W.F.T.M. Post 5

To build a story one must start with a message. It's interesting how I'd never thought about that before. In retrospect I can see that most of my stories message is ,"Laugh". What I find so intriguing about this is that even if a storyteller or film maker is unaware of this story building structure, they tend to follow it. First you start with your message then you build the universe, next you create your characters, then your conflict and on and on. It seems that these steps of story building are derived from the common practice of professional story tellers.