Trey Parker’s Writing Tips

Most of my writing has been in the form of screenplays so when transitioning into novel-writing it’s difficult to gage what skills, tips and tricks transfer to the novel format. Usually the answer is: if it’s simple it works.

No advice I’ve seen has been as simple, and impressive, as Trey Parker’s “therefore” strategy.

In 2011 Parker and his writing partner Matt Stone did a guest lecture at N.Y.U where he explained how to tie a bunch of comedy beats together into a decent story.

The video is not embeddable so watch it here.

Parker said, “What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but’. What I’m saying is, you come up with an idea, like, this happens  and then this happens. No, no, no. It should be, this happens, and therefore, this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens.”

It’s simple advice that really gets to the heart of why a scene is happening, to set up a conflict or complication. It ensures a story is a chain of events where each scene causes the next scene or makes things harder for the character.

This advice has been public since 2011 but I forget it all the time. Now I’m putting it here for myself, and anyone else that wants it. As I write on Scrivener I use a scene template for each new story beat at the top of the scene I’ve included: “Therefore/But”. Hopefully that will keep this handy tip at the forefront of my mind when writing story beats.