How to Run a Story Breaking Session

"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…