Note: Arc Studio Pro users can scroll to the bottom to learn how to download a Pilot Story Worksheet as a note that lives alongside your script. New users can download Arc Studio for free and start writing their pilot today!

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The story you tell in the pilot episode of your TV show has to do a lot of work. It has to introduce your characters and the world, set up the rest of the show, and be so good that it convinces the audience to keep watching. That's a tall order! But don't despair; in this article I'll be covering how you can draw on what we learned in Lesson 1, Lesson 2, and Lesson 3 to come up with a strong pilot story.

BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END

A lot of lessons on TV pilot stories will focus on act structure, but I want to give advice that will be helpful no matter what you’re writing, whether it’s a half-hour sitcom or an hour-long drama. So instead of focusing on a specific act structure I’m going to break this down into what you should do in the beginning of your story, the middle of your story, and the end of your story.

But before we get lost in the weeds, I want to make sure you stay focused on the most important thing: telling a great story. Yes, a pilot story has to accomplish a lot of things, but none of that matters if the audience isn’t enjoying it.

The Beginning

The beginning of your pilot is incredibly important because it’s like a representative sample of your entire pilot, and your pilot is like a representative sample of your entire show. That makes the beginning of your pilot a representative sample for your entire show! It also might be the only part of your show that a viewer watches or the only part of your script that an executive reads, so it needs to be really good.

No pressure!

But don’t worry, here are some tips for the beginning of your pilot story.

Don’t explain too much

Don’t explain too much at the beginning of your story. This can be hard because you’ve been working so hard on this show, creating the characters and the world, and you want to make sure the audience understands everything. Over-explaining is particularly tempting in genre shows that take place in a world that’s different than ours. You want to explain the rules, how the magic works, or how the intergalactic government works.

You don’t need to do that. We can learn about the world as we go.

Explaining too much slows the story down and makes people lose interest. You never want to do that, but you especially don’t want to do that in the first few pages. Only share the information that the audience needs to know, and only share it when they need to know it. If you feel like you’re explaining too much, ask yourself if the audience needs to know this information to understand what your characters are going through right now. If they don’t, that info can probably wait.

Establish tone

If the beginning of your pilot is a representative sample of your show, the audience is going to want to know what kind of show this is. Establishing the tone helps the audience understand the show and sets their expectations moving forward. It also forces you to make the show compelling right away. If you’re writing a comedy, make the beginning funny. If you’re writing a thriller, make the beginning thrilling. Same goes with scary, soapy, mysterious, dramatic… whatever. Audiences and readers are impatient. They aren’t going to wait around for the good stuff.

Now, tone might seem like something to worry about when you’re writing the script, not coming up with the story. But your story is where you’re coming up with what the scenes are going to be in your script, and that will have a huge influence on the tone.

Hook the audience

We can take the idea of making the story compelling right away a step further by hooking the audience. This means starting with something that is going to make the audience lean in and pay attention. There are many different ways of doing this. One is to present a question or mystery that will be answered later in the episode. Another is to use a flash forward to the most exciting scene in your pilot, and the audience wants to see how we get there.

Or you can just make it really fun or funny! Start your story with something that is going to make the audience think, “Oh, I want more of this.”

Introduce your main characters

We also will meet your main characters pretty early. Either in the first scene or pretty soon after that. That mean seem obvious since they’re the main characters, but what isn’t as obvious is what they’re doing when we meet them. It’s helpful to meet them as they are doing something that tells us about who they are. Have them solving a problem, reacting to a situation, making a decision, or otherwise taking some kind of action that is revealing about them.

It’s not just what they’re doing, it’s how they do it. Are they brilliant? Fearless? Deadly? Lazy? Do they cheat? Do they lie? Do they put themselves at risk to help another person? Show us who they are.

You can also use this moment, or another moment early on, to hint at what their core problem is. We talked about this in the lesson on developing your characters. What’s the fundamental disconnect between what they want and the reality of the world they live in? This fundamental disconnect is the heart of your show.

Show us what normal is

Pretty soon your pilot is going to change your protagonist’s world with the inciting incident, but before that happens think about showing us what normal is for your protagonist. What is their everyday life? What’s nice about it, but also what’s lacking? Because if your show is serialized it’s probably going to take us on a journey where your protagonist reckons with what they’re lacking.

Showing us what normal is helps us to understand what that journey is going to be, and why it’s necessary.

Introduce the Problem/Inciting Incident

Stories come from problems. The story of each episode is how your character or characters deals with a particular problem, so in the beginning of your pilot story you need to introduce what the problem is that the pilot episode is going to be about. But out of all the problems in all the episodes of your show, the pilot is special because the problem that you introduce in the pilot is the problem for the whole show.

The thing in the pilot that starts the story for the entire show is called the inciting incident. The inciting incident is the reason your show is starting now. It starts your characters on a path that is different from the path they were on before. That new path is your show!

This ties into the character goals we talked about in Lesson 2. At the start of your pilot, and even before the pilot started, your character had an internal goal. This is a need or desire, some internal problem, that has been there but that they've ignored. When the inciting incident happens it gives them an external goal. The external goal is something in the actual story that they’re pursuing because of their internal goal.

Your whole show is about how the quest for this external goal, or goals, because it can change over time, forces them to reckon with their internal issues. In some shows that reckoning will force them to change a lot, and in other shows they will only change a little or very slowly.

When does the inciting incident happen in your pilot? It can vary. On some shows the inciting incident can be the first scene. Or it could be ten pages in, or it could be a little later. But in general earlier is better than later. In fact, in some shows the inciting incident actually happens even before the episode starts. In Ted Lasso you could say the inciting incident is him getting hired, but we meet him already on his way to start the job.

But why is earlier better than later? Because your pilot needs to demonstrate to the audience what your show is, and your show doesn’t really become your show until after the inciting incident. If you wait until the end, we’re spending most of our time in a world, that then changes and is no longer relevant.

That's why, if at all possible, you should move the inciting incident up. Don’t wait, get to the heart of your story!

As a caveat, there are some shows that don’t really have an inciting incident. Mad Men is an example of this. Nothing really changes for Don Draper in the pilot, what changes is the audience’s understanding of who he is. However, this is very difficult to pull off.

Don’t forget your B Story

Last lesson we learned about A, B, and C Stories. The A Story is your protagonist’s main storyline, and the B Story is either a secondary storyline for that character or another character’s storyline. The C Story would be a third story, which your pilot might not have.

In a pilot the A Story is essential, because that’s what your show is and you have to get it started, but B Stories are also important because they add more depth to your character or the world of the show. I gave the example last lesson of a show where the A Story is a detective pursuing a serial killer and the B story is the detective dealing with family problems at home. The A Story is obviously important because it is a detective show, but the B Story is also really important because it’s how we connect with the detective and understand the consequences of their job.

All that is to say, make sure you have a beat or two of your B Story in the beginning of your pilot story, and keep that story moving throughout the rest of the pilot.

The Middle

After the beginning of your story, you move into the middle of your story. The main problem for the pilot has already been started in the beginning, and now in the middle you want to escalate that problem. The situation get worse through new complications or the introduction of new problems.

It’s important that your characters stay active here. Instead of them passively having things done to them, make sure they're actively doing things and making decisions that have consequences.

Remember how we were talking about “but” and “therefore” last lesson? “Buts” are the complications in your story and “therefores” are the consequences. The inciting incident is a really big complication, and in response your protagonist will have made some kind of choice and taken some kind of action that is different than what they’d normally do in their life. What you need after that are consequences to this action, and then based on that consequence your protagonist makes another decision, which then has another consequence and creates another complication as the tension builds.

Throughout this process we’re also learning about the characters based on how they’re reacting. Don’t be afraid to really put them in hot water, to really push them. They should be unsettled, challenged, threatened, uncomfortable, whatever!

Now, this won’t apply in every case, but I think it’s often really good to have a really big change or twist here in the middle of the story. Some big problem that changes things, and launches us with momentum into second half of the pilot. That big twist might lead to a low point or an “all is lost” moment where it seems like there is no way out of this. And that takes us to our ending.

The End

The ending of a pilot is just as important as the beginning. Maybe even more important, because it has to leave the audience satisfied but also wanting more since this is TV and you’re going to want them to watch the next episode.

Climax

The ending usually includes the most intense , dramatic, or wacky part of the episode, the climax. This is where the problem of the episode comes to a head. It’s a crisis where the character has to dig deep and find some way to solve (or fail to solve) this problem that they’ve most likely created for themselves.

It’s really important that how they solve this problem comes from who they are, and what their strengths are. I keep saying that our characters reveal who they are through their actions, and this is their biggest action in the pilot, so it reveals the most of who they are.

The climax also reveals what kind of show this is. Is it a show with happy endings? A show where horrible things happen? A show with musical numbers? The climax in the pilot plays a big role in defining it.

An ending and a beginning

I think it’s also important that the ending ends the story of the episode. That might seem obvious, but what I mean by that is that each episode should be a self-contained story. Whatever the story was in this episode, try to give it a satisfying conclusion.

The trick is that while your ending the story for this episode, you’re also setting up the story for the rest of the show. You can think of this in terms of questions. You’re answering one question in the pilot, but then at the end you’re asking another larger question. The audience will want to keep watching because they’ll want to know the answer to that question.

You want the audience to be wondering “what’s next?” This is where TV pilots differ from movies. A movie ends with the question being answered. A TV pilot answers one question, and asks another bigger question.

It should be clear by the end of the pilot what new path your protagonist or protagonists are going to be walking on.

Organizing Your Story

So how do you organize all this story information that you’re coming up with for the beginning, middle, and end?

Beat Cards

A lot writers also like to use index cards to help them figure out their story by writing each beat on a separate card. This lets you see can see an overview of your story and restructure things by moving them around.

This is something that Breaking Bad is famous for, they put all their beats up on cards on cork boards.

You can also do this in Arc Studio with the Beats board, which uses digital index cards. Each card represents a beat in your story, so we call the cards beats. You give the beat a title, and a synopsis of what happens in that beat. You can also tag the beats and color code them with the storylines they represent, and with the characters in that beat. This lets you filter the beats to see the ones with the storylines or characters you want.

The beats are arranged in columns called acts, and you can drag-and-drop them to rearrange your structure.

Each beat also has a note attached to it where you can brainstorm and store ideas and bits of dialogue you plan to use in that beat. I love brainstorming in the notes and having another place to write that isn’t the script. My favorite part of Arc Studio is that I can write my scrip with my outline open on the left and my notes open on the right. This means I can reference my outline and notes without switching tabs or apps, which keeps me focused.

Pilot Story Worksheet

I've put together a Pilot Story Worksheet to help Arc Studio Pro users through this process of figuring out the beats in their pilot story. (If you're not an Arc Studio Pro user, don't worry, you can download it for free here.)

You may not know, but Arc Studio Pro has a built-in notes app. This means that all your notes for a script can live side-by-side with that script. You can easily reference the notes while you write without having to click to another tab or another app.

Even better, you can save these notes as templates and open them in other scripts. I've already created the Pilot Story Worksheet note template for you. All you have to do is add it to your account and you'll be able to open it with any of your scripts.

To add it to your account, click here and then select Copy to my templates.

You can now add it to your script by clicking the down arrow at the top of your notes list and selecting Pilot Story Worksheet.