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.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The principle of uncertainty

“It is difficult to make accurate predictions, especially about the future” – Storm P.

Drama is exciting because we don’t know what will happen in the next moment. We are observing a conflict playing out in the moment, but we don’t know how the conflict will be resolved. Which one of the opposing forces win? Is the conflict of such a nature that only one of them can win? Or will they find a compromise, or maybe even the unknown, unexpected solution that will fully satisfy each of their wants or needs? As stated in the first principle this is the engine of drama, and the derived principle of uncertainty is a focus for one aspect of this. The uncertainty.
It is an evident fact of life that we can’t predict the future. The unexpected will happen, coming at us from an unseen direction. How we handle the unexpected when it arrives shows a lot about our character. It is the moment of truth, when we are taken by surprise and can’t easily hide behind careful laid plans or well-meaning attitudes. Do we run and hide? Do we face the difficult choice? Can we act with integrity?
Especially the main plot points of your drama should be dominated by the unexpected, because the plot points are there to dramatically change the direction, the stakes or the perception of what is going on. Nothing does this better than the unexpected. From all the plays and films we have watched these are the moments we remember. In Silence of the Lambs the initiating plot point happens when Clarice Starling for the first time is interviewing Hannibal Lecter, and we unexpectedly meet a highly intelligent and civilized serial killer, and at first she doesn’t succeed in getting information from him, but when the prisoner in the next cell, Multiple-Miggs, unexpected throws sperm at her, it also offends Hannibal and in return he gives her a clue to the Buffalo Bill-case. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeos aggressive monologue of despair as he kills Tybalt is the unexpected midpoint, which suddenly changes all plans and our sense of hope for the lovers. In Last Tango in Paris the Marlon Brando-characters confrontation with his dead wife, suddenly revealing to us the depth of his despair and the reason behind his almost nihilistic behaviour, is the point of no return. In The Sixth Sense the point of resolution comes with the unexpected realization that the main character has been dead throughout most of the movie.
How do we create the unexpected? First of all you have to constantly challenge your own confirmed beliefs. You think you know what will happen in the next scene. You think you know how your main character will convince his father to let him borrow the car. You think you know what is good and what is bad. You shouldn’t. Any kind of preconception you have about your drama should be open to a new interpretation, to taking a new direction and to reversals of beliefs. Challenge yourself by questioning these firm ideas. Play with them – the beautiful game of ‘what if…’
When you meet negative response to your script, maybe the real reason is that your script is too predictable. Mind you, I am not at all advocating for a haphazard story, because to surprise convincingly demands a lot of logic. You have to build an expectation and at the same time prepare for the ‘hidden’ logic of its reversal. See again the initiating plot point of Silence of the Lambs. In the previous scenes two clear and obvious expectations have been build up. Two men of authority have stated that Hannibal Lecter is impossible to get any information from. And one suggests that maybe Clarice can entice Hannibal because she is a woman. Clarice fails because he is too clever, but when Multiple-Miggs surprises Clarice (and us) with his sperm-assault, this unexpectedly offends Lecter’s sense of courtesy and manners and as a reparation he offers a clue. But it still seems convincing and believable that he would act like this, because we have just seen him as a man who values courtesy, who likes sophisticated behaviour, but it has been played out at a more subconscious level, and therefore still comes as a surprising turn.
If you always play on two horses, if you let interpretation remain open, if there is value on both sides, then you have a general approach to maintaining uncertainty and finding the unexpected. Even the most negative character has to have something positive, the most necessarily successful action needs a chance to go awry, or we will be bored, because as the Germans put it so well: “Mann merkt den Absicht und wird verstimmt” or in English: “You sense the intention and become resigned”.
I can recommend two ways to train your sense of scenario – that the characters and the action is a dynamic field in fluctuation, where we never know what happens next. It is all about playing. Get together with some actors and play around with some of your scenes, give changing directions about what could happen in the scenes, about the character’s intentions and also let the actors offer their take, their interpretations and improvisations. Or get together with some friends and play role-playing games, yes, that’s right, games like Dungeon&Dragons, only try and find some better ones than that old horse. There is a bunch of more dramatic, narrative, character-oriented rpg-games on the net, to be downloaded for free or bought cheaply. Play around with some stories in this form, and see how it is when you do storytelling with an interactive, participating audience.

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

The principle of economics (unity+story)

This is about spending the least to gain the most. And this is a really beautiful principle, because it not only help you to increase the chances of your script being produced as it will be a more financial appealing project, but also because the construction and cohesiveness of the script will be more convincing.
It’s about using the same locations, characters and ideas over and over again, and thus it goes hand in hand with the principle of unity, if it’s not really just another way of looking at the same fundamental quality of drama.
It also relates to the principle of story, because you will focus on being economical in starting it, developing it and ending it, meaning that when you introduce a character, you have to ask where he is going and where he is ending up. Neither leaving him as an unfinished story or over-story him in different directions.
Every time we introduce something new in a script it will cost us – time, money and energy. We will spend an amount of the script’s time in presenting the location, character or idea. We will spend production money on moving to a new location/creating an extra set-piece, hiring another actor or simply shooting/rehearsing something extra. And even more importantly we will spend the audiences’ mental energy on grasping this new locale, person or idea. On the other hand when we are using the same characters, locations or ideas, by elaborating on them, extending them, we add to them, and thereby increase our investment in them. We will be able to develop and show new aspect or depths, without spending as much time, money or energy, as we would have by introducing a new. Unless you have good reason, you should never introduce a new character, location or idea. Always check your script – as you develop it – to see if you can merge characters, re-use locations and streamline or connect your ideas into one.
It is also beneficial for the director, especially when we talk films or TV, as he or she will save energy (by not spending it on moving to new locations, dealing with new characters/actors) and can focus on getting the most out of the script in terms of acting and staging.
Many scripts look good for the first 30-60 pages, but then when closing time begins after the mid-point, they fail to do so, and this problem be could solved if this principle was adhered to. It happens either because they have introduced too many elements and forget or are unable to finish them, or because they keep introducing new elements.

Receiving response

Tricks and advice
It is can be difficult to handle response and criticism when readers, directors or producers have read your script. There are a lot of pitfalls. But it is an essential part of our job, and unavoidable because it is a collective art form. Teach yourself how to get the most out of the collective.
The ideal responder will never pass judgment on you or the script, but try to understand the logic of the dramatic universe you are creating, and give all responses as either questions, suggestions or impressions, and perhaps supporting these with reasoning within the perceived logic of the universe.
But in most scriptwriters' experience there are very few ideal responders, even though it is actually pretty simple rules of engagement you have to follow, to be one.
So often we find ourselves in a situation with less- or much-less-than-ideal responders. You can't escape this, as they might be the ones who decide if your script will get produced, and neither should you try it, as even the daftest responder might actually lead you to improve upon your script, if you know how to use them.
The first step to handling this situation is to have a strong script you believe in, and more so, one where you know how the construction works. Why every element is there and how it plays together with other elements connecting to the fundamental conflict, and leading forward to its final resolution. Even when you are not that clear about everything in your script, at least be clear about what the fundamental conflict and logic is, and what you believe is your strong points.
Because then when you meet response you''ll be able to deal with it constructively. You can sort between relevant and irrelevant response. Sometimes people will say things that have much more to do with their own issues than with your script. Lets say you have a character who is controversial - she might be gay - and a reader who is not entirely comfortable with homosexuals, this person might not say this directly, but it comes out as irrational criticisms of details or concepts in the script. Obviously you should never let yourself be persuaded in any degree by this, and you will be able to argue why it makes sense that this character is gay. And you might also realize, that if you want this person and persons like him or her, as audience to your drama, then you could perhaps try and introduce this character in a way, that would make it easier for them to take the bait.
Then there is the kind of response which might be funded in something substantial but is phrased in a non-constructive way. It is often the case, when a reader is not able to phrase his or hers criticism within the logic of the script, or even within the logic of drama, and it is more rooted in a subjectivity. In this case you should try to translate it into something constructive - either by questioning the reader to find the logic behind, what disturbs them, or by making the translation by yourself - often it can be quite obvious - like if you have missed to give a proper set-up for a reader to understand a subsequent action.
Often you'll receive very specific suggestions about how to solve perceived weaknesses. Be courteous and appreciate the suggestions, but never take it at face value. Yes, maybe your main character seems to in-active, and you need her to show more initiative, for us, the audience to understand her and take an interest in her, but perhaps not by accepting the first and best suggestion of making her have a fight with her boyfriend in the opening scene, as your fundamental conflict is exactly about her problem taking a conflict into the open - so instead you have to find other ways of showing us what she wants and what she is trying to do.
Many times people might use comparisons to what they see as bad examples - other films, plays, stories - to convince you, that your ideas are wrong. This always makes my alarm go off. Most often these examples are quite superficial, and can be like "Oh, no, I don't like you have a transvestite in the script, it's like all those spanish movies by that guy Almodovar, it's passé and boring". Yes, maybe it seems so, but what if the transvestite is essential to basic logic? Maybe we don't need to get rid of him, but only to make sure, he is presented in a new original way? In these cases it is mostly about the reader's taste, and not about the quality or weakness of the script.
One of my favourite tricks when I am finishing a draft of a script is to leave something in there, which obviously doesn't work. I do this because no matter how good you make a script, people like to find something they can comment on. So I leave them this 'obvious' weakness that I know they will pick up, because then they can feel clever and better than me - and I can play the 'good collaborative writer' who accepts criticism. Also if they fail to see the obvious, then I know they haven't read it very carefully.
I will finish this post with reminding people of the test that the British film magazine Empire did in the early 90s, when they took the script from Sex, Lies and Videotapes, changed the title, the author name, the names of the characters and other superficial stuff, and then mailed it to a wide range of production companies. Not one of them realized that they had been reading Sex, Lies and Videotapes, and almost all of them completely rejected the script. This is what you are up against. Be brave and clever.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

The principle of character

“The strictest observation of the rules (of composition) cannot outweigh the tinniest fault made in the characters” – G. E. Lessing.

The defining aspect of a character is the will. This means everything can be a character as long as it has a will it can act upon. Remember we are talking construction here. Of course the background, the feelings, the profession, the relations and the psychology of a character can be extremely important – but in terms of construction all we really need is the will. What the character wants, what its intentions are in any given scene. How you go about ‘finding’ or inventing your characters are entirely up to you. But when you get down to constructing your script, you must be clear about what the basic will of the character is. This is the will, the intention that will guide the characters’ actions throughout the script. Romeo wants love – everything he does in Romeo and Juliet is done out of this basic will to find love. Even when he kills Tybalt, he does so beset by rage out of love for his best friend Mercutio, newly slain by Tybalt.

The complementary aspect of 'want' is 'need', which is a way of expressing an internal conflict or dynamic in the character. We may want something, but often what we really need differs from that. Romeo wants personal love, but maybe his need is to find the compassion that his world seems to lack. If you look at the incidents in the play, which sends Romeo on his tragic course, they might arise from lack of compassion. He kills Tybalt, which gets him expelled from Verona. For Romeo this seems almost like the end of the world, because it means separation from his personal love, and only the priest's compassionate words, which are able to encompass a broader view on the situation, persuade Romeo to leave for Mantua and bide his time. But when confusion muddles the intricate and dangerous plan to reunite Romeo and Juliet - who are being kept apart because of the lack of compassion from the parents - Romeo finally succumbs, feeling mortally wounded by the apparent loss of Juliet, exactly because what he wants is his personal love and he is not able to balance that with a compassion, which extends beyond his own personal interest, he chooses to take his own life.

Another aspect of character is what I call – a little simplistic – the heroic quality. Romeo has faith in love. Batman is resourceful. Chaplin’s vagabond never gives up. Pacino’s Michael Corleone understands the danger of the mafia-game. The knight in Bergmann’s The 7th Seal is self-sacrificing. All great characters have one fundamental quality, which makes them able to strive for they want in their world. It may or may not be enough to get them what they want. This depends on the world and their weakness.

The heroic weakness is the last main aspect of character. This is the Achilles’ heel of the hero. Romeo has doubts about love. Batman carries a personal tragedy, the loss of his parents. Chaplin’s vagabond is poor and without means. Michael Corleone has a blind love for his father or psychological speaking a father-complex. The knight doubts the meaning of life after his sacrifices in the holy crusade seems pointless. As much as the heroes will struggle with the world, they will also struggle with their weakness.

You can create a drama where you only operate with the will of the character, but adding the other two aspects and linking them together in a simple meaningful triangle, you create a dynamic which will steer the drama, and give rise to the unfolding of conflicts and their resolutions. You will probably add other characteristics to your characters, but you have to stay focused on these three. In every major conflict and turning point of the drama, it has to be this trinity, which is at play. The construction questions will every time be: What opposes what the character wants, how will the he apply his heroic quality to overcome it and how will the weakness go against him?

BUTTERFLIES AND TORNADOES

The principle of unity

“Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of Unity are already two.” - Prince Gautama Siddharta.

Nothing stands alone. It is unified in both obvious and subtle ways. This is more or less what the first philosopher of drama, Aristotle, was talking about with the “The unity of place, action and time”. Traditionally this has been taken in a more or less literal sense. Many theatre plays take place in a single day, in the same location and all about a singular event. And this normally works really well, because they follow this Aristotelian principle to the letter. But taken in a broader sense, the principle means that things are connected. They don’t exist in and by themselves.

The reference above to the famous butterfly-effect, the idea of the so-called chaos-theory, which uses the image of a butterfly flapping its wing in Japan, which initiates a chain of reactions that leads to tornado in America, as a metaphor to explain the immensely complex and connected systems that determines events all over the world. Actually this is not chaos at all, but something called self-organizing critical systems. It only seems like chaos if you are used to think within the framework of the classical physics of linear cause-and-effect.

What we do, when we create a drama is basically to create a self-contained universe, a micro-cosmos. And the peculiar thing is that both in aesthetic and scientific terms such a universe, or system, seems to work most convincingly when we make sure that all elements are somehow connected. And this goes for any level of your script, from the obvious plot-connections, over the psychology of the characters, the weaving of your theme(s), use of visual imagery and all the way to signaling of your grand motif (the big fat secret of your drama). All these should have as many plain visible or hidden connections as possible, because this creates complexity – not in the sense of being intellectual high-brow – but in the simple sense of creating a system (a work of art) that each and every time you immerse yourself into it seems alive and able to generate a fulfilling reflection of human experience and life.

There is quite a number of well-known script techniques and models, which relates to this principle – that I will return to later on – but as a principle it simply means that when you are creating a script, you just have to keep connecting your dots inside whatever universe you have chosen, with whatever logic rules that cosmos. Every time you introduce new elements you will know that eventually they have to be integrated into your system, in the sense that they connect to other elements. If for example you have a character that only appears once, maybe it doesn’t really belong in your universe, or maybe you need to take a good long look at how the character connects, how this character, within the logic of your world, creates more ‘meaning’ than what it is in itself. This is the mechanism behind the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – exactly because the parts ‘interact’ they generate more meaning than they have in themselves.

Again with the example of a single appearance of a character, I want to mention “Apocalypse Now” as film where even though the ‘villain’, the Marlon Brando-character, Colonel Kurtz only appears in the final scenes of the film, the script constantly creates connections to him in advance of his appearance, so when we finally experience him, it is with the full resonance of all that has gone before.
This is a good example of why I don’t really believe in rules and models, even though they can be really helpful, because what we are dealing with in drama is so complex that for every rule you can come up with, there will always come along a new rule to undo it. For me at least is has been more creative and productive to focus on principles, and only use the rules as temporary tools.