Three Acts and Go!

Back when I first started writing, my eyes would quickly glaze over as screenwriting types would go on and on about three-act structure. I didn't care if it was Syd Field or Joseph Campbell or Linda Seger. It all boiled down to the same thing: answers that are too simple and too rigid. I don't take commandments well.

Only later did I come to realize the real power of three-act structure lies not in WHAT we write, but how we write... and in how readers and viewers receive your work. I believe that there is a sense of narrative hardwired into our brains, and it looks an awful lot like set up-conflict-resolution. You got it: three-act structure. It's in the way we tell stories. It's built into the language.

I'll probably always nod politely when a disciple of screenwriting guru X tells me that in this beat the protagonist absolutely must be separated from ally Y by the scheme of opponent Z because of his misbehavior blah blah blah. But I almost never write a scene or think through a beat without being conscious of my three-act structures. Yes, structures -- plural.

There's your overall structure -- the one you wrote up and reworked forty-two times in your synopsis before you even started to write the script. (You did that, right? Well done.) And then there's the three-act structure of the particular scene event. Finding a resonance between those two almost always helps me tell a better story. It's sometimes a tricky thing, and it does take practice. But it will help you find unity and reinforce your main conflict at every stage.

Why shouldn't it work? Think about it for a second. Let's get downright logical for a moment. Take a look at your climax. It should perfectly reflect the main conflict of the whole movie, right? It should absolutely resonate with your overall message. This means that your main character must be fighting the same internal and external battles on a grand scale. There's a set up, a conflict, and a resolution that feel almost pre-ordained by the rest of the script.

Now look at the inciting incident (the event at the beginning of the script that sets the action in motion). What is the hallmark of a good inciting incident? It plays out the same issues as the climax, just on a (usually) smaller scale. It tells the audience how to watch. It tells the audience how to watch. If it doesn't resonate with the climax, you're probably not satisfying the audience as much as you think you are.

Take any other major beat of the script -- the midpoint, the low point, inner cave, what have you. There's a set up, a conflict and a resolution to each of those. And you got it: each must resonate very strongly with both the overall three-act structure and the events that precede it. From a single idea you can generate huge amounts of story.

New writers often bristle at the importance of loglines and synopses. I certainly did. What I didn't understand is that a trained reader does more or less what I've done here. They take a few traits and a controlling idea (expressed in the logline) and they unfurl a huge story in their own heads. They look for story potential. They are often way ahead of new writers. Wanna catch up? Think through three-act structure from the ground up.

Conceit and Structure

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've had a couple ideas tumbling around in my head, but nothing ready for the blog. Then there's work and teaching and... writing for myself. It's been a busy few months, and it feels amazing to have a moment or two to work out some new material and reread some old stuff.

My students have been getting a real handle on conceit recently -- realizing that it's got to be a simple thing: a unique strategy for unity in your work; a strategy that brings 'thingness' to your story. There are a million ways to define a strategy. There are a million paths to conceit. You might have to try most of them before you really find the 'thingness' in your story. But once you have that, you have better answers than you ever imagined to your story problems.

Conceit, once achieved, knocks your writing, and your thinking about writing, up to the next level. It's more than a good idea. It's a good idea that's been fully developed. A reader sees it on page one. They miss it if it's not there. An experienced reader (or producer or filmmaker..) knows that conceit is what sells a piece. You can think of studio readers as armies of prospectors sifting through rivers of scripts, looking for a speck of gold -- a well-developed, marketable conceit.

But enough about them. This industry stuff gets boring quick.

What I want to talk about today is conceit and structure. Structure is obviously important to a script. Structure is key in any storytelling -- visual or written. There are many, many individuals who claim to know the keys to structure. For the most part, I think they are reiterating the same basic structure that's worked for the first 10,000 years of human development... with a few added bells, whistles, and purely academic distinctions.

Most screenwriting teachers, myself included, will harp endlessly on drilling your conceit down into your structure. For the vast majority of cases, it can only help you to model your conceit across the the beats of the expected structure. And it's true. If you reinforce your conceit at every turn, with every major conflict, you're solving audience reception problems before they even arise.

But conceit can also function as a kind of anti-structure, and it's worthwhile at least to model and brainstorm through those possibilities as well. Why?

Because conceit is a more or less direct connection between you and your audience. It can pull you along through and past all kinds of plot issues. Take The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Does that plot make sense? No. No, it does not. Do you care? No. You're being entertained consistently with the conceit. (Or some of us are.)

Another place that conceit can really come to the fore is music videos. Narrative structure is of more limited use in a music video, because the visual story is just supporting the music. Quite frequently there's one strong, simple, central idea that drives a music video. That's the conceit. If it's good, you remember the video. If it's not thought out, or is a cliche, then you don't.

The band Sigur Ros, in my opinion, does a fairly remarkable job with this. People either adore them or despise them -- I'll leave that to you. But consider watching videos for Hoppipolla, Saeglopur, Glosoli, and Svefn-g-Englar. For some reason Hoppipola always brings tears to my eyes. Not sure why. I guess it's the old people playing in the graveyard. All these videos are available on youtube, and you deserve a treat for reading this far into my post. Just watch them full screen.

In each, you have a remarkably clear, developed conceit. The viewer can name it quickly and clearly. And it's very carefully worked into the structure. And it's very carefully used where structure doesn't apply.

Sigur Ros recently produced a concert film, and did a call for submissions for fans to submit videos. It's fascinating to see what amateur filmmakers did with the band's basic conceit. Some get it. Some don't. Some add something more. I learned a lot. Check that out this youtube search.

3:10 to Yuma

Westerns are coming back! They've been out of favor for a long time. It's almost as if we have to forget about them and rediscover them again. I'm very excited about this. Despite the stereotype shoot 'em up, Westerns are an incredibly fertile genre for exploring our culture. There's room for true ambivalence and emotional engagement while talking about American history... and entertaining the heck out of the audience. Thousands of grainy black and white films of art school students smoking cigarettes in messy kitchens notwithstanding, Westerns represent the true American existentialism on screen.

Plus, I have a western script I really love, and there's suddenly a snowball's chance in hell I might sell it.

3:10 to Yuma is a perfect manifestation of the resurgent Western. It's a remake of the 1957 version, in which Glenn Ford played the bad guy (who is played almost too convincingly by Russell Crowe in the 2007 remake).

Anyone with questions about what the three-act structure really needs to watch this movie. It's textbook. Set the protagonist: problem; misbehavior; clear, concrete, goal; link external and internal conflicts, get the dynamic character in place. Set the antagonist. Show them in contrast. And your inciting event. Kaboom. Want to know what a midpoint looks like? Watch the action undermine all the protagonists reference points in a brilliant genre move.... I don't want to spoil the movie here, so I won't go into too many specifics. But you get the idea.

Why DOES the movie follow the three-act structure so religiously? I think a lot of it has to do with the climax. Keeping the audience clear on the character intention for both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale is an incredible balancing act in the final scene -- and absolutely essential. If we can't watch the subtle interplay, there's no depth... and suddenly we ARE just watching a shoot 'em up. If the character intention wasn't carefully laid out at EVERY STAGE up to that point, we'd be lost in the climax. If the writers hadn't thought it through carefully, and worked it into the set ups and action at every stage, it just wouldn't have been satisfying.

And it wouldn't have said nearly as much as it does. Writers often tire of discussions of structure and character intention and so on. Dialogue is so much easier, and it's right there, on the page in front of you. But getting your story clear on the screen is a whole other ball of wax. And hopefully Westerns will be teaching a new generation of writers just how much you can say with a little structure.

Structure is Everywhere

I've been a little light on posting recently. Mr. Gary is done tomorrow, at which point I can clear out the mental real estate I need to blog properly.

For now, watch this trippy video. It's magnificent. What's it got to do with screenwriting? Well, it's beautiful. And when a writer or artist sees a beautiful thing, they should watch it and see what it can teach them.

What does it teach me? That three-act structure is hard-wired into our perception. That symmetry between the set up and the resolution is innately satisfying. That when a setting is a creative reimagining of a world we've seen before, it excites and moves us. It reminds me that great narrative usually arises from a simple conceit, not ornate structure. Enjoy.

Chasing Chickens Around the Yard

Brainstorming is one of the most rewarding processes for a screenwriter. There's something really exhilarating about free-associating, finding connections, and building drama out of a rough idea. You remember that your brilliant idea is connected to a whole world -- and that world brings life to your story.

Brainstorming is also a chaotic process. It can be very threatening to a writer. You follow a character's traits and the main action to its logical conclusion... and it doesn't work. Or the message changes. Or you start drifting into delicate territory. Or it starts sounding like that movie you really, really hate. Or the big one: suddenly you realize that all your work so far is for naught.

It's one thing to comfort yourself with the knowledge that you've merely written yourself up to the next stage of understanding around a story idea. You find your happy Zen place, and destroy the Mandala you've been working on for weeks.

Or, like the rest of us, you get that horrible feeling that you're spinning your wheels in mud. There's no traction in any of your plot points. You're stuck. And it's all crap.

It's way too easy to find yourself in that dark place where nothing really makes sense, or matters, or will even remotely appeal to Spielberg. That's when I like to throw my hands up and chase chickens in the yard.

Have you ever done this? You catch very few chickens. But there are two or three things you can do that will turn the task from an ordeal into an enjoyable experience.

1. Have a plan. If you run around randomly, you can be sure the chickens will too. You ARE spinning your wheels if you don't do some basic work to structure your process. I like to work with a rough set of guidelines around the three-act stucture. But what's more important is that you have a structure that gives you discipline.

2. Have a friend. It's much easier to catch chickens if you're not the only one in the yard. And if you're both working with the same strategy, you're gonna catch lots of chickens.

Having the basic beats of the three-act structure as a common language is very helpful indeed. Even when you reject a solution that the three-act structure points to, you're learning a lot about the script, and developing a better shared sense of the script with your collaborator.

3. Have fun. Be a kid. Follow your bliss. Play. An adult will wear themselves out chasing after chickens. A kid will have a blast, and be energized by the task. Brainstorming is the same way. You get more strong, organic solutions if you're losing yourself in the task. You get more entertaining plot points when you're entertaining yourself.

There's a reason we tell stories. The more connected you are to that, the more grounded you feel in your material.

The older I get, the less I know.

When I was younger, I was filled with a grad student's certainty about how drama worked. I thought I knew all about this stuff, and was happy to debate it for hours. Now I find myself in a very different place. It's a lot harder to stand on my soap box. But it's a much happier, in-the-moment place to be (and to write from). I'm seeing screenwriting from so many perspectives these days that I can't help but stay in the moment.

I had a three-hour meeting this morning to guide the final stages of the edit on Mr. Gary. We're still finding new meaning and new questions in the script. We're forced to use what we have, even if a shot doesn't work the way we thought it might. The funny thing is that the solutions we're finding are usually better than the original script. Somehow you don't come up with the really genius answers until you're the protagonist, and the script issue is the invincible antagonist and you've gone through your midpoint, low point, and battle scene. It's like every moment of the script has a three-act structure leading up to its creation.

I'm teaching a class of college kids about screenwriting. They're mostly new to storytelling. Some of them aren't even interested in film. They're video game designers. I've spent the last two weeks figuring out how to condense and communicate the crazy, wonderful mystery of writing and the fairly practical ways to getting there. Screenwriting feels more like an instinct to me than a set of rules. But they want the rules, of course.

I showed them the first five minutes of Harold and Maude yesterday. It might not be the natural choice, but I wanted to push them a little out of their comfort zone. (And who knows -- maybe there's a video game in there somewhere..) One reason I chose it: the first scene has a pretty neat three-act structure itself. I could talk about every topic I'd be touching on for the whole semester.

I've got some pretty standard topics to cover this semester: loglines and synopses and treatments and beat sheets and all the story elements. And somehow it hit me all of a sudden. The three-acts are just the nature of events. It's how we perceive them. You've got a three-act structure in a logline. You break down each element of the logline into a three-act structure, and you've got a synopsis. Break down each of those beats and you've got a treatment. And so on. This stuff doesn't translate well to words. So many screenwriting gurus have tried to slap their bumper sticker on the three-act structure and call it their own. But the moment you call it one thing, you lose hold of what it truly is. There's something really beautiful here. There's something full of joy here. And I hope I find better words for it before I recklessly start blogging again.

Three Acts, Many Uses

I was going through my worklist of the last several weeks, and realized I'd consulted or worked on two sci-fi features, several commercials, a documentary, a couple dramas, a historical epic, a buddy movie caper, a musical, a horror flick and, of course, Mr. Gary on the Feedback Show.

I'm a little amazed. What's amazing to me is what all these have in common: the three-act structure. It doesn't matter if your movie is 30 seconds long or 3 hours. It needs that basic structure, and, in each case, there's a structure that your viewer is already conditioned to expect.

Now the specifics of how you hook a viewer into your personal documentary is quite different from how you hook them into a horror movie. But the mechanism is the same. You frame up your story. You ask a big question. You point to the central struggle. And then you follow through.

The same can be said about just about any other beat in the structure. The climax of a commercial can be defined with the same elements as the climax in the musical, or the sci-fi epic, or Mr. Gary. Your choices and your execution will be very, very different of course. But how you come up with those choices is much the same.


Screenwriters read lots of books about the three-act structure. They quibble over Syd Field vs. Robert McKee vs. Linda Seger. Just remember that what they're all talking about is really audience reception -- that boilerplate that's burned indelibly into our skulls through years of watching movies, musicals, commercials, and whatever else. They have different ways of talking about this structure. And they differentiate themselves out because it helps sell books.

But the three-act structure is nothing more or less than the gateway into a mystery. It's there, and you know it when you see it. But it's too slippery to be a straightforward roadmap. It's a set of guideposts that let you figure out your story. When I'm consulting with a filmmaker, they give us a way to navigate our thoughts. When I'm working alone, the structure is my devil's advocate, telling me what doesn't work, and why. The key is listening to that audience member in your head. Sometimes he's the best collaborator you'll find.

When Structure Gets in the Way

Before I wrote scripts, I studied Russian language and literature. Four years in college, then five more years in grad school. While I'm grateful for that education, it's also the kind of thing you can take years to get out from under. You can't read a book without analyzing it to within an inch of its life. You can't write a thing without seeing the critical structure. It crippled me as a writer, and it took all the joy out of reading.

I spoke Russian very well. One reason was that I loved the 'puzzle' aspect of it. Nouns and adjectives have six possible endings for both singular and plural. Verbs have two 'aspects' that are completely alien to an English speaker. Each word is marked for its role in the sentence, which allows you to jumble the word order, placing a noun on one end of the sentence and its modifier at the other. The complexity was completely addictive to me. One day I was chatting with a Russian friend when he used a dative case of a present active participle of a reflexive imperfective verb. I suddenly woke up: He can't be computing all this in his head. Of course he isn't. The structure helps me speak, but he's not thinking about it any more than I stop and think "hmmm... I need to form the direct object of the third-person pronoun" before I say 'him'.

I felt pretty stupid for ever making that assumption even while I had trouble shaking it. But it was only then that I really started to think in Russian. I needed to learn about present active participles. And then I needed to forget about them.

Same goes for story. Listen to a kid tell you about a movie. Listen to a kid tell you about her day. The three-act structure is in there. Listen to yourself as you tell stories. The three-act structure is there. Sometimes structure helps, and sometimes it makes things a lot clearer. If you've been nailing down your structure and it's not working for you know, try writing your story out free-style. If you're writing yourself in circles, maybe it's time to sit down with a really rigorous structure and force yourself to make some decisions. Lots of screenplay consultants will push one or the other. I think it completely depends on the circumstances.

Night at the Museum

I was visiting with family and friends this weekend. I saw Night at the Museum in a small living room filled with three generations, two languages, piles of food, misbehaving kids, and no beer.
We all watched the whole thing. The two year old watched it. Her grandmother, who speaks no English, watched it. I watched it after spending nearly four hours in a minivan on a crowded California highway with aforementioned kids. If you think about it, this is pretty amazing.
Night at the Museum is a remarkable movie.

Now, by remarkable, I do NOT mean 'good'. By remarkable, I do not mean 'original'. By remarkable I just mean 'effective'. It does exactly what it sets out to do. And it does this through the awesome, awful, awe-inspiring power of the three-act structure. Love it or hate it, it must be reckoned with.

The conceit of the film is simple: a night watchman finds that the museum comes to life each night. It is, plain and simple, a vehicle for a series of comic sketches based around the conceit. There's not a lot of dramatic import unless you find suspense in hoping that the lions will devour Ben Stiller soon. The three-act structure pretty much gives us a reason to sit there, to engage his otherwise not terribly real, believable, or even sympathetic character.

At first I was a little shocked at how long the first act ran. We're treated to this unbelievably textbook protagonist set up. Ben Stiller needs a job or he'll lose the respect of his son, who's gravitating to his mom's jerk of a boyfriend. There's a suitable love interest/history docent conveniently located behind the information desk, but she thinks he's a loser who won't amount to anything, and gee, if only there was a way he could bring history to life for her.

If you're a screenwriter, you're groaning. And for some reason, the first act just won't end. But as soon as the second act gets rolling, you realize why. The audience will be getting NOTHING but Ben Stiller playing fetch with T-Rex, spanking monkeys, and arbitrating fights between dioramas for the next 45 minutes. They WANT the story to be as simple as possible. The simpler it is, the more that question is out of the way. The story here is nothing more than the stakes that hold up the tent. When this is the case, all you have to do is drive them deep into the ground.

I hear lots of people, often very new screenwriters, say that "they could write something better than that". And it's true sometimes. Why does Hollywood hire these morons? Well, because they aren't morons. They realize when a simple, painfully obvious story is the goal. What separates the men from the boys is mostly a matter of how conscious you are of your story elements, and how you exploit them as tools. And in that sense, Night at the Museum is no less remarkable a film than Magnolia, or Midnight Cowboy, or even Shaun of the Dead.

Reading a Script

The more time I spend with screenplays and screenwriters, the more I realize how many problems are tied up with a single problem: writers don't know their audience. I'm dealing with a script right now that very generously lets me know when I've come upon the inciting incident and the tragically flawed hero by indicating that directly in the script. He's also included a list of characters, scene breakdowns, and a three-page synopsis. He's got extensive action lines to give me all the backstory and drama, and, just to make sure we're up on all the details, has the characters remind us who they are, why they're here, and what the essential conflict is at the moment in their dialogue. Then there are the flashbacks, the flash forwards, and the montages so we understand the historical context.

The problem is that a movie audience doesn't have access to his copious notes of back-story, character motivation, and survey of the historical period in question.

You can't SEE the movie, because you're too busy reading the story.

A screenplay isn't a novel, of course. And screenplay readers aren't novel readers, either. In fact, they aren't big fans of reading at all. A studio reader may read 6-8 scripts a day, and is responsible for producing detailed notes and making an initial decision on the viability of a script. That's hundreds and hundreds of pages every night. How do they do this?

Basically, they watch the movie. They play out the visuals, the actions, and the set ups in their heads. The last thing they want is someone telling them what's there, or what it's supposed to mean. This just slows them down. They want to see it for themselves. If you need to explain a plot beat, it isn't going to work on screen. A good script reads quickly.

Now, how does a reader keep all the plot beats straight in his or her head? Think back to the discussion of three-act structure. A reader looks for the inciting event, and the second act complication, midpoint, etc. Everyone has their own way of looking at this stuff, and different ways of interpreting the material, of course. But there is a basic way that movie audiences watch a movie. There is a huge set of expectations that we all share. The studio reader simply applies that set of expectations, and measures your script against them.

It's ruthless. It's unfair much of the time. But a good reader doesn't measure how close you are to hitting that perfect formula. She's much more interested in how you exploit those expectations to tell us a good story.

It's stressful giving up action lines and dialogue that tell the reader directly what's going on. But when you start using action lines to SHOW the story -- to bring it to life in front of your audience -- you'll never look back.

Shaun of the Dead

If you've never seen this spoof of a zombie film, you owe yourself as a writer to see it. Why? Not because it's brilliant, although it does have its moments, but because it's a great example of all those things that screenwriters are supposed to do. You want a three-act structure, with internal and external conflicts linked inexorably in a life-and-death struggle through the main character? He's right there. Trying to figure out how to build a main character around a strong desire and a single misbehavior? There he is. Want to see how to exploit character to develop backstory? Make him a bored, lazy TV salesman who doesn't actually hear what's being reported on the 32 televisions in the room.

One good thing about both spoofs and zombie films is that a key to their success is playing to audience expectations. You can't spoof a genre unless you portray it accurately. You can't have a zombie film without references to all the other zombie films.

This is valuable because the same basic three-act structure is used in everything from romantic comedies to action-adventures and historical epics. If you don't believe me, try a little experiment. Watch Shaun of the Dead. Stop the DVD every ten minutes or so, and write a sentence or two to describe what you've seen. You should have ten to twelve sentences. Now watch "Young Guns". Do the same thing. Now try "How Stella Got Her Groove Back." Look at when and how the main problem is introduced. Look at how the problem escalates every ten minutes. Look at how the main character grows. Look at the climax, and how it resolves the internal and external conflicts. Even when the problems are different, the answers all come from the same basic place.

I could also point to any number of really bad films with the same structure. It's not the fact of using this three-act structure that makes a film work. It's how you use it. If it's a tool that helps you develop something original and new, you're doing your job as a writer.

STICKING WITH THE CONCRETE

One thing I find repeatedly, both in my own writing and with clients, is that there's a huge tendency to explain what's going on. This is especially true when the script is emotionally intense. Bob can't just sign the divorce papers in the third beat of act II. No. Bob, driven by his irrepressible rage at his unfaithful wife while subconsciously also allowing himself to begin thinking about Maizie, the sincere but homely doughnut shop clerk, in a new way, heads to the lawyer's office, almost gets in an accident, where his rage bubbles to the surface, and then he suddenly realizes he's at peace.

It goes without saying that the first is easier to write. And easier is always better.

But there's a deeper reason for STICKING WITH THE CONCRETE. That's what's on the screen. That's what the audience sees. Not only does the human mind gauge actions and characters. It does it better than you can explain. And it does it instinctively.

When you explain the internals in the synopsis (or, horrors! in the action lines), you're working against yourself. You're actually sapping energy from the structure of your story.

GENTLE READER

But it's right there on the page!

RICH

But the movie viewer doesn't have your
script in his lap.

Take a look at Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo. What do they do? Not a lot. Steal some food. Go to a party. Try to get paid for sex. What we all do everyday, right?

We're drawn in by what they don't say. There's a series of actions, and they're written with a strong through-line. This tells the writer how they'll react. It tells the actor how to approach the part. And it tells the viewer how to look at the movie. The single biggest reason Midnight Cowboy works is that we know what drives the characters. Once you get that nailed down, step back, and just let the characters steal fruit, or sign the divorce papers, or flirt with the doughnut girl. It's a whole lot easier.

It's hard to let go of that level of control, of course. That's why I'm going to talk about the actor's job in the next post.

Brainstorming the Synopsis

Welcome back! So you've got a great idea for a script, and you followed my last recommendation for getting started:

Write down what the movie audience sees. Action. Visuals. Try to tell the story without telling us what the story means.

Good job! Some of you have pages and pages. Some of you probably have a paragraph. Whatever you have, it's fine. There are only two absolutes in the world: Everything Tastes Better With Bacon and Start Where You Are.

Now we're going to start brainstorming MORE story for you, and making sure that your story works on film. And we're going to use the three-act structure. Why? Because it's what audiences are used to. It works in films. It works in short stories and novels. It works in Greek tragedy and detergent commercials. It's more or less what the human brain is wired for. Many of you are resistant to you, because it sounds like a formula. It CAN be used like a formula. But when it's used to support creativity rather than tap it down, it's an incredibly useful tool.

It's this simple:

Bob falls in love with Karen.
Bob fights for Karen.
Bob marries Karen.

Now take a look at your own story, and find the on-screen moments that "book end" your script. What starts the script, and what ends it.

Why is that a better story than Bob falls in love with Karen, Bob fights for Karen, Bob gets a job out of state? Because there's UNITY in the tale. The beginning tells us what the story's about, and the ending should satisfy that question. Screenwriters often know what the ending of their story is -- the big message, the big climax, the big pay off. And because they know that, they know where to start.


Take a moment and ask yourself if the question asked at the opening is really answered by the event at the end.

Next, BRAINSTORM.

1. Look JUST at the opening. Come up with three scenes that answer the questions asked. Remember, use just the action and visuals an audience will see on screen.

2. Look JUST at the ending. Just like before, use only what a movie audience can witness, and come up with three new openings.

What's the most dramatic combination of all these options?

I'll bet money it's the points that are as FAR AWAY from each other as possible. Now you've got an opening and an ending that are probably farther apart than they were originally.

3. Push it again. What's ONE CRUCIAL DETAIL about the MAIN CHARACTER that make the journey from beginning to end even MORE OF A STRUGGLE?

It looks like I've left out an absolute: Drama, it appears, is the distance (physical, emotional, or otherwise) a character travels in the course of a script.


More soon. Feel free to post your beginning and ending moments in the comments section. I'll be happy to comment on them!