Screenwriting : Structure - The Elephant in the Room by Lee Matthias

This is from an article I wrote a long time ago:

Story structure has become a riddle. We have bona fide experts, people with solid credentials, telling us story structure is critical. Many argue that story structure comes in 1 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 7 or even 9 acts! Others proclaim story structure to be a myth.

Set-Up: Blind Man’s Bluff…

They say that we shouldn’t care about the structure in our stories. New writers go from expert to expert, book to book, screenwriting boot-camp to guru seminar, never getting to a truth they can use. The answer eludes them.

So what is going on? Who is right? The answer, I will show, is everyone. Everyone is right. And, no one. No one is right. First, structure is a riddle, now it’s a paradox. Or, maybe not.

In the modern age, Hollywood story analyst Syd Field identified, and, in a series of books, laid the ground-work for a structural model of screen stories. Field referred to it as a “paradigm,” three connected parts, proportioned approximately in a 25/50/25% relationship. Borrowing from the first wave of screenwriters (who, in turn, had borrowed from classic drama and Aristotle), he called them “acts,” functioning in the story as “set-up, confrontation, and resolution.” He numbered these acts 1, 2, and 3, and he separated them with “plot points,” 1 and 2. He said that they were story events on which the story pivots as it plunges forward into each successive act. Later, he identified a “mid-point” that had the effect of amplifying the story’s momentum toward resolution. He found all movies had this arrangement. And he saw that it was good.

But then, others saw movies that didn’t seem to fit. The acts proportioned differently, and worse, sometimes there seemed to be more than three of them. Some among the new experts identified a transformational “character arc” for the protagonist that, they said, was utterly necessary for a successful story. Then others found successful stories with non-transforming protagonists. What was this thing called story structure, anyway?

New “paradigms” were developed. Some looked to classic music, some to classic myth. Others found eight or even more components. Many theorists built flocks of followers who, in turn, duly considered any theory but theirs heretical. The world was thrown into chaos. Screenwriting anarchy ruled. Syd Field’s books were proclaimed EVIL!

There is a classic book, Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbot, published in 1880, that tells the story of a two-dimensional being, a square, living in a two-dimensional world, who discovers he actually inhabits three dimensions, and that he is really a cube. It has a profound effect on his understanding of his world and his view of his own potential. It is required reading for many math and physics students.

Screenwriters, take heed: many of you are flatlanders. But know that you and your stories live in a multi-dimensional, multi-level world.

One is reminded of the story of the blind men all describing an elephant by feeling parts within their reach. One describes the trunk, a different fellow the ear, and another the tail. None can get it truly right. If there was a way to take the best of each description of the “story structure elephant,” what might it be?

As it happens, there is a way of looking at structure which allows this…

You’ve got to bear with me here. Computer networks are designed according to topologies: notions of the layout of the computers on the network in relation to one another.

Confrontation: On The Levels…

Networks are said to have topologies which are both physical and logical.

Yet computers are connected by wires and components which channel the wires in occasionally deceptive or unexpected ways.

The physical corresponds to the layout as it looks, while the logical is the layout as it functions on the wire.

A network can look like a ring, but function like a star, for example, where a managing source point on the ring interacts (to and from) with each of the other managed “end-points” on the ring. If one were to draw it, the source (or central) point would be, not as it is, on the ring itself, but as it seems to work, in the center, with “to” and “from” lines to each point surrounding it, like a star.

In essence:

--The physical is important and necessary due to the environment in which the network must function, the what and how of it.

--The logical is the topology which matters for the reason it exists at all, the why of it.

The physical is concerned with the carrying of the data or meaning, and the logical, is concerned with what is carried, that “meaning” to which we refer.

The parallel of computer network topologies to screenplay story structure is startling:

A level to “carry,” the physical network: in story structure, what happens, the plot.

A level for that which is carried, the data: in story structure, what the story means for the protagonist.

(And there are sometimes at least 8 protagonist-transforming sub-logical levels below that that I have identified: The Sub-Textual Level, the Symbolic Level, the Image Level, the Aural Level, the Montage Level, the Performance Level, the Environmental Level, and the Presentation Level. Most of these only operate in the great films.) 

It is effectively a multi-dimensional model, with the hardware effectively living in the 1st and 2nd dimensions, and the software living in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (time) dimensions. One can adequately describe the hardware portion of the network, how it works, in only two dimensions. But to understand why it works, one must add two more dimensions: depth, to separate it from the second dimension—for quantity of data or meaning; and time, to extend the first three dimensions and allow for changing or evolving data or meaning.

Other analogies work equally well. Fashion, for example: Story can wear a jumpsuit (no act/1 act), slacks and a shirt (2 act), a three-piece suit (3 act), or, like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, a free-form, layered/accessoried look (4 – 9 act and beyond), but, deep down inside, it still needs to be a single, unified, transforming story. Even super-models can be complex. But skeletons all look pretty much the same, after the clothes and the skin are removed; just as do the three acts: set-up, confrontation, and resolution. However, inside the bones, the DNA, the individuality, the meaning, tells a different story, and each skeleton is unique.

Stories are not just endless series of connected events in infinite variety, amounting, nonetheless, to a mere chronicle of how things happened. They need to matter. Therefore, they must also be about why things happened. A story may unfold in the arctic with the Inuit, in an igloo; it may arise in South Africa, in a kraal; it may transpire in Buckingham Palace, itself. Or it may happen in all three. It may tell the tale of MY DINNER WITH ANDRÉ, in what might be seen as a single act, or it may tell the story of FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (which some schizoid analyses have trouble reconciling whether there are three or five acts). And yet, still, in both of the examples above, one can also uncover a meaning structure composed of three discrete parts (or acts).

So these two parallel descriptions, these two structures, both valid, both encompassing the whole, can only co-exist if on separate planes. This is the multi-level model, and it (and only it) can account for the length and breadth of story in all its “infinite" variety.

The physical structure of screenplays does “the carrying” up on the surface or plot level in any grouping of components which the writer deems necessary and which allows the story to succeed.

The logical structure of screenplays, on the other hand, succeeds at a level below the surface, and is always and only in three parts, where the meaning is found.

The logical level, the level of meaning, is below the physical or plot level because the meaning is, when done serviceably, not obvious. In fact, when done well, it is sub-rosa, hidden, and must be divined or inferred from the events of the plot.

Resolution: the "Why" of a Screenwriting Theory of Everything

Why is this? The answer is, because it’s true to life. Life rarely offers answers. And when it does they are concealed among questions and the struggles of living. When meaning is concealed, infinite meaning can be derived.

Infinite? Effectively, yes, because the meaning comes not from the story, but from the viewer, all the viewers. Greater and different meaning, even opposing meaning from the same viewers over the course of their lives. In truth, there is no meaning in the story, only "encoding" that is "de-coded" and then interpreted, by each viewer in each viewing based on the experience of their own lives. That is why writers, are often able to find surprising new meaning in their own stories.

So, how is the story’s meaning on that deeper level, the logic level, conveyed? Answer: through the experience of the protagonist. The protagonist either alters, transforms, as the result of the events of the story, or he/she/it/them fails to transform, despite the need for it. In that case, the meaning still transforms. It transforms where it always has, where the meaning of the tale really ever exists, within the audience. So there is a transformation of meaning, and it is articulated in the three parts, the three “acts,” wherein a protagonist encounters a dilemma (1), chooses to confront it (2), and ultimately either succeeds or fails to resolve it (3). In reality that protagonist is us, the audience, for that is where the meaning derives.

On the logical level the parts are always in threes. That is the simplest configuration from which to fully convey meaning. It is also the essential structure found throughout human reasoning: the logic syllogism, the dialectic, jokes, all of them work in threes. Anything more is superfluous, anything less, like "Cool Hand Luke" to the "Boss," risks failure to communicate. And that leaves room for the writer to, up on the physical level, create a plot in any configuration, any numbering of parts, he/she chooses. Provided it works for its audience.

The value of the multi-level model of story structure is (what else?) three-fold:

--It offers writers the ability for quick analysis of both existing stories (for study) and their own story ideas (for analysis).

--It offers the potential for audience illumination and growth.

--It more readily assures an entertaining and satisfying story experience.

Make no mistake, the physical and logical structures are always both present in serviceable works. Sometimes the logical exactly corresponds with the physical. Other times the two co-exist in separate configurations, on their own levels, and with little or no correlation between them.

The way to test the notion that a story’s structure is tied to the protagonist is to pick a successful story, ask oneself whose story it is, and chart the arc of transformation which that protagonist, either undergoes, or fails to undergo despite the need for it. “Whose story is it?” This is the most important question to ask in determining a story’s structure.

For all of this, an awareness of structure is good only to writers. As long as it works, audiences don’t care. To be sure, audiences would rather not know the structure of a beloved story, because it takes away the magic created by the piece and kills it. So, structure is for writers. It is useful, as we’ve pointed out, for conception, for efficiency, and later as the story is written, for unity, and for focus.

For audiences, then, it is valuable to the extent it works to yield its magical results. It is important not just to help writers work their way through huge blocks of narrative plot-line. It is valuable because it explains its subject to its creators. And, thanks to such functioning on the deeper level of meaning, it helps audiences in understanding their own lives.

So, both surface, physical-level structure, and deeper, logical-level structure are useful. One helps writers find a way to tell the story, and the other helps writers find a way to tell the truth.

I cover structure in much greater depth in two books: LATERAL SCREENWRITING - Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Write Great Movies, and THE LAST REVEAL - Movies, Screenwriting, and the Decline of Western Cinemazation.