WRITING LOVE
(Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, II)
by
Alexandra Sokoloff
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Alexandra Sokoloff
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Elaine Sokoloff
For more information about the author, please visit http://alexandrasokoloff.com
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
5. The Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure
9. Plan, Central Question, Central Story Action
11. Hero/ine, Protagonist, Main Character
12. Hero and Heroine, Lover and Loved One
13. What Makes a Great Villain?
15. Elements of Act Two, Part 2
18. What Makes a Great Climax?
19. Act Climaxes Overview and Examples
20. Expanding on the Key Story Elements
21. Expanded Story Elements Checklist
25. "High Concept" and “The Big Book”
29. Theme and Thematic Image Systems
35. Your First Draft is Always Going to Suck
36. Top Ten Things I Know About Editing
42. Four Weddings and a Funeral
50. How Do I Get a Literary Agent? Or Do I?
51. Internet Resources for Writers
52. So You Want to Know About Screenwriting
Introduction
Let me be very clear right up front. This is not a book on writing romance.
This book is a greatly expanded follow-up to Screenwriting Tricks For Authors, a manual that teaches authors how to steal — I mean use — screenwriting and filmmaking techniques to help them write better, more appealing books (and have more fun doing it!). Writing Love contains all of the general story structure material from the first book, and uses examples from all genres to illustrate these story structure principles.
But for this book I have also added a specific focus on the key story elements and structure tricks used in writing love (including love subplots), and the ten story breakdowns in this book are all romantic comedy, romantic adventure, period romance and romantic suspense. So yes, this book should be extremely useful for romance writers (who tend to get a lot out of my workshops anyway), but it’s organized in a way that I hope will be useful to writers of all genres.
Why Film Structure?
Well, 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 sure your book stands out from the crowd.
But the good news is, that means authors can give themselves an edge by stealing —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 the film techniques I’ve learned and use as a screenwriter are invaluable in my own novel writing, and I believe — no, actually I know — that any novelist, from aspiring to multi-published, can benefit from these screenwriting tricks of the trade.
A novelist who samples this book will probably be wondering why I spend the bulk of my time analyzing films when I’m talking primarily 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 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 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.
Why Love?
It’s been a year and a half since I wrote Screenwriting Tricks for Authors, and I had been working on a general revision of that book to incorporate all of the new discoveries I’ve been making from writing my own novels, from teaching workshops, and from interfacing with my students and blog readers about their story problems and discoveries. One of the things I most wanted to do, at my readers’ requests, was include more examples from love stories and comedies. I admit it, I’m a thriller writer, and I delve in paranormal, supernatural mystery and sometimes horror, and my teaching examples can run toward the — well, “dark” is a good word, but “homicidal” often fits.
Then as I was reviewing a lot of romantic comedies and romantic suspense for great and teachable examples of key story elements and storytelling techniques, it dawned on me how much more useful it would be to let the first workbook stand as is and move forward by concentrating the new material in this book, and each subsequent book, on just one genre at a time.
I’ve included all the general information on the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure from the first book, and I’ve expanded on the key story elements, so this book will also work just fine as a general introduction to all the story principles I cover in my workshops.
But in this book, we’re also going to look at some particular storytelling tricks of writing love, with ten full story breakdowns of popular and classic romance films.
One powerfully effective technique of developing stronger stories that I am always trying to demonstrate to writers is the idea of working with a Master List, that is, a Top Ten list of their own favorite stories in their specific genre. So it made sense for me to organize this new book by making my own list of ten love stories and analyzing those in-depth, looking closely at how these films handle key elements, both of general storytelling and those elements specific to love stories. (I’ve focused the breakdowns mostly on romantic comedy rather than darker subgenres like urban fantasy, although I do include a romantic suspense and romantic adventure, and a romantic fantasy. I’ll have to save paranormal thrillers and urban fantasy for another book.)
As I worked my way through the list I was finding patterns and elements of love stories that I’d never been consciously aware of before, but after my third or fourth story breakdown I realized how very common certain elements are to love stories of all kinds, and how helpful it is to know and name those elements every time you start out to write a love story — or love subplot.
It’s my hope that you will have the same breakthroughs and discoveries of your own, about whatever genre you work in, as we work through the stories and elements in this book.
So let’s get started, with a general story structure review.
PART ONE: Story Structure
1. The Master List
There are four 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. The concept of story patterns, types, or kinds.
Along with breaking down basic story structure that is applicable to all genres, we’re going to start looking at the dozens — well, more like hundreds — of story patterns that exist within that basic structure, such as the Chosen One story, the Three-Brother or Three-Sister structure, the Road Trip, False Identity, Reluctant Witness, Fish Out Of Water, the Magical Day … The list is as long as your imagination. I’m not exaggerating when I say this may be the most important concept you ever learn about story structure.
3. Story elements and structures specific to romance and love stories.
Throughout the book I’ll be identifying key story elements and story patterns common to romance, and using examples from popular and classic movies to illustrate these elements.
4. Your own personalized story structure notebook.
In addition to teaching that general Three-Act, Eight-Sequence structure, and analyzing specific story patterns and specific techniques of writing love stories, 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.
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. We know 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 Roman Holiday, 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.
I’m primarily a thriller writer and my personal favorite game when I’m watching or writing thrillers 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 thriller novel 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.
And I’ve found that when I write love stories (as in the paranormal series I’ve been doing) or love subplots in my thrillers, I am looking for magical elements as well: the working of synchronicity or fate, the influence of a magical day, and lots of fairy tale elements — all of which are story elements you see working in Sleepless In Seattle, Next Stop Wonderland, Groundhog Day, Notting Hill, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, just to name a few examples.
But what works for me structurally is not necessarily going to do it for you. That’s why my primary goal here is to teach you how to do this for yourself.
If you take the time to list, 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 meta-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, Amazon, 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 online 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 movies and three books if you’re writing a book, mostly movies if you’re writing a script).
Or if you’re trying to decide on the right project 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 I’ve heard talk of, 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.
Remember, this list isn’t written in stone! You can change anything you like on it at any time. And honestly, when you’re first doing these lists, it’s often most useful to write the first ten films and books that come to mind, regardless of genre. 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. Here’s my love story list:
• Four Weddings and a Funeral
• Next Stop Wonderland
• Notorious
• Bridget Jones’ Diary
• Notting Hill
• When Harry Met Sally
• Philadelphia Story
• Rebecca
• Bringing Up Baby
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Casablanca
• Sleepless in Seattle
• Lost in Translation
(That’s a list of more than ten, just to demonstrate that the list is whatever you want it to be.)
Now, that’s a list of romantic comedy, which is more along the lines of typical romance, which demands a happily-ever-after ending; classic romance, Casablanca and Rebecca; and subplot romance, like Notorious. As I explained, I’m not delving into urban fantasy and paranormal this time.
Four Weddings and a Funeral and Philadelphia Story are probably my favorites of that list.
Four Weddings appeals to me on a very personal level because writer Richard Curtis, as is his wont, is not just exploring love relationships between two people, or several sets of two people, but also the group love dynamic of a posse of friends. In fact, in that movie, the group dynamic is one of the factors keeping the hero, Charlie (Hugh Grant) from settling down to marry — and has kept every single one of the others single, except for the one truly married couple in the group, the gay couple who can’t legally marry. (Wonderful, scathing truth there).
That group dynamic has always resonated deeply with me, and I imagine it struck a chord for a lot of people. Also, in terms of high concept, the film is great because most of us have experienced that totally exhausting year that every single person you know gets married and your entire social calendar revolves around weddings. I certainly could relate to Hugh Grant burying his head under a pillow as yet another embossed linen envelope arrived in the mail.
But the real beauty of Four Weddings is the underlying theme that there is something magical about a wedding that opens the door to love, not just for the couple involved, but potentially for everyone who attends. The structure of the film is a round-robin, where at each wedding at least two people find the loves of their lives, and we see one of those weddings next, or the preparation for a wedding, or at least the deepening of the relationship with a promise of marriage. This is something I think most of us would like to believe about weddings: that there is an encompassing magic there, a kairos, that invites something life-changing. That story truly delivered on that theme.
When Harry Met Sally is an enduring romantic comedy, not just because of the great chemistry between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan and the charming documentary clips of elderly couples talking about how they met and fell in love, but because it explores a strong theme: Can a man and woman ever really be friends? And we experience the great treat of watching Billy and Meg first become friends and then fall in love.
Next Stop Wonderland and Sleepless in Seattle are examples of the theme of the soul mate — that there is someone out there who is destined for you, and that the Universe will guide you to that person. Next Stop Wonderland shows two people whose paths cross over and over again, with all kinds of attendant signs that these two people are supposed to be together — but they don’t meet until the last few seconds of the movie. Sleepless in Seattle explores the same kind of fatedness, and similarly keeps the hero and heroine apart until the end of the movie. I admit, this kind of thing just turns me inside out. I would love to believe that there is one person who is all that, and that all of life is conspiring to help you find that person.
Lost in Translation is a bittersweet variation on the soul mate theme: Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are two married people (married to other people!) in spiritual crisis who meet each other in a posh hotel in Japan. They are drawn to each other despite their marriages and the big age difference between them, and we feel a simultaneous HOPE and FEAR that they will get together. We want it at the same time we sense it’s wrong. But the story is really about — to me — the concept that we may have lived multiple past lives, with multiple lovers, and sometimes in the midst of a crisis, one of those soul mates will show up to guide you through the dark woods … but not necessarily stay with you. In the Final Battle (the film’s climax), Bill does not sleep with Scarlett, and they part ways, but their lives have been transformed by each other nonetheless.
Notting Hill is an interesting story because there’s no one person who’s the antagonist (even though Alec Baldwin does a charming turn as the rival, the movie star boyfriend). The real obstacle to Hugh Grant’s and Julia Roberts’ relationship is her fame, and each sequence explores a different aspect of that celebrity and how it keeps the couple apart.
Philadelphia Story has a very sophisticated underlying premise: Cary Grant knows that Katharine Hepburn will never be able to love him fully until she steps off her pedestal and has a roll in the mud. It’s only after she abandons herself and sleeps with Jimmy Stewart (oh, come on, you know they did!), that she is fully human to love Cary.
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 fascinating 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. Quite a few stories on that list are fairy tales of some sort, and the fairy tale structure is one I use over and over in my own writing. But instead of launching right into fairy tale structure (and confusing everyone completely!), I want to give that discussion its own chapter later, after we finish talking about basic structure.
And the first thing you need to understand about structure is the concept of PREMISE.
2. What’s Your Premise?
I am always at one author event or another, which always entails doing the chat thing with people in the bar or whatever pre-dinner cocktail party, and I am always finding myself in basically the same conversation with some aspiring author who has just finished a book. The conversation goes like this:
Me: “What’s your book about?”
Aspiring Author: “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 “Family” 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 stakes, 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, or that Amazon Kindle uploading screen asks 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
– 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.
Let’s try some love premises:
• A commitment-phobic Englishman falls in love with a beautiful, elusive American during a year in which all the people around him seem to be marrying and finding their mates at a round robin of four weddings — and a funeral.
• A lonely widower and a lonely journalist who live on opposite sides of the country fall in love with each other without ever having met.
• A man and a woman debate the theory that a man and a woman can never really be friends over a period of years in which they become best friends, and then fall in love.
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.
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. You can say it as shorthand to your agent, or to your friends, and your agent can say it that way to your editor.
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: it 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 master 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 usually 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.
I don’t want to overload anyone on this difficult concept up front, but if you’re comfortable with the idea of premise, you might want to go to Chapter 25 now and continue reading on the High Concept Premise.
And if you don’t have a premise line yet, that’s just fine; the next chapter is about finding that perfect idea.
3. First, You Need An Idea
Generating the initial idea is a part of the writing process that people rarely spend enough time on, and it is crucial if you want to develop a riveting book, even more crucial if you have any hope of earning money as a writer. You are going to spend two years of your life, minimum, on this book of yours (and that's truly a minimum). So even if you do have a great idea already, or if you’re launching into a second draft, I think the thought processes laid out in this chapter are an important step to work through. It’s really useful to allow yourself to do free-form brainstorming, to see what themes and characters are rolling around in your head that might just help you with the new project. Don't you think you better be sure this is the right book to write before you start?
And if you don’t have that great idea yet, this is the way to uncover it.
When people ask authors, “Where do you get your ideas?” authors tend to clam up or worse, get sarcastic — because the only real answer to that is, “Where don’t I get ideas?” or even more to the point, “How do I turn these ideas off?”
The thing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” is not the real question these people are asking. The real question is “How do you go from an idea to a coherent story line that holds up — and holds a reader’s interest - for 400 pages of a book?” Or more concisely: “How do you come up with your PREMISES?”
We all have story ideas all the time. Even non-writers, and non-aspiring writers — I truly mean, everyone – has story ideas all the time. Those story ideas are called daydreams, or fantasies, or often “Porn starring me and Edward Cullen, or me and Stringer Bell,” (or maybe both. Wrap your mind around that one for a second … )
But you see what I mean.We all create stories in our own heads all the time, minimal as some of our plot lines may be. So I bet you have dozens of ideas, hundreds. The real question is: “What’s a good story idea?”
I see two essential ingredients:
a) What idea gets you excited enough to spend a year or two or more of your life completely immersed in it?
and
b) Gets other people excited enough about it to buy it and read it and even maybe possibly make it into a movie or TV series with an amusement park ride spinoff and a Guess clothing line based on the story?
Just a) is fine if you only want to write for yourself.
But both a) and b) are essential if you want to be a professional writer.
I’m all about learning by making lists. Because let’s face it – we have to trick ourselves into writing, every single day, and what could be simpler and more non-threatening than making a list? Anything to avoid the actual rest of it!
So here are two lists to do to get those ideas flowing, and then we can start to narrow it all down to the best one.
List # 1: Make a list of all your story ideas.
Yes, you read that right. All of them.
This is a great exercise because it gets your subconscious churning and invites it to choose what it truly wants to be working on. Your subconscious knows way more than you do about writing. None of us can do the kind of deep work that writing is all on our own. And with a little help from the Universe you could find yourself writing the next Harry Potter or Twilight.
Also this exercise gives you an overall idea of what your THEMES are as a writer (and very likely the themes you have as a person). I absolutely believe that writers only have about six or seven themes that they’re dealing with over and over and over again. It’s my experience that your writing improves exponentially when you become more aware of the themes that you’re working with.
You may be amazed, looking over this list that you’ve generated, how much overlap there is in theme (and in central characters, hero/ines and villains, and dynamics between characters, and tone of endings).
You may even find that two of your story ideas, or a premise line plus a character from a totally different premise line, might combine to form a bigger, more exciting idea.
But in any case, you should have a much better idea at the end of the exercise of what turns you on as a writer, and what would sustain you emotionally over the long process of writing a novel.
Then just let that percolate for a while. Give yourself a little time for the right idea to take hold of you. You’ll know what that feels like; it’s a little like falling in love.
List # 2: The Master List
The other list we’ve already talked about: that list of your ten favorite movies and books in the genre that you’re writing, or if you don’t have a premise yet, ten movies and books that you wish you had written.
It’s good to compare and contrast your idea list with this ideal list.
This list of ten (or more, if you want – ten is just a minimum!) – is going to be enormously helpful to you in structuring and outlining your own novel.
These exercises can easily take a week of straight writing. Read this whole book through first, see some movies, do the breakdowns, work the process however you want to do it – but no matter how you approach it, I hope you come back and try the suggestions in this chapter. It’s a hundred percent worth doing.
4. What KIND of Story is It?
Now that you have an idea, or a lot of them, it’s time to narrow it down a little to just one premise, and be clear about it. Many people struggle mightily with premise. In those initial stages of writing, when your story seems like a hurricane of characters, scene ideas, visual images, and snippets of dialogue, it is so hard to nail precisely what it is that is going to bind the whole wonderful mess together. Believe me, I know.
So before we move on to general overall structure, I want to briefly introduce you to an idea that may help you nail your premise down. It’s actually one of the most important things you will ever learn about structuring a book, or movie, or play: the idea of story patterns or types. You can call it anything you want, but I always think of it as:
What KIND of story is it?
While everything I’m going to talk about concerning general story structure is going to be useful for you, I really think that the best thing that you can do to help yourself with story structure is to look at and compare in depth 5-10 (ten being best!) stories – films, novels, and plays – that are similar in kind (or structural pattern) to yours. Because different kinds of stories have different and very specific structural arcs, and those structures have their own unique and essential elements which are incredibly useful to be aware of so you can use them for yourself.
The KIND of story a story is does not always have anything to do with genre. Let me use a couple of recent movie examples to illustrate this.
– What genre would you call Inception? Something like a sci-fi thriller, right? It’s futuristic, it uses dream technology, it has thriller elements and action. But what really drives Inception is that it’s a caper story (you could also say a heist, or reverse heist), like The Sting, Ocean’s 11, Armageddon, The Hot Rock, and Topkapi. The structure of Inception is a professional dream burglar gathering a team of professionals to pull off a big job, then training for and executing that job. That’s the action of the story. And that’s what made Inception stand out: it crosses a caper story with a sci-fi thriller.
– The Hangover is a guy comedy. But the structure of the story is a traditional mystery: the groom has gone missing during a wild blackout night of a bachelor party, and his friends have to follow the clues to piece together what happened that night and get the groom back (before the wedding!). The action of the story is unraveling that mystery to find the groom. So if you’re writing a story like The Hangover, you want to be looking at how mysteries are put together just as much as you want to be learning from comedies.
– Leap Year is a romantic comedy, but the structure of the story is a road trip: the action of the story is a journey across Ireland. And if you’re writing a road trip story you can learn a lot from taking a look at road trip stories in all genres: Planes, Trains and Automobiles, It Happened One Night, Thelma and Louise, even Natural Born Killers.
So while it’s important to know the general, Three-Act, Eight-Sequence structure, and it’s important to know the patterns of the particular genre you’re writing in, it’s sometimes even more useful to identify the KIND of story you’re writing within that genre.
Once you know the kind of story you’re writing, you can look at examples of that particular story pattern and get a sense of the structural elements and tricks common to that story pattern – the key scenes a reader wants and expects to see in these stories. A Mistaken Identity story, for example, will almost always have threat of discovery, a confidante who knows the score, numerous tests of the hero/ine’s story, scenes of trapping the hero/ine into the role, scenes of the role starting to backfire, and of course, a big unmasking scene, usually at the climax of Act III. Identifying these expected scenes and taking a look at how other storytellers have handled them is a great way of brainstorming unique and fun scenes of your own (See Tootsie, While You Were Sleeping, Roman Holiday).
So what are these story types?
The late and much-missed Blake Snyder said that all film stories break down into just ten patterns that he outlined in his Save The Cat! books. Dramatist Georges Polti claimed there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations and outlined those in his classic book.
I think those books on the subject are truly useful; as I say often, I think you should read everything. But I believe you also have to get much more specific than ten plots or even thirty-six.
(I also think it’s plainly lazy to use someone else’s analysis of a story pattern instead of identifying your own. Relying on anyone else’s analysis, and that for sure includes mine, is not going to make you the writer you want to be.)
Personally, I think there are hundreds of story types and kinds.
In a workshop I taught recently, there was a reluctant witness story, a wartime romance story, an ensemble mystery plot, a mentor plot, a heroine in disguise plot, a high school sleuth story. And others.
Each of those stories has a story pattern that you could force into one of ten general overall patterns – I guess – but they also have unique qualities that would get completely lost in such a generalization. And all of those stories could also be categorized in other ways besides “reluctant witness” or “hero in disguise”.
Harry Potter, for example, is what you could call a King Arthur story – the Chosen One coming into his or her own (also see Star Wars, The Matrix…) but it is told as a traditional mystery, with clues and red herrings and the three kids playing detectives (high school sleuth). It’s also got strong fairy tale elements. So if you’re writing a story that combines those three (and more) types of stories, looking at examples of any of those types of stories is going to help you brainstorm and structure your own story.
If you find you’re writing a “reluctant witness” story, whether it’s a detective story, a sci-fi setting, a period piece, or a romance, it’s extremely useful to look at other stories you like that fall into that “reluctant witness” category – like Witness, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Conspiracy Theory, Someone To Watch Over Me, Collateral.
If you’re writing a mentor plot, you could take a look at The Princess Diaries, Silence of the Lambs, Searching for Bobby Fischer, An Officer and a Gentleman, Dirty Dancing – all stories in completely different genres with strong mentor plot lines, with vastly different mentor types.
A Mysterious Stranger or Traveling Angel story has a very specific plotline, too: a “fixer” character comes into the life of a main character, or characters, and turns it upside down – for the good. And the main character, not the Mysterious Stranger, is the one with the character arc (look at Mary Poppins, Shane, Nanny McPhee, and Lee Child's Jack Reacher books).
A Cinderella story, well, where do you even start? Pretty Woman, Cinderella, of course, Arthur, Rebecca, Suspicion, Maid in Manhattan, Slumdog Millionaire, Notting Hill, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl.
A deal with the devil story: The Firm, Silence of the Lambs, Damn Yankees, The Little Mermaid, Rosemary’s Baby, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Devil’s Advocate.
And you might violently disagree with some of my examples, or have a completely different designation for what kind of story some of the above are …
But that is exactly my point. You have to create your own definitions of types of stories, and find your own examples to help you learn what works in those stories. All of writing is about creating your own rules and believing in them.
So this is what I'm trying to say. Identifying genres is not enough. Knowing how general story structure works is not enough. What’s the kind of story you’re writing – by your own definition?
When you start to get specific about that, that’s when your writing starts to get truly interesting.
And when you look at great examples of the type of story you're writing, you'll find yourself coming up with your own, specific story elements checklist, that goes much farther than a general story elements checklist ever could.
Here are just a few dozen examples to get you started brainstorming types of stories:
• Caper/Heist/Con (Inception, Topkapi, Ocean’s 11, Armageddon)
• Mythic Journey or Hero’s Journey (The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars)
• Mentor story (Karate Kid, Good Will Hunting, Dirty Dancing, Silence of The Lambs, An Officer and a Gentleman, The King’s Speech)
• Mystery (too many to list!)
• Cinderella story (Notting Hill, Slumdog Millionaire, Pretty Woman, Titanic)
• The Soul Journey (Eat Pray Love, The Razor’s Edge, Lost Horizon)
• MacGuffin story (“MacGuffin” was Hitchcock’s term for the object or person that everyone in the story wants and is usually racing or fighting to get, like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon, the treasure map and the emerald in Romancing the Stone)
• Mistaken Identity or False Identity (Tootsie, While You Were Sleeping, Sommersby, Beloved, Roman Holiday, You’ve Got Mail)
• The Wrong Man (Hitchcock loved to do this type of thriller, with an innocent falsely accused, or set up: The Wrong Man, North by Northwest)
• Forbidden Love (Lost in Translation, Butterfield 8, Casablanca, Sea of Love, Someone to Watch Over Me, Water for Elephants, Roman Holiday)
• Mysterious Stranger or Traveling Angel (Mary Poppins, Shane, the Reacher books, Mrs. Doubtfire, Nanny McPhee)
• Three Brothers (The Godfather, The Deerhunter, Mystic River)
• Reluctant Witness (Witness, Conspiracy Theory, Someone to Watch Over Me)
• Wartime Romance (Casablanca, From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind)
• High School Sleuth (Brick, Twilight, Harry Potter stories)
• Trapped (Die Hard, The Poseidon Adventure)
• The Wrong Brother – or Wrong Sister (While You Were Sleeping, Holiday)
• Road Trip (Leap Year; Natural Born Killers; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; It Happened One Night; Thelma and Louise, French Kiss)
• Fairy Tale (there are dozens of sub-genres here, including Cinderella, the Animal Groom, The Three Brothers, The Journey To Find The Lost Loved One, etc.)
• Epic (Gone with the Wind, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Troy)
• Monster in the House (Alien, The Exorcist, Paranormal Activity, The Haunting)
• The Roommate from Hell (or best friend from hell, first date from hell, neighbor from hell: Fatal Attraction, Morningside Heights, Single White Female, The Roommate)
• Rashomon (Rashomon)
• Redemption (Groundhog Day, Jaws)
• Hero Falls (Chinatown, The Godfather, The Shining)
• Alternate Reality (It’s a Wonderful Life, Groundhog Day, Back to the Future)
A variation of this is “The Road Not Taken” story (Sliding Doors, Family Man)
• Chase/On the Run (The Fugitive, Thelma And Louise, Natural Born Killers)
• Lovers Handcuffed Together (Leap Year, What Happens in Vegas, The Proposal)
• Enemies Handcuffed Together (The Defiant Ones)
• Gaslight (Gaslight, So Evil My Love, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death)
• Alien Attack (Signs, The Day the World Ended, Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
• Slasher (or Ten Little Indians, which was the play and film that started off that genre)
• Changeling Child (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Orphan, Harry Potter)
• Man Against Nature (Jaws, Twister)
• Fish Out of Water (The Proposal, New in Town)
• Ensemble Mystery Plot (Murder on The Orient Express, The Last of Laura, The Spiral Staircase)
• Ensemble Romance (Four Weddings and a Funeral)
• Impostor (While You Were Sleeping, Tootsie)
• The Therapeutic Journey (Good Will Hunting, The Sixth Sense, The King’s Speech)
• Unreliable Narrator (The Usual Suspects, Fallen, The Sixth Sense)
• A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do (Jaws, High Noon)
• Descent Into Madness (Apocalypse Now, The Shining, Black Swan, Sunset Boulevard)
And that doesn’t even scratch the surface! Are you starting to get the idea? Have you even already thought of a few of your own that I haven’t listed?
Why not start a section in your notebook to collect all the story types you’re going to be looking out for from now on? Create your own names for them – just like I did above. There’s no right or wrong, here. And the story types you notice are the ones you’re likely to be attracted to in your own writing.
ASSIGNMENT: Take your master list and think through each story. What KINDS of stories are working in each one? There will almost always be more than one kind of story working, but try to identify at least one for each at first.
ASSIGNMENT: Take at look at your own WIP or premise. What KIND of story is that? Do you know? That would be a good thing to figure out, right?
5. The Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure
Okay! Now that we have our own master lists and premises, and a hint of the vast variety of story patterns that are available to us out there to use, we are going to step back and talk about basic filmic structure. No matter what KIND of story you’re writing, and no matter what genre it is, it’s almost certainly going to follow this basic storytelling structure, so we need to be clear about that right away.
Movies almost always 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 or 30 minutes, an Act Two of roughly 60 pages or 60 minutes, and an Act Three of roughly 20 pages or 20 minutes, because as everyone knows, the climax of a story speeds up and condenses action. If you’re structuring a book, you use the same proportions. In a 400-page book, Act One is about 100 pages (p. 1-100), Act Two is 200 pages (p. 100-300), and Act Three is 100 pages (p. 300-400).
WHY THE THREE-ACT STRUCTURE?
So what is this Three-Act Structure, anyway, and why should you care?
If you 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 classical Greek playwrights 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, good call! But if you look at Elizabethan plays, their Acts I and II constitute what we’ve been talking about as Act I, their Acts III and IV comprise our Act II, and Act V is Act III (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, which made the printed word available cheaply (that was 1436, and yes, there was moveable type in China in 1041, but it wasn’t used for mass production and didn’t have the world impact that the Gutenberg press did), plays were the entertainment of the populace (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.