In this extract from his article for the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2025, scriptwriter and crime author Greg Mosse shares his thoughts on how story development helps shape and support his novels.
I had worked as a reader and editor for several London publishers and had experience of the industry in Paris, too, alongside freelance work in international organisations and businesses as an interpreter and translator. Before that, I gained a degree in Drama and English from Goldsmiths, University of London. I read widely in three languages. But it wasn’t these qualifications that made the workshops a success.
So what did? A technique for which I didn’t yet have a name.
[…]The workshop technique that I employed… without knowing its name, I now refer to as ‘story development’. It is the foundation of the theatre script programme that I run in the West End, on stage at the Criterion Theatre. It underpinned the MA in Creative Writing that I wrote and taught, validated by the University of Sussex, and my open-access Southbank Centre Creative Writing School. It relies on a very particular mindset of positivity and growth that says, simply:
Given this interesting thing happening now, it would be great if this other compelling thing happened later, as a consequence, and even better if this third intriguing thing happened earlier to set them both up.
It sounds simple because it is. My story-development workshops teach and practise ten or twelve fundamentally productive aspects of narrative creation that the participants are usually aware of but seldom – if ever – articulate. By saying them out loud, I hope to help each writer to grow their story into a dynamic sequence of falling dominos, with a crescendo of intensity leading to a dramatic conclusion where all the narrative questions are answered.
Greg Mosse is a ‘writer and encourager of writers’ with twenty-five plays and musicals on his CV. Founder and leader of the Criterion New Writing script-development programme in London’s West End, he is the author of an ongoing series of cosy crime novels, The Maisie Cooper Mysteries published by Hodder, and a trilogy of future cli-fi thrillers, The Coming Darkness, The Coming Storm and The Coming Fire (Moonflower Publishing).
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