Who Is the Best Type of Story Consultant?

The best consultant to help you develop and lift your story is a writer. Why?

A script consultant best helps develop and fix a story when he works creatively inside it as a “co-writer.” A (good) writer sees clearly how a story works -- and how it doesn’t. He brings his writing skills and experience to find the fundamental problems in a story and to conceive the deepest solutions.

The real gold to a writer, director, producer, or executive with a floundering script is solutions to its problems and omissions.

Story Solutions exist on two key levels:

1) Problems. One form of “solutions” focuses on identifying the ideas that are mistaken or missing in a story. For example, a script consultant might tell a producer that his script lacks 3D characters, the climax needs a big final choice in the main character arc, or that the dialog requires more individualized voices, and so forth. The consultant has given the producer the broad ideas of what is wrong and needs fixing. The producer is helped by these “negative” notes because the solutions are implicit in the problems the consultant has identified.

Solutions can also be explicit.

2) Answers. These are solutions that are specific fixes of problems, are individual content answers on the page. That is, the script consultant will supply the producer or writer with the actual motivations, conflicts, and events, for instance, that he believes fix the script problems he has identified.

The Two Levels of Every Story

A skilled writer has trained his mind to work on these two levels: Ideas and Concretes, or as seen from a more specific context, Problems and Solutions.

Remember that stories in essence are ideas in conflict and action. When a script consultant works on the level of the fundamental ideas of a story, he is working at its deepest level and thus can conceive the most logical, dramatic, and consequential concretes or solutions.

Of course, such a writer/consultant must also be reflective about writing and a good communicator. Not all writers are editors. Not all good editors are writers. But a writer has the best potential skill and experience to be a great story fixer.

Actionable Creative Takeaway

If you want the best solutions to your story omissions, weaknesses, and problems hire a consultant who is also an experienced and skilled writer, not just a writing theorist or a recent college graduate attached to some anointed academic model.

A good story theorist may help you with the ideas of what is wrong in your story but not so much with the practical ways of how to concretely develop and fix your story. An expert script consultant gives the most fundamental and creative answers. Script consulting at its best is rethinking and “rewriting” a story. And that takes a skilled writer who can communicate well about story.

Creative thinking is the key to great writing and great editing.

If you need solutions for your story development or script problems, reply ANSWERS.

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