Storytelling for entertainment means creating stories, pitches, treatments, and scripts for film, TV, new media, fiction, and theater.
Of all the kinds of professional storytelling, storytelling for entertainment is the most lucrative, most competitive, and has the highest degree of difficulty.
Storytelling has evolved faster and further in the world of entertainment simply because of the forces of natural selection: massive supply, intense competition, high barrier to entry, huge rewards, and rapid iteration.
Entertainment storytelling requires additional elements such as genre, theme, causality, transformation, and surprise. There are necessary structural beats, modern versions of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, such as Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet. There’s cutting-edge techniques like “save the cat” and mystery boxes. There’s genre-specific tropes like the scene where the good guy and the bad guy meet and the bad guy’s like, “You and me, we’re the same….”
Consider entertainment storytelling techniques like a buffet of potential storytelling for business tactics. For example, you might frame external forces shaping the business landscape as catalysts, major decisions as act breaks, and key insights as callbacks to previous victories.
If you are primarily interested in becoming a professional entertainment writer, check out the entertainment storytelling resources for advice more directly relevant to “the business.”
NOTE: When pitching an entertainment story, the listener needs the context of genre to understand how the story works within the existing entertainment ecosystem, so it would sound like this:
“It’s a GENRE about ONE hero who wants ONE goal despite ONE insurmountable obstacle.”