Screenplay Structure

I think that if my writing life over the past year has been about any one thing, it's been about reconciling myself to the requirements of structure. Because, you see, I'm one of those creative right-brain people, so I have a certain ingrained bias against anything that feels like a template for creative work. Why does there have to be a Catalyst on exactly page 12? What's wrong with page 13 or 14? And who says that your protagonist has to have likable traits even if he's supposed to be a son-of-a-bitch? I was instinctively certain that all these things were just crutches for people who don't really know how to write.

But in Hollywood, you face certain challenges. Like script readers, people paid a set amount of money per script to read whatever comes in and make that first basic decision as to whether the script is worth someone more important reading it. If the script reader who happens to be assigned your script is one of those who looks for certain elements in the first ten pages then throws the script away if s/he doesn't get those elements, then you're hosed and it doesn't make one bit of difference whether the rest is good or not. And if your script does get passed up the line, the development person at a production company could do exactly the same thing: look for an interesting Catalyst moment on page 12, then look for a big, decisive act break on page 25, and if they're not there, in the trash it goes.

Fair? Phooey on fair. Just imagine that you've been assigned to read ten scripts over the weekend, and a full reading takes around ninety minutes. That's fifteen hours out of your weekend, reading what are probably bad scripts. Anyone, even us hoity-toity right-brain types, would soon find ourselves begging for a system that gives us more of our lives back.

But there is an even more inescapable reason why these screenplay-structure outlines exist: they work. Whether it's because audiences have been trained to react to this specific structure, or the structure emerged because audiences instinctively respond to it, I don't know and it doesn't matter. The structure works. There are exceptions, but you don't get to write those exceptional screenplays until you're already an established writer who will be given the latitude to stray and try something new. Until then, if you want to get anywhere near the door, you are strongly, strongly advised to pay attention to the classic structure.

Does it feel like selling out? A little bit--but there's another way of looking at it. Think about what poets often say: the requirements of writing a sonnet actually force them to be more creative. Anyone can string together fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with an AB-AB rhyme scheme and a couplet at the end, but writing a good sonnet is hard. The words that first come to mind don't exactly fit the meter, and simply switching them around doesn't fit. Now you have to find another way to say the same thing that does fit the meter, and along the way the thing you want to say starts to shift. Quite often you'll find that this shift is toward something deeper and truer and better. Before long, all those damned pesky restrictions on your creativity have forced you to be more creative, and the work is better and you're a better writer for it.

Or put it this way: when you have a thousand choices available, you tend to go for the easy ones. When you have only three or four choices, you tend to go for the better ones. (My crazy novel, Thereby Hangs a Tale, is monumentally difficult precisely because it deliberately discards a bunch of rules and then makes up a bunch of new ones. Since it can go anywhere and do anything, it is very hard to figure out exactly where it should go and what it should do. I find myself suffering as a writer precisely because I don't have a structure to hang my hat on.)

The outline that Marc and I have been following lately--and which has indeed spurred our creativity--has been Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! Which is funny, since he's a romantic-comedy writer and we definitely do not write those sorts of scripts--but if the aim is to be "bulletproof" when your script goes before a reader, then this outline seems pretty damn tight. Marc found it first, and practically had to hold a gun to my head to get me to buy my own copy, but now I'm (grudgingly) glad I did. Other writer-friends have now encountered the book through us and picked up their own copies, so there does seem to be something about it that speaks to us in the right way.

And by the way, I've been reading John August's weblog this morning, and I like it a lot. I finally got around to watching Big Fish this weekend, and I'm amazed that I hadn't seen it before because it is exactly my kind of movie. I completely loved it, a five-star movie for sure, and Mr. August wrote one hell of a script. If you're interested in screenwriting, his blog is entertaining and informative; and that movie in particular is a gem. Highly recommended.