Screenwriting structure Part 2
Some good comments about Screenwriting structure Part 1. Thanks for those. The POINT being that most outstanding screenplays and movies DO HAVE consistent structural elements that you really need to make sure you have AT A COMPLETE MINIMUM.
Let’s see what we all came up with:
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INCITING INCIDENT
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ACTION
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CONFLICT
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HERO’S POINT OF NO RETURN
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DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
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BEGINNING
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END
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RESOLUTION
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INTRODUCE MAIN CHARACTER AND HIS FLAW
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BRING THE CHARACTER IN CONTACT WITH THE PREMISE VIA THE INCITING INCIDENT
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HAVE HIM GO THROUGH LOTS OF DENIAL AND ANGER (AND LOST OF OUTER CONFLICT) UNTIL HE REACHES…
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THE MID-POINT, WHICH IS THE STRUCTURAL KEY MOMENT OF EVERY GOOD STORY
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THE MID-POINT WILL THEN CAUSE THE CHARACTER TO RE-EVALUATE HIS APPROACH, WHILE STILL BARGAINING ABOUT HOW MUCH HE REALLY HAS TO CHANGE IN ORDER TO REACH HIS GOAL
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AT THE SECOND ACT LOW POINT HE FINALLY REALIZES THAT HE HAS TO CONFRONT HIS INNER FLAW HEAD-ON
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AND AT THE MOMENT OF MORAL DILEMMA HE WILL CONFIRM THAT HE IS TRULY COMMITTED TO CHANGING HIMSELF DESPITE BEING TEMPTED TO RETURN TO HIS OLD WAYS
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AND ONCE ALL THAT IS DONE WITH, IT’S TIME TO KICK SOME THIRD-ACT ASS…
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A CHARACTER DEFINING MOMENT. THE MOMENT THE PROTAG IS SICK AND TIRED OF HIS WEAKNESSES HE’S DRAGGING ALL ALONG THE QUEST AND NOW TAKES ALL THE THINGS HE LEARNED DURING THE STORY TO COMPLETE THE TASK NEEDED
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THE HERO’S FLAW…
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MOMENTUM
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THE MIDDLE
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MIDWAY PLOT POINT
Not a bad list generically speaking and again, the point being that most great movies do share common structural elements. It’s the HANDLING of those elements that can separate the men and women from the boys and girls.
Another really outstanding definition of structure that I came across last month was something Laura wrote over at her blog, WRITING & BUILDING:
“Structure is the arrangement of a story’s elements into a particular shape, with the purpose of eliciting maximum emotion from an audience … or… The shape or design of a movie that is experienced by the audience.”
If you think about it, any time a movie fails to elicit maximum emotion from its audience, that fact TENDS to take us right out of the story… If and when THAT HAPPENS, the movie generally has to work even HARDER to get us BACK into the story…
Do you really want to have to do that?
I sure as hell DO NOT.
Which is why I tend to approach screenplay structure as an extension of character development i.e., my Protagonist goes through a series of MODES and within each mode, he or she must deal with conflict and through their decisions and resulting actions that deal with that conflict, we watch the Protagonist change, grow, and transform.
Of course screenplay structure ALONE, doesn’t guarantee this process but I will say that if you start out with a good SOLID structure that has your Protagonist’s transformational character arc BUILT-IN, you’re starting out way ahead of the pack.
So how the hell do we do that?
First, we start out with those common screenplay structural elements that we just gotta have no matter what… Just like building a house or a wall within a house, we’ve got to have some structural elements to get the job done, NO MATTER WHAT. Same with writing a screenplay.
Your list may or may not be similar or identical… Doesn’t matter. The point here is that YOU decide what structural elements YOU feel that you need to have in your own screenplay BEFORE you even begin to write.
I’m simply sharing mine:
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Introduce your Protagonist — set up your Protagonist’s ORDINARY WORLD.
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Thematic Message.
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Introduce the rest of your main characters.
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Inciting Incident.
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Protagonist’s CALL TO ACTION DILEMMA.
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Protagonist’s voluntary entrance into the NEW WORLD.
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Subplots.
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Mid-point — Your Protagonist’s point-of-no-return.
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Protagonist is HOPELESS.
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Protagonist is HOPELESS times 2 — he or she is at their lowest point in the story.
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Beginning of the END — Protagonist finally figures out how to beat the Antagonist.
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Beginning of the END times 2 — Protagonist has learned all lessons of this new world — transformation complete.
There you have it… A simple little list that I have memorized for any screenplay that I might write. Please take note that this is NOT the actual screenplay structure I use… These are simply plot points that “I FEEL” I really gotta have to even THINK about writing a screenplay. I guess you could call it a variation of the Hero’s Journey although I find the Hero’s Journey a little stiff for my taste.
The point here is knowing that you must, at an absolute minimum, have some absolute structural points before you start writing. I almost look at it a little like animation… i.e., once I have these main structural points figured out, I can now proceed to the TWEENING stage where I can now generate even more structural elements to make the overall structure evolve in a realistic manner for my Protagonist and his or her story.
And yes, I have lots of “tweening stages.”
But that’s for next time…
Unk
Ice Rocket : hero’s journey, protagonist, screenplay structure, screenwriting, screenwriting structure, story structure
Screenwriting structure Part 1
That’s right… Another series.
Are you READY?
First…
Thanks for all the cards and letters… Actually, just email but thanks for all that. Even Tabre sent me a little snip from the CONTACT FORM:
Yo Unk,
Where you at, Bro?
sorry for all the shitz I give u bout Smokin Joe. He ain’t so great after allz.
Tabre
I haven’t had a chance to reply back to Tabre yet because… Well. I’m just too fuckin’ tired.
So Tabre… I assume you’re still out there… Does this mean I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder? Let me go ahead and thank you for taking the HIT off me… But hey… Even though SMOKIN’ ACES hasn’t made a $100 Mil yet — it has made over $55 Mil. Not bad… Could’a been better though.
It’s nice to be Bros again… LOL.
Where I been? LOL.
I’ve definitely been around… A lot of meetings within the last couple of weeks and right before that, my laptop hard drive FRIED. Not good and like an idiot, my last thorough backup was almost six months ago… Pretty stupid but I figured out a workaround… My laptop drive wouldn’t boot up Windows. I pulled it out of the laptop it was in — stuck it in another laptop and tried booting it up with no success… It wanted to but just wouldn’t go the distance…
So I had this notebook hard drive external enclosure sitting around… Stuck the laptop drive inside and connected to my good laptop via USB. BAM! The good laptop was able to read everything off that drive… So I plugged in a 250 gig external hard drive via USB and dragged all the files over. Only took 13 hours to copy everything over.
In the meantime, I just happened to be in BEST BUY looking for a laptop drive to stick in my laptop and found a nice Gateway laptop for $600 that I couldn’t pass up. Unfortunately, I should have passed on it because it has Vista installed and let me just say that Vista fuckin’ SUCKS. I gotta click at least double and sometimes triple to do the same computing I was doing before. I hate it so I reformatted the hard drive which proved to be a pain in the ass but finally managed to succeed. I then installed Windows XP Pro after downloading all the drivers I needed to run the hardware on the laptop…
What a fuckin’ bunch of bullshit.
All the drivers worked EXCEPT the one I needed MOST… The wireless card driver. No matter what I did, it just wouldn’t recognize the card… So I called up Gateway and these fuckers didn’t even want to fuck with me since I had reformatted the hard drive and installed XP. These idiots wanted me to reinstall Vista and then help me get it back to Gateway default mode.
Fuck that.
Hung up on them — went to their online chat support and then, with prior knowledge of how fucked up they just were to me, I got an outsourced guru to provide me with a link to the driver… Which was in and of itself, very revealing because he told me that it would ONLY WORK WITH VISTA! Yet, when I clicked on the link, the description said it was good for Vista AND XP. And guess what? The description was correct so fuck you, Gateway. I should just get on the roof of my house and frisbee the motherfucker down the road.
The gist I’m getting is that Gateway just doesn’t want to work with XP anymore… Even the XP drivers I downloaded for the wireless card didn’t work with XP. And, to top it off, the driver I finally persuaded the online chat support guy to give me the link to, never did come up in any of the searches I tried. It was like they were hiding the fucking driver…
All this bullshit and a friend of mine just bought a Dell laptop with XP already installed because the people at Dell are being smart enough to keep selling their ‘puters with XP if you so desire.
I desire.
In fact, I’m gonna buy another laptop from Dell just so I can have another XP machine laying around because as far as I’m concerned… Vista sucks. I had encountered at least 3 MUST HAVE programs that I was running before on XP that simply would not run on the Vista OS.
I wasted at least three days with all that bullshit thank you very much.
Anyway, that’s all boring shit but thanks for letting me vent… LOL. Kinda makes an Unknown Screenwriter wanna head to the hills with his manual typewriter and a few reams of paper but I digress…
Oh by the way… Did you know I had a birthday while I’ve been gone? Yup. Unk turned 1 on June 13. I’ve only been doing this shit for a year and look at me now, Ma!
Yeah right.
Structure.
Out of everything there has to do with screenwriting, I think STRUCTURE is the nearest and dearest to my heart. I am in constant search of the perfect structure and to be honest, I use my own version that works pretty well for ME… Might not work for anyone else but I like it and I keep tweaking it as I write new material.
Something that I highly recommend everyone do and if not… Get to know the structure that YOU DO USE like you know the back of your hand. Don’t know the back of your hand? Take a look at it right now… LOL.
So Part 1 of screenwriting structure is going to be fast and loose…
How many fucking screenwriting articles and screenwriting books have you read where they tell you something like, “structure is like building a house” or “you gotta lay the foundation before you can build.” –?
Too many fuckin’ times if you ask me.
The above statements are TRUE of course but come on… Too much reading between the lines so let’s take that a little further… Let’s go ahead and use the “building the house” metaphor and talk about what structure is… Just like building a house, you start by FRAMING the house… Okay, let’s fuckin’ stop right there. Think about all the houses you’ve seen being built at this stage… They pretty much all look alike, RIGHT? Just framing. Sure, some are higher. Some are taller. Some are longer — some are shorter.
Whatever.
But basically, when you visualize the frame of a house, you probably visualize just one picture in your mind’s eye…
Cool. Let’s go inside…
Now that we’re inside this house being framed, we can see the individual construction elements however, we have NO FUCKING CLUE how this house is going to look once it’s completed… Ya follow?
Cool. Let’s walk around…
Walking over to a wall structure, we can see that to have a sound wall, we need studs, headers for windows or doors, cripple studs, sills, blah blah blah blah blah… In other words, these are the things you probably need 98% of the time to build a good strong wall. Of course if we don’t have windows or doors, we won’t need a header. We won’t need cripple studs. I personally like to use fire stops in my own construction but hey, everybody’s different.
But this is cool… Think of screenwriting like construction… As you complete certain steps of the building process, you gotta call the code inspector and he or she’s gotta sign off on your structure before you can continue…
Right?
Right.
Suffice to say that different kinds of houses and maybe even more specifically… Different kinds of rooms within that house are going to require different building elements. What the FUCK does this have to do with screenwriting?
EVERYTHING.
Most GOOD movies and even most bad movies have structure. Those story elements that you really just gotta have until someone reinvents the wheel i.e., comes up with something new that works.
For instance… How about your inciting incident? You really gotta have that. How about a climax? Gots to have one. How about introductions of characters? How about reversals, plot points, act breaks, etc.?
All parts of structure and when you put them all together in a certain sequence, they help form the WHOLE. In other words, there’s some things YOU JUST GOTTA FUCKING HAVE!
And that’s where we are at Part 1 today. What are the screenwriting structure elements that we just gotta have NO MATTER WHAT? No matter what kinda movie you’re writing. No matter what kind of characters you have or what kind of ending you end up with… There’s just some things that you GOTTA HAVE so we can see that you’re building a movie. Not a book. Not a magazine article…
A MOVIE.
I’ll start off…
You’re next.
Unk