time?”
Last, the writer or writers then are prompted to develop the storyline – the order of events the reader or moviegoer will experience as the story progresses.
Compared with previous ideas about being a writer, this process helps creative people solve story arc problems before they get too deep into writing scenes, describing everything and sometimes creating a lot of rework for themselves when story elements conflict or run into timing issues.
Is writing about the lightning strike, or the process?
The individualistic conception of what it means to be a writer that came out of modernism relies on lightning to strike for the individual to be inspired with a narrative fit to inspire the masses. More often than not, that approach results in missed opportunities and stories that don’t connect with audiences. Today, writers are professionals that work individually, but collaboratively with readers, editors, and often other writers to shape and craft powerful stories.
Whether writing novels, movies, ads, or social media content, the line between fine artist, collaborator, and creative service provider is blurred more than ever. To keep story development on track, it is helpful for writers to apply structure and process to their storytelling.
One of today’s tools for long-format writers is the Fabula storytelling deck. Built around the “story scaffold” model, the fable framework is structured around three stages; ideation, journey development, framed as the “character’s steps,” and then concludes with structuring the book, film, or story by laying out the order of events as the reader or filmgoer will experience them.
Let’s look at the stages and process as presented in the Fabula Deck: A Framework for Fiction Writers.
Asset Development with the Fabula Deck
In the first stage, the author or writing team collects a range of assets – images for a mood board, character profiles, and backgrounds, and outlines heroes, enemies, allies, plots, subplots, and so forth. The goal is to go big. Writers, in this model, are encouraged to use a wall, sticky putty photos, and note cards to collect as many shaping ideas as possible. By making it both visual and informal, writers are spurred to inspiration.
Story Development with Fabula Deck
Once the author has a mental picture empowered by a wall of inspiration, story development ensues. In the Fabula Deck, this follows a traditional three-act structure. It is linear, starting with the ordinary world of the characters, which is shaken up by a call to action that initiates the journey. In the Fabula model, there are fourteen steps in each character’s journey. These details, such as “the anxiety of the call” wherein the character questions whether they should pursue the journey or attempt to remain in their ordinary world, give writers opportunities to refine the struggle and to develop the motivations of each character.
The deck has writers lay these steps out horizontally with the beginning on the left and the end on the right. Characters have their own rows, so the hero’s steps go below the prompts, the antagonist below the hero, the allies, the narrator, and so forth. As the plot thickens, so do the layers of character steps and interactions.
The Fabula Deck creators recommend generating most of the recommended steps for multiple characters. Because this stage of story development is linear it’s easy to see and correct timing conflicts – character 1 was grocery shopping while character 2 was in their parked car outside a shopping center fretting about being late to a meeting. The timing of a near collision when character 1 leaves the store and character 2 starts the car’s engine will naturally line up.
Many of these steps will disappear or become background in the final story, but organizing them can save writers a lot of struggle later on when they have to resolve timing conflicts in their story.
Story Line Structuring with the Fabula Deck
Once the narrative structure is organized, then the author or writing team goes about creating the reader’s steps – the way the reader will experience the story as they read the novel or watch the film. These steps follow the traditional three-act structure and include the prologue, set-up, catalyst, rising action, and on to the climax of the story, solution to the conflict, and epilogue.
The Fabula creators call this process “editing,” and to an extent it is. You’ll cut out many elements you created in the first and second stages – you don’t need to describe every step of every character. You will draw from the first two stages as you organize the reader’s experience. You may change the order – a big event happens and your main character responds to it in a unique way. Later in the story, we may find out about a previous event that caused them to respond that way. I generally call this “structuring” and describe “editing” as the process of refinement and revision after the story structure has been laid out.
As with the character’s steps, not all of the reader’s steps will exist in every novel, film, or short story. Not every story needs a prologue and epilogue, for example.
That’s the beauty of this system. It provides a framework that can be either simple or complex.
In fact, the authors have created a “Fabula Storytelling for Kids” deck that provides a great example of how simple these steps can be and still develop rich, powerful stories.
If you are interested in trying the Fabula Deck story process, you can get yours, and a 10% discount by using our affiliate code Murdock10 at checkout.