A fill-in-the-blank template that captures the core of any story in about eight sentences using prompts like 'Once upon a time' and 'Until one day.'
The story spine is a storytelling framework created by playwright and improv teacher Kenn Adams. It uses a series of sentence starters to walk you through the essential shape of a narrative: establish a world, show the routine, disrupt it, escalate through consequences, and arrive at a new normal. The template goes roughly: 'Once upon a time... Every day... Until one day... Because of that... Because of that... Until finally... And ever since then...' Pixar adopted it as an internal story development tool, which is how it became famous in the wider writing world.
The story spine is deceptively simple, but it forces you to identify the one thing many writers struggle with: cause and effect. Each 'because of that' demands that the previous event logically causes the next one. If you can fill out a story spine for your novel, you probably have a solid structural foundation. If you cannot, you may have a sequence of events rather than an actual story. It takes five minutes and can save you months of structural revision.
The film follows the story spine almost perfectly: overprotective father, lost son, journey of escalating obstacles, reunion, and a changed perspective on letting go.
Once upon a time, a homebody hobbit lived in the Shire. Every day, he avoided adventure. Until one day, a wizard showed up with thirteen dwarves. The entire novel follows the spine's cause-and-effect chain.
Even a nonlinear, multi-perspective novel like Station Eleven can be distilled to a story spine: a pandemic ends civilization, and the survivors must figure out what from the old world is worth keeping.
Each step must be caused by the previous one, not just happen after it. 'And then' is not the same as 'because of that.' If your events are connected by 'and then,' you have a list, not a story.
The story spine is a discovery tool, not a final outline. Use it to find the core of your story, then build a more detailed structure around it.
The 'every day' step establishes the status quo that gets disrupted. Without it, the disruption has no context and no weight. The reader needs to know what 'normal' looks like before you break it.
Write a story spine for a project you are working on right now. Use the template: Once upon a time... Every day... Until one day... Because of that... Because of that... Because of that... Until finally... And ever since then... Force yourself to make each 'because of that' a genuine consequence of the previous step. If you get stuck, that is probably where your plot has a structural gap.