Connecting the dots

Introduction to structure

David Mamet likens the well structured script to an airplane. If it has been constructed well, it will fly under the guidance of a pilot. If it hasn't, it will at one point or the other crash. This is what happens when we halfway through a film or play begin to loose interest, because the plot logic and/or emotional logic doesn't lead us on towards a satisfying conclusion. Because we get confused, irritated or in other words, we are simply not persuaded by the universe of the drama. This has a lot to do with structure.

There is no single way to structure your drama. Although Mamet's airplane metaphor is not wrong, it points too much in the direction of an exact science. Rather than linear engineering the structure of drama is more of an organic thing. It should change according to the purpose and material. Any idea of 'the ideal model' for structuring scripts is nonsenses. It is like in nature, where there is vast variety of living creatures, yet there are general principles and formative patterns which always apply. And as the first principle for life is the existence of carbon-oxide, the first principle for drama is the existence of conflict.

One of the reasons to work with structure is to have a way to simplify the complex universe of your drama. The most simple thing we can say about structure is: A drama has a beginning, a middle and an end. These three parts should be connected, so one leads to the next. It is like a fish, it has a head, body and tail. As with the fishes, you can find them in many different proportions and colours, yet like the fishes, if they don't fit well together, the drama will not swim well.

This leads us intuitively to a three-act structure. An opening act to introduce characters, conflicts, locations and themes. A middle act to further develop these with complications, nuances and additional layers to the point where everything is such as mess, that something needs to be done. The final act do exactly that: it cleans up the mess (more or less) and conclude the drama's fundamental conflict. The idea of the three-act structure is very strong and widely used, both in theater and film.

Famous script gurus like Syd Field have made their models based upon the classic three act-model, inspired especially by Henrik Ibsen, the grandfather of modern dramatic structure. I don't believe these structural models are artificial inventions per se. They try to sum up our experience of how the human mind understands and interprets events unfolding in time. As all attempts at summing up experience, they are however never complete. When you examine some of these contemporary film models, like Syd Fields, they are actually four-act models, because the middle act takes up double as much time as the first and last act. So it makes more sense to call it a four act model, at least to me.

The sense is that each act, as a unit of the drama, should be similar to the others in respect to length and the basic purpose of moving us from one point and to the next. The sense is not only logical, but has to do with a sense of rhythm. Drama is in its form strongly related to music, much more than it is to literature, because as with music, drama is played out in real time. It takes place in front of us, moment by moment. I cannot stress how important it is to grasp this difference, to understand the importance of structure.

Another way to think of structure is to compare it to the structure of language. When we form sentences, our language has structural rules which helps us understand the meaning of the sentence. These rules are more or less flexible. Even though it is normal in English to begin a sentence with a personal pronoun, followed by a verb and conclude with a noun, like He walked home, we can play around with these rules, using a poetic license, like Home he walked. Exactly because the last sentence varies from the standard rules, it gives us a different impression. The first sentence seems to simply state the fact. In the second, the words home and walked are lend more significance and could for example carry a meaning that he longed for home and it was a very long walk.

We also know from language that rhythm and length plays a vital role in conveying the sense of what is being said. Urgent or commanding communication needs short staccato-like sentences. Pleasant conversation relies on harmonic structure with longer, developed sentences and a mellow rhythm.
In the structure of a drama, these basic insights from language applies. The sequence, the lenght and the rhythm are as important for the perception of the drama, as the actions taking place are in themselves.

The point is to structure your drama in a way confluent with its nature. To select a number of acts by which you separate different parts of the drama. Depending on the length and nature of your material it can be any reasonable number of acts. A short film of 10-15 minutes or a short theater play of 20-30 minutes normally consist of only one act. Most feature films running 90 minutes or more usually have four acts. Each act should be like a drama unto itself, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

The end of each act functions as the transition into the following act. The transition between acts should be major plot points, which reveal crucial new information, raise new questions and add another level of pressure to the main character(s) situation. The major plot points are of the greatest importance, as they give us the push forward, deeper into the drama, and they should always be integral with the drama's and the characters' main conflict.

Acts can also be broken down into separate units. If an act has a length of, say, 30 pages, then it could consist of three sequences of scenes. The sequences should more or less be of equal length and also have a beginning middle and an end, working as a mini-act in themselves. Scenes are the smallest dramatic unit and are of course also structured in the same way, beginning, middle and end, but unlike the act and the sequence, we get to play around with the length of the scenes. Normally they can be from just below half a page and up to around seven pages in an ordinary film script - with the standard lenght being around one to three pages for contemporary films.

The number of pages are crucial to the process of structuring a script and this is one of the reasons why the film industry is almost religious about using a standard lay-out format for scripts, making the page count reliable - and close to one minute of film per page. Before actually writing your script, when planning the acts and major plot points, as well as making an outline for the sequence of scenes within the acts, you can't be sure of the exact length, but you can, surprisingly well, make an estimate of how long each scene should be, giving you a total count that lets you affirm your structural ideas.

Some writers begin to feel mightily uncreative with all this talk of structure and page counting. That's perfectly understandable, but it is a very necessary discipline to master to create scripts, especially for a feature film script. The longer, the more need for structure. This is for example why comedians, making their first feature film, often fail as they don't haven't acquired the grasp of the feature films need for over-arching dramatic structure. A few writers have an innate sense of structure and need not think too much about it - the structure emerges by itself from their writing. Others need to do the math from the ground up, while most of us are somewhere in between, switching between the intuitive and planned.

In my experience, many writers of drama that have shortcomings, have them exactly because they haven't learned to love to play around with structure. We easily become too focused on the story itself, and forget the equally important part: How we tell it. Anyone who has ever failed in telling a joke knows exactly how important the 'how' is. The sequence of the information given, the tone and the timing. To master the structure of drama is not unlike mastering the structure of a joke. Its all about knowing what the joke is, how to build up expectation and then play against it. In postings to come, we'll take a look at the specifics of script structure.

One to One

The dead-end-argument called reality

Strangely enough, when discussing the construction of a script, you can often meet arguments based upon reality: "This would never happen in reality". Of course the argument is almost always right. It wouldn't happen, at least not in reality as we have experienced it. Maybe it could happen or maybe not. The argument is despite its relative correctness, more or less invalid when discussing the construction of a fictitious script.

We are not trying to construct reality. If we were scientists trying to construct a computer simulation of reality, it would be a valid argument. We are trying to represent reality in an artistic form (yes, even when making mainstream entertainment). 'Represent' means that we somehow translate our experience of reality into a different form than reality itself. It is not 1:1 - not even in so-called realistic films. If it were 1:1 it would actually be reality. And we, the creators, would be God.

The argument should be: "This is not convincing" or "The audience will be lost" or something similar. And the argument doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have a man falling 50 meters down to a concrete surface and survive. It all depends on how important that action is for you. If you as a creator want this to happen, then the only question should be, how do you pull it of in a convincing way. Not if it could happen or has ever happened in reality.

The question if something is convincing or not has a lot more to do with your plotting, structure and the fictional universe you are establishing than it has to do with reality. In a super-hero or a cartoon universe characters can easily fall extraordinary lengths and survive intact. In the seemingly realistic french film "Small Change" a child falls from the 4th or 5th floor of a building and survives without a scratch - and although the universe of the film seems realistic, this event is convincing, because the whole rhythmic build-up to the event and a certain lyrical tone underscoring the seemingly real world, allows us to experience the survival of the child as a poetic miracle.

Reality should never be a dead-end, a stone blocking your path to fulfilling your narrative and dramatic desire. It can be an inspiration. The reality of the audience is the reality you have to struggle with, because if you can't convince them of entering your dramatic universe, suspending belief and enjoying the dramatic events you have cooked up, then it is completely irrelevant how much you have researched and obeyed the real reality.