SCREENWRITING TRICKS FOR AUTHORS
(and Screenwriters!)
by
Alexandra Sokoloff
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Alexandra Sokoloff
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Table of Contents
4. The Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure
5. The Index Card Method and Story Elements Checklist
7. Hero/ine, Protagonist, Main Character
8. Protagonist Case Study: Jake Gittes
9. What Makes A Great Villain?
10. Villains, Part 2: The Forces of Antagonism
12. Elements of Act Two, Part 2
14. What Makes A Great Climax?
22. Your First Draft is Always Going to Suck
23. Top Ten Things I Know About Editing
25. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
29. Act Climaxes and Turning Points
30. How Do I Get A Literary Agent?
31. Internet Resources for Writers
32. So You Want to Know About Screenwriting
Introduction
Screenwriting Tricks—for novelists?
Absolutely. Let’s face it. Book agents and editors and the whole publishing business in general have been corrupted—I mean, influenced—by Hollywood. The blockbuster mentality is rampant. Even though the bottom line is always a great book, publishing houses increasingly want big ideas; fast, visceral, visual plots; and a big, high concept hook for marketing. And if you’re e-publishing, it’s even more important to make your book stand out from the crowd.
So that means authors can give themselves an edge by stealing—I mean using—some of these film techniques to make their stories more immediately appealing and easily marketable—and by the way, to create better, more engaging books. I’ve found that screenwriting techniques are invaluable in my own novel writing, and I believe any novelist, from aspiring to multiply-published, can benefit from these screenwriting tricks of the trade.
When I wrote my first novel in 2005, it was the first piece of fiction I’d ever written. The book got me a literary agent within a week and sold to St. Martin’s Press in a two-book deal two weeks after that, then went on to be nominated for a Bram Stoker Award (horror) and Anthony Award (mystery) for Best First Novel. My second supernatural thriller The Price has been published in hardcover and paperback, my third and fourth, The Unseen and Book of Shadows, are out in hardcover; The Shifters is out in paperback, and I’ve picked up four more book contracts, numerous foreign sales, and a Thriller award.
While every book sale and subsequent career has a lot to do with luck and timing, I also know that my quick representation and sale had a lot to do with the fact that even though I was a first-time novelist, I had already written dozens of screenplays, some of which were original scripts that sold to various studios, some of which were novel adaptations I’d done on assignment. In other words, even though I was brand new to publishing, I’d been getting paid to tell stories for years. And I know my screenwriting background had a lot to do with my quick and painless entry into publishing—because my agent and editor said so
But when I started teaching writing workshops (a happy and unexpected perk of being an author), I realized very quickly that the storytelling techniques that we Hollywood types take for granted are a huge revelation to people outside the glass dome of the film business. Granted, I’d had a lot of exposure to this stuff—not only as a working screenwriter, but also before that as a story analyst for various production companies, and along the way as a member of the Board of Directors of the WGA West, the screenwriters’ union, and as the founder of WriterAction.com, a private message board of over 2000 WGA screenwriters.
But I also think that this stuff is just in the air out here. Without even half trying, just by virtue of living in Los Angeles and working in the business, I was automatically exposed to the techniques that successful filmmakers have used since the beginning of the form, and that have been painstakingly detailed by story and scriptwriting gurus such as Robert McKee, John Truby, Christopher Vogler, Linda Seger, Viki King, Michael Hauge, the late Blake Snyder, and the late Frank Daniel, who taught screenwriting in the USC Film School.
So my workshops, my blog, and now this book, are my way of making these screenwriting techniques and tricks available to novelists and aspiring novelists who may not live anywhere near Hollywood, but who could get the same benefit I and other author friends have reaped from applying screenwriting techniques to our novel writing.
A novelist who samples this book will probably be wondering why I spend the bulk of my time analyzing films when I’m talking mostly to authors. Good question.
The thing is, film is such a compressed and concise medium that it’s like seeing an X ray of a story. In film you have two hours, really a little less, to tell the story. It’s a very stripped-down form that even so, often has enormous emotional power. Plus we’ve usually seen more of these movies than we’ve read specific books, so they’re a more universal form of reference for discussion.
It’s often easier to see the mechanics of structure in a film than in a novel.
And realistically, film has had an enormous influence on contemporary novels, and on publishing. Editors love books with the high concept premises, pacing, and visual and emotional impact of movies, so being aware of classic and blockbuster films and the film techniques that got them that status can help you write novels that will actually sell in today’s market.
And even beyond that—studying movies is fun, and fun is something writers just don’t let themselves have enough of. If you train yourself to watch for some of these structural elements, then every time you go to the movies or watch something on television, you’re actually honing your craft (even on a date or while spending quality time with your loved ones!), and after a while you won’t even notice you’re doing it.
When the work is play, you’ve got the best of all possible worlds.
PART ONE
Story Structure
1. The Master List
There are two pillars to these techniques we’re going to be working with:
1. Basic film story structure: the Three-Act, Eight Sequence structure.
USC Film School teaches it, the screenwriting story structure gurus teach it, all film execs and producers are aware of it even if it’s only in a vague way, and even screenwriters who claim not to follow this structure pattern (and I could name names!) do it to some extent or another. Now you’re going to learn it.
2. Your own personalized story structure notebook.
Along with teaching you that general Three-Act, Eight-Sequence structure, this book will help you create your own, personalized story structure and genre manual, using novels and films that are specific to the story and genre you’re working on, and more importantly, that have had the maximum emotional and intellectual effect on you.
It’s very simple—in order to write stories like the ones that move you, you need to look at the specific stories that affect you and figure out what those authors and filmmakers are doing to get the effect they do. So you are going to be making a lot of lists: lists of your favorite movies, lists of your favorite hero/ines, lists of your favorite endings, lists of the most suspenseful stories you have ever seen or read.
Every genre has its own structural patterns and its own tricks—screenwriter Ryan Rowe says it perfectly: “Every genre has its own game that it’s playing with the audience.”
For example: with a mystery, the game is “Whodunit?” You are going to toy with a reader or audience’s expectations and lead them down all kinds of false paths with red herrings so that they are constantly in the shoes of the hero/ine, trying to figure the puzzle out.
But with a romantic comedy or classic romance, there’s no mystery involved. 99.99% of the time the hero and heroine are going to end up together. The game in that genre is often to show, through the hero and heroine, how we are almost always our own worst enemies in love, and how we throw up all kinds of obstacles in our own paths to keep ourselves from getting what we want.
So—if you’re writing a story like It’s A Wonderful Life, it’s not going to help you much to study Apocalypse Now. A story that ends with a fallen hero/ine is not going to have the same story shape as one that ends with a transcended hero/ine (although if both kinds of films end up on your list of favorite stories, you might find one is the other in reverse. That’s why you need to make your own lists!)
Once you start looking at the games that genres play, you will also start to understand the games that you most love, and that you want to play with your readers and audience.
My personal favorite game is: “Is it supernatural or is it psychological?” I love to walk the line between the real and unreal, so I am constantly creating story situations in which there are multiple plausible explanations for the weird stuff that’s going on, including mental illness, drug-induced hallucinations, and outright fraud. That’s why my master list for any book or script I write will almost always include The Haunting of Hill House and The Shining, both classic books (and films) that walk the line between the supernatural and the psychological.
But what works for me structurally is not necessarily going to do it for you.
If you take the time to study and analyze the books and films that have had the greatest impact on you, personally, or that are structurally similar to the story you’re writing, or both, that’s when you really start to master your craft. Making the lists and analyzing those stories will help you brainstorm your own, unique versions of scenes and mega-structures that work in the stories on your master list; it will help you figure out how your particular story will work. And doing this analysis will embed story structure in your head so that constructing a story becomes a fun and natural process for you.
Another great benefit of making the master list is that it helps you “brand” yourself as an author. Agents, editors, publishing houses, publicists, sales reps, bookstores, reviewers, media interviewers, librarians, and most importantly, your readers—all of these people want to be able to categorize you and your books. You need to be able to tell all of these people exactly what it is you write, and why it’s unique. That’s part of your job as a professional author.
So the first order of business is to make your master list.
And I encourage you to splurge on a nice big beautiful notebook to work in. We poor writers live so much in our heads it’s important to give ourselves toys and rewards to make the work feel less like work, and also to cut down on the drinking.
ASSIGNMENT: Go to an office or stationery store or shop on line and find yourself a wonderful notebook to work in.
ASSIGNMENT: List ten books and films that are similar to your own story in structure and/or genre (at least five books and three movies if you’re writing a book, at least five movies if you’re writing a script.).
Or—if you’re trying to decide on the right project for you to work on, then make a list of ten books and films that you wish you had written.
I might as well let you know that you’re also going to be making lists of
* 10 great hero/ines
* 10 great villains
* 10 best endings
So if you’re one of those efficient types and want to get started on those while you’re brainstorming, it’s always interesting to see how much crossover there is on these lists.
This list isn’t written in stone! You can change anything you like about it at any time. And honestly, when you’re doing these lists, it’s often most useful to write the first ten films and books that come to mind. Doing it fast and without thinking about it too consciously might show you something you never realized about what you’re writing.
ANALYZING YOUR LIST
Now that you’ve got your list, and a brand-new notebook to keep it in, let’s take a look at what you’ve come up with.
For myself, I am constantly looking at:
Silence of the Lambs (book and movie)
A Wrinkle in Time (book)
The Wizard of Oz (film)
The Haunting of Hill House (book and original film)
Anything by Ira Levin, especially Rosemary’s Baby (book and film), and
The Stepford Wives
The Exorcist (book and film)
Jaws (film, and it’s interesting to compare the book)
Pet Sematery (book, obviously!)
The Shining (book and film)
It’s A Wonderful Life
That's off the top of my head, just to illustrate the point I'm about to make—and not necessarily specific to the book I’m writing right now. On another day my list could just as easily include Hamlet, The Fountainhead, Apocalypse Now, The Treatment, Alice in Wonderland, Philadelphia Story, and Holiday Inn.
All of those examples are what I would call perfectly structured stories. But that list is not necessarily going to be much help for someone who's writing, you know, romantic comedy. (Although the rom coms of George Cukor, Preston Sturges, and Jane Austen, and Shakespeare, are some of my favorite stories on the planet, and my master list for a different story might well have some of those stories on it).
Okay, what does that list say about me?
• It’s heavily weighted toward thrillers, fantasy, horror, and the supernatural. In fact, even the two more realistic stories on the list, Jaws and Silence of the Lambs, are so mythic and archetypal that they might as well be supernatural—they both have such overwhelming forces of nature and evil working in them.
• It’s a very dark list, but it includes two films and a book that are some of the happiest endings in film and literary history. I read and watch stories about the battle between good and evil… but if you’ll notice, except for the Ira Levin books, I do believe in good triumphing.
• The stories are evenly split between male protagonists and female protagonists, but except for Jaws, really, women are strong and crucial characters in all of them.
And guess what? All of the above is exactly what I write.
A lot of the stories on your own list will probably be in one particular genre: thriller, horror, mystery, romance, paranormal, historical, science fiction, fantasy, women’s fiction, YA (Young Adult, which has all its own subgenres). And odds are that genre is what you write.
(If you’re not clear on what your genre is, I suggest you take your master list to the library or your local independent bookstore and ask your librarian or bookseller what genre those books and films fall into. These people are a writer’s best friends; please use them, and be grateful!)
But there will also always be a few stories on your list that have nothing to do with your dominant genre, some complete surprises, and those wild cards are sometimes the most useful for you to analyze structurally. Always trust something that pops into your head as belonging on your list. The list tells you who you are as a writer. What you are really listing are your secret thematic preferences. You can learn volumes from these lists if you are willing to go deep.
Every time I teach a story structure class it’s always fantastic for me to hear people’s lists, one after another, because it gives me such an insight into the particular uniqueness of the stories each of those writers is working toward telling.
You need to create your list, and break those stories down to see why they have such an impact on you—because that's the kind of impact that you want to have on your readers. My list isn't going to do that for you. Our tastes and writing and themes and turn-ons are too different—even if they're very similar.
There’s another thing that my list says about me. I would say that every single story on that list is a fairy tale, and the fairy tale structure is one I use over and over in my own writing. But instead of launching into fairy tale structure (and confusing everyone completely!), I want to give that discussion its own chapter later, after we talk about basic structure.
And the first thing you need to understand about structure is the concept of PREMISE.
2. What’s Your Premise?
I was at some author event recently and doing the chat thing with people at the pre-dinner cocktail party and found myself in conversation with an aspiring author who had just finished a book, and naturally I asked, “What’s your book about?”
And she said—“Oh, I can’t really describe it in a few sentences– there’s just so much going on in it.”
WRONG ANSWER.
The time to know what your book is about is before you start it, and you damn well better know what it’s about by the time it’s finished and people, like, oh, you know—agents and editors, are asking you what it’s about.
And here’s another tip—when people ask you what your book is about, the answer is not “War” or “Love” or “Betrayal”, even though your book might be about one or all of those things. Those words don’t distinguish your book from any of the millions of books about those subjects.
When people ask you what your book is about, what they are really asking is—“What’s the premise?” In other words, “What’s the story line in one easily understandable sentence?”
That one sentence is also referred to as a “logline” or “one line” (in Hollywood) or “the elevator pitch” (in publishing) or “the TV Guide pitch”—it all means the same thing.
That sentence should give you a sense of the entire story: the character of the protagonist, the character of the antagonist, the conflict, the setting, the tone, the genre.
If you’re writing a comedy, that one-line premise should be funny in itself, and also suggest a whole series of comic situations.
If you’re writing suspense, then the danger and fear factor should be clear in the premise and again, the situation should suggest a whole series of scary situations and danger on multiple levels.
And—it should make whoever hears it want to read the book or see the movie. Preferably immediately. It should make the person you tell it to light up and say—“Ooh, that sounds great!” And “Where do I buy it?”
And if you pitch your premise to another writer and they say, “I could really kill you,” you know you’ve hit the jackpot.
Writing a premise sentence is a bit of an art, but it’s a critical art for authors, and screenwriters, and playwrights. You need to do this well to sell a book, to pitch a movie, to apply for a grant. You will need to do it well when your agent, and your publicist, and the sales department of your publishing house, and the reference librarian, and the Sisters in Crime Books In Print catalogue editor ask you for a one-sentence book description, or jacket copy, or ad copy. You will use that sentence over and over and over again in radio and TV interviews, on panels, and in bookstores (over and over and over again) when potential readers ask you, “So what’s your book about?” and you have about one minute to get them hooked enough to buy the book.
And even before all that, the premise is the map of your book when you’re writing it.
So what are some examples of premise lines?
Name these books/movies:
• When a great white shark starts attacking beachgoers in a coastal town during high tourist season, a water-phobic Sheriff must assemble a team to hunt it down before it kills again.
• A young female FBI trainee must barter personal information with an imprisoned psychopathic genius in order to catch a serial killer who is capturing and killing young women for their skins.
• A treasure-hunting archeologist races over the globe to find the legendary Lost Ark of the Covenant before Hitler’s minions can acquire and use it to supernaturally power the Nazi army.
Are those perfectly stated premises? No. But you do get what each story is, right? Notice how all of these premises contain a defined protagonist, a powerful antagonist, a sense of the setting, conflict and stakes, and a sense of how the action will play out.
Another interesting thing about these premises is that in all three, the protagonists are up against forces that seem much bigger than the protagonist.
Also note that I have not described any of those stories as “THIS BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE meets THAT BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE.”
This is a very common mistake that authors make. There is no faster way to make an agent’s or editor’s or producer’s or director’s eyes glaze over than to pitch your book as “It’s When Harry Met Sally meets Jaws!!!!”
Remember that this “method” of pitching was immortalized in The Player, a movie that is a satire of Hollywood. The famous pitch: “ It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!!!” was a joke.
Don’t do it.
That is not to say it is not done. In fact, the Kirkus review of The Harrowing included the line—“Poltergeist meets The Breakfast Club”, and you better believe my publisher jumped on that and put it on the cover of the paperback. This is a literal description of my book, and I bless Kirkus every day for saying it.
But I, the author, am not allowed to say that. It’s cheating. It’s a joke. Please don’t do it. You can say it as shorthand to your agent, or to your friends, and your agent can say it that way to your editor. My agent was delighted to pitch the book I’m currently writing for St. Martin’s as “It’s The Shining on a boat!”
Which it is.
But I would never pitch it that way myself. It’s just too risky. It’s not the way to sell your book to someone you don’t know. The risk, bluntly, is coming off as an amateur. With your own pitch, you need to be detailed and you need to be specific.
Here’s my premise line for The Harrowing:
Five troubled college students left alone on their isolated campus over the long Thanksgiving break confront their own demons and a mysterious presence—that may or may not be real.
I wrote that sentence to quickly convey all the elements I want to get across about this book.
Who’s the story about? Five college kids, and “alone” and “troubled” characterize them in a couple of words. Not only are they alone and troubled, they have personal demons. What’s the setting? An isolated college campus, and it’s Thanksgiving—fall, going on winter. Bleak, spooky. Plus—if it’s Thanksgiving, why are they on campus instead of home with their families?
Who’s the antagonist? A mysterious presence. What’s the conflict? It’s inner and outer—it will be the kids against themselves, and also against this mysterious presence. What are the stakes? Well, not so clear, but there’s a sense of danger involved with any mysterious presence.
And there are a lot of clues to the genre—sounds like something supernatural is going on, but there’s also a sense that it’s psychological—because the kids are troubled and this presence may or may not be real, so there’s a mystery there. There's a sense of danger, too, possibly on several levels.
The best way to learn how to write a good premise line is to practice. I encourage you to take the list of films and books you’ve made and for each story, write a one-sentence premise that contains all these story elements: protagonist, antagonist, conflict, stakes, setting, atmosphere and genre.
If you need a lot of examples all at once, pick up a copy of the TV Guide, or click through the descriptions of movies on your TiVo or DVR. Those aren’t necessarily the best written premises, but they do get the point across, and it will get you thinking about stories in brief.
But the very best thing you can do is to spend some time writing out the premises for your master list. Not only is it great practice for crafting premise lines, but it will give you a terrific sense of the elements that you want to see in a story, and quite possibly a good sense of the story patterns that you most enjoy.
ASSIGNMENT: Write out premise lines for each story on your master list, and for your own Work In Progress (WIP) .
Do it now, and add those to your fabulous new notebook.
3. What is “High Concept”?
Since we’re talking about premise… here is one of the biggest lessons an author can take from Hollywood—the HIGH-CONCEPT PREMISE.
There seems to be eternal confusion on this subject. It’s sort of an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing. But I will do what I can to define it.
If you can tell your story in one line and everyone who hears it can see exactly what the movie or book is—and a majority of people who hear it will want to see it or read it—that’s high concept.
Here’s another way of looking at it: the potential of the setup is obvious. A movie like Meet The Parents instantly conjures all kinds of disaster scenarios, right? Because we’ve all (mostly) been in the situation before, and we know the extreme perils.
I would also add, not as an afterthought—with a high-concept premise, the moneymaking potential is obvious.
Here’s another indicator. When you get the reaction: “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that!” Or even better, “I’m going to have to kill you”, you’ve got a high-concept premise.
Screenwriter/producer Terry Rossio calls it “Mental Real Estate”: a topic or subject that is in a majority of people’s heads already, and his essay “Mental Real Estate” on Wordplayer.com is a must-read on the subject. (Then take some time—got a few years?—and explore the rest of the site. It’s a free mini-film school by two of the best in the business: Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott).
While we’re on the subject of Ted and Terry, and the concept of mental real estate: just think for a minute about one of their movies, Pirates of the Caribbean. Who hasn’t been on that Disney ride? All the studio had to do to advertise it was slap that skull and crossbones on a one-sheet (movie poster), and people were sold. The studio was counting on our collective racial memory of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland to get us in to see the movie, and it worked.
But okay, let’s break it down, specifically. What makes stories high concept? One or more of these things:
• They’re topical—they hit a nerve in society at the right time: Fatal Attraction for AIDS, Jurassic Park for cloning, Disclosure for sexual harassment (only reversing the sexes in that book and movie was utter sexist bullshit.)
• They are about a subject that we all have in our heads already (The Passion, The DaVinci Code, Four Christmases, Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean)
• They exploit a primal fear (Jaws, Jurassic Park) or spiritual fear (The Exorcist)
• They are about a situation that we all (or almost all) have experienced (Meet the Parents, Blind Date. That movie out fairly recently—Four Christmases—is about a young couple who have to spend a Christmas with each set of their divorced parents. Very universal!)
• They are controversial and/or sacrilegious enough to generate press (Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation, Jesus Christ Superstar)
• They generate water-cooler talk (Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal)
• They have a big twist (The Usual Suspects, The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game, Presumed Innocent, Ruthless People).
Let’s take a look at some high-concept ideas:
Jurassic Park—A group of scientists and the grandchildren of an inventor tour a remote island where the inventor has cloned dinosaurs to create a Jurassic amusement park—and then have to fight for their lives when the dinosaur containment system breaks down.
What kid has not had that obsession with dinosaurs? And who of us has not had the nightmare thought of how terrifying it would be to be face to face with one of those things—live? Throw in the very topical subject of cloning (they get dinosaur DNA from a prehistoric fly trapped in amber) and the promise of amusement-park thrills, and who isn’t going to read that book and/or see that movie?
Fatal Attraction—A happily married man has a one-night stand and then his family is stalked by the psychotic co-worker he hooked up with.
This film hit a huge number of people in the—uh, gut—because even people who have never had an affair have almost certainly have had moments of thinking about it. Also the film came out when AIDS was truly a plague, with no effective treatment in sight, and suddenly a one-night stand could literally be fatal. It’s easy to see the potential for some really frightening situations there, as the innocent family of the guilty father is terrorized, and of course we all like to see a good moral comeuppance.
Indecent Proposal—A young, broke couple on vacation in Vegas are offered a million dollars by a wealthy man for one night of sex with the wife.
This is a great example of the “What would you do?” premise. It’s a question that generated all kinds of what the media calls “water cooler discussion”, and made it a must-see movie at the time. Would you have sex with a stranger for a million dollars? Would you let someone you love do it?
One of the best classes I ever took on screenwriting was solely on premise. Every week we had to come up with three loglines for movie ideas and stand up and read them aloud to the class. We each put a dollar into a pot and the class voted on the best premise of the night, and the winner got the pot. It was highly motivating; I made my first "screenwriting" money that way and I learned worlds about what a premise should be.
Whether you’re a screenwriter or novelist I highly recommend you try the same exercise: make yourself come up with three story ideas a week, and try to make some of them high concept. You'll be training yourself to think in terms of big story ideas. You don’t have to sell out. I’m always telling the stories I want to tell, about the people I want to write about. But there’s no reason not to think in more universal terms and be open to subject matter, locations, themes, topics, that might strike a chord in a bigger audience.
When The Price was optioned by Sony, the executives pitched it to the studio as:
The devil is walking around the halls of a Boston hospital making deals with the patients and their families.
And there’s a “What would you do?” built in:
“What would you give to save the life of a loved one? ”
The reality is, these days agents and editors and publishers are looking for books that have those unique, universal, high-concept premises, and the attendant potential for a TV or movie sale.
Open your mind to the possibility of high concept, and see what happens. You may be surprised.
ASSIGNMENT: Make a list of ten high concept premises (that I haven’t already discussed here!). Try to define what about them makes them high concept for you.
ASSIGNMENT: Make a commitment to come up with at least three premises a week. Try them out on your friends and family. Which ones make their eyes light up? Why aren’t you writing those stories?
ASSIGNMENT: Look at your own premise line. Is there a way to tie it into a subject or theme, or holiday or setting, that will make it more universal and appealing?
4. The Three-Act, Eight Sequence Structure
Okay! Now that we have our own master lists and premises, we are going to step back and talk about basic filmic structure.
Movies generally follow a three-act structure. That means that a 110-page script (and that’s 110 minutes of screen time—a script page is equal to one minute of film time)—is broken into an Act One of roughly 30 pages, an Act Two of roughly 60 pages, and an Act Three of roughly 20 pages, because as everyone knows, the climax of a story speeds up and condenses action. If you’re structuring a book, then you basically triple or quadruple the page count, depending on how long you tend to write.
WHY THE THREE ACT STRUCTURE?
So what is this Three Act Structure, anyway, and why should you care?
Now, if you come from or know anything about theater, you already know this, but I’m sad to have to admit this is not the case for most people these days. So here’s a little—very short!—practical history, that I hope will really drive home the concept of Act Climaxes we are going to be working with.
Three Act dramatic structure comes from theater, which was around waaaaayy before novels, film, and television; the golden age of Greek theater was, oh, 500-300 B.C., and in this period was developed the dramatic structure on which plays, novels, film and television are based.
Dramatists would be the first to point out that three-act structure is really the natural structure of a story, period, and has been employed since cavemen came back from the hunt and insisted on recounting their huge life-threatening adventures out there to the cavewomen (who naturally had great adventures of their own during the day, but were wise enough to understand even back in those cave days that there are some things men just don’t need to know).
It is often said that the essence of dramatic structure is:
“Get the hero up a tree. Throw rocks at him. Get him down. ”
That’s three acts right there. A little simplistic for my taste, but it does give a basic rhythm: Introduce a main character and a problem, intensify the problem, then solve it.
Another bare-bones structure summation that you hear a lot is:
Someone wants something very badly and is having trouble getting it (but eventually does, or doesn’t) .
Again, three parts: a heroine with a desire, opposition to the desire, and eventual triumph (or failure).
That basic three-part rhythm of storytelling was set into a standard form by the ancient Greeks and is still largely the same today, not just in plays, but in all dramatic media.
Now, wait a minute, you may be saying. Shakespeare’s plays have five acts.
Well, yes. But if you look at Elizabethan plays, their Acts I and II constitute what we’ve been talking about as Act 1, their Acts III and IV comprise our Act II, and Act 5 is Act 3 (shorter than the others, which the third act almost always is.).
Plays were the form of storytelling for thousands of years, because most of the populace of any country couldn’t read, and there was no television yet. So, until the invention of the Gutenberg press (1436, and yes, there was moveable type in China century in 1041, but it wasn’t used for mass production and didn’t have the world impact that the Gutenberg press did), which made the printed word available cheaply, plays were the entertainment (music and sports are different media). The novel wasn’t even invented until—well, that’s up for debate, but anywhere from 1007 to 1740: you can Google “Candidates for the world’s first novel” and decide for yourself.
So because they were the reigning form of dramatic entertainment for thousands of years, plays have had an indelible influence on all of the dramatic media. And what’s important to understand about the structure of plays is that they’re based on how long human beings can reasonably sit in one place without getting bored, restless, hungry, thirsty, and just numb in the posterior—and walking out on the show.
Right?
Same with movies. Admit it—anything over two hours and you’re going to start looking at your watch.
So plays built in the concept of intermissions, so that people could have breaks and go out and—uh—refresh themselves, and sponsors could hawk their wares and make money off the show. Commercials have history, too.
But the trick about intermissions is that once people are out in the lobby drinking and flirting and smoking and doing what they do on a Saturday night, their natural tendency is to want to keep drinking and flirting and all those things that drinking and flirting hopefully lead to.
So it was absolutely crucial for the playwright to end that first act and second act, before each intermission, with something so great and enticing that the audience would come right back into the theater when the lobby lights blink, and not just go carousing into the night.
And that’s how the cliffhanger was born. The “curtain scene”, or just “curtain”, had to be so explosive—such a startling revelation or reversal, such a dramatic shift in the power dynamics of the characters, that the audience would want to come back in to the theater after intermission to find out what happens.
That curtain scene is alive and well today as act climaxes. In movies it’s not quite so evident because the film doesn’t actually stop for a break at the act climax, but that rhythm is definitely there. In network television, you do have an obvious curtain and an intermission, called a “commercial”, and woe betide you if you want to work for television and don’t understand the concept of a cliffhanger before the act break, or “act out”. (I am not a TV writer, and this is not a TV writing book, and I’m being horribly simplistic, but the actual timing of these breaks varies according to where the commercials are set, and Internet delivery of shows is going to change that drastically. For further information, TVwriter.com is a great resource for aspiring TV writers.)
Now, when you’re reading a book, you can take your intermission any time, and you do. But as an author, you still have to lure your reader back to your book. My point here is—why not understand the concept of the curtain and possibly use the tricks that have kept audiences coming back into the theater, and back from commercial breaks, for thousands of years?
So I implore you: see a good play once in a while. No one does cliffhangers and reversals and revelations better than the great playwrights. Shakespeare, obviously, but any good playwright understands how to do this. For example, I find Lillian Hellman’s curtains just breathtaking; check out The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest to see how the whole power dynamics of a ruthless family can turn on a dime, and you can’t wait to get back into the theater to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
And that—is what we’re after, right?
ASSIGNMENT: Start being on the lookout for great curtains or cliffhangers—theatrical, filmic, and novelistic. In a film you will be looking at your watch at about 30 minutes, 60 minutes, and 90 minutes to find the act breaks and Midpoint climax; in a novel the climaxes will be around p. 100, page 200, and page 300. Make a page specifically for this in your notebook and add to it, so you’ll have those examples right at your fingertips whenever you need them.
THE THREE-ACT, EIGHT-SEQUENCE STRUCTURE
So hopefully we now have somewhat of a grasp on the three acts.
But the real secret of film writing and filmmaking, that we are going to steal for our novel writing, is that most movies are a Three-Act, Eight-Sequence structure. Yes, most movies can be broken up into 8 discrete 12-15-minute sequences, each of which has a beginning, middle and end.
I swear.
The eight-sequence structure evolved from the early days of film when movies were divided into reels (physical film reels), each holding about ten minutes of film (movies were also shorter, proportionately!). The projectionist had to manually change each reel as it finished. Early screenwriters incorporated this rhythm into their writing, developing sequences that lasted exactly the length of a reel, and modern films still follow that same storytelling rhythm.
And the eight-sequence structure actually translates beautifully to novel structuring, although you might end up with a few more sequences in the end. So I want to get you familiar with the eight-sequence structure in film first, and we’ll go on to talk about the application to novels.
If you’re new to story breakdowns and analysis, then you’ll probably want to go straight to the Story Breakdowns section of this workbook (Part Two) and watch several, or all, of those movies, following along with my notes, before you try to analyze a movie on your own. But if you want to jump right in with your own breakdowns and analyses, this is how it works:
ASSIGNMENT: Take a film from your master list, preferably the one that is most similar in structure to your own WIP, and screen it, watching the time clock on your DVD player. At about 15 minutes into the film, there will be some sort of climax—an action scene, a revelation, a twist, a big SET PIECE (see the section on Set Piece Scenes, in Chapter 15). It won’t be as big as the climax that comes 30 minutes into the film, which would be the Act One climax, but it will be an identifiable climax that will spin the action into the next sequence.)
Proceed through the movie, stopping to identify the beginning, middle, and end of each sequence, approximately every 15 minutes. Also make note of the bigger climaxes or turning points—Act One at 30 minutes, the Midpoint at 60 minutes, Act Two at 90 minutes, and Act Three at whenever the movie ends.
NOTE: You can also say that a movie is really four acts, breaking the long Act Two into two separate acts. Whichever works best for you!
In many movies a sequence will take place all in the same location, then move to another location at the climax of the sequence. The protagonist will generally be following just one line of action in a sequence, and then when s/he gets that vital bit of information in the climax of a sequence, s/he’ll move on to a completely different line of action, based on the new information. A good exercise is to title each sequence as you watch and analyze a movie—that gives you a great overall picture of the progression of action.
Also be advised that in big, sprawling movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, sequences may be longer or there may be a few extras. It’s a formula and it doesn’t always precisely fit, but as you work through your master list of films, unless you are a surrealist at heart, you will be shocked and amazed at how many movies precisely fit this eight-sequence format. When you’re working with as rigid a form as a two-hour movie, on the insane schedule that is film production, this kind of mathematical precision is kind of a lifesaver.
My advice is that you watch and analyze all ten of your master list movies (and books). But one at a time.
And every time you see a movie now, for the rest of your life, look for the sequences and act climaxes.
Then—once you’ve watched a movie for basic overall structure, you should go back and watch it again and this time fill in the structure grid that I’m going to talk about in the next chapter, THE INDEX CARD METHOD.
5. The Index Card Method
This is the number one structuring tool of most screenwriters I know.
Get yourself a pack of index cards. You can also use Post-Its, and the truly OCD among us use colored Post-Its to identify various subplots by color, but I find having to make those kinds of decisions just fritzes my brain. I like cards because they’re more durable and I can spread them out on the floor for me to crawl around and for the cats to walk over; it somehow feels less like work that way. Everyone has their own method—experiment and find what works best for you.
Now, get a corkboard or a sheet of cardboard big enough to lay out your index cards in either four vertical columns of 10-15 cards, or eight vertical columns of 5-8 cards, depending on whether you want to see your movie laid out in four acts or eight sequences. You can draw lines on the corkboard to make a grid of spaces the size of index cards if you’re very neat (I’m not)—or just pin a few marker cards up to structure your space. Write Act One at the top of the first column, Act Two:1 at the top of the second (or third if you’re doing eight columns), Act Two:2 at the top of the third (or fifth), Act Three at the top of the fourth (or seventh).
Then write a card saying Act One Climax and pin it at the bottom of column one, Midpoint Climax at the bottom of column two, Act Two Climax at the bottom of column three, and Climax at the very end. If you already know what those scenes are, then write a short description of them on the appropriate cards. These are scenes that you know you MUST have in your story, in those places—whether or not you know what they are right now.
And now also label the beginning and end of where eight sequences will go. (In other words, you’re dividing your corkboard into eight sections—either four long columns with two sections each, or eight shorter columns).
Look at Figure 1 at the end of this book for an example.
Now you have your structure grid in front of you.
What you will start to do now is brainstorm scenes, and that you do with the index cards.
A movie has about 40 to 60 scenes (a drama more like 40, an action movie more like 60), so every scene goes on one card. This is the fun part, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. All you do at first is write down all the scenes you know about your movie, one scene per card. You don’t have to put them in order yet, but if you know where they go, or approximately where they go, you can just pin them on your corkboard in approximately the right place. You can always move them around. And just like with a puzzle, once you have some scenes in place, you will naturally start to build other scenes around them.
I love the cards because they are such an overview. You can stick a bunch of vaguely related scenes together in a clump, rearrange one or two, and suddenly see a perfect progression of an entire sequence. You can throw away cards that aren’t working, or make several cards with the same scene and try them in different parts of your story board.
You will find it is often shockingly fast and simple to structure a whole story this way.
And this eight-sequence structure translates easily to novels. Now, if you’re structuring a novel this way, you may be doubling or tripling the scene count, but for me, the chapter count remains exactly the same: forty to sixty chapters to a book. And you might have an extra sequence or two per act, but I think that in most cases you’ll find that the number of sequences is not out of proportion to this formula. With a book you can have anything from 250 pages to 1000 (well, you can go that long only if you’re a mega-bestseller!), so the length of a sequence and the number of sequences is more variable. But an average book these days is between 300 and 400 pages, and since the recession, publishers are actually asking their authors to keep their books on the short side, to save production costs, so why not shoot for that to begin with?
I write books of about 300—350 pages (print pages), and I find my sequences are about 50 pages, getting shorter as I near the end. But I might also have three sequences of around 30 pages in an act that is 100 pages long. You have more leeway in a novel, but the structure remains pretty much the same.
In the next chapters we’ll talk about how to plug various obligatory scenes into this formula to make the structuring go even more quickly—scenes that you’ll find in nearly all stories, like opening image, closing image, introduction of hero, inner and outer desire, stating the theme (as early in the story as possible), call to adventure/inciting incident, introduction of allies, love interest, mentor, opponent, hero’s and opponent’s plans, plants and reveals, setpieces, training sequence, dark night of the soul, sex at sixty, hero’s arc, moral decision, etc.
And for those of you who are reeling in horror at the idea of a formula… it’s just a way of analyzing dramatic structure. No matter how you create a story yourself, chances are it will organically follow this flow. Think of the human body: human beings (with very few exceptions) have the exact same skeleton underneath all the complicated flesh and muscles and nerves and coloring and neurons and emotions and essences that make up a human being. No two alike… and yet a skeleton is a skeleton; it’s the foundation of a human being.
And structure is the foundation of a story.
ASSIGNMENTS:
Make two blank structure grids, one for the movie you have chosen from your master list to analyze, and one for your WIP. You can just do a structure grid on a piece of paper for the movie you’ve chosen to analyze, but also do a large corkboard or cardboard structure grid for your WIP. You can fill out one structure grid while you watch the movie you’ve chosen.
Get a pack of index cards and write down all the scenes you know about your story, and where possible, pin them onto your WIP structure grid in approximately the place they will occur.
If you are already well into your first draft, then by all means, keep writing forward, too—I don’t want you to stop your momentum. Use whatever is useful about what I’m talking about here, but also keep moving.
And if you have a completed draft and are starting a revision, a structure grid is a perfect tool to help you identify weak spots and build on what you have for a rewrite. Put your story on cards and watch how quickly you start to rearrange things that aren’t working!
Now, let me be clear. When you’re brainstorming with your index cards and you suddenly have a full-blown idea for a scene, or your characters start talking to you, then of course you should drop everything and write out the scene, see where it goes. Always write when you have a hot flash. I mean—you know what I mean. Write when you’re hot.
Ideally you’re working on four piles of material, or tracks, at once:
1. The index cards you’re brainstorming and arranging on your structure grid.
2. A notebook of random scenes, dialogue, character descriptions that are coming to you as you’re outlining, and that you can start to put in chronological order as this notebook gets bigger.
3. An expanded on-paper (or in Word) story outline that you’re compiling as you order your index cards on the structure grid.
4. A collage book of visual images that you’re pulling from magazines that give you the characters, the locations, the colors and moods of your story (see Chapter 15, Visual Storytelling, for more about this. In fact, I strongly suggest you read the chapter on Visual Storytelling sooner rather than later.)
In the beginning of a project you will probably be going back and forth between all of those tracks as you build your story. Really this is my favorite part of the writing process—building the world—which is probably part of why I stay so long on it myself. But by the time I start my first draft I have so much of the story already that it’s not anywhere near the intimidating experience it would be if I hadn’t done all that prep work.
At some point (and a deadline has a lot to do with exactly when this point comes!) I feel I know the shape of the story well enough to start that first draft. Because I come from theater, I think of my first draft as a blocking draft. When you direct a play, the first rehearsals are for blocking—which means simply getting the actors up on their feet and moving them through the play on the stage so everyone can see and feel and understand the whole shape of it. That’s what a first draft is to me, and when I start to write a first draft I just bash through it from beginning to end. It’s the most grueling part of writing, and takes the longest, but writing the whole thing out, even in the most sketchy way, from start to finish, is the best way I know to actually guarantee that you will finish a book or a script.
Everything after that initial draft is frosting—it’s seven million times easier to rewrite than to get something onto a blank page.
Then I do layer after layer after layer—different drafts for suspense, for character, sensory drafts, emotional drafts—each concentrating on a different aspect that I want to hone in the story—until the clock runs out and I have to turn the whole thing in.
But that’s my process. You have to find your own. If outlining is cramping your style, then you’re probably a “panster”—not my favorite word, but common book jargon for a person who writes best by the seat of her pants. And if you’re a pantser, the methods I’ve been talking about have probably already made you so uncomfortable that I can’t believe you’re still here!
Still, I don’t think it hurts to read about these things. I maintain that pantsers have an intuitive knowledge of story structure—we all do, really, from having read so many books and having seen so many movies. I feel more comfortable with this rather left-brained and concrete process because I write intricate plots with twists and subplots I have to work out in advance, and also because I simply wouldn’t ever work as a screenwriter if I wasn’t able to walk into a conference room and tell the executives and producers and director the entire story, beginning to end. It’s part of the job.
But I can’t say this enough: WHATEVER WORKS. Literally. Whatever. If it’s getting the job done, you’re golden.
OVERDOING IT
Is there a danger of overdoing this structure and analysis work?
Can you overwork your outline, or try to do just too damn much—try to force every one of these concepts in? Or spend so much time on outlining and reworking your structure that you never get to the actual writing?
Yes, of course you can. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is almost always a problem for creative people. You have to be fairly obsessed to succeed at anything, and obsession feeds on itself. There’s a point at which obsessive outlining, or obsessive anything, can become counterproductive. You have to know that tendency in yourself and stop yourself when you feel yourself becoming hung up.
The bottom line of all this method is just one thing: teach yourself how to write the kinds of stories that you love, that work for you, by analyzing the books and films that turn you on, and figuring out what those storytellers are doing to create the effects they do.
That’s really the main thing I’m trying to show you, here, and then I’m throwing in a lot of general structure information and technique that I’ve learned from theater and film and novel writing. Because for me, it all helps.
ASSIGNMENT: As a writer, it’s important to know yourself, and understand what works best for you. So I urge you to spend some time pondering, and writing on, this question: are you a plotter or pantser? What are your process quirks?
6. Elements of Act One
So, now that we’ve talked about the index card method, and basic filmic structure and how it might be applied to novels, the natural question is: What actually goes into a first act?
The first act of a movie (first 30 pages) or book (first 100 pages, approx.) is the SET UP. By the end of the first act you’re going to be introduced to all the major players of the story, the themes, the location, the visual image system, the conflicts, and especially the main conflict.
When you’re making up index cards, you can immediately make up several cards that will go in your first act column. You may or may not know what some of those scenes look like already, but either way, you know they’re all going to be there.
• Opening Image
• Meet the Hero or Heroine
• Hero/ine’s Inner and Outer Desire
• Hero/ine’s Problem
• Hero/ine’s Arc
• Inciting Incident/ Call to Adventure
• Meet the Antagonist (and/or introduce a Mystery, which is what you do when you’re going to keep your antagonist hidden to reveal at the end)
• State the Theme/ What’s the story about?
• Introduce Allies
• Introduce Mentor (possibly)
• Introduce Love Interest (possibly)
• Plants/Reveals (or: Set ups and Payoffs)
• Hope/Fear (and Stakes)
• Time Clock (possibly. May not have one and may be revealed later in the story)
• Central Question
• Sequence One Climax
• Act One Climax