The two pillars of a good story

The true test of a viable story--one that ultimately will lift off the page and really deliver the goods--is the strength of your plot points at the end of your structural Act I and Act II.  These are the I-beams of any well constructed story, whether it be a play, screenplay, teleplay, or any narrative fiction.  They each dictate what has to have already happened and what will happen as the story unfolds.

The plot point at  the end of Act I always spins the story in a surprising new direction and demands a set up in Act I that leads to this act ending.  And the plot point at the end of Act II has to accomplish the same--spinning the story in an unexpected way into Act III and the climactic scene and ultimate resolution of your tale, and this plot point again will dictate the developing struggle of Act II that leads to this act ending.

Of course there are a lot of other plot elements that also have to be in place like the Act I inciting incident and the the Act II mid-point, etc. etc.  But the initial development of any good story has to start with these two plot points.  Everything else can then be built on top of these essential structural pillars.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran from June 22 to July 1 and we're current considering applications for starting the program next January at our residency scheduled for January 5-14, 2018.  If you're interested in finding out more about our program, email me at buzzmclaughlin@gmail.com and we can start a dialogue.

I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process.  You can follow me on Twitter @eitherorfilms or @mfastagescreen.  I’m also on Facebook at buzzmclaughlinscriptconsulting.     

Script prep: Laying out the cards...

I'm currently in the middle of developing a script up in my second story home office and I thought it might be informative to share a bit of the plot outlining phase of my pre-draft process.

What you see here is my day bed taken over by my project.  What's obviously apparent is that I still like to use the old index card method of laying out the scenes--playing with how to structure the telling of my tale. 

I've laid out the three acts, with the white cards the A plot and the blue cards the B plot.  I find working with actual cards like this allows me to get a tactile feel for the developing story and I can add, remove, and shuffle scenes with ease.  When I'm working on Act 3 for example, I have acts 1 and 2 instantly available at a glance and I can actually see and feel the emerging structure of the whole script right there in front of me and make adjustments as needed.  There are digital software versions for doing this of course, but this simple visual method still works best for me.

The only drawback is that for the duration of my plot outlining, I have to find somewhere else to take my short afternoon naps.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran from June 22 to July 1 and we're current considering applications for starting the program next January at our residency scheduled for January 5-14, 2018.  If you're interested in finding out more about our program, email me at buzzmclaughlin@gmail.com and we can start a dialogue.

I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process.  You can follow me on Twitter @eitherorfilms or @mfastagescreen.  I’m also on Facebook at buzzmclaughlinscriptconsulting.  

Your Act 3 determines your Act 1...

One of the danger areas I've come across with the writers I work with is the understandable urge to get into draft as quickly as possible.  As storytellers this is a natural inclination--"let's get on with it already; enough backstory prep work and plot outlining; I want to start turning out pages."

Unfortunately what often happens when this urge is embraced is that an extraordinary amount of time is spent working and reworking Act 1 without having a clear and consistent focus on the overall structure of the story being told.  And what happens is that there is not the full awareness of what needs to be established in Act 1 that must later pay off in Act 2 and especially in Act 3. In other words, what I often see happening is that the entire story is not kept front and center as the writer immerses him/herself in those opening 25-30 pages, getting lost in trying to perfect the beginning of a script while losing sight of the whole.

The script for Brooklyn: a second act meltdown

My wife and I finally caught up with the film Brooklyn last weekend.  It's been in our queue and we were looking forward to screening it.  And many aspects didn't disappoint.  The performances are all first rate, the cinematography is beautiful, and the overall look and period feel reads authentic.  And, most importantly, an hour into the film we were totally swept away with the story.

The script's Act 1 is masterful in inviting us into young immigrant Eilis Lacey's journey to America--her bright spirit as well as her struggles, her fears, and her growing isolation resulting from her immense decision to cross the sea to a new life.  We fall in love with her and the life she finds herself in.  And then she meets this special and humble young man (Tony) at the end of Act 1 and suddenly everything shifts and we're further carried away into her Act 2 romance.  The film is succeeding to totally immerse us in Eilis's world, taking us inside the story, increasingly carrying us along with the tale's forward momentum, up and through Eilis and Tony's elopement. Then at the midpoint of Act 2 Eilis gets the news that her only sibling, her sister, has suddenly died back in Ireland and Eilis has no choice but to return home to comfort her widowed mother.  A key plot point that again throws us in a new direction--setting up strong jeopardy to her new found relationship.  All is well with the story up until now.  I even recall saying to my wife at this point what a beautifully constructed screenplay this is.

And then, unfortunately, everything starts to fall apart.  Once back in Ireland, our heroine meets and slowly begins to fall for another young man and suddenly we start feeling as if a narrative switch has been turned off.  The Tony love story is literally dropped from the tale and we are left increasingly bewildered, watching our Eilis step ever deeper into this new life with scarcely a thought of who and what she left behind in America.  Absent are the moments of struggle pulling her heart in two opposite directions.  Absent is any visible concern over the fact that she is married to another man.   Or an explanation as to why she won't even open Tony's many letters to her. Or why she let her secret go on so long.  Or show moments of agonizing struggle as she's pulled ever deeper into this false life. We began to wonder if she would have ever told the truth of her marriage to anyone if she hadn't been eventually caught in her lie.  And as a result we felt like the rug was pulled out from under us.

The film is actually an excellent example of how a script can go wrong in the second half of Act 2, often the trickiest part of a screenplay to get right. Basically, the problem stems from the story not staying true to its central character who has been so expertly and successfully established in Act 1 and the first half of Act 2.  As a result, in Act 3 when Eilis finally makes the decision to return to America and her Tony, the story is so derailed that it rings false and isn't really earned.  As Anthony Lane asks in his review of the film in the The New Yorker, "Why does that choice [between the two men] not feel more like a wrench?"  The reason is that we no longer know who this central character is or why she is behaving the way she does.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter), a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwrights Process.

Can the plot of your script carry the load...?

One of my favorite script clients recently sent me a first draft of a new play.  It was the first time I'd seen or even heard of this particular project.  So I read it with great anticipation.  However, before I got to the third act, I knew that the plot was on increasingly thin ice, that the story was getting top heavy and that the script's structural engineering insufficient and faculty.  To put it bluntly, the whole thing came crashing down like a house of cards.

What happened here was that this writer likes to work out his plot structure as he writes his draft and doesn't want to create the framework for his plot before plunging into the actual script.  As a result, what inevitably happens time and again is that everything--all those many, many first draft pages--have to be put aside and the structure of the story has to be developed and planned out from the ground up.

It's like building a three story building and realizing when you get up to building the third floor that the load has become so great that this final floor can't be supported by what you've built underneath--the foundation and first and second floor can't hold the third.

It might look something like this underneath the surface...

So everything has to be dismantled stick by stick (or scene by scene, page by page) until you're back to square one and you're looking at your original hole in the ground.  And you have no choice--painful as it may be--but to figure out and create viable working drawings before you can attempt reconstructing your edifice.

The problem here is that many writers work this way--plunging into draft way too soon--and most of them have a huge problem with letting go of the pages and scenes they've already written in acts one and two.  I run into this time and again.  The reality is that, to do it right and have a fighting chance to eventually write a script that works, everything in that first draft effort needs to be dismantled and put aside and the story carefully reworked and designed from the ground up.  You have to be willing to let those original pages go. And instead, the story needs to be outlined carefully--engineered in fact--so that when it's reconstructed as a script it's able to carry the full load of the story--a critical part of which is your third act that sits on top of the other two.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter), a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwrights Process.

Musings on story structure...

The other week I was talking with a writer friend about why solid story structure is always present if a script is going to work.

In trying to explain why this is so I said to imagine a hundred people standing in front of you in a long row.  And you're directed to walk by them slowly, engage in a short conversation with each person, and observe how strikingly unique every individual is in terms of physical appearance, personality, and general "presence."  Without question, you'd conclude when you finished the assignment that no two people were the same and that you'd just experienced one hundred different versions of what it means to be a unique one-of-a-kind human being.

Now imagine that all clothing, flesh, and life suddenly was removed from those hundred people and all you were left with was a long row of parched white skeletons lying on the ground in front of you.

Would you be able to see any difference between them?  Oh, variations in height, perhaps, and general size.  But what about personality, sex, unique physical features?  None--at least to the untrained eye.  The bone structure would look basically identical for all one hundred.

My writer friend laughed and understood.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran January 3-11, 2016 and we are now considering applications for starting the program with our July 2016 residency that runs July 21-31.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter), a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwrights Process.

Plot outlining--a scriptwriting key

The other day I walked back into the modest guest wing of our home that serves double-duty as my wife Kris's writing office.  Kris was not there and a part of me felt like I was intruding on her private world.  But I couldn't help but notice that on the quilt covering one of the single beds was an impressive array of 3 x 5 index cards with hand written notes on them.  The cards were arranged in three columns, each of which was identified with its own card at the top that read Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3.  What I was looking at, of course, was the beginnings of the plot invention for the novel she's working on.

Script Writing Master Class April 5 2014

Under the auspices of the New Hampshire Institute of Art, I'm teaching a day-long Master Class/Workshop in Writing for Stage and Screen on Saturday, April 5 from 10 am to 4:30 pm in Manchester, NH.

This intensive class is designed to be an introduction or review of the process of developing an idea into a working draft of a play or screenplay.  It will cover the basics of formulating your story idea, techniques of in-depth character exploration, investigating the back story, analyzing the story structural components, inventing plot, charting out the dramatic shape of a story, techniques of good dialogue writing, and tips for writing of the first draft and beyond.   Numerous exercises and handouts will guide you through the writing process as it unfolds.

I've taught a version of this master class for several years around the country.  It's always been a lively and stimulating time for me and participants.  If you're within shouting distance of Manchester on April 5, I hope you'll consider joining us.

More details can be found here and you can register here.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art and we are currently accepting applications for entering the program at our June 2014 summer residency, although the April 1st deadline is fast approaching.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter), and a professional script consultant.

The Motor of Your Script

Raise the hood of any play or screenplay and you should see its motor staring back at you.  And without a doubt, in the vast majority of cases, that motor is the script's central character and his or her main want and/or need that somehow has to be satisfied.  This is what drives the story from the beginning to the end of the journey, what pushes it forward and gives it ongoing momentum.  

Just this week I've been struck again with how critical this basic tenet of good script writing is.  I've been reading a client's screenplay that is filled with wonderful moments and lovable characters. Clever and witty humor abounds.  But the story never fully springs to life and gets me entirely engaged in the first act because the writer has not clearly defined the main external want and dominating internal need of the central character.  I found myself not being able to focus on the story and get swept up in it's unfolding early on because the motor was not yet firing on all pistons.

Designing story: a script consulting experience, part III

My last two blog posts have attempted to lay out a recent day-long script consulting experience I had with a client where we worked through his story scene by scene and engineered a solid structural framework.  Here’s how the session concluded: 

By the end of the day (actually it was relatively late that night), we were exhausted, but we had on the table four dozen cards divided into three distinct acts that represented a definite structural roadmap for a story that excited us.  We sensed that the script based on this outline would really deliver the goods and make the kind of statement that the writer wanted to make.

Designing story: a script consulting experience, part II

    My last post introduced a day-long script consulting session I recently had with a client.  Here is how it unfolded:

    Basically what we spent the day doing was a very hands-on working through of the story scene by scene and crafting a structure that would fit into the basic three act framework.  I started by writing “Act I” on a card, then “Act II” on another, and “Act III” on a third and placing them on the table, a couple of feet apart.  This gave us from the start a simple structural design to build on—dividing the story into these three time-honored parts of setup, struggle, and solution.  (I’ve posted several blogs on these structural story components—see, for example this one from last month.)

Designing story: a script consulting experience, part I

    A couple of weeks ago I invited a script client of mine to my mountaintop home in New Hampshire to do some intensive work on a promising project he’d been developing. We’d been working on it over the phone and via email for some time and we both agreed that it would be optimal if the two of us could actually grapple with the script together in person and hopefully pin it to the mat once and for all.

Is 3-act story structure passe...?

     There’s been a lot written online lately about the 3-act story structure model for scripts and why it works or should be avoided.  See, for example, John Truby's article and comments on the UK's Raindance website.

     It seems to me, however, that the real issue here is simply a matter of semantics.