Stop Writing!

“This book belongs next to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! and Robert McKee’s Story.” — Jennifer Maloney-Prezioso, Tony and Emmy Award-winning producer How many years have you given to a story that still doesn’t work? The drafts pile up. The middle sags. You fix one scene and break three more. So you do what every writing book taught you to do: rewrite. Again. Here’s what nobody told you: the problem was never your talent. You started writing too soon. Writing isn’t rewriting. It’s pre-writing. Stop Writing! presents a complete story-development method from David Cornue, a television writer who sold his pilot Triage to 20th Television for ABC and has spent a decade coaching writers. Envision the concept. Engineer the world and characters. Execute the outline. Then—and only then—start writing. You’ll learn how to test your story in seven sentences instead of seventy pages; discover its “third side,” where the heart of the plot lives; see the entire story through visual maps and a three-dimensional plotter; pitch before you write; and turn feedback into progress. If outlining has ever killed a story for you, this is different. You’re not writing the story before you write it. You’re learning to see its shape—so you can plan like a plotter while preserving the discovery of a pantser. Best of all, development is designed to end. You’ll begin writing on schedule, equipped with a story that works and a first draft that knows where it’s going. For screenplays, novels, plays, and series. Read by the author. Includes a companion PDF featuring the book’s maps and figures. Story first. Words last. Start here.