So you have come up with a cracking premise for your movie. Brilliant. Now you need to turn it into something that actually makes narrative sense.
You may already have a plot of sorts. But plot is only what happens. Working out when it happens is what makes a story tick. That is where screenplay structure comes in, and it pays to sort it out early, while your idea is still soft enough to shape.
Some people will tell you to just start writing. Put words on the page, see where they take you, worry about the rest later. The trouble with that is you can end up going round in circles until you throw the whole thing in a drawer. And that is how we lose a promising writer, not for want of talent but for want of a map.
You have roughly 90 to 120 minutes to tell your story, which piles on the pressure from the very first page. So there are things you want to do, and things you want to avoid. There is, in other words, a way to go about this. Scripts follow a formula. Not a magic one that showers you with Oscar-worthy pages, sadly. Think of it more as a compass. It will help you find True North, though it will not stop you getting hopelessly lost and cursing your way across the map along the way. (See what I did there, with the compass and the map? Fine. Moving on.)
Different Pen Strokes for Different Writing Folks
No two writers work the same way. We pick up quirks and habits as we go, little tricks that suit us. Some dive straight into the script with no outline or treatment in sight. Others like to chart the ground first so they do not vanish into a sea of their own words. (Yes, the seafaring has crept back in. It does that.)
I am a fan of freestyling the opening of a story, but only in outline or treatment mode. Underneath it all, I’m a planner. I’ll write a treatment to get the shape of the story, then map the script from that. And if I hit a wall in the treatment before I reach the end, I’ll map out what I already have, which usually shakes the ending loose. Win-win.
I tell every writer I work with the same thing. Sort out some of your sequencing before you get too deep into the pages. It is the closest thing screenwriting has to a time machine, and it saves a fair bit of heartache too.
This is important for a script, which needs a clear spine. It should be properly sequenced, with a defined plot. By defined, I mean events that are linked to one another, not a loose chain of and-then-this-happens, and-then-that-happens. Those linked events are your skeleton. They’re important because everything else hangs on them.
It might sound cold to talk about story this way. But you are a screenwriter, and screenwriters have a few hard realities to face. One of them is that you are writing, at least at first, for other people. And the first of those people is usually the reader, the people who can kick this script up the line for you. And readers know what they are looking for, or at least what the people who pay them are looking for.
You will have heard of a few kinds of story structure. The three-act is the one you meet most often in film. Five-act structure works just as well, while four-act is commonly associated with television, particularly series episodes. Everything I am about to say works with any of them. But rather than bore you rigid by saying it three times over, I will use the three-act as our model.
Key Events in Screenplay Structure
A feature of 90 to 120 minutes tends to carry roughly twelve Key Events, the twelfth being the final beat. These are the big narrative moments, the ones that turn the story and change things. I say roughly twelve because this is a guide, not a rule. Some stories carry a few more, some a few less.
Character change tends to ride on these Key Events. Each one should push your protagonist toward, or through, the change they need to make. Between the big beats you will also find sequences of smaller moments, the micro events, quietly setting up the Key Events to come. Pinning down your Key Events first makes it far easier to see what those smaller moments need to do. You are not obliged to use micro events, mind. That is your call. Skip a Key Event, though, and you do so at your peril.
Key Event 1: The inciting incident. The old books on the mythic shape of story call this the awakening, or the Call to Adventure. Put simply, it is the moment your protagonist goes, Huh? What the…?
Something has shifted. Maybe things are not what they believed. Maybe something strange has happened, or someone new has turned up. Either way, the world they knew has changed. But more often than not, they will try to carry on as normal and ignore the call.
Key Event 2: The nudge. A moment that confirms the suspicion that things really are different, and that perhaps our protagonist ought to do something about it. This is often where a mentor turns up. Hey, Mister Miyagi, have you seen Obi-Wan?
Key Event 3: Overcoming the doubts. Our protagonist finally decides to take up the challenge, and we cross into act two. The chase is on, whether that is the girl, the criminal, the monster, the mystery or the quest.
Key Event 4: Learning the ropes. The protagonist starts to get to grips with the new world, the new person, the new way of living.
Key Event 5: Doubts creep in. Something makes our protagonist waver. They might come off worse in an early run-in with the antagonist.
Key Event 6: The mid-point, also known as the Point of No Return. Our protagonist makes a game-changing decision, and there is no going back. Life is different from here on.
Key Event 7: Initial success. The big decision seems to be paying off.
Key Event 8: The bill arrives. The consequences of that mid-point decision start to bite. Things stop going to plan. Pushback, conflict, failure.
Key Event 9: Doubt and fear return. It all goes badly enough that our protagonist starts to lose their bottle, questioning their choices and whether they have it in them to win.
Key Event 10: The final confrontation begins. Protagonist and antagonist square up for the last time.
Key Event 11: Death and rebirth. Our protagonist dies, in a manner of speaking. Physically, symbolically or socially. Then they are reborn, carrying some new strength or knowledge they did not have before that helps them defeat their opponent.
Key Event 12: The final beat, a new equilibrium. Our protagonist arrives at a new way of living, or a new understanding of how the world works.
The Point of No Return (Key Event 6)
This one deserves a closer look, because it is a defining moment. Somewhere around the middle of the story, your protagonist makes a decision that leaves them no way back. The door closes behind them.
In The Godfather (1972), it is the moment Michael Corleone shoots the crooked police captain and the rival mob boss in that restaurant. Once he pulls the trigger, he belongs to the family, and to the criminal world, for good.
In Thelma & Louise (1991), it is Thelma robbing a convenience store. Up to that point, the women could still have gone back and argued self-defence over the shooting. After the convenience store, they are wanted for armed robbery, and that option is gone.
In Serenity (2005), it is Mal deciding to lash the bodies of his massacred friends to the hull of his ship, splashing it red and flying it straight through Reaver space.
You may have spotted a pattern. The decision at the Point of No Return is often a morally dubious one. In The Godfather it is less dubious than flat-out wrong. In Thelma & Louise it is also wrong, if a shade less so. In Serenity it is both wrong and thoroughly yucky. And yet, by the time these choices arrive, we are already on side. Those pesky screenwriters have done it again, quietly steering our sympathies so that we not only understand why the characters do what they do, but we’re emotionally in cahoots with them.
A quick but important note. I have called this the mid-point, and it usually does land in or near the middle. Usually, not always. The Point of No Return in Serenity, for instance, comes late, closer to the run into the finale than to the centre. And that is fine. Screenwriting is a creative craft, not an assembly line, and the shape bends to suit the story. Treat this whole article as a guide for finding your feet, not gospel. Think of the structure as a slide rule, with the Key Events as markers you can slide along it to fit the beats of your particular narrative. The beats matter. Their exact spacing is yours to decide.
So when you sit down to structure your script, think about the stages of change your protagonist has to go through. The character arc, in other words. Be clear on how each Key Event lands on them, because every one should move them toward or through the change they need. That includes the moment of self-revelation near the end, where they finally see what they have to become to be a better person. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. That is a conversation for when we get to character. I say conversation. It’s really just me talking, so it is a fairly one-sided one as these things go.
Set-Up and Pay-Off
Another cornerstone of structure is set-up and pay-off. It is one of the simplest and most common techniques in screenwriting, and one of the most often fumbled or forgotten. You will also hear it called foreshadowing.
Take the opening of The Last Samurai (2003). We meet our protagonist, Captain Algren, blind drunk and barely able to stand, yet still able to fire off a run of trick shots over the heads of a terrified crowd, silencing a steam fairground organ as he does. In that one moment, we see the warrior buried under the whiskey, which is exactly what makes his later mastery of the sword believable.
Set-up and pay-off can also plant the seed of a later victory. Early in Get Out (2017), we watch one of the antagonist’s victims snap briefly out of his conditioning when a camera flash goes off. Later, cornered and under attack by another controlled victim, our protagonist remembers and uses a camera flash to break the spell and save himself.
Now the flip side. Fail to set up something that turns out to be crucial, and the solution feels like it fell out of the sky. A cheat. New writers often hold back key information because they think it will spring a lovely surprise later. It rarely does. Without the earlier signposts, the reader does not feel surprised; they feel conned, as though you invented the skill or the knowledge on the spot to wriggle your character out of a corner. If your protagonist is going to escape a tight spot using a particular skill or piece of knowledge, we need to have seen it earlier, or at least seen them come by it. Show us they have it, or show them getting it. Otherwise it reads as a giant contrivance, and you may find a mob gathering outside your door with pitchforks and flaming torches. Some people take this stuff very seriously.
The same goes the other way. Introduce someone or something and then forget about it, and you leave a loose thread flapping. Bring on a character to deliver one vital piece of information and then never explain where they went, and a small voice in the reader’s head keeps asking about them. While they are wondering, they are not following your story. They have checked out, because the narrative has stopped adding up.
Which brings us back to where we started. A script’s structure has to be cohesive. Set-up and pay-off is that cohesion in action. Everything on the page should be earning its place in the wider story. If it is not, it should not be there at all.
Happy writing!