Rage Against The Page

For storytellers, this sentence is as important as it is simple: A person with a particular characteristic goes through conflict and is changed . That's your story, right there, buckeroo. A character, a conflict, a change. These three elements give you your beginning (character), middle (conflict), and end (change). Now comes the part where I pick it to death for hidden meaning, me being the over-analysing, left-brained ape that I am. Characteristic We learn about the protagonist's 'particular characteric' early. That's because typically the protagonist is tested at the Act One end crisis, and the particular characteristic makes thing a LOT worse instead of fixing the problem. Oh, to heck with it — let's just go ahead and call the characteristic exactly what it is: the hero's flaw. The hero's flaw is the thing that makes us shake our heads and groan: "Geez, he's his own worst enemy!" It's the thing restraining the hero from reaching...

Murdered Minister's Wife Confesses to the Crime ... was the headline that caught my eye and had me clicking through to shortnews.com . I really wanted to know how the deceased wife of a minister managed to confess to murdering herself. It sounded like some kind of delicious time-travel scenario, or perhaps a ghostly confession from the spirit world. I mean, are we talking about a cryptic suicide? Did she have multiple personalities and go through a sudden and awful Jekyll-Hide struggle while chopping carrots for the evening meal? No. The wife is safe and well. And headed for jail. You guessed it: she was the one doing the murdering and her minister husband was the one doing the expiring. But that's not what the title says. The title is horribly ambiguous. Both readings are valid: that the victim was the minister or that the victim was his wife. Now, ambiguity is a wonderful tool for writing comedies. Audiences love to be fooled by clever use of language (so long as you don...

Just a quick note about an interesting confluence of blogging about structure. Inevitably this type of thing comes and goes, especially with such a lively topic of debate as screenwriting structure. First, Craig Mazan at The Artful Writer threw down the glove with his article Q: How Strict Should I Be With Act Breaks? A: Not Very . Two days later, Phil Morton of ScreenwriterBones fame picked up the glove, dusted it off, and torched it with an arc welder. Phil's article is called On Structure . Polite as they are, you could not get two more opposing opinions. Clearly I'm in the Morton camp, as evidenced by my 4-Act Story Diamond post , and I'm glad to see Phil stand up to Craig's hogwash (albeit coincidentally) on this issue. Craig is a dedicated writer, and a passionate Guild rep, but telling novice writers this (about Act breaks) is misleading at best and downright professional sabotage at worst: Hooey. Baloney. Argle-bargle. Go ahead…fill in your own Montgomery Burns...

Characters must struggle then suffer as a result. Update 1: (27 February, 2006) Perhaps better written as: Characters must struggle, suffer, and finally change . _____ The 'signpost' entries are meant to be mercifully short -- it's not a fault with your browser leaving stuff out! These occasional and brief posts will be a welcome relief for those who, er, struggle through my customary long-winded posts and, um, suffer because of it.

Seriously, right now, stop work on that screenplay until you answer this question: Why are you writing this? Money? That better be your Number Two reason, buckeroo. I'll give you a pass if your Numero Uno reason is in order. Is it? (Return to the top of this post and start again.) New Year's Resolution? It's February already. Let it go. Everybody else already did. Nobody cares if you stick to your promise to finally finish your killer screenplay. I'm one of those people. There are a lot of us. So slide your twenty pages back into the bottom drawer. You can dust it off again next January 1. To win back your girl? Move along. This one's taken. Ahem. Guilt? Yeah, funny how that 'paint yourself into a corner' philosophy thing works. You know, you go around telling everybody you'll write a screenplay and make it big time. That way you set up a tangible motivation to achieve your goal. There is real risk and real reward. You've already told everybody ...

This is a new blog. So I really should save this topic for later. I don't want to 'jump the shark' this early in the game. I feel like I'm about to act out the money shot before the cameras are up to speed. Ah well. Once we are done, here in this post, you may not want to return. Ever . Some will run screaming because of the two brief but stenchiferous sentences I am about to utter. Yes, I had to invent a whole new word to describe how disgusted these folk will be a few short paragraphs from now. Others won't return because they will soon have an essential piece ( the essential piece) of the storytelling puzzle they didn't have before. They'll walk away from this post bearing a firebrand that will spark heat and light and life into their stories. Once you have that, the rest is a technicality. A third group will read what follows and curse me for being the masked magician who gives away the mechanism behind the mystery. But, know what? I don't give ...

Update: new version of the 4-Act Story Diamond graphic here . Update 2  (2023): Even more 4-act structure , courtesy of Stan Williams. I don't believe in the three-act screenplay story structure. It's four acts, plain and simple. I said so ten years ago on Jack Stanley's Scrnwrit list, and nothing has changed since. Four acts, no more, no less. I'm sorry those screenwriting gurus sold you on three acts and then five acts and then seven acts or -- what are we up to now? Nine? Twelve? Look, we're all grasping for the magic template that will reign in the chaos and tame our wild stories, so I don't blame you for listening to those guys. The four acts were there all along and the screenwriting gurus knew it, or at least sensed it. Certainly Syd Field knew it, although he failed to make a clean break from the dogmatic Aristotle three-act structure . I swear, if I hear once more that line about "Get your hero up a tree, throw rocks at him, then get him ...