When I wrote The Moral Premise the purpose was not to help rid myself of writer’s block. After it was written, however, I started teaching and consulting about what writing the book had taught me – that the moral premise is an ancient law of storytelling that not only affects a story’s success at the box office, but also your story’s success in your writing office. As I consulted with students and other writers I saw stories sift, lights tricked on, and impregnable blocks were pulverized into a fine, free-flowing sand. I was intrigued by the lights behind those at first dreary eyes that turned brighter as story premises were mined, character arcs took shape, and we discovered what the story was really about.

Maybe this was the answer. Over time and many such sessions I’ve allowed myself a bravado -that the moral premise is the solution to writers block. I don’t say this to build myself up, for surely I did not invent the moral premise, anymore than Newton invented gravity. In fact, it isn’t even my theory. Plato writes about the moral premise, as has practically every story guru since then, although they’ve used a variety of different terms to identify it. Through my research I’ve concluded that the moral premise is part of natural law. If you use it correctly, your chances of the story being accepted by a broader audience increase dramatically. If you use it inconsistently, or violate one of its rules of formation, your story is destined to fall far short of its potential.

What is the moral premise? It’s quite a simple concept, actually. Perhaps that’s the problem. Many of us, when we write, want to create involved complex stories, and we forget that even ensemble pieces, successful movies, most novels, and all stage plays, are really about only ONE thing.

You can see the moral premise and the writer’s plight in movies like City Slickers, where Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) is having what you might call life-block. He’s not happy with the story of his life. He doesn’t know what his story is about. He mopes. He whines. He’s selfish. What’s wrong? Does he need a new wife, new friends, a new job, a new adventure? His wife tells him to go out West to herd cattle with his friends and find his smile.

It is on that journey that Mitch meets Curly (Jack Palance) who counsels Mitch that life is about one thing. Moments after Curly’s soliloquy, Mitch finds himself delivering a calf from its dying mother. The calf adopts Mitch as its guardian. Suddenly, Mitch begins to take responsibility for something outside himself. Later, that responsibility grows as he returns from a selfish escape to herd the cattle home and save the calf caught up in a raging river. Mitch’s heroic efforts turn on a light. He feels a satisfaction that he’d had lost long ago. He discovers that by focusing outside his self he finds satisfaction and joy. It’s significant that the City Slickers writers, Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, have Mitch name the calf “Norman” which is a contraction of “Normal Man” that is, the calf teaches Mitch what it is to be normal and a man.

Mitch discovers what was always true, what that one thing is that will make him complete. He discovers the importance of caring for others, the importance of being a father and a husband – a normal man. He discovers a true moral premise and applies it to his life: Selfishness leads to sadness and frowns; but selflessness leads to happiness and smiles.

In that same way The Moral Premise is about helping you as a writer to find your smile. It’s about discovering what your story is about and how the structure of everything you create – characters, plots, sets, dialogue, action, and camera angles – are all about, can only be about, one thing. Curly was right.

That one thing, however, has two sides, just like a coin. There is the physical side, and there is the psychological side. When we talk about a story’s physical side we describe what a movie is about. But when we talk about a story’s psychological side, we describe what a movie is really about. That difference cannot be emphasized enough. The physical and the psychological sides of the story are inseparable, like the two sides of a coin.

The same thing is true of the characters in your story, or should be if you want audiences to react to your characters as real and properly disposed human beings. In City Slickers Ed (Bruno Kirby) is trying to cheer Mitch up and convince him that having an adulterous affair would spice up Mitch’s life and make him happier. Ed tries to convince Mitch that it’s possible to do such a thing in total secrecy and no one would ever know. Ed even suggests that an alien could visit earth, have sex with Mitch and disappear forever. ED: “No one will ever know. You’re telling me you wouldn’t do it?” Mitch cracks a joke and says: “Look Ed, it wouldn’t make it all right just because Barbara didn’t know. I’d know. And I wouldn’t like myself. That’s all.” Mitch realized what Ed didn’t, that everything that happens to his character physically affects his character psychologically. Mitch’s mental decisions and culpability are inseparable from his bodily actions.

One of the big mistakes some writers make in writing stories is to concentrate on the physical plot, and ignore the reality of what is happening inside their characters. Sometimes writers make the mistake of thinking that physical events come first and only secondarily do such effects affect a character’s psyche. But the opposite is true. Everything that happens externally is driven first by internal thoughts; even a character’s decision to put himself in a vulnerable situation. Our thoughts are driven by our values. Thus, at their foundation all good stories are about values-in-conflict, that find motivation through thoughts-in-conflict, which morph into bodies-in-conflict. Values come first. Then thoughts. Finally action. It is never any other way, even when a character reacts instinctively. That “instinct” finds its motivation in values and thoughts.

Think about it. You (and likewise all your characters) will do nothing out of purely physical stimulation that isn’t motivated by a deeper psychological need connected to a value. All physical conflict is first a conflict of internal values. As I am typing this I just took a break and massaged one of my fingers. That physical action was predicated upon a mental decision to stop typing and literally scratch the itch. Your character gets out of bed in the morning based on a mental motivation whether it be the need to eat, get to work, or empty a bladder. The psychological always precedes and motivates the physical.

Therefore, your story is really about what is going on mentally, psychologically, and emotionally between your characters. What you write for the director to put on the screen are the physical representations or metaphors of the motivating, true, real story. Movies only have sight and sound to tell stories with. We’re not writing novels where we spend page-after-page describing a character’s thoughts. We can’t show what is going on inside a character’s mind, unless we listen to his or her thoughts as we do with the protagonists in Forrest Gump and American Beauty.

In the best movies, the most successful ones at the box office, the physical story (or visible element) is a metaphor for the psychological story. In Interiors, Woody Allen does a masterful job to metaphor his characters’ empty mental state through the set design of the barren rooms they occupy. In A Beautiful Mind we see the dysfunctional marriage of a man with a dysfunctional brain. In Die Hard John McClane’s physical struggle against murderous thieves metaphors his psychological struggle to save his marriage – his love for Holly dies hard.

The basic form of the moral premise is simple: Vice leads to defeat; but virtue leads to success. If we parse out that form, we notice that the first part of each phrase begins with the psychological motivation of the characters or a value, and the second part of each phrase ends with the physical ramifications of pursuing that value. Thus, selfishness (a psychological value) can lead to rejection (a physical consequence); but selflessness (the opposite psychological value) can lead to acceptance (the opposite physical consequence).

When you have a true moral premise, you can apply it to each of your characters to determine their goals, failures, successes, and obstacles. Good movies are about a protagonist who has a goal that is hindered by two cogent obstacles. One obstacle is physical and one is psychological. The physical obstacle is the antagonist who tries to prevent the protagonist from achieving his goal. The antagonist’s motivation is an extreme form of one of the moral premise’s values. The psychological obstacle is the protagonist’s own imperfection or lack of understanding and application of the moral premise’s truth.

For example: At the beginning of a movie a protagonist is being a bit selfish in his search for the girl of his dreams. That selfishness is a psychological obstacle to getting the girl because the girl rejects guys that are selfish. Thus, our hero is rejected because he has an internal imperfection that needs to be corrected. The physical obstacles may be created by another guy, who is even more selfish, but perhaps more clever at covering his selfishness up as far as the girl is concerned. Perhaps the antagonist plays tricks on the protagonist and makes him look foolish in front of the girl; and at the same time the antagonist woos the girl with some success, perhaps playing on her selfish ambitions. In this way the antagonist becomes the physical obstacle. The moral premise for such a movie might be: Selfishness leads to rejection; but selflessness leads to acceptance.

These two types of obstacles are related by the moral premise. Both stem from selfishness. As our protagonist learns how to be giving, kind and less selfless, (perhaps by watching our clever but even more selfish antagonist), he (the protagonist) changes his thinking and behavior, and in the end defeats the more selfish antagonist and hooks up with his dream. Likewise, the girl at first is attracted to the poor goon who selfishly feeds her natural selfish desires. During the course of our story the girl and the hero learn the truth of the moral premise and adapt it to their lives with success. The antagonist encounters the moral premise but rejects it. By the end, every main character that embraces selfishness is rejected and those that are selfless are accepted.

In such a way, the moral premise directs the writer’s development of each character’s arc, their goals, their weaknesses, their obstacles, and the story’s resolution – and the problems associated with writer’s block are eliminated.

The moral premise will tell you, the writer, what direction the protagonist and the antagonist have to go to make the story flow. If you think you have a true moral premise and are still experiencing writer’s block the problem may be one of two reasons: (1) you are trying to include a scene, an action, or a character that, while interesting, has nothing to do with the one thing of your movie – the moral premise. (2) The scene is interesting and dramatic, but refocuses the audience’s attention on a different moral premise. In creating a successful story that connects with your audience, each of these problems is like stepping over the third balcony railing at the infamous Sherman Oaks Cineplex and expecting to float in mid air. It might happen in one of your movies, but in your writing such reasons defy the natural law of storytelling, and writer’s block will result. You’ll crash on the marble below. Call it writer’s crash on a block.

My suggestion? Early on, find your moral premise – and stick to it. I promise, writer’s block will be a thing of the past. And your story will float to success.

Stan Williams is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and show producer with over 400 film, video, interactive, and live-stage projects completed for Fortune 100 Corporations, many Non-Profits, and broadcast television. He holds a B.A. in Physics, an M.A. in Communication, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies. Stan is author of the book: THE MORAL PREMISE: The Guiding Principles of Great Screenplays and Films and has lectured internationally on the principles of writing, directing, and filmmaking at secondary, college, graduate, and trade school levels.

Source with permission: The Writers Store

I haven’t hit many of these ‘how to’ bits since summer, being swept up in this project, work stuff, and recent tragedies, so I think it’s time.

This phrase is shot out at baby writers as often as ’show, don’t tell’; and probably receives the same number of sage nods combined with vapid expressions.

What the hell does it mean?

It’s one that baby writers like to argue about – how can you write about goblins and dragons and such, if you CAN’T know them – they’re imaginary.

It’s about writing things that you’ve experienced and understand, certainly. By the time a person is 15, they understand longing, social gaffs, the pain of failure, etc. It would be a bit more difficult for someone of this age to write about the inner workings of a long term marriage from the inside, or convincingly represent an industrial engineer from a mathematical basis.

Writing isn’t about facts, it’s about personalities and emotions. As you grow older, you meet more personalities, and relationships become more complex.

The core of this theory is that a beginning writer will have greater difficulty writing something they are entirely unfamiliar with, both from a technical and emotional standpoint.

I’ve never been a police officer. Could I write one? Sure. I would need to do enough research to make it buyable, though. How long is training? (Depends upon what type of officer). How does the ranking work, what are the basic skills, social atmosphere, acceptable/typical behavior, etc. The character would know this stuff.

For someone just starting out, all that research might prove daunting, and hold up the progression of actual practice.

If someone has never been in love, experienced major losses, they are more of a challenge to evoke.

That’s what it really means – taking small bites. Starting with the familiar territory as a jumping off point.

And it can be far more pleasurable for the writer to begin somewhere that is interesting to them. Love dragons and pixies? Then I bet you’ve read enough folklore to know the difference between a pixie and a skeltie. Love firearms? Then you’ve got a base for the difference between a Firestar and a musket – and enough knowledge to rough out what kind of character would use each, and how.

Or the world of competitive bodybuilding, gambling, art galleries…the list could go on forever!

As you gain experiences, your knowledge base and interests will broaden, and you’ll be able to write more off-the-cuff on a variety of situations, objects, time periods, etc., and make it real.

What will always feel the most legitimate, are the things you know best. So write what you know.

And you know a lot.

Join the disscusion of this article on the forums

The interest in story is greater now than it has ever been, and – putting aside for a moment the movie business, television, book publishing, other major producers of story and their consumers – that interest now extends to every facet of our society.

Heavily funded, major research projects now exist throughout government, the sciences, and the corporate world. And everywhere that interest is growing. Everyone – from stock brokers selling derivatives, lawyers trying to convince a jury, preachers trying to save our souls, and neophytes looking for employment – wants to be able to effectively tell their story – who they are, what they do, how they (or their products) fit into the scheme, and why they (or their products) are destined for great things.

In short, people everywhere have begun to realize just how important story is
and the key role it was meant to play in our lives. We are, in fact, entering the age of story and the time is not far off when knowing what stories actually are and how to create them may well be the most valuable knowledge a person can possess. In such a world, unbounded opportunities will exist for skilled storymakers and others with a profound knowledge of the art.

There is, however, a fly in the ointment. Along with this new interest, and considerable research, has come the realization that the inner workings of a great story are more elusive and profound than previously assumed – and what great stories actually are, the real purpose they serve, and the mechanics of their creation remains, for the most part, an intriguing mystery.

The three act structure, which is the most popular storymaking tool being used in Hollywood these days, it turns out, isn’t really a story structure at all. It’s a holdover from the theatre and the arbitrary division of an action into three parts, and you can’t find it in the great stories and literary masterpieces of the past. Other popular structures like those that hinge on conflict and turning points are derived from Aristotle’s classical story structure – which is important because it’s a structure of action and will appear naturally in any problem solving action that encounters resistance. But there’s much more to a story than the action. Then there’s Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey which is also important and even more sophisticated because it is grounded in the initiation rites of primitive societies and has a lot to say about our psychological development. But taken together, the Classical Structure and The Hero’s Journey still add up to just a small part of what writers and filmmakers will need to know to actually master the art form. There are huge missing pieces to the puzzle.

This, of course, is not hard to prove – when you consider that out of the hundreds of feature films that are produced each year in Hollywood, fewer than ten or fifteen are worth seeing. That’s a pretty sorry statistic. And in television it’s even worse. Mozart, Beethoven and Van Gogh (artists who understood their art forms) could do what they did every time. That’s not happening in Hollywood. If you study the credits of our top writers and directors, you’ll discover a few outstanding hits and a long list of things you never heard of. Why? Because the principles of the art form have not really been established so it’s still a hit and miss process. Which leaves us, in effect, with an entire industry manufacturing something which it doesn’t understand. Story. That leaves about six and a half billion people in this world with a desperate need for real stories which isn’t being met. So despite the nine billion dollar yearly grosses, there is a vast, untapped potential market out there – and if we can actually crack the story code, there will be, to paraphrase a line from Shakespeare in Love, “rubies in our saddlebags.”

Be that as it may, there’s a new, higher level of understanding emerging in the world of story concerning deep, hidden story structures which all great stories have in common. These hidden structures are intimately linked to our evolutionary journey and are extremely powerful. They are the reason some of these great stories defy time and remain active and relevant for thousands of years and why others became so charismatic that religions were formed around them – religions that attract millions of followers who have worshipped the revealed truths in these stories for an equally long time. These new deeper structures make clear where these extraordinary stories got their enormous power and why these hidden structures are the missing pieces of the puzzle.

In this new series of articles, I will attempt to reveal the significance of these
new deep structures and why it is critical for every writer and storymaker to know. This is what’s coming in the age of story, and this is what we will need to know, if we are going to become masters of the craft.

By far the most important revelation contained in these new deeper structures has to do with the source of our creativity. And this is absolutely where the search for the truth about story must begin.

When we work with the creative process, the creative decisions we make are governed by positive and negative intuitive feelings. That’s how we know what works – by how we feel about our ideas.

Well, what’s behind those feelings? Where do those feelings come from? Carl Jung called the source of those feelings the collective unconscious. Others call it the muse, the psyche, the holy spirit, or the God within. George Lucas called the positive aspect The Force and the negative aspect The Dark Side. I call it the creative unconscious, the hidden truth or the self. You can call it anything you like.

My own take on it is this. We traveled an evolutionary path. A record of this path has been kept and is buried deep in the unconscious like a treasure. This treasure is probably stored in the DNA. It may be a manifestation of the DNA itself. Whatever it is, or whatever you call it doesn’t matter, it is the source of all of the higher intelligence and hidden wisdom we possess. It plays a major role in our lives and it plays a major role in storymaking. And when we’re creating stories, it helps to be aware of it.

Great stories, especially those created in oral traditions, bring this creative unconscious wisdom to consciousness. The information contained in great stories
is all about this hidden wisdom and how we can use it to achieve higher states of being and awareness.

And how do great stories do this? With the use of metaphors.

Metaphors are the symbolic language of great stories. This hidden, creative unconscious energy is translated into the visual images and intricate structures of story. These metaphors are made of real things that have been taken apart and artistically rearranged to represent these hidden truths. The unique combination of these real things when brought together creates the characters, gods, Shangri-las, haunted houses, and real people, etc. which expresses different attributes and dimensions of the hidden energies. The natural world is taken apart and rearranged to reveal the supernatural, unconscious, hidden world. And this is what makes a psychological connection. When these visual images correspond to this hidden energy, you get a story of extraordinary power.

In any event, if you analyze hundreds of great stories, the patterns hidden in these deeper structures begin to emerge. These patterns are called archetypes, and you can use these archetypal patterns to create models of this hidden truth. These models reveal some amazing secrets, not the least of which is a dynamic model of the human psyche, all of the life cycles we experience from birth to death, and all of the archetypes and passages that can lead us to higher states of being and success. You can use these models not only to analyze and create great stories, you can use them to fathom your own psychology and analyze important events in the real world. In fact, you can use them in every aspect of your life.

And why is all of this important to writers and filmmakers? Because the patterns hidden in the deep structures of these great stories have enormous power, and if you utilize these patterns in your stories, you can create super powerful stories that have a significant impact on the world. And, if that isn’t enough, there are enormous psychological benefits to be gained from a creative storymaking process that engages and collaborates with the creative unconscious self (the source of our creativity) using our intuitive feelings.

My next article, in March, 2009, will be about one of these new models: The Storywheel. Every great story, ancient or modern, has a place on this storywheel, and when taken all together in this way, you begin to see how they are all really connected and have a common purpose, namely: they all have something to do with guiding us to higher states of being. In fact, they only begin to reveal their deeper secrets when they are viewed together in this way.

*****
James Bonnet is an internationally known writer, teacher and story consultant. He was elected twice to the Board of Directors of the Writer’s Guild of America and has written or acted in more than forty television shows and features. The radical new ideas about story in his book Stealing Fire from the Gods: A Complete Guide to Story For Writers And Filmmakers are having a major impact on writers in all media.

Source: The Writers Store

…Stephen King suggests that you create a space for yourself somewhere in your house where you can go to do nothing but write. Whether it’s the balcony, office, or bathroom, be sure that you have a place to go when you want to write … which should be every day by the way if you’re a true writer. By the way, if you’re writing on a computer, make sure its not connected to the Internet … it truly put the block in writer’s block…

— scriptxray.com | Read The Full Article

…You’ll most likely be told to write what you know from dozens of screenwriting books, screenwriting professors, seminars, fellow students, and probably even strangers while preparing to write a screenplay, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a story analyst in Hollywood, it’s this:

If we all wrote what we knew on a first hand physical experience level, we’d be bored out of our minds!

— ScriptXRay.com | Read The Full Article

…Aristotle 384-322 BCE, in his seminal treatise ‘Poetics or Poetica’ concluded there are seven golden rules of successful story telling. These rules or principles in his days pertained to ancient Greek theatre. Incredibly, today the same seven elements are essential to writing successful film screenplays. Whenever I asked film graduates at NYU if they could guess the seven principal elements of good story telling, they would between them quickly answer correctly the following six elements, which Aristotle prioritized as:

— Pavand.com | Read The Full Article

…A while back, I was on Radio 4’s Film Programme the same day as Simon Pegg. We were asked what we thought of screenwriting manuals. I dismissed them as get-rich-quick compendiums of cliche. Pegg said he thought they were really useful. Our films opened that weekend. His vacuumed up money. Mine tanked. It may well be, I thought, that I’ve been missing something.

I decided to watch all my favourite movies again, notebook in hand, to figure out what made them work. Here are some of my observations. This is not a description of how I write. It’s more how I wish I’d written. A map of the rocks on which I perished.

— Guardian | Read The Full Article

A common misconception sees genre as a fixed list of dramatic requirements or a rigid structural template from which there can be no deviation. Writers laboring under these restrictions often find themselves boxed-in creatively. They become snared in the Genre Trap, cranking out stories that are indistinguishable from a whole crop of their contemporaries

In fact, genre should be a fluid and organic entity that grows from each story individually. Such stories are surprising, notable, memorable, and involving. In this article, you’ll learn a new flexible technique for creating stories that are unique within their genres.

How We Fall Into the Genre Trap

The first step in escaping from the Genre Trap is to understand how we fall into it in the first place. Consider how wrapped up you become in the details of your story. You slave over every plot point, struggle to empathize with every one of your characters, and perhaps even grieve over the effort to instill a passionate theme.

The problem is, you become so buried in the elements of your story that you lose sight of what it feels like as a whole. So while every piece may work individually, the overall impact may be fragmented, incomplete, or inconsistent. To avoid this, we fall back on “proven” structures of successful stories in a similar genre. We cut out parts of our story that don’t fit that template, and add new sections to fill the gaps. We snip and hammer until our story follows along the dotted lines.

And lo and behold, we have fallen into the genre trap – taking our original new idea and making it just like somebody else’s old idea. Sure, the trappings are different. Our characters have different names. The big battle between good and evil takes place in a roller rink instead of a submarine. But underneath it all, the mood, timber, and feel of our story is just like the hundred others stamped out in the same genre mold.

A New Definition of Genre

Rather than thinking of your story as a structure, a template, or a genre, stand back a bit and look at your story as it appears to your reader or audience. To them, every story has a personality of its own, almost as if it were a human being. From this perspective, stories fall into personality types, just like real people.

When you meet someone for the first time, you might initially classify them as a Nerd, a Bully, a Wisecracker, a Philanthropist, or a Thinker.

These, of course, are just first impressions, and if you get the chance to spend some time with each person, you begin to discover a number of traits and quirks that set them apart from any other individual in that personality type.

Similarly, when you encounter a story for the first time, you likely classify it as a Western, a Romance, a Space Opera, or a Buddy Picture. Essentially, you see the personality of the story as a Stereotype.

At first, stories are easy to classify because you know nothing about them but the basic broad strokes. But as a story unfolds, it reveals its own unique qualities that transform it from another faceless tale in the crowd to a one-of-a-kind experience with its own identity.

At least, that is what it ought to do. But if you have fallen into the Genre Trap, you actually edit out all the elements that make your story different and add others that make it the same. All in the name of the Almighty Genre Templates

How to Avoid the Genre Trap

Avoiding the Genre Trap is not only easy, but creatively inspiring as well! The process can begin at the very start of your story’s development (though you can apply this technique for re-writes as well).

Step One – Choosing Genres:

Make a list of all the Stereotypical Genres that have elements you might want to include in the story you are currently developing. For example, you might want to consider aspects of a Western, a Space Opera, a Romance, and a Horror Story.

Step Two – Listing Genre Elements:

List all the elements of each of these genres that intrigue you in general. For example:

Western – Brawl in the Saloon, Showdown Gunfight, Chase on Horseback, Lost Gold Mine, Desert, Indians.

Space Opera – Time Warp, Laser Battle, Exploding Planet, Alien Race, Spaceship Battle, Ancient Ruins.

Romance – Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, Misunderstanding alienates Boy and Girl, Rival for Girl throws out Misinformation, Last Minute Reveal of the Truth leading to Joyful Reunion.

Horror Story – Series of Grizzly and Inventive Murders, The Evil Gradually Closes in on the Heroes, Scary Isolated Location, Massive Rainstorm with Lightning and Thunder.

(Note that some genre elements are about setting, some about action, and some about character relationships. That’s why it is so hard to say what genre is. And it is also why looking at genre as a story’s Personality Type is so useful.

Step Three – Selecting Genre Elements:

From the lists of elements you have created, pick and choose elements from each of the genres that you might like to actually include in your story.

For example, from Western you might want Lost Gold Mine, Desert, and Indians. From Space Opera you might choose Spaceship Battle, Exploding Planet and Alien Race. Romance would offer up all the elements you had listed: Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, Misunderstanding alienates Boy and Girl, Rival for Girl throws our Misinformation, Last Minute Reveal of the Truth leading to Joyful Reunion. And finally, from Horror Story you might select Scary Isolated Location, Massive Rainstorm with Lightning and Thunder.

Step Four – Cross Pollinating Genres:

From this Master List of Genre Elements that you might like to include in your story, see if any of the elements from one genre have a tie-in with those from another genre.

For example, Indians from the Western and Alien Race from the Space Opera could become a race of aliens on a planet that share many of the qualities of the American Indian. And, the relationship between the boy and the girl easily becomes a Romeo and Juliet saga of a human boy colonizing the planet who falls in love with an alien girl.

Step Five – Peppering Your Story with Genre Elements:

Once you’ve chosen your elements and cross-pollinated others, you need to determine where in your story to place them. If you are stuck in a Genre Trap, there is a tendency to try and get all the genre elements working right up front so that the genre is clear to the reader/audience.

This is like trying to know everything there is to discover about a person as soon as you meet him or her. It is more like a resume than an introduction. The effect is to overload the front end of the story with more information than can be assimilated, and have nowhere left to go when the reader/audience wants to get to know the story’s personality better as the story unfolds.

So, make a timeline of the key story points in your plot. Add in any principal character moments of growth, discovery, or conflict. Now, into that timeline pepper the genre elements you have developed for your story.

For example, you might decide to end with a massive spaceship battle, or you could choose to open with one. The information about the Alien Race being like the America Indians might be right up front in the Teaser, or you could choose to reveal it in the middle of the second act as a pivotal turning point in the story.

Because genre elements are often atmospheric in nature, they can frequently be placed just about anywhere without greatly affecting the essential flow of the plot or the pace of character growth.

As you look at your timeline, you can see and control the reader’s first impressions of the story genre. And you can anticipate the ongoing mood changes in your story’s feel as additional elements in its personality are revealed, scene by scene or chapter by chapter.

What about Re-writes?

Not everyone wants to start a story with genre development. In fact, you might want to go through an entire draft and then determine what genre elements you’d like to add to what you already have.

The process is the same. Just list the genres that have elements you might wish to include. List the elements in each that intrigue you. Select the ones that would fit nicely into your story. Cross-Pollinate where you can. Pepper them into your existing timeline to fill gaps where the story bogs down and to reveal your story as a unique personality.

Summing Up the Sum of the Parts

Genre is part setting, part action, part character, and part story-telling style. Trying to follow a fixed template turns your story into just another clone. But by recognizing that genre is really a story’s personality type, you can make it as individual as you like. And by peppering your elements throughout your story’s timeline, you will create first impressions that will capture your reader or audience and then hold their interest as your story’s one-of-a-kind personality reveals itself.
About the Author:

Melanie Anne Phillips is the creator of StoryWeaver and co-creator of the Dramatica theory and software. After working on over 200 film and video productions in various capacities such as writer, producer, director, editor, director of photography, and even music scoring and special effects, Ms. Phillips has devoted her career to teaching writers the mechanics of story structure and the passionate art of storytelling. Today, she continues to develop new software tools for writers, teach both in-person and online writing workshops and to write books on a variety of aspects of the writing craft and story development.

The three act structure is not a story structure. You can’t find it in myths and legends or other great stories of the past and you can’t find it in nature. So why is it being applied to the screenplay or the story of a film? It’s a good question because it makes no sense. And my very strong recommendation in this article will be that you avoid thinking in act structure terms when creating a story or story film.

The three (four, five, six, or seven) act structures are the arbitrary divisions of the principal (or main) action of the story into a number of parts – a legacy from the theatre and applicable today only to the theatre or television shows which have commercial breaks. If you write a movie for television, it will have seven acts. Why? Because it has seven commercial breaks. And you will be asked to insert something intriguing at the end of each act to lure the audience back after the break. But that has nothing to do with story.

The Greeks had no act structure in their plays. The plays had one act. The Romans had five acts. It’s arbitrary. It appeared in plays because of the need to have intermissions. People can’t sit for three hours in a theatre listening to an auditory experience without taking a break or going to the restroom. It appears in television shows because they want to have commercial breaks so they can sell something. None of which has anything to do with story.

A two hour feature film shown in a movie theatre is a continuous action. There are no intermissions. It’s one continuous act-less event which revolves around a problem. A much better way to look at a story, when you are creating one, is not through any arbitrary division into acts but through the eyes of that problem, which is the central event and the heart of a great story’s structure.

In The Silence of the Lambs, a serial killer is on the loose, and that is the problem that has to be resolved. In Gladiator, a tyrant has usurped the Roman Empire, preventing the restoration of the Republic. In The Sixth Sense, a murdered child psychologist is stuck in limbo and the spirits of dead people are haunting a little boy’s mind. In Independence Day, aliens have invaded the Earth. In Star Wars, the Evil Empire has taken possession of the galaxy. In The Iliad, not to be mistaken for a movie called Troy, the Greek army is being decimated because their best warrior has dropped out of the fight. In King Arthur, the kingdom is in a state of anarchy and has to be reunified. In Harry Potter, Voldemort is trying to take possession of the Wizard World. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron, a very similar dark force, is trying to take possession of Middle Earth. In Ordinary People, a young boy is suicidal. In The Exorcist, it’s a problem of demonic possession. In Jaws it’s a shark problem. In The Mummy it’s a mummy problem. In The Perfect Storm it’s a weather problem. In Jurassic Park it’s a dinosaur problem. In Traffic it’s a drug problem. In Armageddon it’s an asteroid problem. In Erin Brockovich it’s an environmental problem. Each of these stories and hundreds of others I could name all revolve around a problem that has to be resolved.

And what need is there to think of these events as having three acts? None.

What use would it be to think in terms of three parts (or acts) when creating a story like A Beautiful Mind – which, if you wanted to divide it into parts, clearly has five parts and not three. In the first part, Russell Crowe is a genius mathematician, in the second part, he is a spy; in the third part we discover the first two parts were a delusion and that he is really mentally ill (the problem); in the fourth part, a first effort is made to solve that problem which fails; and in the fifth part, a second effort is made to solve that problem which succeeds. How would it help to impose a three act structure? It wouldn’t.

What good would a three (four or five) act structure do if you were writing a novel – the DaVinci Code, for instance? If you really want to gauge how irrelevant act structure is to a story, try to apply it to a novel. It makes absolutely no sense.

You quickly realize the idea is absurd. It has nothing to do with story. But the screenplay which becomes a story film is a story in the same way that the novel is a story. The spine and structure of both are essentially the same. This is true of the great myths, legends, fairytales, as well as the classics and modern blockbusters. They all have the same basic structure. (See my previous eZine articles: Beyond Theme: Story’s New Unified Field (Parts I, II, III); The Essence of Story; and Conquering The High Concept (Parts I & II) .

Story has adopted these problem-solving structures from real life. From real serial killers that have to be caught, real terrible diseases that have to be cured, real lost or kidnapped children who have to be found, and real man-eating sharks that have to be destroyed. The principals of dramatic action are the laws of problem solving action in real life artistically treated – and the actions that solve these problems in real life don’t contain a three act structure.

So why impose that oddity on a story which is destined to be filmed? Perhaps it’s happening because it makes story structure seem simple, which it is not. You can work with the three act structure for twenty years and still not make a story come out right.

What is the alternative? In my opinion, it makes much more sense when you’re creating a story to be thinking in terms of the natural structure of the problem which has two main parts: the action that created it and the action that will resolve it. The action that creates the problem is called the inciting action and the action that resolves the problem is called the principle action. The threat, which is the driving force of the inciting action, be that a villain, an asteroid, a shark, etc., is the cause the problem. The anti-threat, which is the driving force of the principal action, be that a protagonist or a hero, is the one who opposes the threat and solves the problem. Either of these actions will acquire the components of the classical structure if there is resistance – which is to say if there is sufficient resistance, there will be complications, a crisis, the need for a climactic action to resolve the crisis, and a resolution.

In Harry Potter, Voldemort is the threat that creates the problem. He is also the main source of resistance that creates the complications and crises, and the need for climactic actions to resolve the crises whenever Harry attempts to solve the problems Voldemort creates. In The Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill is the threat that causes the problem and also the main source of resistance creates the classical structure when Jodie Foster tries to track him down. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron is the threat that is causing the problem and is also the main source of resistance that creates the complications, crises, etc. when Frodo and his little Fellowship try to solve the problem by destroying the Ring of Power.

Aristotle’s classical structure, which is the dominant feature of this structure, can stand alone. All of the structures you might find in the act are already built into the problem solving action that encounters resistance, namely: conflict, complications, crises (turning points) climax and resolution. It is, in fact, the structure of any problem solving action (real or fiction) that encounters resistance. From there, the natural thing to do is divide the principal, problem solving action into scenes, which are the ideal units of action to reveal these larger, essential actions.

After the story is created, of course, you can divide the action into any number of parts that you like, but it’s counterproductive to think in those terms at the story’s inception. In other words, you shouldn’t be using act structure to lay out or create the story.

However, if you need to use the three act structure because you’re pitching an idea to someone who only speaks that language, then follow Aristotle and translate the idea of three acts into a beginning, a middle, and an end and you’ll be able to communicate with them. Then, if you’re asked: what is the first act? Tell them how the story begins (which is really what they want to know) and make it as intriguing as possible. If asked: what is the second act? Tell them what’s happening in the middle of the story (which includes the main crisis of the dominant plot) and make it as stressful as possible. If asked about the third act, tell them what the climax of the story is (and make that as exciting as possible) – and finally how the story is resolved – and make that as satisfying as possible.

To conclude, what I’m saying is this: when you’re creating a story, you should put aside the archaic notion of three acts and focus on the natural structures surrounding the problem, which is the central event and heart of your story.

James Bonnet was elected twice to the Board of Directors of the Writer’s Guild of America and has written or acted in more than forty television shows and features. The radical new ideas about story in his book Stealing Fire from the Gods: A Dynamic New Story Model For Writers And Filmmakers are having a major impact on writers in all media.

…People in Hollywood like to say that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be a screenwriter. But what about the philosopher Aristotle? Writers who know their family trees are aware that Aristotle laid the foundations of storytelling instruction around 335 BC in his work Poetics. Not much of western civilization has gone untouched by Aristotle’s influential mind, and writers of the greatest stories have been using the Poetics; probably completely unaware of it at the time. A former story analyst for Miramax Films, Michael Tierno, has built the bridge from this foundation in his book, Aristotle’s Poetics for Screenwriters.

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