Screenwriting, structure and what I learned along the way
Screenwriting, structure and what I learned along the way
Tom Morgan
Our culture is built around storytelling: going to the movies, thumbing through the paper, buying too many books during lockdown … reading a blog. We can’t get enough!
I’ve always been fascinated by the spell a good yarn can cast over you but it wasn’t until I studied screenwriting that I actually understood where that magic came from: structure.
Let’s glance at the most common narrative structure: the three-act structure:
Beginning — Middle — End
It couldn’t be simpler. This is the basis of human storytelling, stretching back thousands of years. Blake Snyder, writer of Save the Cat (the most unapologetically structure-focused screenwriting book I’ve ever read), phrases it differently with:
Thesis — Antithesis — Synthesis
Any compelling story begins with a theme, or argument (the thesis), that is then challenged during the second act (the antithesis), until the hero finally overcomes their great peril by using all they’ve learned to find a final solution that returns them to a place of emotional clarity (the synthesis).
This isn’t unique to screenwriting; every story ever told around a campfire follows some sort of structure, with a beginning, middle and end. But screenplays are pure structure. They have to be! You’ve got 90–150 minutes to introduce your character, their world, blow that world up, stick it back together with the power of friendship and roll credits before the lights come back on and people head for their cars. You have to wring as much adrenaline/tears/laughter out of the audience as you can.
Writing a novel can seem downright lackadaisical by comparison.
What is unique to screenwriting is the sheer economy of storytelling on display. In order to be a great screenwriter, you have to learn how to intertwine plot and character as tightly as possible. Everything else is secondary to that goal: dialogue, action, the very words used to describe a scene—if it isn’t serving the structure, it has to go.
In his book, Snyder advocates for thinking of a story as an ocean and structure as a chain of islands, making the ocean crossable. I love this metaphor as a writer (who constantly feels like he’s drowning), but as an editor I’ve always resonated more with the analogy of a Jenga tower.
When handed a piece of writing, my job is to see the tower of blocks within it, loosely and miraculously supporting one another. Anybody can notice when a tower is shoddily constructed, listing to one side with pieces sticking out at odd angles—but the trick and the craft is knowing how and where to apply pressure to those pieces. Too much and the whole thing will collapse, worse off than when you first approached it. But take the time to understand how each of the blocks fit together, what they need from one another to stay stable and strong, and you can gently nudge them in the right direction.
So then … what is that process? How do you find where the “blocks” are weakest in a piece of writing? Let me show you what I do:
Read the piece—and read it again! You can’t possibly know how the end relates to the beginning without being intimately familiar with them both. Read it one more time just to make sure.
Isolate the thesis—what is this story trying to say? A quick way of checking this is to read the start and the end and note the change in the world. What has the main character been through? What have they learned? Does the story feel like its advocating for this change, or is it more of a cautionary tale?
Interrogate the thesis—has this been clear the whole time? Are there elements of the story that don’t contribute to this main idea? Examine the subplots and character relationships; do they interact with the thesis or are they useless deviations?
Examine the third act for unearned ‘moments’—this step is a little more nebulous and relies on intimate familiarity with the text (see step 1!), but I’ve found no greater way of punching up a narrative catharsis than examining the third act for ‘lessons learned’ moments; little callbacks and payoffs that rocket the reader back through the entire story to where the seed was planted. It’s hard to do in a first draft as a writer but can be shockingly easy to insert into a second or third pass as an editor—don’t miss those opportunities!
These are the rules screenwriting taught me, the tricks I use to understand the blocks stacked on the table in front of me—and hopefully they can help you too.