019 | The StoryWise Framework: A Bridge for Plotters and Pantsers

What if a storytelling framework could help you stay on course without taking the creativity out of writing?

In this episode of Christian Author 2.0, I explain how I developed the Storywise framework through years of trial and error, pastoral ministry, and plenty of time spent learning how stories shape people’s beliefs and life direction. Listen in for a practical way to bring structure to your story while still letting the creative process surprise you.

🗝️ 5 keys you’ll learn

1. Why stories matter beyond entertainment Stories influence culture, beliefs, and the direction of people’s lives. I share how my work as a pastor helped me see the power of stories and inspired him to tell stories that ignite faith and connect people to the heart of God.
2. How the Storywise framework uses major milestones The framework gives your story a supportive structure, including the first plot point, midpoint shift, second plot point, pinch points, climax, and resolution. I compares it to a suspension bridge that carries readers safely from the opening scene to the story’s destination.
3. Why your opening chapters carry so much weight The beginning of a story introduces the character, their world, goals, flaws, and the problem that disrupts everything. These early chapters help readers connect with and empathize with the character.
4. How to balance plotting with discovery writing Plotters can get stuck planning forever, while pantsers can lose cohesion by wandering too far from the story’s path. The Storywise framework aims to unite both approaches by giving writers a roadmap while leaving room for the story to emerge.
5. How structure can protect your deeper themes For Christian storytellers, planning key parts of the storyline can help keep important themes and ideas woven throughout the book. At the same time, the framework still leaves room for the excitement of discovering the story as you write at 21:58.

🎉 A fun fact from the episode

The bridge illustration comes from my home state of Michigan. I picture the Mackinac Bridge, the longest suspension bridge in North America, carrying the story and its characters toward the other side.

⚡ Outtro

A good framework shouldn’t feel like a cage. It should give you enough direction to keep moving while leaving space for creative surprises.

As Jeremy puts it, writing into the dark can be stressful, but it’s also “super fun” when you know the major milestones will help you reach the story’s destination.

Hey, creative Christian, Jeremy Bauma here, and welcome to Christian Author 2.0, the podcast for modern stewards of the written word with insights for your GospelWise author journey. For 2 decades, I've watched authors struggle with their creative calling. That's why I built the GospelWise author ecosystem, to provide the practical training and high-tech tools you need to thrive. From deep dive insights to specialized apps and personalized coaching, I'm here to help you turn your manuscript into a movement. So stop guessing and start growing your reach with excellence. Let's dive into today's episode and master the path together. So, the Storywise framework, as I've framed it, is something that I have developed over the last 10 years or so through trial and error and really just coming at storytelling without any formal background, without formal training at university or writing workshops or instruction beforehand. I came to storytelling as a pastor and a minister who has a heart for our culture and for people's stories and journeys.

And in pastoring, walking with people through their own stories, I began to see how stories themselves impact people's journeys and how people process their journeys and their own stories and how the power of Story and the power of the pen, whether good or bad, can be wielded in order to influence the shape and contours of people's beliefs and their own life direction. I have found that in my own life, and I've seen that in the way just anecdotally culture has shifted and changed and the direction that it has shifted and changed because of the stories that We tell ourselves, the stories that impact our culture and the contours of that culture. So, I came into storytelling wanting to influence that direction in a way that would ignite faith in my world and connect people to the heart of God and broadcast the gospel in very practical ways. So, when I decided to sit down during a National Novel Writing Month challenge, I came to the blank page with No clue what I was doing. But beforehand, I had researched a bit about how you tell a story and do this thing called storytelling. The first book that was super helpful was this book called The Writer's Journey, which was actually based around Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, which, if you've looked at storytelling at all, you know that this is pretty much a foundational Structure that has impacted especially Western storytelling, but mostly stories in general, have sort of followed this, uh, flow of the hero entering into an adventure and encountering a number of milestones along the way to come from a world as he knew it and change into a new hero and enter a new world. Based upon what he's learned and experienced. That really set me on sure footing when I came to write my first book, which was this spiritual coming-of-age story based loosely around my own spiritual journey and crisis of faith.

So because I was writing a story about this hero, Peter Daniel Young, and his own change and development and journey, that was super helpful in structuring and influencing how I framed my story. Farther along, I started reading much more deeply into how you tell a story and how you structure a story so that it holds together and gives the reader a thrilling, exciting, enjoyable reading experience. The next couple books that I came across were a magical book called Story Engineering, which gave me a lot of the language and structure for my own framework that I have used ever since by Larry Brooks. Highly recommend reading that book along with Robert McKee's classic Story, which is another deep dive into the substance, structure, style, and principles of screenwriting. But that screenwriting structure in the 3-act structure is super helpful for storytellers and was vital for me in my own framing of storytelling that I I've actually shifted into more of a 4-act structure with the, which I'll get to in a bit as I talk about that structure, that Storywise framework. But that book with an emphasis on screenwriting really gave me the language and the structure for my own framework for telling novel-oriented stories. And then the last one was Story Grid: What Good Editors Know About the Storytelling Process. And this little grid on there a way to gauge whether or not a story works and how a story is held together.

Those books were vital for my own evolution and development as a storyteller, and those, along with some others, were influential in me developing my own, as I call it, Storywise framework that I have incorporated into this training for you and the template that is included in this course. So there you go, there's a little bit of an introduction about how I myself came to develop this framework that has been super helpful for me in my own storytelling journey. And I'm excited to be able to share it with you in this training and hope that it will likewise give you the freedom you need to just tell your story, to be able to record the bits that you need beforehand in the prewriting phase as you creatively sketch out sort of a roadmap for where your story might head at the front end, but then also just let it emerge using the structure and the framework to give you the freedom, like I said, but also drain away any tension. Or any fear or any apprehension you might come to the story with. Because storytelling should be fun. And I found that when I'm able to have a sort of a structured, frameworked roadmap, my storytelling is enjoyable. It is carefree. It is a bit painless, even though there is that stress and that work that comes from the act of storytelling.

But in using this template that I've designed and the framework, I've been able to tell the stories I've wanted to tell in a way that is just free and my own way and is enjoyable, I think, for the readers as much as for myself in the act of storytelling. This is a framework and a structure that you can use, but also you should be able to tweak and to mold into your own image, if you will, your own storytelling image. Use it again to give you the freedom to take away any tension or fear that you might have coming to the blank page, but then use it and shape it into the way you need to tell the story you need to tell. All right, enough introduction for my own storytelling journey. Let's get into the course itself, beginning with a bit of an overview of that framework to orient you with the template and also the roadmap ahead. In wrapping our minds around this story-wise framework at the outset, I thought that it would be helpful to illustrate sort of graphically how this plays out. Now, I don't want to overwhelm you at the front end with all of the bits and parts to this framework. Instead, I wanted to just give you an overview Of the major milestones using the graphical sort of illustration of a bridge.

I'm going to explain some of these parts. Don't pay attention to them in their entirety. Instead, just go with the illustration, sit back and enjoy the overview. We'll drill down into the details farther into the course. I want you to envision in your mind's eye a bridge, something along the lines of the Golden Gate Bridge. In my mind, it's the Mackinac Bridge, the— actually the longest suspension bridge in North America, in my home state, Michigan. So you got the sort of road there, if you will, going across the massive river or strait or bay, and along the ways you have these— Piers. Pillars or posts or whatever they are that hold the parts of the suspension bridge in place.

It creates this framework for the bridge, this structure to suspend the road over which the cars zoom. People on their journey toward the end of the bridge, their destination, are brought safely across to the other side. This is the way we can think about our story. The same sort of framework, the same sort of suspension bridge that creates this solid supportive structure, flexible enough to flex with your story as you write, but also gives you a framework for the writing. Along the way, you're going to hit these milestones at the quarter mark, at the first plot point, which is going to catapult your hero, the main character, and even his team around him Into the story, the main adventure. After that, we get to the midpoint shift, dead set in the middle. This is when everything turns again, plunging the story but also the characters headlong into a massive twist, a massive turn in their adventure, in order to bring them through to the second plot point, as it's called. This is around the 75% mark, the 3/4 mark, where the characters, every everything they need to resolve the story and to bring it to its final conclusion.

These are the main milestones in the story, but there are several more important inflections along the way, beginning at, of course, the start with the opening scene. These are super important chapters that set up the story, that set up the character, who they are, their goals, their personalities, their flaws. That help orient the reader solidly into the story. You want the reader to connect with the character, to empathize with the character, to like the character. They're going to be spending a whole lot of time with this character. And so these early chapters help ground the reader in who is telling this story. And of course, this character, their world is messed up. Something comes into the story, incites the story, and incites them into the action, into the adventure.

This leads on to the plot point, and then in between the first plot point and the midpoint shift is what we call the first pinch point. Again, we'll describe more in detail the milestones that come into play with this structure, but this is sort of the first real glimpse we get of the antagonistic force. It's a reminder that this guy or gal or Presence is a force to be reckoned with. As you can imagine, just like the first plot point and the second plot point, there is a second pinch point. Again, a sort of moment when the antagonistic force raises its head in some certain way to remind the reader of the stakes as well as the hero. This sets us sailing through the second plot point and into the climax and the resolution. In which the hero battles the forces of darkness, the good guys and the bad guys clash, and our intrepid hero and his team brings about a resolution to the original problem. We end the story with that aha moment, the validation.

When everything is wrapped up, the characters kick back, they reflect upon all that they had experienced, and they are better characters for it. So this is the Storywise framework, where you have the story beginning at the front end, sailing through to the other side, using a framework that helps orient not only the reader, but also the writer. You! Which is why I'm explaining this framework, to give you yourself a sense of how to write, what to write, and also when certain parts of the story should be written, when certain aspects of the story, the plotting, should appear in the course, sort of the time frame of the story, and when characters should encounter certain things and do certain things to make the story hold together and to fulfill certain reader expectations about how their particular story, the genre that they read, should be experienced. Again, we'll get into all of this very soon, but I wanted to address one more thing before we get into the details of the framework itself by addressing who I envision this framework properly serving. Because there are really 2 different camps within the author community, the storytelling community, about how storytellers should actually go about telling their story. And we know of these 2 camps as plotters versus pantsers. Plotters or pantsers, huh? Yeah, that's exactly right. Plotters, you will probably sense, plot their story.

They often spend a lot of time beforehand laying the groundwork to get the details laid out before they even enter into the storytelling process. Sometimes this takes a long time, and there can be problems with this type of writer who spends so much time plotting and worldbuilding that the story never gets written. All of their time is spent laying out these detailed worlds and all of the backstory to the characters, including their mother's maiden name and their favorite sushi and whatever other detail that gets written beforehand, and the writer never actually gets around to writing the story itself. Or the writer rigidly sticks to the script without letting their creative brain wander off the beaten path. The framework can actually become sort of a noose, if you will, that strangles the creative momentum of the story as the writer gets into it and gets to know their characters without letting them— these characters through which the story is being told— dictate the direction of the story. So plotters have one sort of set of problems or issues that can stand in the way of getting the story written. I'll tell you that pantsers have another set of problems. Pantsers, of course, being people who write By the seat of their pants.

Pantsers sort of have the opposite problem of plotters. They can veer so far off the path that they are charting their own course and their own map, getting into rabbit trails, getting way off course, that the story becomes unwieldy, that the reader can become lost, that the story becomes nonsensical and falls apart. Details about the events get lost, and the connections between the events of the front and the back end become totally disconnected. So in the end, you have a story that is muddled and wandering without any cohesion or clarity for the reader at the end of the story. My hope is that this framework can actually unite these 2 methods. The Storywise framework is a uniter between the plot The plotters and the pantsers, because I myself have used it in a way that captures really two sides to my own process and method of writing, which has been both to plot or at least sketch a framework leading into the story with some of the details of characters and the actual plot and events of the story itself, while letting my creative brain discover the story as it goes along. The story sort of emerging by the seat of my pants in a way that makes the story exciting and unpredictable for both the reader as well as me, the writer. I figure that if I don't know what's happening in the story except for a few paces on, then the reader is also not going to know what happens next.

And as a storyteller, especially a thriller storyteller, that's where I want my reader to be. I want them to be anticipating what I want them to be trying to figure it out, but also surprised and delighted at the way I twist and turn the road ahead to bring them through to the other side of the story. And I think that this framework that allows plotters and pantsers to prepare, but also discover the story as it emerges, is the way to go. I myself have found it helpful, and I believe you will as well. Because in thinking through the Storywise storytelling process, really what this is is a framework for capturing the major story elements during both the pre-writing and the discovery writing process. Typically in that pre-writing phase, leading up to the point where I will sit down with a blank page and start writing the story, I will have all of these ideas floating around and racing around in my head, both at the theme side, but also the idea side and the plot side. I have usually a sense of that first moment in the story that everything changes and the character enters into the adventure, but then sometimes I will also have something down the road that I think will be crucial for the characters to experience or the characters to find or discover. And so I will put that in my framework outline so that I don't forget it and I know exactly where it goes.

But then along the way, oftentimes the entire story will change because of the way the storytelling goes and what I discover in the process and what emerges in that process of actually sitting down And writing the story. And so the framework, the outline, the template that you have in this workshop is designed to then also capture those elements, those major milestones along the way as they emerge from the storytelling process. Now, if your stories rely heavily on theme, drawing from the depths of the Christian story, Seeking to offer insight into faith and to inspire people to have faith and to grow in their faith. That's me waving my hand here because that is the way I tell my stories. If that is you, then plotting certain parts of the storyline can help carry that story along and get at those thematic elements. Which is why I imagine people who are plotters who are freaking out about the idea of story emergence and simply discovering the story along the way might be intimidated by a more discovery, riding-by-the-seat-of-your-pants process. Because if you have big themes and important ideas that you want to get across, there is this element of preparing and plotting that you'll want to have at the front end to make sure that those themes and those ideas are woven through the story. So this framework in the template will let you take those themes and those ideas and apply them in a way that keep the pace moving and make sure that they don't get left behind in that discovery process.

But on the other hand, if you do super love the way that the story emerges as you write along, if you enjoy that discovery process that comes from trusting the story to emerge, from your creative brain while writing into the dark without much of a plan, you're also going to love this framework and the template that goes along with it. I'm that kind of a person. I love to sit down with some ideas of where the story is going to head, but then writing into the dark, knowing that I have no idea what's coming down the road into that darkened story world. All that I know is where my flashlight hits on the ground and the road ahead. It's thrilling. It's also stressful, but it's super fun. And this framework allows me to have enough of control over the story and those major milestones to know that I'll get where I need to go while also enjoying the process along the way. All right.

I hope that you sense that this framework is for you, both as a plotter or as a answer, and that it can help you bring about clarity to your story and a sense of cohesion and forward movement and momentum that will be exciting for you as a writer in the storytelling process while giving readers an exciting, entertaining, thrilling read as well. That's a wrap for today, but the real work happens inside the Gospel-Wise Author Fellowship, a totally free membership filled with actionable advice and practical insights. For the deep dive articles, tools, and coaching you need to thrive, go to gospelwiseauthor.com/join. Everything we discussed today and the resources to help you implement it is live in the hub right now. So join the fellowship, grab tools and training, and let's build a lasting Gospel Wise Author legacy with lasting impact. That's gospelwiseauthor.com/join. See you next time on Christian Author 2.0 Insights.