Story Types and Tips from Our Friends the Screenwriters

I recently received a comment on one of my old (almost three years now, but still very popular) posts. It’s the one on Four Act Structure:

Sean Ashby said:

Four acts, eh? Very interesting, thank you! I’m learning so much more about structure than I ever thought existed. I just read an interview over at Writer Unboxed with Blake Snyder about his book “Save the Cat”.

He’s a screenwriter, but the same principles apply to novels, I think. Anyway, he breaks down all stories into only 10 basic, fundemental stories (using movies as examples, natch). He says that if you model your story around these “primal” story arcs, you’ll connect with and engage the reader every time.

Ever read it, or ever heard of approaching stories in a similar way?

Again, thanks for the post!

Thanks, Sean! By the way, I love the drawings in your portfolio. I am deeply envious of anyone with skills in visual art. I can’t even do stick figures.

I did read Save the Cat. It was a few years ago now, and I can’t find my copy at the moment, but I remember enjoying some of it and then getting lost when it got too much into the film industry end of things. (This is not uncommon for me when reading books that talk about story, then talk about story in terms of Hollywood. Sometimes it works for a novelist, and sometimes she’s glad she deals with the east coast!)

By the way, the entire interview with Blake is worth reading. Check it out: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Regarding how many different “story types” there are… sure, why not? Sounds good to me. Snyder is not the first person to break that down, and he won’t be the last. Rudyard Kipling supposedly claimed there were 69, but I think that this must just be a theme to the blog this week. It’s just another form of analysis.

Another breakdown, one I learned in my freshman lit classes in college, goes like this:

1. Man* against man.
2. Man against nature.
3. Man against society.
4. Man against God.
5. Man against himself.

(I’ve also seen this one with the addition of “Man against the supernatural” and “Man against machine” but I think the latter, at least, can usually be broken down into Man against man/society/himself depending on whether or not we’re dealing with a Terminator, Matrix, or Paul Bunyan paradigm, here. Yes, I’m joking. Kinda.)

I’m also fond of the following: there are two plots:

1. A man comes to town.
2. A man leaves town.

Now, all this is fun, and a good intellectual parlor game (like the one Sailor Boy and I play where we try to figure out the way in which The Terminator, the Matrix, and Dune can all exist on a continuum — which I swear, it works), and seriously, I can play literary criticism games ’til people start chucking their popcorn and Milk Duds at me and scream that I’m ruining the movie, but do I approach writing stories that way? Nah.

I think it works better in retrospect, to start with. I mean, I can usually sit down and go, “My manuscript is a romance,” (or an adventure, or a mystery, or an insert-genre-here), but honestly, it works better for me to write it and turn off the literary analysis until I’ve got a good handle on the nuts and bolts. My internal editor is a bit of a bugbear, so I’ve got to do whatever it takes to keep her gagged and hogtied in the far recesses of mind.

But engaging with the reader is NEVER a bad thing for a writer to do, so whatever helps you get there is awesome. If that means throwing a dart at one of x-many plots, or doing a posterboard or interviewing your characters as to their favorite running show brand, go for it.

Plus, I’m a big fan of saving the cat. I’ve pulled that particular trick out of the bag before. I’ve shot it to hell, too, but that’s another story.

And on the topic of tips from screenwriters, I highly, highly recommend Michael Hague. I’ve attended several of Hague’s workshops and it’s always a revelation for me. Now I’ve got his books and DVDs, too, though I haven’t done anything with them since I’ve been in deadline hell for the last few months. His ideas about plot and structure growing from character arcs really resonate with me. Seriously, check him out.

To the writer/blog readers: what writing tips have really worked for you lately?
______________________________________________
* Please note, all uses of word “man” above to be a substitute for protagonist, whether that’s a man, a woman, a talking bunny rabbit, or a superintelligent form of the color blue.