Structure for Tree People


If you are a beginning screenwriter and aren't confused, then you haven't been doing your homework. The marketplace is filled with "screenwriting gurus", and these sages are filled with so much good and seemingly contradictory "rules" and advice that it's no wonder that you're confused. If you're not, you should be!

Since Syd Field published his influential book Screenplay: the Foundations of Screenwriting [REF] in 1982, a cottage industry has flourished to meet the growing hordes of beginning screenwriters, many of whom read about incredible six-digit advances to first time writers and get dollar signs in front of their hungry student eyes. Every time you turn around, someone is meeting the growing student market with a new paradigm, a better method, a greater insight, into the craft of screenwriting.

At this point, you might be asking yourself - if this is true, why am I writing yet another book?

I'm writing this book in an effort to bring some order to the chaos of the moment. And because I believe two things:

So let's begin at the beginning with the ABC's of structure for tree people.

Beginning, Middle, End

Creative people rebel at rules - even tree people. And yet the notion that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end goes all the way back to 350 B.C., to Aristotle. In his Poetics (Book VII), Aristotle wrote:

"Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude; for there may be a whole that is wanting in magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end." [URL]

From such small beginnings, empires have risen! Western culture has believed in beginning-middle-end storytelling ever since. (Since serious students should know where modern structure analysis all began, I'm providing you with a complete copy of the Poetics).

What Aristotle thought about Tragedy (a certain kind of Greek play), our culture has come to think about stories: that they have beginnings, middles and endings, and this "division of three" naturally evolved into a three-act structure.

This, in turn, solidified into a recipe for good storytelling, specifying what should happen in each of the three acts. This is what today we call the three-act paradigm, which in fact is the foundation of every paradigm in today's crowded market of screenwriting theories. It all starts with a story having a beginning, a middle and an end.

The turn-of-the-century actor George B. Cohan said the same thing in a different way (to paraphrase):

"All stories have three acts. In the first, put your hero up a tree. In the second, throw rocks at the hero. In the third, get the hero out of the tree."

Someone added that if the hero is still alive, you have comedy; if dead, you have tragedy.

Contemporary "gurus of storytelling" still embrace the three-act paradigm. In The Art of Storytelling (1997), Michael B. Druxman, himself a produced screenwriter, writes:

"Indeed, no story, be it a novel, screenplay, dramatic television show, one-act stage play, short story or whatever, will work without a proper three-act structure. That is a given....Ignore three-act structure , and you will fail. I guarantee it." [REF]

How, you might wonder, can a one-act stage play have a three-act structure? Because "act" in the first sense refers to when the curtain comes down, and act in the second sense refers to the dramatic structure of the story.

So powerful is three-act storytelling in our culture that it spills into all narrative genres. Listen to Stephen J. Cannell, one of the most successful television producers in history, here quoted in Rich Whiteside's wonderful book, The Screenwriting Life:

"I write stories that have a three-act structure. Act One should define the problem. At the top of Act Two you should complicate the problem. That's usually when something in the back story hits the hero on the back of the head that makes the problem much more complicated and dangerous than it originally was. Then during Act Two, your protagonist should be moving to solve this new, more complicated problem. And, very importantly, your antagonist should be moving to try and prevent the solution of the problem." [REF]

To summarize:

Stories Are About People

Some movies are plot-driven and some movies are character-driven. Which is more important?

Surprisingly, Aristotle sided with what would become the clear preference of Hollywood producers, that the best (in Hollywood read this as "commercially successful") stories (movies) are plot-driven. In Book VI of the Poetics, he wrote, "The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place."

To be sure, Hollywood's "big effects" movies are lengendary, movies in which the characters seem to take a back seat to big explosions, extraordinary car chases, fantastic special effects, and all assortment of thrilling visual entertainment.

In startling contrast, the European film market, as well as a growing faction of the American independent market, is filled with quieter stories that depend more on our involvement with the story's character(s) than with big displays of visual effects.

So do people only matter in movies made in Europe and by independent producers? The answer is a resounding, No!

Even in the most expensive, outlandish "special effects" movie, it's what happens to people, not to buildings and cars, that keeps us involved. When the people in a movie don't matter, or when the focus (on a hero with a clear goal and an obstacle preventing him/her from getting it) goes astray, we lose the story-spine on which to hang our involvement.

Consider a movie like Jumanji. For all its wonderful special effects, the human interest in the story - and human interest is about what happens to people - is negligible, and as a result the movie comes off as one animal stampede after another. The critical question we moviegoers are always asking is, What happens next? In Jumanji, who cares? Once you've seen one stampede, you've seen them all.

A more recent example: Ali

Good action movies - like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Romancing the Stone - have characters we care about. We want to know what happens to them, we become personally involved in their goals and needs, and because we care, all the obstacles they face, all the action they get involved in, matter that much more.

True, many movies get made today in which people matter little. Some even make money because we all like to be entertained by dazzling special effects. But the movies that stay around, that get rented over and over again on video, no matter what the genre, are movies that touch us on some personal level - and that means their stories are about people we care about.

The art of creating people we care about is called characterization.

Goal + Obstacle = Conflict

The Hollywood movie has evolved into a story about a hero. This, of course, meshes nicely with the fact that Hollywood is star-driven. A movie star plays a hero, and there you have it.

But not quite.

"Hero" in the sense I am using it here means "main character" or protagonist (not Hercules or Robin Hood). Every movie has one - almost. There are a few "ensemble movies" in which many characters appear to share the spotlight (The Breakfast Club, for example), but upon analysis even these usually are shown to have a central character whose concerns (goals) drive the story.

The hero is your story's main character, then, and s/he must want something as a result of things that happen (and happen very quickly) after your story begins. The hero has a goal.

And there must be something that stops the hero from reaching the goal - an obstacle. Most often this obstacle is a person, or has a personal embodiment, called "the villain" - or the antagonist.

The easier the movie is to understand, the clearer the antagonist is - in big Hollywood action movies, for example, it's usually a matter of good guy v. bad guy. And there's never a doubt about who is who.

But in more subtle character-driven movies, the kind of fare independents do so well, the antagonist can be "fuzzier" and harder to nail down. It may have a shifting face, or it may be a "negative" aspect of the protagonist.

In Citizen Ruth, for example, the antagonist is embodied by both sides of the abortion issue - so in a sense the "villain" or antagonist is politics itself, or the kind of politics that becomes blinded by its own causes. In Chasing Amy, although the hero's best friend opposes his affection for a lesbian, it is the hero's own immaturity that keeps him from finding "true love."

The pattern is always the same: the hero has a goal but the antagonist stands in the way of achieving it. This is the basis of conflict - and conflict, in turn, is the basis of drama.

What screenplay structure does, in other words, is put conflict into an order that will communicate your story in its most powerful expression. This order has a beginning, middle and end - which is why I prefer to call it the 3-act paradigm.

The 3-Act Paradigm

As stated earlier, the most explicit "hard line" exposition of the three-act paradigm in the specific context of screenwriting was made by Syd Field. This is as good a place as any to start.

My "take" on Field's Paradigm looks something like this:

ACT I                            ACT II                       ACT III

"put your hero                "throw rocks"                 "get hero out
 up a tree"                                                  of the tree"

exposition                    development                    climax
& complication                & conflict                     & resolution

hook and complication;
intro main char               "throw rocks" at               but the hero
and "the problem"             main char, more                comes through
or obstacle; what's           complication, "the             (usually), "the
the char need and what's      plot thickens"                  happy ending"
in the way?
                              MIDPOINT PLOT POINT            (Total script 90-120pp) 
PLOT POINT (pp 20-30):        (pp 50-60):
something happens in the      again, something happens
story to shift focus, to      to shift focus, increase
tighten tension and make      danger to main char getting
the problem/obstacle tougher  what s/he wants; reversals
than it seemed before         of fortune can happen; goal
                              of hero can change
Movement from ordinary 
world into 
extraordinary world            FINAL PLOT POINT (pp80-90):
                              the hero may fail; danger
                              abounds, obstacles everywhere

I am much more flexible than Field is on the "page location" of the plot points. This isn't a hard science.

On the other hand, it is a foundation for screenwriting that not only works when incorporated into the writing process, for tree and forest people alike (who may use the paradigm at different stages of the writing process), but which is a superb model with which to analyze screenplays, as you'll see in our examples below.

Put this 3-act paradigm to memory.

Another useful "take" on the paradigm is by Mary Shomon in her The Screenwriter's Master Chart.

The 3-Act Paradigm at Work: Examples

I'll never forget the moment that made me a "true believer" in the three-act paradigm for movies. I had recently finished Syd Field's book and, quasi-forest person that I am, looked at his paradigm chart with both disbelief and dismay.

So I decided to prove Field wrong where it counted, in the movie theater.

I went to a double-bill carrying along a stop watch to check out Field's celebrated "plot points," confident that I would prove his theory wrong. After all, the movies on the double-bill couldn't possibly have anything in common: An Officer and a Gentleman and Harold and Maude.

To make a long story short, the three-act paradigm as explicated by Syd Field worked like a charm. I came out dazed - and a convert.

You don't have to take my word for it. Rent some videos and look for the major plot points at the end of act one, at midpoint and at the end of act two. They will be there.

To make your work a little easier, I've broken down dozens of very different movies into their structural foundations. Print out the structural analysis for a film, rent the video, see if you can find the script (either on the Internet or in a bookstore), and get to work. There is no better way to learn screenplay structure than to study how the pros do it.

You need to learn the three-act paradigm for a very simple and practical reason: it works!

More.

Spinoffs of the 3-Act Paradigm

In the competitive cottage industry of "how to write a screenplay," everybody can't sit around and agree that Syd Field is right. Or even that Aristotle is right, who after all was first with this approach. How do we get any business that way?

So different people have looked at the three-act paradigm more closely, put it under a particular kind of lens, and come up with something a bit different - naming it something else entirely and sometimes claiming that their theory "proves" that the three-act paradigm is dead.

Right. Like God, and like the king, the three-act paradigm is dead. Long live the paradigm!

In fact, what people are doing is fine-tuning the basic concept of three acts - and often with very useful results. Since we all must ultimately find the writing method that works best for us, it's good to be exposed to many different explanations and versions of screenplay structure. But understand that, despite what the gurus will tell you, these are theories that rise from the three-act paradigm (i.e. stories have a beginning, middle, and end), without which all of them would collapse into a pile of unread Aristotle.

So here are some of the major variations of three-act structure:

Since you are a tree person, you probably are curious enough to explore these variations. As you do, remember to keep your goal in mind: to learn how to write a powerful screenplay.

If you don't understand a paradigm, it's not the end of the world. All these writers are really saying more in common than they let on, and it's senseless to get caught up in quibbling about how many acts a screenplay really has.

Here tree people can learn something from forest people: don't lose the big picture by getting lost in small details.

The 3-Act Paradigm Worksheet

I've developed a bare-bones worksheet that I use for sketching out the three-act structures of my screen stories. Sometimes I take a pile of these along on a camping trip to structure out future scripts.

I'm putting the worksheet, which should be self-explanatory once you read the rest of the material in this module, in a separate file so you can easily print it out for your own use.

Go to 3-Act Paradigm Worksheet.

"American Movies Are About What Happens Next"

Actor William Macy (Fargo) has put the axiom above, which comes from Richard Toscan's online Playwriting Seminars [URL], as forcefully as anyone:

"The only thing I want to see when I go to see a movie -- and I'm not being facetious at all -- is what happens next. What's the next plot point. All I want to do is be told a story, and it better be a good story. It better have something to do with my life." [URL]

There are two important points being made here.

No matter what paradigm makes sense to you, no matter if none do - if you can write a movie story in which the audience is on the edge of its seat, forever asking, "What happens next?", then you've written what is called "a page turner" and can be proud of the accomplishment. Page-turners are easier to market than slower stories.

My screenplay A Woman Scorned, for example, has enthusiastic agent representation even though it is a risky, controversial story whose main character is a child molester. This "hero" makes it a difficult, if not impossible, sell.

And yet: "I couldn't put it down," my agent told me. "It's a real page turner."

Even quieter, softer movies have narrative drive, an order of events that makes us want to know what happens next. Keep this focus central as you write your screenplay.

Because its opposite is the one cardinal sin in screenwriting: to be boring.

Throughout this course, I am going to do everything in my power to help you make sure you are never boring.

The Bottom Line: Finding Your Structure

So much for theory. What do you actually do to find the structure of your movie story?

Let's look again at our example: The First Lady is kidnapped by terrorists and held for ransom.

How do we structure this into a screenplay?

Our first decision must be this: who is the main character? Let's say the First Lady. What does she want? A divorce.

So far, so good - we have an interesting idea here, the First Lady is in a bad marriage and wants a divorce. And then she is kidnapped and held for ransom.

Let's now use our worksheet to develop the structure of our story. As I work this out, understand that there are many ways to develop this material. You may have much better ideas than I do.

THE HOOK

Two strange characters are tailing the First Lady as she tours a children's hospital, a retirement home and a library dedication during a busy day.

THE COMPLICATION

At the same time, the President is having a rendezvous with his lover.

THE HERO'S CALL TO ACTION

At the end of her busy day, the First Lady meets with her lawyer. She knows her husband is having an affair and wants a divorce - political consequences be damned. Against her lawyer's advice, she decides to file.

FIRST ACT PLOT POINT

The next day, on another busy schedule, the same two people from the hook kidnap the First Lady. They are terrorists demanding that the U.S. stop supporting their enemies.

HERO'S GOAL

The First Lady fears for her safety and wants nothing more now than to get out of this alive.

MIDPOINT PLOT POINT

The terrorists are kind. For the first time, the First Lady understands the political position of the foreigners, who do not get good press in the U.S. She is falling in love with one of her kidnappers. She wants to help them.

ACT TWO PLOT POINT

The President locates where his wife is being held captive - and decides that losing his wife in an armed raid would not be altogether a bad thing. A huge Army surrounds the terrorists and First Lady.

HERO'S GOAL

The First Lady is now in love with one of the terrorists and does not want to leave him. She wants to negotiate a peaceful settlement.

CLIMAX & RESOLUTION

The President convinces everyone that the First Lady's offer is only a ploy , orchestrated by the terrorists. During the ensuing raid, the terrorist-lover manages to save the First Lady - but is killed himself, as all of the terrorists are. The First Lady, instead of being thankful to be rescued , gives a speech condemning her husband's use of overkill and publicly announces her divorce, ruining her husband's career.

The story also can be structured as a sequence outline.

More about moving from logline to structure.

Getting Ready to Write

The development above is the sort of thing a tree person does before s/he begins to write a screenplay. Many go from the worksheet, or something similar, to a second step: writing a step outline.

One way to do this would be to take the outline above and now develop it scene by scene, putting each scene (described in one or two sentences) on a different index card.

After the step outline, still other tree people then would go to a third step, writing a treatment. A treatment is a prose telling of the screen story, using almost no dialogue, that is written in the present tense.

A treatment of our story thus might begin: "The First Lady is making the rounds at a children's hospital. She moves from bed to bed, taking time to meet personally with many of the children. Outside the hospital, two suspicious characters are watching her activities with binoculars, catching as much of her movement through the windows as possible."

I personally never write a treatment (unless a producer requires one in a for-hire deal). But I do use the worksheet and index cards, though not for every screenplay. I find some stories come in a great rush, demanding to be written quickly, while others simmer and take more time to develop.

But these are your tools: a paradigm worksheet, a step outline, a treatment. Your goal if you are a tree person is to understand as much of your story as possible before beginning to write it.

Your Project's Structure

Now it's time for you to write.

Fill out the paradigm worksheet for your script concept.

This done, and if you are so inclined, write a step outline for your script (you may want to begin with a sequence outline). And if you are really a tree person, you may even want to write a treatment.

Whether you go on to the next module before or after you finish this work on your own project is entirely up to you.

[BACK TO TEXT]


MODULE 4: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

2/99