How I use them

Story Engine says what a movement is and Story Assembly how movements nest. This is how I work them.

Where to begin

Below the top of the tree, no movement starts blank. Its position hands it cells before anything is written.

• First child. Its catalyst is the previous sibling's resolution, or a disruption of the status quo it left. At the start of a work, it is an event that disrupts the status quo. It ends when the character holds the parent's objective; its resolution is the fact they read it from. Its own objective, crisis and climax are open; its objective can be what they wanted before.
• Second child. Its catalyst is the first child's resolution, or a disruption of the status quo it left. Its objective is a narrower form of the parent's. Its resolution is pinned as the parent's crisis. Its crisis and climax are open.
• Third child. Its catalyst is the second child's resolution, or a disruption of the status quo it left. Its objective is a narrower form of the parent's. Its crisis is the parent's at finer grain; its climax and resolution are the parent's. Expect it to echo its parent.

Each catalyst follows from the resolution before it: therefore, or but — never and then.

So start from what the structure hands you, then design the open cells between the given ones — usually the crisis. The crisis needs the other parts to exist: name its two roads and the cost, the stakes and the objective follow from them. The catalyst is whatever has to happen to put the character at the fork — an external event, even when what it builds to is a realization.

Only the top of the tree has nothing handed to it. There, start from whatever you know.

Catalyst, objective, resolution

The catalyst is a collision: the event where the characters' paths meet. Every character in a movement shares it, and each cell names that same event from that character's side. It happens to the character; for the one who acted, name what the collision did to them.

The objective is the outcome the character wants, never the tactic for getting it. Tactics belong to the children.

The resolution is the fact as the character can observe it. What they make of it stays off the sheet.

Lens and irony

State each character's lens and position at the top of the tree. Below that, state a position only when the objective needs it to make sense.

Write the irony line last, once the climax and resolution exist; they decide how it lands.

Before drafting a scene

Know the hard choice before writing it. The crisis fixes where the scene has to arrive; the drafting can discover how it gets there.

Plant the stakes on the way. Stakes revealed at the crisis arrive too late.

Reading a sheet

Down each character's column, never across rows. The parts are positions in each character's own sequence, not shared timestamps, so characters may be off-beat inside a movement. What they cannot do is overrun the movement's span.

Zoom

Every cell is one simple sentence at its movement's magnitude. What a cell cannot say simply, its children say in detail. A scene's prose proves its sheet.