How To Write TEW Storiesby panix04

First of all for those who don't know me, i'm Panix and I developed the PBS (or Panix booking system) this is a simple system incorporated into angle/story writing to aid booking. I am a keen writer and so writing TEW story’s really appealed to me but I was always somewhat put off by the seeming complexity of it. Now I write stories for fun, but I thought I’d put together a short guide to story writing to help bring out the Vince Russo in you editor shy folk.

1) Plot

The most important part of any good story is a good plot. So sit down and write the outline for your story. You can take your inspiration from anywhere, it doesn’t have to be the latest TNA feud, it could be based off a 20 year old SMW feud or even be inspired by a real life event. If you are really struggling there is even an ideas thread here:

http://www.greydogsoftware.com/forum...ad.php?t=16532

2) Character

Write down a list of your characters, and number them 1 through to 8 depending on how many you use. You will probably use this as a reference quite a bit.

3) Outline

The next step is too see how the story will play out from a wrestling perspective. This is where I give you a small introduction to my booking system! I generally write out a planning sheet that looks a little bit like this:

You can use excel to do this and I have an excel spreadsheet made especially for this which you can access at the bottom of this post (hopefully)

The ‘S’ stands for show and basically means which show for that month the segment will appear in. It is probably a good time to point out that my system works on the assumption you run one show per week, so S1 is the 1st show of the month S2 the second etc. I also have P1 on there which stands for Pay per view – this is basically the large event people tend to hold at the end of a month. So basically you use the grid to write out the various plot points for your story. For example you might want to have Vince McMahaon attack HHH to start a feud so you would type in the S1/angle1 box Heel attacks face, the next week Vince could book trips in a handicap match so you would again fill this in on your grid.

4) Entering plot points

Now fire up the editor and go to the storyline section add a record, assign all your characters an appropriate role. Type the description for the story and enter a title. When it comes to entering the title, in order to keep it consistent with the PBS please put a prefix on there which indicates the story type. This is made up of a letter followed by the number of participants the letter part is as follows S = singles feud, G = group feud (IE a stable story) T = tag feud. So if you were doing a story with two rival factions each with 4 members then your prefix would be G8. Once you have done this hit the ‘edit plot’ button and a new box will come up, within this box will lie your plot point – the ones you have written up in your story planner. Hit Add plot point and you will be presented with this (Fig. A1)

Scared? Don’t be! This couldn’t be simpler. If the plot point is a match click the match section, if its an angle click the angle. Name the plot point and save (we will come back and do the rest later. When you name the plot point make sure you put in brackets at the end of the plot title which show this point is scheduled for, it should have the appropriate code on the match planner I made for you. Once you have entered your first plot point, just do exactly the same for all the other plot points in your story. Don’t forget to save as you go, or you will lose work (anyone who has made stories will tell you how frustrating it is to exit without saving!

5) Bring that bad boy to life (editing plot points)

Well I have gone easy on you so far so its time to get to the slightly more complicated part. By now you have all your plot point’s named, but its time to breath life into them by assigning angle types and roles. First of all I will cover matches, because to be honest that’s fairly straight forward. There are 4 match types you can choose between. So lets start there shall we, choose one from either singles, tag, triangle or 4-way matches. Now what you have to realize is that each of the eight participant here represents the 8 participants you entered on the main story screen (here’s were you will be glad you wrote these down!) Simply click on the appropriate participant and give him a side. So if it’s a tag match with participants 3 and 4 against 7 and 8, set participants 3 and 4 to side one and 7 and 8 to side two. If you want to dictate which team wins then choose the winning side on the drop down box at the bottom of the window. Easy as that!

Now onto angles which can be a little bit trickier. It works in a similar fashion to the matches except you have to assign an angle type. This is pretty straightforward, if you have 2 people attacking someone then choose attack, if you have someone hyping themselves choose hype. Just scan through them until you find the type you think best suits your plot point and now move on to the participants roles. There are 4 roles you can choose from Catalyst, Target, Subject and support. Theses are important as they dictate which story character is going to be doing what in this angles. For those of you who don’t really understand the roles here is a brief guide (bare in mind these are my interpretations)

Catalyst = the person who starts it off (EG in an attack angle it would be the person attacking)Target = the person on the receiving endSubject = if a person is being referenced but is not on screenSupport = a minor character within the plotline.

Once you have edited all of the plot points the actual story part is finished and you are ready to move on to the most vital part of a story – the angles!

6) Making sure you cover your angles

I don’t know about you guys but something that frustrates me no-end is running a story and finding a missing angle. You have to go into the editor and import stuff, its just a time consuming chore and one that can easily

be avoided! You may think, I have just written 30 plot point im now going to have to write 30 angles. This is seldom the case as many of the angles you want will probably already exist. The way to check if a plot point needs an angle making is to go to the modify plot point screen and hit the analysis button, it will then list all of the angles in the database that can be used for that plot point. Scan through and see if there is one that fits your plot point. If there isn’t I tend to highlight that plot point in red using excel, just so I know I have to make an angle for it.

7) Creating Angles

Always save the most complicated bit for last, that’s what I say! Actually creating angles isn’t as bad as you would think, but I knew the 1st time I attempted it I was a little bit petrified! First of all fire up the angles section of the editor and hit add record. It should come up with a screen similar to (Fig. A2)

First thing is 1st name your angles don’t forget to use the appropriate pre-fix, as that keeps everything nice and tidy. If you don’t know these pre-fixes simply do a filter on the type of angle you want and see what prefix the other angles of that type have. Once you have done this select your type, make sure this matches the type of your plot point or you will not be able to use it. The set the risk, I believe this signifies how risky the angle is from a media point of view, IE a girl getting naked would be considered high risk, a wrestler hugging a teddy bear would be considered low risk. Fill in the times – this is pretty much at your discretion but don’t be un-realistic, don’t make 30 minute tee-shirt firing angles – its just lame! Fill in a description of the angle and enter keywords. Keywords are words that when you do a search on them this angle would come up. Just put in what you think would be most appropriate here.

Characters are next up, start off by selecting a role for each participant. Make sure the role you select is consistent with the role you gave that person in the plot point or the angle will not qualify for use with the plot point. Next fill in what the angle should be rated on, if its an interview perhaps it should be microphone skills, if it’s a bikini contest looks might be appropriate. Choosing the rating is really just about common sense and personal preference. Next on to Injury risk, if you are doing an interview, chances are you can leave this out. If you are doing an angle were a worker gets thrown 14 foot onto a bed of nails chances are you might want to increase the injury risk! ‘Can turn’ is the next column, this basically says whether the angle can potentially change someone’s alignment from a heel to a face or vice versa, again bare in mind whether this angle would be able to turn someone in real life when making this decision. Finally there is appearance this is purely to say whether a worker appears on or off-screen.

If your angle sets up a match, for example the angle could be Vinny Mac announcing a triple threat match. Then the purpose button makes a pre-book possible off the back of the angle when you use it in game.

The final thing to add to angles is the commentary this will appear when the angle runs during a show, this is occasionally overlooked, but personally I like to put in really in-depth commentary as it adds a bit of flavor to the game. Basically you just write down what you want here if you want to say “Mick Foley came down to the ring and tore Melina a new one” the trick here is that you are not always going to use Mick Foley or Melina in this angle. But you are going to use participant1 and participant2 every time you use the angle. So instead of writing “Mick Foley came to the ring” you would select the appropriate person from the drop down list and then hit either the Full name or short name button, that will enter a strange code (usually a dollar sign with a couple of characters) the afterwards type “came to the ring” when you run this it will replace the strange code with the appropriate name. Use this method to define character gender as well; IE “he walked down to the ring” would not work if you were to put Trish Stratus in the angle. So use the same method except instead of hitting the name button hit the he/she button.

8) Final testing

So you have created all the angles for the plot point all that remains is to go back to the story and do an analysis just to double check that all the angles you have created work as intended and then give it a quick test in-game. Once you have done that, copy your created angles and stories into a blank database and send them to me so I can add them to the angles/story mod! I hope this helps, any criticism is welcome! I know this may come across as a tad patronizing to all you regular story writers but if it helps one person to start writing it would have been worth the effort!

Figure: A1

Figure: A2