How to Run a Story Breaking Session

26 Jun, 2026

"Story breaking" is a term I used at Failbetter¹ for the process of taking a story from basically nothing to a rough outline. When I was Fallen London's lead designer, I led several story breaking sessions over the years—those would be long meetings involving 3-4 writers, with the goal of breaking a story for a major storyline or a seasonal event.

Story breaking is essentially a process of rapid ideation and outlining. It has several benefits over just sending one writer off to outline a story on their own:

• It's, surprisingly, quite fast; I found that a lot of progress was made in a 2-hour session, although of course that 2-hour session was 6-8 person-hours of labor.
• It's a very consistent and reliable way of unblocking a writer at the outlining stage, getting them over the hump quickly to the point where they can start refining the outline and writing an actual draft. Some writers are very good at banging out a highly functional outline from the dome with little input, but I find that for most writers (including myself) this type of group process is a huge help.
• For stories that are going to be written by several hands or abut the work of several people, story breaking is a way of giving everyone participation and ownership in the entire production cycle of the storyline.
• It's a tool for alignment; a narrative director or lead can set the brief and make sure that it's clearly understood and followed, or even figure out when the brief is nonfunctional and needs to be adapted. You are having a conversation about your goals and what you're trying to accomplish, which is always going to be better than just handing someone a one-pager.
• It enriches the resulting story. Several writers in a room together will make connections that any one writer alone wouldn't, and riff on one another's ideas. Writer's room time is very productive of exciting ideas and unexpected narrative opportunities. Countless things that excited or delighted (or tortured) players came out of these meetings, and I really don't think we'd have come up with most of them alone.

For example, several Fallen London seasonal events and mainline stories had side narratives, extra story content, or sub-components done by different writers. A typical case might be one of the "Estival" summer seasonal events, which would feature a main story written by one writer, but also additional components done by other members of the team. Doing story breaking as a team ensured everyone had ownership of the resulting story arc and everyone was aware of the overall narrative rather than being siloed in their corner. It meant that I could give more effective direction and help support the primary writer who was taking point on the story.

And every writer could bring their specific strengths to bear on the emerging outline to make it better. For example, different writers had different levels of familiarity with different past storylines and areas of the setting; so having everyone in a room together helped cover for gaps and identify opportunities for riffing on existing material in the game.

I never really formalized this process, as I kept refining and adapting it each time I ran one of those sessions. This is a representative version of how I'd run it, step by step. This process was of course developed for adding new stories to a large, ongoing, narrative live game; but it could very reasonably be adapted to the use case of breaking overall stories for an entire medium-sized game, or breaking individual quests/storylines in a game.

Roles in story breaking

We didn't really use this terminology because it wasn't necessary—everyone knew what they were doing—but for purposes of explaining the dynamics in this article, I'm assuming that story breaking includes:

A lead, who is running the session. The lead keeps everyone on task, keeps everything moving, makes sure people participate,² and keeps track of the process. In every one of these sessions the lead was also responsible for direction—as in, giving the rest of the team their goals and brief.

A principal writer, who is the person who'll be tasked with actually writing the story that is being broken. This person may actually be the same person as the lead, or may be someone else. They "own" the outline and the story, because they're the ones who are going to eventually execute.

If they're someone else: as a lead, you really are here supporting them, and not the other way around; your job is to set them up for success. So you need to respect their instincts and ideally not override them on the final arrangement of the story (unless things are going off the rails in substantial ways). Different principals will have different levels of comfort with the running of a writer's room itself; the goal of having a distinct lead is to cover that gap for them.

Other contributing writers, who may be writing additional or side material; or they may just be here to contribute to the writer's room.³

The Big Board

Failbetter being a fully remote company, we'd do this on Miro; if you're working for some barbaric outfit that has you trapped in a tragic prison of flesh, you can use a regular whiteboard, but you'd need a lot of magnets and index cards or post-its.

The board is, essentially, the work product of story breaking.

My ultimate goal is to produce the "vertical outline," which is a vertical line of story beats (each one a Miro virtual "post-its") running from start to finish. These are intentionally very vague at this stage—basically a one-sentence summary of what should happen. The principal writer is meant to then write a full, proper outline using this as a starting point.

Everything else would be loosely arranged around in groups by category, and then eventually moved next to (and connected) to the story beats those things relate to as those get defined.

A note about branching and structure: The vertical outline is meant to be just a basic skeleton of the critical path of the story; depending on the needs of the story, it might be completely linear or you might be thinking about major branches at the outline stage (and so your vertical line might fork and rejoin). I would generally only think about branching or reactivity in outlining if it's going to outright cause a story beat to not happen at all or be replaced by a completely different beat. Reactivity, or different ways scenes can play out, is more of a question for the full detailed outline downstream from this process.

Process outline

These steps are intentionally loose; they're meant to be adaptable to the shape of what you're doing. The most important thing is that they follow a sort of arc:

• Get clear about what you're doing;
• Perform one or more ideate-and-cull loops:
  • Fill the toybox with toys to play with;
  • Throw out most of them;
• See what story beats or scenes emerge from this vapor;
• Get them ordered and squared away.

0: Warmup

This is optional—experienced teams used to working together can get straight into the meat of the meeting. But when introducing this methodology to a new team, especially, it's useful to take a little time to warm up first.

By "warm up", I mean doing a structured version of "ideation and culling" (section 2 on this schema) but faster and about something low-stakes; it can be completely fictitious exercise, or it can be a less pressured element of the story you're trying to break. The goal is to get everyone familiarized with how this process works by giving them a toy example, and build some rapport and trust to carry into the process.

Sharing unpolished or loose ideas is difficult for a lot of people, as is expressing your thoughts on someone else's opinions, so there's a level of required comfort; doing it in a lower-stakes way first is a good way of building that.

A worked example: You are the lead and two writers, breaking the main story of a new action platformer at a "big indie" studio with about 20-30 devs altogether. The creative brief is loose, but you know it's an action-oriented story and you have some early vizdev as inspiration—the art team is doing stuff that draws on 1980s action movies and battle anime. As a warmup, you lead the team through ideating for some fake "WacDonalds"-style fast food brands that might exist in this world.

1: Goals, constraints, and overall scope

Go over the basic format and purpose of the story. For a Fallen London storyline, this meant answering questions like what type of story it is (a seasonal event, a mainline story, etcetera) and therefore how big it is.

Often we'd have certain constraints that were useful to call out here—things like "last year's event focused on this set of characters, so we should shift narrative focus to another part of the setting for this year."

Thematic, tonal, and experiential goals, too, get raised and called out. Themes are going to emerge through this process, but if you already have thematic "pillars" or targets you mean to hit, they go on the board. At Failbetter, it was also common in many contexts to talk about "ungoals"—things we were specifically not doing. Ungoals are very useful in steering away from pitfalls that you might identify, like for example genre tropes that aren't tonally right for your project.

A worked example: You go over the parameters of what you're doing: you expect the final script to be about 30k words, mostly told through a substantial amount of character dialogue; it's a pretty big game. The story has one main protagonist (there's some early concept sketches of what they might look like) but in action-movie fashion they will often team up with various allies. Thematically, the game wants to capture the feel of big bombastic action-movie set pieces, with levels taking place in cool high-concept places for a gunfight. Also, we have some ungoals: we want to steer clear of the casual misogyny of actual 1980s action movies; and we don't want to scope for vehicle sections, so no car chases or the like.

2: Ideate then cull for story elements

First: let the team brainstorm story elements. I would generally do this by asking people to add cards to the board, without talking. I'd make sure that everyone had added things. We'd stop when everyone felt "done". It's worth noting that, as long as people can see and read what others are adding to the board, they do have an opportunity to riff or simply get inspired by one another during this ideation stage—this is probably logistically easier on a Miro than a real whiteboard.

Then, go over all of the cards one by one, reading them aloud. The reason to do this is twofold. First, I'd make sure that everyone understood what the writing on the card meant; sometimes this would mean the person who wrote the card explaining in more detail what they're thinking of, or giving an example of what it might look like. Second, it forces everyone in the room to form an opinion about each card.

My goal was not to get a lot of feedback on suggestions, but just to identify what people are attracted to; what feels apropos, exciting, or fruitful to them. I'd ask team members to mark those cards with a star.

Finally, the cull: I'd keep a selection of things that have stars, and drop the things that don't.⁴ How many things to keep is a matter of subjective judgement based on eyeballing how much "stuff" the story is going to need to function.

What's a "story element"? Virtually anything. On Fallen London we were writing new stories to add to an existing, rich, and dense story world; so often story elements were existing setting elements and characters we wanted to loop into the new storyline. But other things you could brainstorm with this process:

• Themes you want to explore;
• Characters, either from an existing cast or ideas for new ones;
  • It can be helpful to narrow this down—"antagonists", "allies", "townsfolk", etcetera.
• Locations;
• High concepts (ie, ideas like "orbital laser" or "cursed sword")

You can do this process multiple times, ideating then culling on different areas each time. But with an experienced team who's comfortable with this process, I often would go through all of the ideation phases one at a time, then go through all of the culling phases together.

For a Fallen London storyline, typically I would ideate two groups of things: Characters (meaning both existing canonical NPCs and possible new characters in this story) and setting elements (meaning locations, phenomena, or other non-character elements of the setting; both already-existing and possible new ideas).

A worked example: You arrange ideation around three elements: allies, villains, and locations. You get a bunch of ideas of varying coolness back, but one writer pitches the idea of a bad guy who's a comically evil oil executive; another writer riffs on that and brings up oil rigs as a possible location. Both of those ideas survive culling.

3: Short break

You've been at this for an hour. Let everyone take ten. Get tea, coffee, or just water. Stretch your legs. It is actually important that you do this.

4: Ideate then cull for story beats

Let everyone sit down and look at the board again; give everyone a few minutes to chat, riff, make additional suggestions, talk about what you have so far in a free form way. See if people want to add anything or say anything, or if anything jumps out at them with fresh eyes. Don't linger too long doing this, though.

Then, lead one more ideation round, this time for story beats. For our purposes here a "story beat" is a loosely-defined unit of storytelling; it could be a self-contained scene that might present in different ways (a cutscene, a branching conversation, etc) or it could be something more diffuse like "the overall narrative of this platformer level". At this stage we're typically not thinking about exactly what story beats will look like, just what happens in them and what they're meant to convey.

This loose pile of unorganized story beats—loose moments or scenes—is your raw material for assembling the story. A good "story beat" card is something like "seeing the wreck of the Titanic underwater for the first time" or "love interest confesses her love". These are anchoring moments; the key scenes that the story drives towards or is propelled forward from.

Worked example: You do one more ideation round, this time just for story beats; very naturally, "firefight on the oil rig" emerges and people quickly want to incorporate it, but you also generate other story beats; for example, "an antagonist falls in love with the player character."

4: Arrangement

Start pulling story beats into the vertical outline and seeing how they fit together. Mostly, they will suggest their position naturally—most story beat ideas are already born as a climax, second-act obstacle, inciting incident, etcetera. But things can move around. Discuss as you go.

As story beats get placed on the vertical outline, I'd also drag the various story element cards close to where they show up in the outline and draw lines to tie them to story beats that they factor into. This is useful both for visualizing things about the story (for example, how tone might shift) and to check that nothing is being "orphaned" (like a theme that figures in an early scene and never shows up again).

As you start to define more what the arrangement of the story is going to be, and throughout the rest of this process, you can start to get more declarative about it; it's okay to say "okay, let's do it this way" and just define something. You can also ask pointed questions to get a decision made. The goal is really not to debate each point at this stage, otherwise you'll be here all day. If you're both the lead and the principal writer, this is pretty straightforward; if you're the lead supporting a principal writer, you should defer to their instincts about how to start assembling things. In practice, at this stage you can let the principal writer take the reins entirely if they're comfortable doing so.

You will be left with a very rudimentary outline that has a bunch of gaps in it. Most likely you know the "heart" of your story, though: the most important scene at the center of the story; this is usually, though not always, the climax. It's usually, though not always, where the main themes tie together. You will also have a few other moments that can fit as leading up to, or down from, this central scene.

At this point, you can skip to cleanup, end the meeting early, and have the principal writer take just these "points of light" and finalize an outline on their own. I'd strongly suggest doing this immediately, though, while everything is still fresh in everyone's minds; a goal here is to make sure you capture subtle ideas and connections that were talked about in the meeting.

However, I would usually go ahead and finalize a rough skeleton of an outline in the meeting; this is done by filling in those gaps. In my experience this is fairly smooth because you're just applying logic and problem-solving; the remaining story beats in the outline will become increasingly defined as the story constrains them, and you're mostly trying to figure out how to get from A to B.

Again, the principal writer "owns" the production of these story beats, whether that's you or another writer. They're the one who's going to have to write the thing. You and/or them can be declarative about how you want to approach filling in the story at this stage, though of course everyone is welcome to bring their perspective.

The story beats you pulled out of brainstorming are your points of light, and all you have to do is connect them—then make sure there's a beginning and an ending at the edges of the story.

In collaboration with your team, and drawing on your preexisting knowledge of how to outline this kind of story: draw the rest of the owl. This is the least structured part of this process, really, but often I would go in story order, ensuring that each beat connects to the next and possibly finding something to fill that gap if needed; and also making other structural adjustments (like dropping story elements that ended up underutilized). But remember, the goal is not to produce a fully polished outline; just a skeleton for the principal writer.

A worked example: You slide the firefight at the oil rig into the climax of the story. Other loose story beats find natural places to go; "antagonist falls in love with the protagonist" seems like it'd tie nicely into one of the lesser villains ideas that people liked. You start riffing and connecting things—maybe the lesser villain is the evil oil CEO's henchperson at first, and so on.

If you're going to have a fight in an oil rig, then you need to figure out why you're on the oil rig and therefore there has to be a scene where the player learns this. You need to get to the oil rig, so there may be a scene on the helicopter on the way there—but you know from your ungoals that it has to be a simple cutscene, and you can't have a helicopter dogfight!

5: Cleanup

Read the vertical outline from start to finish, aloud, as a final sanity check; narrate the story to the team and see that it makes emotional and logical sense.

Check in with everyone on the team, especially the principal writer (if they're not you). Do they have feedback? Does anything feel vague or unclear? Do they have worries about the story as outlined? Are they confident they can execute?

If necessary, go back and tweak or adjust to address this feedback—but in reality, I've found that because this process is so aligning to begin with, typically people are pretty confident in the outline when it gets to this stage.

Thank your team for their time, take a deep breath, and end the meeting.

Where to go from here

Again, the vertical outline produced in story breaking is the earliest version of an outline. The principal writer then takes it and, in their own time, fleshes it out into a full outline. This may go through another round of feedback or adjustment before writing can begin in earnest. From there, the story just moves through your narrative pipeline, however that works.

The nice thing about story breaking is that it's self-contained and many-to-one; you get everyone involved, but the output is a single intermediary product that then one person is going to take full ownership of. Often that finished outline will loop back to the other contributing writers to help contextualize their contributions.

Thinking about adapting this process

Largely, I have experience doing this in Failbetter's specific circumstances and with Failbetter's specific team culture—which is very high-trust, high-autonomy, high-expertise. There are a lot of things to consider in a different context:

• Your team dynamics. Do you struggle with trust? Do you have writers who are much more outspoken than others? Are people on your team wary of feedback due to past bad experiences?
• The shape, size, and significance of the story. If you're breaking the main story for an entire, large narrative game, you may need to split your process across multiple sessions. Maybe in a linear way (one chapter at a time) or in a telescoping way (building a very rough overall outline, then coming back to break individual chapters).
• Your team size and responsibilities. What made this process work so well at Failbetter was that we could do it with 4 people in a room, everyone there would be a highly capable writer, and that group would include every relevant stakeholder including the game's overall creative lead.
• Story context. A lot of this process was informed by having Fallen London's already dense canon to draw on; when working completely from scratch on a new project, you may need to adjust. For example, by running earlier brainstorming sessions meant simply for worldbuilding or general "setting breaking".

Every team and every game has unique circumstances, of course. But hopefully this article provides an overview of one methodology for running this kind of process, and why you'd want to do it.

PS: Soft announcing the Game Narrative Reader

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