#047 Story Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting - Part 2 The Elements of Story

I have already written the note on the Chinese translation version of this book, you can read it here: “#033 故事——材质、结构、风格和银幕剧作的原理”. The only reason why I reread the English version is my distrust of translation and my pursuit of the original meaning.

2 The Structure Spectrum

THE TERMINOLOGY OF STORY DESIGN

From an instant to eternity, from the intracranial to the intergalactic, the life story of each and every character offers encyclopedic possibilities. The mark of a master is to select only a few moments but give us a lifetime.

Structure

A film isn’t just moments of conflict or activity, personality or emotionality, witty talk or symbols. What the writer seeks are events, for an event contains all the above and more.

STRUCTURE is a selection of events from the characters’ life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.

Event

“Event” means change.

A STORY EVENT creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a VALUE.

STORY VALUES are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.

A Story Event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and ACHIEVED THROUGH CONFLICT.

Scene

A SCENE is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a STORY EVENT.

If exposition is a scene’s sole justification, a disciplined writer will trash it and weave its information into the film elsewhere.

No scene that doesn’t turn.

1 Scene != 1 Location.

Beat

A BEAT is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction. Beat by Beat these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene.

Taking a closer look at the “lovers break up” scene: As the alarm goes off. Chris teases Andy and he reacts in kind. As they dress, teasing turns to sarcasm and they throw insults back and forth. Now in the kitchen Chris threatens Andy with: “If I left you, baby, you’d be so miserable …” but he calls her bluff with “That’s a misery I’d love.” In the garage Chris, afraid she’s losing him, begs Andy to stay, but he laughs and ridicules her plea. Finally, in the speeding car, Chris doubles her fist and punches Andy. A fight, a squeal of brakes. Andy jumps out with a bloody nose, slams the door and shouts, “It’s over,” leaving her in shock.

This scene is built around six beats, six distinctively different behaviors, six clear changes of action/reaction: teasing each other, followed by a give-and-take of insults, then threatening and daring each other, next pleading and ridiculing, and finally exchanges of violence that lead to the last Beat and Turning Point: Andy’s decision and action that ends the relationship, and Chris’s dumbfounded surprise.

Sequence

Beats build scenes. Scenes then build the next largest movement of story design, the Sequence.

A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes—generally two to five—that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene.

Act

An ACT is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.

Story

A series of acts builds the largest structure of all: the Story.

• The arc of the film: the great sweep of change that takes life from one condition at the opening to a changed condition at the end.
• This final condition, this end change, must be absolute and irreversible.

STORY CLIMAX: A story is a series of acts that build to a last act climax or story climax which brings about absolute and irreversible change.

THE STORY TRIANGLE

To PLOT means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path. Plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time.

Archplot, Miniplot, Antiplot

CLASSICAL DESIGN means a story built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.

• CLASSICAL DESIGN / Archplot
  • Causality
  • Closed Ending
  • Linear Time
  • External Conflict
  • Single Protagonist
  • Consistent Reality
  • Active Protagonist
• MINIMALISM / Miniplot
  • Open Ending
  • Internal Conflict
  • Multi-Protagonists
  • Passive Protagonist
• ANTI-STRUCTURE / Antiplot
  • Coincidence
  • Nonlinear Time
  • Inconsistent Realities

FORMAL DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE STORY TRIANGLE

Closed Versus Open Endings

• The Archplot delivers a closed ending—all questions raised by the story are answered; all emotions evoked are satisfied.
• Miniplot, on the other hand, often leaves the ending somewhat open.

A Story Climax of absolute, irreversible change that answers all questions raised by the telling and satisfies all audience emotion is a CLOSED ENDING.

A Story Climax that leaves a question or two unanswered and some emotion unfulfilled is an OPEN ENDING.

External Versus Internal Conflict

• The Archplot puts emphasis on external conflict. Although characters often have strong inner conflicts, the emphasis falls on their struggles with personal relationships, with social institutions, or with forces in the physical world.
• In Miniplot, to the contrary, the protagonist may have strong external conflicts with family, society, and environment, but emphasis will fall on the battles within his own thoughts and feelings, conscious or unconscious.

Single Versus Multiple Protagonists

• The classically told story usually places a single protagonist—man, woman, or child—at the heart of the telling. One major story dominates screentime and its protagonist is the star role.
• However, if the writer splinters the film into a number of relatively small, subplot-sized stories, each with a separate protagonist, the result minimalizes the roller-coaster dynamic of the Archplot and creates the Multiplot variation of Miniplot that’s grown in popularity since the 1980s.

Active Versus Passive Protagonist

• The single protagonist of an Archplot tends to be active and dynamic, willfully pursuing desire through ever-escalating conflict and change.
• The protagonist of a Miniplot design, although not inert, is relatively reactive and passive.

An ACTIVE PROTAGONIST, in the pursuit of desire, takes action in direct conflict with the people and the world around him.

A PASSIVE PROTAGONIST is outwardly inactive while pursuing desire inwardly, in conflict with aspects of his or her own nature.

Linear Versus Nonlinear Time

• An Archplot begins at a certain point in time, moves elliptically through more or less continuous time, and ends at a later date.
• An antiplot, on the other hand, is often disjunctive, scrambling or fragmenting time to make it difficult, if not impossible, to sort what happened into any linear sequence.

A story with or without flashbacks and arranged into a temporal order of events that the audience can follow is told in LINEAR TIME.

A story that either skips helter-skelter through time or so blurs temporal continuity that the audience cannot sort out what happens before and after what is told in NONLINEAR TIME.

Causality Versus Coincidenc

• The Archplot stresses how things happen in the world, how a cause creates an effect, how this effect becomes a cause that triggers yet another effect.
• The Antiplot, on the other hand, often substitutes coincidence for causality, putting emphasis on the random collisions of things in the universe that break the chains of causality and lead to fragmentation, meaninglessness, and absurdity.

CAUSALITY drives a story in which motivated actions cause effects that in turn become the causes of yet other effects, thereby interlinking the various levels of conflict in a chain reaction of episodes to the Story Climax, expressing the interconnectedness of reality.

COINCIDENCE drives a fictional world in which unmotivated actions trigger events that do not cause further effects, and therefore fragment the story into divergent episodes and an open ending, expressing the disconnectedness of existence.

Consistent Versus Inconsistent Realities

CONSISTENT REALITIES are fictional settings that establish modes of interaction between characters and their world that are kept consistently throughout the telling to create meaning.

INCONSISTENT REALITIES are settings that mix modes of interaction so that the story’s episodes jump inconsistently from one “reality” to another to create a sense of absurdity.

Change Versus Stasis

• Change: Story arc.
• Stasis: The value-charged condition of the character’s life at the end of the film is virtually identical to that at the opening.

THE POLITICS OF STORY DESIGN

• The Writer Must Earn His Living Writing.
• The Writer Must Master Classical Form.
• The Writer Must Believe in What He Writes.

3 Structure and Setting

THE WAR ON CLICHÈ

The source of all clichés can be traced to one thing and one thing alone: The writer does not know the world of his story.

SETTING

A story’s SETTING is four-dimensional—Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict.

• PERIOD is a story’s place in time.
• DURATION is a story’s length through time.
• LOCATION is a story’s place in space.
• LEVEL OF CONFLICT is the story’s position on the hierarchy of human struggles.

The Relationship Between Structure and Setting

A story’s setting sharply defines and confines its possibilities.

A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability. The event choices of the writer, therefore, are limited to the possibilities and probabilities within the world he creates.

THE PRINCIPLE OF CREATIVE LIMITATION

The world of a story must be small enough that the mind of a single artist can surround the fictional universe it creates and come to know it in the same depth and detail that God knows the one He created.

• A “small” world, however, does not mean a trivial world.
• “Commanding knowledge” does not mean an extended awareness into every crevice of existence.

The irony of setting versus story is this: The larger the world, the more diluted the knowledge of the writer, therefore the fewer his creative choices and the more clichéd the story. The smaller the world, the more complete the knowledge of the writer, therefore the greater his creative choices. Result: a fully original story and victory in the war on cliché.

RESEARCH

The key to winning this war is research, taking the time and effort to acquire knowledge.

Memory

1. Lean back from your desk and ask, “What do I know from personal experience that touches on my characters’ lives?”
2. Write them down.

Imagination

1. Lean back and ask, “What would it be like to live my character’s life hour by hour, day by day?”
2. Write them down.

Fact

Writer’s block - You’re blocked because you have nothing to say. Cure: library.

Research must not become procrastination. Too many insecure talents spend years in study and never actually write anything.

CREATIVE CHOICES

Creativity is five to one, perhaps ten or twenty to one.

CREATIVITY means creative choices of inclusion and exclusion.

1. Sketch a list of five, ten, fifteen different scenes.
2. On and on the list grows. You needn’t write out these scenes in full.
3. Once you’ve exhausted your best ideas, survey your list, asking these questions: Which scene is truest to my characters? Truest to their world? And has never been on the screen quite this way before? This is the one you write into the screenplay.

4 Structure and Genre

THE FILM GENRES

1. LOVE STORY.
   • Buddy Salvation: substitutes friendship for romantic love.
2. HORROR FILM.
   • the Uncanny: the source of horror is astounding but subject to “rational” explanation, such as beings from outer space, science-made monsters, or a maniac.
   • the Supernatural: the source of horror is an “irrational” phenomenon from the spirit realm.
   • the Super-Uncanny: the audience is kept guessing between the other two possibilities.
3. MODERN EPIC.
4. WESTERN.
5. WAR GENRE.
   • Pro-war.
   • Antiwar.
6. MATURATION PLOT.
7. REDEMPTION PLOT. The film arcs on a moral change within the protagonist from bad to good.
8. PUNITIVE PLOT. The good guy turns bad and is punished.
9. TESTING PLOT. Stories of willpower versus temptation to surrender.
10. EDUCATION PLOT. This genre arcs on a deep change within the protagonist’s view of life, people, or self from the negative (naive, distrustful, fatalistic, self-hating) to the positive (wise, trusting, optimistic, self-possessed).
11. DISILLUSIONMENT PLOT. A deep change of worldview from the positive to the negative.
12. COMEDY. Differing by the focus of comic attack and the degree of ridicule.
    • Parody.
    • Satire.
    • Sitcom.
    • Romantic.
    • Screwball.
    • Farce.
    • Black Comedy.
13. CRIME. From whose point of view do we regard the crime?
    • Murder Mystery. (master detective’s POV).
    • Caper. (master criminal’s POV).
    • Detective. (cop’s POV).
    • Gangster. (crook’s POV).
    • Thriller. (victim’s POV).
    • Revenge Tale. (victim’s POV).
    • Courtroom. (lawyer’s POV).
    • Newspaper. (reporter’s POV).
    • Espionage. (spy’s POV).
    • Prison Drama. (inmate’s POV).
    • Film Noir. (POV of a protagonist who may be part criminal, part detective, part victim of a femme fatale).
14. SOCIAL DRAMA. This genre identifies problems in society—poverty, the education system, communicable diseases, the disadvantaged, antisocial rebellion, and the like—then constructs a story demonstrating a cure.
    • Domestic Drama (problems within the family).
    • Woman’s Film (dilemmas such as career versus family, lover versus children).
    • Political Drama (corruption in politics).
    • Eco-Drama (battles to save the environment).
    • Medical Drama (struggles with physical illness).
    • Psycho-Drama (struggles with mental illness).
15. ACTION/ADVENTURE.
    • High Adventure. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING.
    • Disaster/Survival Film. If Mother Nature is the source of antagonism.
16. HISTORICAL DRAMA.
17. BIOGRAPHY.
18. DOCU-DRAMA.
19. MOCKUMENTARY.
20. MUSICAL.
21. SCIENCE FICTION.
22. SPORTS GENRE.
23. FANTASY.
24. ANIMATION.
25. ART FILM.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND GENRE

GENRE CONVENTIONS are specific settings, roles, events, and values that define individual genres and their subgenres.

Each genre has unique conventions, but in some these are relatively uncomplicated and pliable. Other genres are relatively inflexible and filled with a complex of rigid conventions.

MASTERY OF GENRE

You must not only respect but master your genre and its conventions.

1. List all those works you feel are like yours, both successes and failures.
2. Rent the films on video and purchase the screenplays if possible.
3. Study the films stop and go, turning pages with the screen, breaking each film down into elements of setting, role, event, and value.
4. Stack, so to speak, these analyses one atop the other and look down through them all asking: What do the stories in my genre always do? What are its conventions of time, place, character, and action? Until you discover answers, the audience will always be ahead of you.

To anticipate the anticipations of the audience you must master your genre and its conventions.

CREATIVE LIMITATIONS

The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles.

Genre conventions are the rhyme scheme of a storyteller’s “poem.” They do not inhibit creativity, they inspire it. Genre convention is a Creative Limitation that forces the writer’s imagination to rise to the occasion.

MIXING GENRES

Genres are frequently combined to resonate with meaning, to enrich character, and to create varieties of mood and emotion.

REINVENTING GENRES

Society changes slowly, but it does change, and as society enters each new phase, the genres transform with it.

THE GIFT OF ENDURANCE

Screen-writing is not for sprinters, but for long-distance runners.

Long before you finish, the love of self will rot and die, the love of ideas sicken and perish.

5 Structure and character

Structure is character; character is structure.

CHARACTER VERSUS CHARACTERIZATION

Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality and nervosity; values and attitudes—all aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out. The totality of these traits makes each person unique because each of us is a one-of-a-kind combination of genetic givens and accumulated experience. This singular assemblage of traits is characterization … but it is not character.

TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

Pressure is essential. Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.

CHARACTER REVELATION

The revelation of true character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental to all fine storytelling.

What seems is not what is.

The revelation of deep character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental in major characters. Minor roles may or may not need hidden dimensions, but principals must be written in depth—they cannot be at heart what they seem to be at face.

CHARACTER ARC

The finest writing not only reveals true character, but arcs or changes that inner nature, for better or worse, over the course of the telling.

STRUCTURE AND CHARACTER FUNCTIONS

The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self.

The function of CHARACTER is to bring to the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naive, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combination of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does.

Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices that characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure. If you change one, you change the other. If you change event design, you have also changed character; if you change deep character, you must reinvent the structure to express the character’s changed nature.

The relative complexity of character must be adjusted to genre. Action/Adventure and Farce demand simplicity of character because complexity would distract us from the derring-do or pratfalls indispensable to those genres. Stories of personal and inner conflict, such as Education and Redemption Plots, demand complexity of character because simplicity would rob us of the insight into human nature requisite to those genres.

CLIMAX AND CHARACTER

A revered Hollywood axiom warns: “Movies are about their last twenty minutes.”

The last act and its Story Climax—this culminating moment must be the most gratifying, meaningful experience of all.

The story’s ultimate event is the writer’s ultimate task.

6 Structure and Meaning

AESTHETIC EMOTION

Life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them.

In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen.

A well-told story neither expresses the clockwork reasonings of a thesis nor vents raging inchoate emotions. It triumphs in the marriage of the rational with the irrational.

PREMISE

Two ideas bracket the creative process: Premise, the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story, and Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax.

A Premise, however, unlike a Controlling Idea, is rarely a closed statement. More likely, it’s an open-ended question: What would happen if…?

Remember: Whatever inspires the writing need not stay in the writing.

STRUCTURE AS RHETORIC

STORYTELLING is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action. A story’s event structure is the means by which you first express, then prove your idea… without explanation.

Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing—they dramatize.

CONTROLLING IDEA

Theme has become a rather vague term in the writer’s vocabulary. “Poverty,” “war,” and “love,” for example, are not themes; they relate to setting or genre. A true theme is not a word but a sentence—one clear, coherent sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible meaning.

A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.

The Controlling Idea has two components: Value plus Cause. It identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed to its final state. The sentence composed from these two elements, Value plus Cause, expresses the core meaning of the story.

• Value means the primary value in its positive or negative charge that comes into the world or life of your character as a result of the final action of the story.
• Cause refers to the primary reason that the life or world of the protagonist has turned to its positive or negative value. Working back from the ending to the beginning, we trace the chief cause deep within the character, society, or environment that has brought this value into existence. A complex story may contain many forces for change, but generally one cause dominates the others.

Meaning and the Creative Process

The story tells you its meaning; you do not dictate meaning to the story. You do not draw action from idea, rather idea from action. For no matter your inspiration, ultimately the story embeds its Controlling Idea within the final climax, and when this event speaks its meaning, you will experience one of the most powerful moments in the writing life—Self-Recognition: The Story Climax mirrors your inner self, and if your story is from the very best sources within you, more often than not you’ll be shocked by what you see reflected in it.

Idea Versus Counter-Idea

PROGRESSIONS build by moving dynamically between the positive and negative charges of the values at stake in the story.

From the moment of inspiration you reach into your fictional world in search of a design. You have to build a bridge of story from the opening to the ending, a progression of events that spans from Premise to Controlling Idea. These events echo the contradictory voices of one theme. Sequence by sequence, often scene by scene, the positive Idea and its negative Counter-Idea argue, so to speak, back and forth, creating a dramatized dialectical debate. At climax one of these two voices wins and becomes the story’s Controlling Idea.

DIDACTICISM

As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas.

IDEALIST, PESSIMIST, IRONIST

Idealistic Controlling Ideas

“Up-ending” stories expressing the optimism, hopes, and dreams of mankind, a positively charged vision of the human spirit; life as we wish it to be.

Pessimistic Controlling Ideas

“Down-ending” stories expressing our cynicism, our sense of loss and misfortune, a negatively charged vision of civilization’s decline, of humanity’s dark dimensions; life as we dread it to be but know it so often is.

Ironic Controlling Ideas

“Up/down-ending” stories expressing our sense of the complex, dual nature of existence, a simultaneously charged positive and negative vision; life at its most complete and realistic.

1. The positive irony: The compulsive pursuit of contemporary values—success, fortune, fame, sex, power—will destroy you, but if you see this truth in time and throw away your obsession, you can redeem yourself.
2. The negative irony: If you cling to your obsession, your ruthless pursuit will achieve your desire, then destroy you.

On Irony

1. It’s tough enough to come up with either a bright, idealistic ending or a sober, pessimistic climax that’s satisfying and convincing.
2. How to say both clearly?
3. If at climax the life situation of the protagonist is both positive and negative, how to express it so that the two charges remain separated in the audience’s experience and don’t cancel each other out, and you end up saying nothing?

MEANING AND SOCIETY

Once you discover your Controlling Idea, respect it.

Every effective story sends a charged idea out to us, in effect compelling the idea into us, so that we must believe. In fact, the persuasive power of a story is so great that we may believe its meaning even if we find it morally repellent. Storytellers, Plato insisted, are dangerous people. He was right.

Lastly, given story’s power to influence, we need to look at the issue of an artist’s social responsibility.