There is only One Story.

Unlock your screenwriting with a groundbreaking psychoanalytic process driving every compelling narrative. Discover how to envision stories that embody the fundamental human struggle from neglected potential to creative becoming.

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One Story: Insights

Screenwriting isn't about following rules—instead, the One Story process and book answer the questions that unlock your story’s deepest journey:


What is a story for?

Why is a character in a story?

What is a human character’s true inner struggle?

Why do some films haunt us, while others leave us empty?

Why do Acts exist and what are they for?

What is the real reason we actually care about characters?

Why do some stories feel inevitable, while others feel forced?

How do some characters undergo a powerful journey, while others remain dead to us?

Why do some films feel alive, while others feel like a series of events?

What makes a tragic character different—in their inner self-process?

Author

Andrew Hewitt is a BAFTA-Nominated screen composer with forty years of international experience in film, television, and classical music. He earned a Masters in Music from Cambridge University, won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and gained the LAMDA Gold Medal for Acting.

On graduation, Andrew completed the Introductory and Foundation courses at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis—including a year's clinical observation at London's Halliwick Center for Borderline Personality Disorder—and began two decades of in-depth personal psychoanalysis.

After performing in the soundtracks to the Star Wars Prequels and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Andrew has gone on to compose over twenty feature film scores and numerous television productions.

Andrew's lifelong passion for cinema and for narrative as psychological process led to One Story—uniquely fusing psychoanalytic insight with cinematic creativity.

www.andrewhewitt.co

los angeles, ca

One Story: The TCR Process

One Story reveals the psychological core beneath all gripping narratives—a profound internal struggle determining why we care deeply, why films resonate, and why characters come vibrantly alive. For the first time, One Story articulates this fundamental process.

Central to this insight is the Tension-Collapse-Repair (TCR) character process—a fusion of psychoanalytic insight and cinematic storytelling that trades vague industry abstractions (arc, transformation, hero, villain, tragedy) for exquisitely sensitive psychological realities.


Tension

Realization
Neglect
Unfulfilled Self

Collapse

Fragmentation
Irreconcilability
Breakdown

Repair

Integration
Responsibility
Becoming


There is only One Story.

Across genres—whether Silence of the Lambs, Star Wars IV: A New Hope, Dances With Wolves, Three Billboards, Aliens, or When Harry Met Sally—truly gripping characters compel our love and concern from loving themselves, preoccupied with the urgent transition from fragmented to integrated self.

Clarice suffers from a childhood pain she cannot reconcile with her adult life. Luke labors to unite skill with intuition. Dunbar seeks his emerging True Self (before it's gone) at the frontier of being. Harry struggles to accept that he passionately loves a woman he deeply likes.

Without an inner transitional process, we simply don't care enough to keep watching. Our hearts don't go out to them.

This essential journey—struggling to become more themselves—is the true pulse of gripping storytelling.

Why TCR is Groundbreaking

Conventional screenwriting methods emphasize external structure and plot mechanics, without recognizing that audiences connect through psychological struggle. What grips us is not action per se, but the raw, existential struggle of an unintegrated self—the agonizing psychic frustration that drives all compelling drama. TCR reveals this missing psychological and personal core.

Rooted in a century of psychoanalytic insight, One Story translates profound psychological realities into practical narrative tools. No other approach integrates psychoanalytic depth, as old as cinema itself, so closely with the heart of drama.

Going beyond formula, One Story reveals the inner struggle of becoming—offering a deeper, more intuitive lens for storytelling.


Contact

We'd love to hear from you—for any enquiries, and for individual, collaborative, or production consultation, please email Andrew Hewitt:


andrew@write1story.com



Follow @WriteOneStory


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One Story: The Book

Coming Soon

Exclusively in this forthcoming book–discover, explore, and learn the One Story screenwriting process through these in-depth chapters:


One Story Screenwriting:
Cinema and the Self

PART 1
A Problem of Becoming: Discovering Selves

1
Introduction: Screenwriting is Everything
2
Why One Story?
3
The Existing Maps
4
The Superficiality of Conventional Language

PART 2A
A Struggle of Becoming: Language & Psychology

5
A Great Start: A Fresh Language for Human Becoming
6
Psychological Feeling: Becoming as Narrative
7
Moving Inward: Compelling Cinema and Psychic Privacy
8
Becoming is Life

PART 2B
A Struggle of Becoming: Imagination & Loss

9
The Tension–Collapse–Repair (TCR) Process
10
Phase 1 – Realizing Neglect (Tension)
11
Phase 2 – The Pain of Fragmentation (Collapse)
12
Phase 3 – The Power of Integration (Repair)
13
Psychological Faith: The Ground of Repair
14
Tragedy: Broken Heroes and Antagonism
15
Letting Go: Destiny and Fate

INTERLUDE
Character Profiles

American Beauty
Drive
Taxi Driver
There Will Be Blood
Three Billboards
Dances With Wolves
Glengarry Glen Ross
A Few Good Men
Nightcrawler
Blue Velvet
Sicario

PART 3
A Pragmatics of Becoming: Preparing Becoming

16
The Screenwriter’s Becoming: Interiority as a Cultural Force
17
Why Some Stories Don’t Grip Us: The Absence of Integration
18
The Evocative Function of Plot
19
The Formal Recursion of TCR
20
Time, Drama, Mind
21
Screenwriting Talent: Writing the Feeling of Becoming
22
The Screenwriter’s Journey
23
From Screenwriter to Audience: The Triadic Integration
24
The Pragmatics of Psychological Integration
25
Screenwriting as Survival and Hope

One Story Studio

Coming Soon

Exclusive and unique Subscribers private creative writing space—for live TCR-trained AI insights into your story and character work. The One Story Studio platform includes writing workspace, project and document storage, access to the below One Story Book, character profiles library, podcasts, intelligent TCR writing analysis and AI discussion, and contextual agentic research.