ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the nature of story development as a process and why it is essential as a skill for any creative writer, novelist, or screenwriter. The biggest myth in creative writing—that writers should just write, that stories write themselves—is debunked, and the argument is set for the value of developing a story first vs beginning pages. The Rapid Story Development system is introduced and each of the seven steps is described at a high level for the reader. The concept of “conscious writing” is also described as well as the importance of writers knowing what they are writing, how they are writing it, and why they are writing.
