In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.
The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative and allows me to write the other things I want to write about.
We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.
There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.
The villain drives the plot.
The more a character wants and the less a character has the ability to get what they want, the more you have an endless fuel for storytelling in comedy.
Villains often more the story along while the heros react to the villains, so the villain becomes the engine of the story.
There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.
There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.
With a horror movie, you want to know where the engine of the fear is coming from. Like in comedy, you want to know what the engine that's going to make the comedy - where that's coming from.
