Western culture dictates that a story is a series of events, told in order, with a beginning, middle and end (Linear).  There’s typically a lone protagonist at odds with an antagonist.   What has dictated this reliance on linear structure is a conception that audiences would be lost if the writer violated what was called the unity of time and place. 

Though this first started during the silent era, studios today are hesitant to greenlight a film that does not conform to their perceptions of story structure. Luckily, there have been financial successes like Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, and Memento to open the door for those of you who want to write your stories organically.

The goal of your screenplay’s structure is to enhance the story.  So, is there a more dynamic way to tell your story?  That’s always something to ask of your story, even as you’re writing it.

Selecting the right structure to use is important.  I always suggest to my students to let the script unfold organically.  When you are ready to sit down and write it, you should already know how you want to tell it (but this can and sometimes does change during the process, and that’s a plus because it means you’ve struck a nerve and found the sweet spot of the story that maybe you were missing). 

NATURAL “ORGANIC” STORYTELLING

Years ago Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros) wrote an article for Script magazine and in it he talked about “natural” storytelling.  His film at the time, 21 Grams, was an interesting story with a fractured structure (I’ll discuss what this means in a minute).

“Every story has a particular way it has to be told,” Arriaga said.  “I strived to find the right structure for 21 Grams… One night I was going through some old manuscripts.  I found an unfinished novel that I had intended to write when I was 24.  The novel began with a dying man who thinks: ‘So this is death’s waiting room, these ridiculous tubes, these needles swelling my arms,’ and then it went back and forth with scenes of his past and present life.  There I found the clue for the structure: Tell the story as we tell our own daily life stories.”

Christopher Nolan (Memento) agrees, saying in one interview, “…film, for me, takes a logical approach to developing a story.  My most useful definition of narrative [structure] is that it’s a controlled release of information.  You don’t feel any obligation to release that information on a chronological basis.  What’s interesting about doing this is trying to expand the story in all directions.”

There are issues when you start to delve into a complex structure.  You have to be aware of how the audience will absorb this structure and what questions they will be asking of your story.  You can’t answer all their questions obviously and you cannot anticipate all of them.  But what you can control is what questions you raise and must answer within your story.

Audiences today are more intelligent and more experienced than any other generation before them.  With technology, the Internet, they can learn more and see more than they ever have without leaving the security of their own bedroom.  This is good and bad for you the screenwriter. 

Sometimes you might write your story at a level that really isn’t challenging the audience, where they are always one step ahead of you. So in response to this you can adjust the structure of your story in such a way as to challenge the audience and make them “stay with” the story and in a sense, pay more attention and absorb it more.  This results in a more enjoyable movie going experience. 

EXAMPLES of Different Structures

If you have a lot of characters, and a strong visual or thematic story, then you have a lot of options: looping, coiled (spiral), parallel, and repetitive structures are all solid options. (We’ll talk about all of these in moment.)  If you have a strong protagonist with a clear goal it probably makes sense to write it chronologically (linear).  If you’re writing a more abstract (psychologically driven and sometimes theme driven) story then structure is probably an important consideration.  Stories that have a heavy theme are often spiral or repetitive in nature, revisiting a situation or event over and over again, until it is resolved. So your story can often dictate structure. 

Free form structure is abstract or conceptual stories like Mulholland Drive where the audience has to inject their own understanding, prejudices, and beliefs in order to re-construct the story in their mind, as it really has no apparent narrative.

Think of structure as not a hindrance, but as a tool that can help you tell a visually dramatic story intelligently.  If you watch sports you’ve heard the term, “trying not to lose the game,” etc.  In writing, when you’re too worried about not “losing the game” you tend to write too simplistic of a story.  It’s a fine line knowing how much information to release and when.

Ever since the very beginning of storytelling, dramatic stories were (are) told linearly because they were (are) based on our primary understanding of time. Western culture, most cultures for that matter, see the passage of time in the same manner.  Aristotle in his Poetics preached that the “arrangement of the incidents” must have “unity”.  He also spoke of the unity of time, place, and action and that it was unwise to break that unity.  Today, unity of time can and should be broken when applicable, but what can never be broken is the trust your audience has in you to tell a story that by its end has resolved itself logically.  Memento and Pulp Fiction resolve themselves logically.  They really do.  Abstract stories such as Mulholland Drive and even, frankly, the beloved Magnolia are films where the audience really has to have a lot of confidence in their own perceptions for those films to really work. Abstract stories rely too much on the audience to “figure” it out on their own.  So, everything you have setup in your story you need to payoff (we’ll discuss setups and payoffs in a later class.) 

If you saw the movie Basic (starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) years ago you know how it can feel at the end when the writer(s) didn’t take care with their story and violated the rule of “logical” progression.  Keep in mind, when something is revealed it doesn’t have to make sense right that moment, but enough information better follow to help make “sense” of it all.  In Basic, there were so many twists and reversals at the end that I gave up trying to figure it out.  I think there was a good ending in there somewhere, only they (I) missed it.