June’s Buzz:

STRUCTURE: TYRANT OR SERVANT?
(Copyright 2002)

By
Kathryn McCullough

Once screenwriters are introduced to the concept of plot structure, they often treat it as if it were a new religion, whose tenets will miraculously solve all their problems. It is difficult not to be caught up in the magic of the three-act form, to be mesmerized by points of attack and reversals. You find yourself applying the rules to every movie you see, analyzing your favorites, amazed at how they all follow the rules so neatly and perfectly. Inspired, you seek out the preachings of the script doctors, the screenwriting book authors, and the film professors, obeying all their commandments in a frenzied attempt to get your own script to achieve the same kind of heavenly perfection.

The danger here is that writers often allow structural “laws” to dictate how their plot will unfold, when this type of analysis can only really be applied later, after the script is written.

If you look at any successful film, you will indeed be able to break it down into parts, but this is not because the writer set down a series of boundaries and then colored them in. It is rather because we are all natural storytellers. Any tale you tell, from a comical run-in with the clerk at the grocery store, to a saga involving your summer at sailing camp when you were eight years old, will inherently be told in a certain manner. There will be the set-up of the characters and setting, the introduction of one or more dramatic events, and then the development of these events, all tied up in a resolution.

When writing a script, you will naturally follow this form. Only after a draft is written does it become useful to look more clinically at the whole piece. If the story seems to stall in certain areas, a knowledge of structure will help you build these areas up, but the foundation will already be there. Because the foundation is not the structure, but the characters.

As any writing teacher will tell you, there are a limited number of plots. It is the characters living that plot that makes the story original. Your characters’ unique goals and fears, their reactions to events, and the way they change and grow as a result of these events are what will pull an audience into your story, and what will make your film memorable instead of formulaic. Stay true to your character and he or she will build the structure for you.