Story Structure

1. Course Introduction: Hi. I'm Joshua Courted. I'm a screenwriter and independent filmmaker, and also an educator. I've been teaching college courses on screenwriting, film directing, film producing, and so on for over 16 years. And in this course, we are going to talk about story structure. Story structure is really the foundation of everything that you're doing in your story. As a screenwriter, I'll probably be using a lot of examples from movies, but we'll try to discuss plays and novels and other forms of literature as well. These principles apply to just about any form of narrative story telling. There may be a overlap with some of the other classes I've done on skill share. You can take a look at those classes if you want to get different perspectives on certain topics depending on what the overall course is. There might be a little bit of overlap in this one, but it'll be in a different context most of the time. Let's get into structure, why it's important and how to actually implement some of the concepts that we're going to be talking about. 2. Course Project: The project for this course is going to be an outline of your story. So whether you're writing a novel or a stage play or a screenplay or a short story or a short film or an epic narrative poem or whatever, what you're going to do is put together an outline with bullet points that explain every major story beat throughout your story. Everything that happens, all of the narrative turning points, and so on, so that you have a sense of the structure. You can move scenes around if you need to. Some writers like to use note cards so that they re arrange the scenes and figure out what's the best order to put them in when certain moments have the most impact, but also to kind of see if the moments are flowing together logically, if there's a sense of cause and effect. Would it be better to flashback structure? Would it be better to be straightforward? Would it be better to leave certain things out and let the audience fill in the gap themselves? Would it be better to include more things so that you can make it clearer what's happening? So an outline is a really critical part of the process, and that's what you're going to be doing as your project for this course. The length of your outline is going to depend on the length of the type of story you're writing? If you're doing a novel, you're probably going to have a pretty long outline? Writing a feature length screenplay, a full length stage play. You know, we're looking at probably two, three, four pages, something like that. If you're writing a short film or a short story, maybe your outlines are going to be a page long. Maybe you only half a page long. You're going to write an outline for your story that breaks down the structure, all the important scenes that are going to happen, all of those dramatic beats that are happening throughout your story. 3. Cheeseburger Fundamentals: Now, if we're talking about narrative story telling, you're going to have a protagonist, a main character who is actively pursuing a goal. Characters want something, and that want drives them in pursuit of their goal. Aloong the way, they run into conflict. Something is blocking them from getting what they want. You can't make it easy on your protagonist. If it's easy to get what they want, then there's no meaning in it. There's no satisfaction in the achievement of the goal. Something has to be at stake. What happens if they don't get what they want? What happens if they do get what they want? So those are some basic elements that you're going to see in any narrative story. Character who wants something driven by a goal, pursues it actively, doesn't just sit around waiting for things to happen, but makes things happen, has to overcome conflict and obstacles in pursuit of the goal because there's something at stake. And ultimately, this leads to a climax and a resolution. Structure isn't the same thing as plot. Plot is what happens. Structure is how we arrange that. How do we put the pieces together for the audience to understand what we want them to understand? When I talk about structure with students, sometimes the red flag starts going up and students start panicking, Oh, no, I'm gonna have to follow some formula for my story. That's not what structure is about. So think of it this way. What makes a cheeseburger a cheeseburger? Well, you have to have the bun? You have to have the patty, and you have to have cheese. That's what makes a cheeseburger a cheeseburger. If you don't have those elements, you don't have a cheeseburger. Within those parameters, there are so many different variations. What kind of bun is it? Is it white? Is it wheat? Is it rye? Is it sour dough? Is it pretzel bun? Does it have sesame seeds? Is it plain? Is it toasted, and so on? With the patty? Is it beef? Is it a veggie burger? Is it a real thick patty? Is it a real thin one? Is it square? Is it round? Do you have two patties? How about cheese? Is Cheddar, Is it American? Is it Colby? Is it something else? Do you have a lot of cheese? You have just a little bit of chee. You also have all the other toppings. Ketch up mustard, onion, pickles, lettuce, bacon, whatever. So creating a structure for your story is very similar. There are certain elements that you need to have in order to make a story a story. But within that basic framework, there are infinite variations. And you can see that by the fact that people have been coming up with new stories for millennia. And there are certain characteristics that all of these stories throughout history will share. But there will also be all of those elements that make each story unique, Unique to the writer, unique to the specific themes, unique to whatever is going on. In that specific story. Now, every narrative story has three basic basic parts to its structure, beginning, middle, and end. Although, as filmmaker Jean Lu Godard pointed out, not necessarily in that order. Quentin Tarantino's pulp fiction. The different segments of that film are not in chronological order. He has ordered them in a way that gives the dramatic impact that he wants, but the scenes aren't necessarily in timeline. Other films might use flashbacks more sparsely. Some films like Andre Tarkovsky's, the mirror. It's more of a stream of consciousness kind of thing. One memory trickles into a fantasy into another memory, into the present, into another flashback. It's all connected more emotionally as opposed to chronological structures. So, much like the cheeseburger, must have the bun, the patty, and the cheese in order to be a cheeseburger, story needs to have a beginning, middle, and end, a protagonist in pursuit of a goal, overcoming conflict because something's at stake and ultimately leading to some sort of a climax and resolution. Those are the pieces that make a narrative story a story. Now, in your writing, you can stray from that. You can go off and do more experimental things and try stuff. But the further you move away from those basic tenets of what make a story a story, the smaller your audience gets. If that's what you want, Brick, if you want your story to be accessible to an audience, to a reader or to a viewer, then you're going to want to stick closer to that form. But there's no rule that says you have to do that. But that's the basics of structure. Now, let's delve into some of the more specific elements. 4. The Inciting Incident: Every story has to have a beginning, something that starts the events of the story. This is what some scholars will refer to as the inciting incident. Others will refer to it as the catalyst. Regardless of whatever term we want to use, it's the thing that starts the story in motion. Usually, this happens somewhere at the beginning of the story, in the first or second chapter, maybe, or in the first five or 10 minutes of the script. In the movie Jaws, the inciting incident, the thing that starts everything off is that the young woman gets eaten by the shark. And then shortly thereafter, the police chief Brody, finds out about it, says, Uh oh, we've got a shark attack. That's it. Now Brodie is off on the adventure of the story. His goal is to stop people from getting beaten by this shark. And his initial action from that is to go and try to close the beaches down. The conflict that he runs into at that point is the mayor and the town council and the bureaucracy telling him he can't do that because of economic reasons. It's a tourist town. It's summertime. They've got independence day coming up and the big celebration, and they don't want to cause a panic by closing the beach because of a shark. But all of the action of the story really starts because of that first shark attack. If that shark attack hadn't happened, none of the rest of the story would have happened. So oftentimes when we're figuring out how to tell a story, we want to consider the question of why now. So that inciting incident or catalyst is often the lie now, or at least is often part of the lie now. Why does Luke Skywalker get involved in the story of Star Wars? Well, because this happens to be the time when the inciting incident of the Droids crash landing on Taten and getting bought by Luke's uncle, and then RGD two running off. That's when that happens. If that hadn't happened, Luke would never go on the adventure. So the why now, why does Luke leave home and go learn the force and become a fighter in the Rebellion? Why does he do that now? Because of the events with Droit, and what happened on Princess Lea ship with Dark Vader attacking, and so on. Why does Hamlet go on the adventure of that play. Well, because at the end of the first act, the ghost of his father says, Yeah, my brother killed me and married my wife, your mother. So now there's a murderer and a usurper sitting on the throne, and I need to go take care of that. Hamlet wouldn't probably have done anything if he hadn't had that call to adventure from his father's ghost. In Greni gerwg's Barbie movie, The inciting incident is the flat feet. Barbie suddenly looks down and her feet are not, you know, up like how Barbie dolls feet usually are, but are flat. And she panics. What do I do? How do I solve this? In the classic Universal Monster movie, the creature from the Blackwood doom. There's a researcher down in the Amazon who finds this fossil of this weird web handed claw. He takes it back to the research institute, shows it to some of the other scientists and they go, Yeah, let's go see if we can find the rest. This might be this missing link, and change science, as we know it. In the novel, as well as the movie, the Multi S Falcon, the inciting incident is when Brigit Oshughesy, using one of her aliases, goes to Spade and Archer and hires them to tail this guy that supposedly has run off with her younger sister, which, of course, all turns out to be a smoke screen to hide her real motivation. But if she had never gone to Sam Spade and Miles Archer in the first place, they would never have begun the investigation. Archer wouldn't be murdered, and then Spade wouldn't be going on this adventure to try to solve the murder of his partner. So every Story needs some kind of inciting incident at the beginning to kick things off. And the way that the protagonists responds to that ultimately puts them in a position where they have to go on the journey of the story. Luke Skywalker has to leave home. Sam Spade has to investigate the murder of his partner. Hamlet has to go and find out if his uncle really did murder his father. Chief Brody has to try to kill the shark. And now we can get into the real meat of the story. 5. Turning Points: In any good narrative story, there should be a number of turning points. A turning point is essentially a fancy way of saying a climax. Something changes in the story. There's usually some kind of a set up, a crisis, or some kind of a little inciting incident. It could be the inciting incident of the entire story. It could be the inciting incident of a particular scene or chapter. By the end of that scene or chapter, something needs to ch And that's where we get to a turning point. The climax of the scene, the climax of the chapter, something changes in jaws. There's a scene where Chief Brody goes out to put up to close the beach signs, and he's going to try to get the boy scouts out of the bay that are doing the swim for a Mert Bag. That goal for that scene is to stop those kids before they eat by Shark. Then something happens that's unexpected. The mayor and a bunch of the other town council members show up and convince him that he can't just close the beaches on his own authority, that he needs to have permission from the town council and that there's economic reasons. Panic and all that stuff. So there's a turning point. The scene changes. If a scene or a chapter doesn't have a turning point. If there's no change in what's happening, then the scene or chapter is stagnant. The story doesn't move forward. If the protagonist ends up in the exact same place, they were at the end of the scene or the chapter that they were at the beginning of that scene or chapter. Why do we need to see that if nothing changes, if nothing happens? So we want to make sure that we have turning points. Each scene, each moment, every story beat results in a turning point. Something changes from positive to negative or from negative to positive. At the beginning of the scene, Regensins Monster isn't alive. At the end of the scene, the monster is alive. Something has changed, and now the story moves forward because of that change. And there are major turning points, which in screenplays and stage plays, are what we call act climaxes or act breaks. In a novel, this might happen every two, three, four chapters, depending on how you're structuring your novel exactly. Novels will typically have anywhere 12-20 major turning points. Sage plays, nowadays, we usually have about two. Although historically, we've also seen plays with five acts or three acts. Screen plays typically have three acts as well. But generally speaking, we want to make sure that at the end of each act or at the end of each big chunk of chapters, we have something big that turns. In a screenplay, you might have, Act one, you have your inciting incident. At the end of Act one, there's a major turning point that changes the direction of the story. That's Luke Sky Walker finding his aunt and uncle dead and saying, Alright, now I'm going to go off and fight the Empire. In Jaws, this is where the little boy gets eaten about 15, 20 minutes into the film. And now Chief Brody is like, Oh, what am I going to do? You know, now there's another death. Everyone saw it. This was very public, and now I have to do something. Then there's usually a midpoint. Somewhere in the middle of the story, we'll have a midpoint climax. It's often a point of no return. It's a point where the hero can't go back. So in Star Wars, this is where they're in the detention center trying to rescue Princess Lea and Honsal shoots the console while he's having that conversation with somebody on the other end. Now there's no way they can sneak back out of the death star. They're gonna have to fight their way out because everyone knows they're there. They're In Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, this is where they go through the tunnel with all the little bugs, and they finally make it through the other side, and the door closes behind them. They can't go back through the bug room to get back into the palace. They can only go deeper into these dark spooky caves, and ultimately into the temple itself. There's no going back at that point. Movie alien, the mid the point of return is the chest burster scene. Up until that point, they could have put an and quarantine, but they didn't. Instead, they bring him into the ship. The face hugger stuck on him, implants the alien embryo. Then he seems fine, everything's good, and then it bursts out, and now there's a monster running around the ship. They can't go back. They had their chance, and they missed it, and now it's too late to do anything. Now all they can do is move forward and try to stop this monster before it kills more of them. Then, usually about three quarters of the way through the story. We'll typically have another major turning point. Screenplay, this would be your second act climax. That's what Sinkfield would call the second plot point. And this is that big turning point that sends us into the home stretch toward the climax of the story. In Hamlet, at the end of Act four, this is the death of Ophelia, for instance, and that changes things now for Hamlet in Act five. Star Wars, this is when they escaped the death star. Right is the lost dark. This is where there's the truck chase, and Indiana Jones gets the arc of the covenant. In Jaws, this is where the ship gets disabled, where they're out on the water, and now they're stuck on the ware. The engine's broken, and the shark is circling. So that second plot point happens toward the end, about a quarter from the end of the story, and that's what launches us into the finale. So we have to have those turning points that change the direction of the story on a larger level, and then also on a small level seen by scene so that every scene or every chapter, something changes, and we're moving forward as opposed to stagnating. 6. Climax!: At the end of any narrative story, there needs to be a climax and a resolution. We get to the end and the goal that the hero has been pursuing since the beginning of the story. Well, now they're either going to achieve that goal or definitively fail to achieve the goal. Luke Skywalker is going to destroy the Death Star. Indiana Jones is going to get the arc of the covenant. Chief Brody is going to destroy the shark. Hamlet is going to get his revenge and kill Claudius. Sam Spade is going to figure out who killed Miles Archer. Or in the event of a tragedy, dips gouges his own eyes out. Or in the movie Chinatown, Jake Gies fails to protect Evelyn Moray, and she gets murdered at the end, and her daughter is taken away by her absolutely sleazy, horrific, rich father who can get away with murder. We need to have a satisfying conclusion. Now, one of the things I run into a lot with students is the idea of ambiguous endings. They want to leave things open ended. There's a degree to which ambiguity can be interesting, but there's an issue if you leave the ending completely ambiguous, and that is that you fail to resolve the conflict of the story. At the beginning of the story, we establish something called a dramatic question. It's the question that drives the action of the story. Will Hamlett get revenge? Will Indiana Jones get the arc of the covenant? Will Chief Brody kill the Shark? That's the question that drives everything. And at the end of the film or the end of the novel or the end of the play, We need to have an answer to that question. We don't necessarily have to have an answer to every question. But whatever that main dramatic question is that drives the plot, there needs to be a satisfying conclusion. That's the climax. That's the moment where the hero makes the biggest choice of the story and gets what they want in some surprising way or fails and it's tragedy. After the climax, we have usually the fancy term is a denuoi, but you could call an epilogue or a resolution or whatever you want to call it. It's the moment after the climax. And this is an important moment in story. Sometimes it's very, very short. We have the climax, and then maybe one more little bit, and we're out like a predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger. After Dutch kills the predator, there's just that one last scene of him on the helicopter flying out and don. Other times, we need that denuis to wrap up loose ends, tie up some of the other threads of the plot. But the main reason why it's important to have the moment after the climax is so that the audience, either the viewer or the reader or whatever, gets a moment to understand the importance of whatever the change is that happened in the climax. Luke Sky Walker is a farm boy. He's a nobody. He feels like, you know, what am I doing that really matters? My friends are all off, you know, fighting the Empire. Why can't I go to? Well, at the end, when he destroys the death star, now he gets a medal. There's a ceremony. People are cheering for him. And it's important to see that moment to understand Luke's character art and to understand that something big has changed. In Jaws, Chief Brody kills the shark, and in the last moment, reunites with Hooper, who, thankfully, isn't killed by the shark. The two of them are swimming back to shore together. It's a moment of levity after the intense build up of the finale. But the other thing that's nice there is we see Brodie swimming in the water. Brodi's big fatal flaw. His weakness in the story is that he has a fear of water. He's scared of drowning. He won't ever go in the water. Now at the end, he's swimming back to shore, and he's okay. The events of the story, facing his fear of the shark has allowed him to face his fear of being in the water, and now we see that he's overcome that, and he's r. Hamlet ends in a tragedy where all the main characters pretty much end up dead. Hamlet achieves his goal of getting revenge and killing his uncle, but also kills his own mother and a whole bunch of other people through his mechanations that weren't necessarily intended. And then Hamlet himself also dies. The end then is when Fort Bros comes in and shows up, and there's a nice little tribute to Hamlet. And then we're done. We're out. So ambiguity is okay, but we still need to have a satisfying conclusion that answers the dramatic question definitively. And then after that clima, then we get whatever the epilogue is, whatever that last denou is, that shows us how the story has affected the protagonist or other characters so that we can see that there was meaning in the journey and that there has come about some kind of a change that's important, or in the case of a tragedy, a change that is negative, or a lack of change that is destructive. But regardless, we need an ending. 7. Chekhov's Gun: Maybe some of you have heard of the concept of Chekhov's gun. Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, said, anything that's in your story needs to be there with a purpose. If you introduce a gun in Act one, it needs to go off sometime by the end of Act three. Otherwise, why is that gun there? This gets into the idea of what we call set ups and payoffs. We want to make sure that things that we introduce in our story have a purpose and will somehow come back later to be important, or that if we do introduce something important later on, that we've properly established the possibility of that early in the story so that we don't go well, that came out of nowhere. For instance, if you've ever seen the movie Hot Fuzz by Edgar Wright. There are tons of great setups and payoffs throughout that movie. If you're not familiar with the story, it's about this amazing police officer who works in the London Police Service, who is by the book and has a higher arrest record than anybody else. He's making everybody in London look bad. So they send him off to this little village in the country to go be a constable there. Instead of going after murderers and bank robbers and such, now he's looking for a swan that escaped. It seems like a throwaway joke. It's funny He's just Then later, there's a scene where he catches a shoplifter and he's chasing the shoplifter on foot. While he's chasing the shoplifter, he sees the swan. And now our protagonist has to make a choice. Do I go and get the swan that I was looking for earlier or do I keep chasing the shoplifter? And of course, he goes after the shoplifter. Then there's another payoff at the end. There's a high speed car chase. And the hero finds the swan in the middle of this car chase, and they pull the swan up and put him in the back seat of the car while they're chasing the bag guy down. At the end, one of the bag guys ends up getting into that car and driving away to escape and doesn't realize the swans in the back, and the swan attacks him and he crashes the car. And that's how they catch the bag guy at the end of what seems like this throwaway joke ends up being a setup for how the film is going to end. If at the end of the movie, they just kind of go, Oh, here's that swan you're looking for. But we've never had any reference. There's been no setup. Then the audience goes, Well, where did that come from? That seems like a convenient plot contrivance. What? It's just out of nowhere, right? Because we've had that set up already, when it comes back at the end, it feels correct. It feels like, Okay, they already laid the pipe for that. We understand where that came from, we understand why the swan is here. In the Shawshank redemption. Andy D Fran always wants these posters of movie stars. Rita Hayworth, later on, Raquel It seems like, Okay, he's in prison, so he wants an attractive woman on his wall that he can look at. Well, at the end of the story, and we find out the payoff to that is that he's been using that to hide the tunnel he's been digging for, 20 years or whatever. The posters themselves are setups for this payoff. Lots of little setups and payoffs all throughout that story. There's an infamous movie called the Room made by a guy named Tommy Wiss, and the room is one of those very popular bad movies that's hilariously nonsensical. If you've ever seen the movie, you know, there's a very famous bit in the first probably half hour or so of the film where one of the main characters, Lisa, is having a conversation with her mother, and her mother reveals that she has breast cancer. And it's a big reveal. It's like, Whoa, Okay, breast cancer. Cancer has been brought into the story. So Presumably, that's gonna be a big plot point, and it's never mentioned again for the entire rest of the film. So it's a setup without a payoff, and it makes us wonder, why is it even there? If it's not going to mean anything dramatically, then why did the writer put it in the script? If you're going to set something up, make sure that it pays off. If you're going to pay something off, make sure you've set it up. 8. Mythic Structure, Part 1: A. So we've been talking about major turning points. We've been talking about beginning, middle, and end, inciting incident or catalyst, climax, resolution, steps and payoffs and all of that. But if we want to get into structure on a somewhat deeper level, one of the structures that is pretty commonly known amongst writers is the hero's journey. The hero's journey comes from the idea of mythic story telling. It's the idea that throughout history, different cultures existing in different places at different times have had similar frameworks for how they build narrative. So there must be something inherent to the concept of story across the board in humanity regardless of culture, time period, and so on. Joseph Campbell, in his book, the hero of 100 Faces, distilled this into this process called the hero's journey. And essentially, it's a 12 step process that takes us through the journey of our hero in a very organic way. And again, you could say, Well, this is all, a formula that I can follow. It's not a rigid formula. There's flexibility within it. Two of the 12 steps are kind of optional, and they don't necessarily always go in the same order. It's more of a framework that gets into the psychology of how a character goes through a journey. The first step is what we call the ordinary world. The beginning of the story, we want to establish the hero in their normal space or whatever's normal for them. So we see Sky Walker on the farm, being unsatisfied and feeling like his uncle hasn't let him do Hamlet, we see him moping around the castle, kind of being a jerk to aphelia. He's depressed. He's sad because his father's dead, his mother's married to his uncle. Marty McFly, back to the future, we see him with his parents and his siblings, we meet his girlfriend, we meet all the people that inhabit his ordinary world in his present of 1985. During the ordinary world, we typically establish that the protagonist has a longing. Luke Skywalker wants adventure. Marty McFly wants to be a rock. This is often in Disney movies where we get the song. Ariel wants to be part of that world. Bell just wants to be left alone so she can read her books. Aladdin wants people to look at him and not just see a street rat. He's, you know, he's something lore. Simba just wants to be king. So we establish whatever it is that they're longing for, whatever their heart's desire is in that ordinary world, and we set up that ordinary world so that we can see a contrast when they move into the special world of the adventure. Some point, the hero gets a call to adventure. Something happens. Some kind of a catalyst or inciting incident that pulls them out of their ordinary world and says, We need you to go on an adventure. Gandolf says to Frodo, you know, take the ring. Oman says, Luke, come with me to Alderon. Hamt's father says, I need you to avenge me, son. Usually, and this is one of the optional steps, but usually the hero then rejects the call to adventure. No, thank you. I'm not interested in going on the adventure. That's a very human thing to do. Oftentimes, even when it's something we really deep down want, we're also often really deep down scared because it takes us out of a comfort zone. When Ove says, Mok, come with me, Mok says, Oh, no, thanks. I got to go back and work on the farm. When Neo in the matrix is asked, you know, to take that leap of faith, essentially by going out on the ledge and following the instructions of Morpheus over the foam, Neo can't do it. Goes back inside and is arrested by the agents. Sometimes the call to adventure is refused for the hero. Like in the Harry Potter stories, Harry is getting all these invitations to go to Hogwarts, and his aunt and uncle are preventing him from going. Typically around this point, the hero will have a meeting with the mentor. Now, a mentor character is someone who gives guidance to the protagonist. Oftentimes, they'll give some sort of gifts. For instance, in the James Bond movies, Q will give James Bond advice, and will also give him gadgets to use in the story. In Star Wars, Obi Kano is guiding Luke's path and gives him the light saber. So the meeting with the mentor often we have those gifts, but it's really about guidance. And many times we see the meeting with the mentor happen early in the story around the time of the call to adventure or the refusal of the call, because the mentor will then give the hero guidance as far as going on the adventure. Sometimes the mentor is the one who actually calls the hero to adventure. In Gladiator, it's Marcus relius. Maximus' first mentor, the Emperor of Rome. Who says, I want you to give Rome back to herself and make Roma Republic when I die. In Star Wars, Obion inob is the one who says, Luke, come with me. Obi Wan is the mentor, and he wants Luke to join him on the adventure. In other cases, the mentor might be cautioning the hero about going on the adventure, like in agers of the Lost star. Indiana Jones doesn't refuse the call. He wants to go. He's a Gung Ho hero who wants to go find the art. Marcus Brody, his mentor and his boss at the university is saying, Indy, you've got to be careful. This isn't like anything you've done before. Some mentors are dark mentor. Sarman as a dark mentor to Gandolf Gandolf a wise mentor to Frodo. But regardless, somehow or other, ultimately, the hero is going to choose to go on the adventure, and they're going to follow the next step, which is what we call crossing the threshold. Crossing the threshold takes the hero from the ordinary world into the special world of the story. In Lord of the Rings, this is where Frodo and Sam leave the shire with the ring. In Star Wars. This is where Luke and Obion go to Moses to try to find a pilot to take them off of town of me. I'm going to leave home for the first time. Or now I'm going to start hunting the shark, or I'm going to start searching for the treasure or whatever the thing is. Once the hero crosses the threshold, now they're in the special world, and they have to learn the rules of the special world. And so we end up in a phase of the hero's journey that's often called Tests allies and enemies. And what happens here is the hero will often meet allies. So Luke Skywalker meets Honsol, and Chubaka, and so on. And then they'll also start to encounter enemies that they may not have encountered before, like storm troopers. The hero will also be tested. They're going on a journey now. Ultimately, they're going to have to resolve the goal. In order to do that, they have to know how to engage with whenever the conflict is. So in Star Wars, Luke is tested when the storm troopers come up and start asking about the dois. Luke doesn't know what to do. Obi Wan saves them. They go into the cantina, and that weird guy starts bullying Luke and pushing them around. Luke tries to respond diplomatically. He fails. Avian steps in and is like, All right, let me take care of this. Later when they're on the millennium falcon, Luke is training with the helmet with the visor. He's got the lightsaber the little thing shooting at him. In the matrix. Neo crosses the threshold when he takes the pill. And then he wakes up in the real world. And now he's not in this computer simulation anymore. He's in the real world. Here's what it's like. Here are the other people on Morpheus ship. Upload training programs, and I can learn Kung fu and do martial arts. And you know, I have to do this big jump and all this stuff. Neo is learning about the special world. He's learning the rules of the special world. He's training and meeting other characters that are going to be important throughout the story. Okay, so that brings us almost to the middle of the story. We'll pick this up in the next lesson with more on the hero's journey. 9. Mythic Structure, Part 2: So when we left off, we're talking about the hero's journey, and the protagonist had moved into the special world and was going through the Test allies and enemies phase learning the rules of the special world. Well, as we move closer to the middle of the story, we're usually coming up to a section that's called the inmost cave or the ordeal. And before we get to that phase, we have an approach to the ord. And that approach is important because we want to build suspense. In Star Wars, we have this sequence where the characters are going through hyperspace. They're flying along and, you know, approaching Alderon. That's where they're going. And we're building suspense, and they come out of hyperspace and Olderon is gone, and they see the small moon, and it's the death star. And are trying to get away, and they're slowly being pulled in by the tractor beam. We could just skip through that quickly. But by having that sequence in there, it's building suspense. It's building up momentum and tension, what's going to happen when they get into the death star. In gladiator in that movie, this is the whole march to Rome. Maximus and the other gladiators are on their way from the little arenas in the middle of nowhere. They're going to Rome itself and approaching the Colosseum. When they get in the Coliseum. And they're inside and they're waiting and the gates are going to open and something's going to come out of those gates. So there's this long build up of suspense. Then we enter into the inmost cave or the ordeal. This is where the hero is going to face the biggest forces of antagonism that they faced throughout the story. Often, this is a pretty big chunk of the story. And it usually involves going into the villain's turf if you have a villain. Or into some kind of a dark place. From mythology, this literally is off a a cave. Sometimes even the der Hercules or Odysseus or various other characters, Orpheus traveling to the underworld in order to achieve certain goals. In the empire strikes back, Luke literally goes into a cave to battle the dark side version of himself. Well, in the original Star War, that takes the form of the death star. When Luke and the others end up inside the death star, that is the ordeal. That is the inmost cave. Luke is now having to face going on the adventure without his mentor, because Ovi separates from him. And so now Luke has to start taking steps on his own to become proactive and to become the hero that he's meant to become. But while he's there, he's going to face overwhelming conflict. In Gladiator, this is when Maximus and the other gladiator slaves are in the arena in the Colosseum in Rome, and they're facing, like, the, meanest, toughest gladiators that Rome can throw at them. In Lord of the Rings, in fellowship with the Ring, They actually go into the minds of Moria, a literal cave. They have to fight Orcs, and they're separated from Gandolf when he appears to die fighting the Bao. After the hero makes it through the ordeal or the inmost cave, there will usually be a sequence called rewards and consequences. Since the ordeal is such a big chunk of the story and involves facing such big conflict, we typically need a moment for our hero to sit back and assess what they've gained or lost. Neo needs to figure out what do I do now that Morpheus has been captured? Frodo and the rest of the fellowship are mourning the loss of Gandolf, Hamlet mourns the death of Ophelia, and so on. We have all these characters who are mourning loss, but we also have characters assessing what they've gained. In Ryder's Lost Ark, this is the moment where Indiana Jones has the arc, and he and Marion are finally together and they're on this ship, and they're on their way on their way home, and it's going to be good. Of course, things don't go as planned, but, in that moment, they've gone through a terrible ordeal, and now something good has happened at least for right now, and they're enjoying. In Star Wars, they're mourning the loss of Obion, but they're also celebrating the fact that they've gotten r2d2 away from the Empire and back to the Rebellion, and now they can look at the plans to destroy the Death Star. At this point, as we move closer to the climax, usually we want to start picking up the pace. And this is where we often end up with a sequence called the Road Back. This is where the hero in traditional mythic storytelling, will often return to the ordinary world for whatever the final thing is. So in the original Lord of the Rings books, in return to the King, the Hobbits go back to the Shire and have to face off with Saman at the Shire. After they've defeated Saron. That doesn't happen in the movie version, but that's what happens in the book. But it's not always a literal returning back to the ordinary world. The road back is essentially a path to the climax. It's sort of like the approach to the cave, except that it's taking us to the climax instead. Sometimes it's a chase sequence. In Star Wars, this is where they're going toward the death star and having the big dog fight with the X wings versus the tie fight. Indiana just in the Temple of Doom. This is that great mine car chase, where they're trying to escape from the temple after they rescued all the slave kids, and India has gotten the Shankar stones. And back to the future, this is Martin McFly and the Dolorian, getting ready to hit the gas and return to 1985 and try to save Doc from getting killed by terrorists. Once we get through the road back, that's when we arrive at the climax, and in mythic terms, we get what we refer to as a death and resurrection. Now, this might be a literal death and resurrection like Neo in the matrix. But oftentimes it's the death of an idea or the death of a colleague or It's the almost death of the hero. In Star Wars, it looks like Luke is about to be destroyed by Darth Vader. And then at the last second, Honslo shows up for a quick assist, and then Luke fires the torpedos that blow up the death star. In Hamlet, Hamlet does end up getting killed, but he still gets his revenge as part of that. He dies in order to have his vengeance. At the end of Gladiator, Maximus dies, but There's this resurrection of Rome as a Republican instead of an empire. At least, you know, that's the plan. But also, we see that Maximus is resurrected in the after life. He gets to join his wife and son in Elysium after that. So, in that case, there's a literal death and a spiritual resurrection, as opposed to a physical one, and then a national resurrection. More often than not, the character doesn't actually die. They simply are on the brink of death. Or maybe it's a fake out like back to the future. Marty gets there just a little too late to save Doc, and it looks like Doc gets killed. Then we find out that Doc actually saved the letter that he had torn up back in 1955, and he appears to be resurrected simply because he was wearing a bulletproof vest and didn't actually die. This is the big climactic moment where everything is on the line. Everything that can possibly be at stake is at stake, and the hero has to triumph or fail in that climax that we talked about earlier. Then in mythic terms, we have what's called the return with the Elixir. This is where the hero returns home with the treasure or having saved the princess or whatever. So going back to what we talked about earlier with the Danos or the epilogue, where we see how the adventure has changed the hero or has changed the world around the hero if the hero himself or herself has died. That's the hero's journey in a nutshell. It's a complicated. If you want to get more in depth in, there are lots of books you can check out to dig deeper into that. But it's a really handy way to break down the structure for the protagonists journey emotionally, psychologically, because it does really get into the idea of how a character thinks and how the audience is going to think and feel as they're watching the story. 10. Subplots: Oftentimes in narratives, we have more than one plot line going at once. We'll often have the main story, which is the A story, and then we'll have, B and C and D stories, sometimes and these subplots. Sometimes the subplots are very significant. Sometimes they're very small and just kind of, like, almost a running joke throughout a piece. But it's important to understand that when you do introduce a subplot, that subplot needs to have a structure just like the A story does. When we map out Luke Skywalker's hero journey in Star Wars, we can also map out a parallel villain journey for Darth Vader, and see that he's hitting similar turning points, but from the villains point of view, but it might not necessarily even be the villain. It might just mean that there are multiple plot lines that are running. Sometimes, we see some rather unusual structures and subplots can step in to help make those work. Let me give you two examples of those. One is the movie Rocky. Rocky has a very strange structure in that the main character, Rocky Balboa doesn't get the call to adventure for the A story until the midpoint of the movie. So we're spending the first half of the movie, not in the story of Rocky training to fight Apollo Creed. That's what the movie is really ultimately about. Is this idea of a character who's kind of given up on himself, who feels that everyone else has given up on him, and he gets this big second chance to go and prove his work. But we don't actually get to that until halfway into the film. Now, why? Why did Sylvester Stelne structure his script like that? Well, we need time to get to know Rocky Belva before he gets that called with venture so that we really understand what a big big deal it is for him to be fighting the champion, that he lives in a crappy apartment, that he's been kicked out of his locker down at the gym because whatever he's not paying his dues or he's losing fights. He can't get Mickey to train him or properly manage him because Mickey doesn't think he's got what it takes. Basically, he's a small time enforcer for a small time gangster. And so we have to understand Rocky's situation in order to understand why this call to adventure from Apollo Creed is such a huge deal for him. But also, so that when we get to that point, we're going, Oh, man, Rocky is gonna d. There's no way he can do this. And now we feel sympathy. So, if that's the case, if we don't even get to the A story until halfway into the movie, what are we doing for the first half? Well, that's where subplots come in. And the main subplot in Rocky is the romantic relationship between Rocky and Adrian. And the relationship has a structure. It has a beginning, middle and end. It has, you know, all the elements of the hero's journey. In a smaller format because it's a subplot. And that is the subplot that we're following that's keeping us invested in the character for the first half of the movie. And through that subplot, we learn everything that we need to know about Rocky and his situation and his life, so that when we get to the middle and Apoocret says, I want you to fight me in the ring, we understand, Oh, my goodness, this is crazy. Less extreme, but sort of similar is Casablanca. The major inciting incident for Casablanca doesn't come until the end of the first act of that movie. It's almost a half an hour in when Ilsa and Victor L asilo walk into the door of Rick's cafe. And the a story in Casablanca is the love story between Rick and Ilsa. There are a whole bunch of other subplots in that movie. Will Victor Laslo escape from the Nazis. There's also the major subplot of the couriers. Two Nazi couriers are murdered on a train at the beginning of the film, and someone has stolen these letters of transit that will allow people to leave Casablanca legally without any question, this could either be sold on the Black market for a ridiculous price or the person who stole it could use it themselves. That subplot is a major part of what starts off Casablanca during that first half hour while we're waiting to get to the A story. Because we need to understand who Rick is. When Ugarte, Peter Laurie's character shows up and reveals that he has the letters of transit. We need to understand that when the police come to arrest Ugarte for the murder of the German couriers, that Rick isn't going to stick his neck out. He's not going to get involved. He's not going to interfere. We also have Senior Ferrara, the Sydney Greenstreet character who shows up and wants to buy Rick's cafe. We learn more about Rick. He doesn't treat human beings as commodities to be bought and sold. There are things that we're learning about Rick that we need to know before Ilsa shows up. If Ilsa shows up in the first 5 minutes, then we don't really get the full impact of that dynamic in their relationship, and why when he starts acting differently around her, why that's a big deal? Even movies that start right out with the A story will often have subplots that fill in the gaps or that add complimentary elements to the main story. Rader is the Los Stark, the A stories about Indiana Jones trying to get the arch of the covenant. The B story is about Indiana Jones's relationship with Mary. Love stories are often included as B stories. The other important thing to remember is that not every story needs to have subplots. Many stories do. But not all of them. If you're writing a short story or a short film or a short play, you might only want to have an A story to keep it focused because it's short, but even a long form story might not have a subplot. The first John Wick movie doesn't really have any subplots. It's pretty much all a story. The sequels have subplots, but the first one is very straightforward, very streamlined. So whatever medium you're writing in, if you do decide that your story needs subplots, make sure to structure them, give the subplots beginning middle and end, find ways to balance them with the A story, and make sure that they add something to the story that they're not just there to fill. But rather that they're there to compliment something thematically or to provide another perspective on a character, to tell us something that we need to know or potentially to set up something that's going to pay off in the A story later on. Whatever that is, use your subplots wisely. 11. Lesson 9 Prewriting: When you're writing a story, it can be very helpful to do what's called pre writing, which is what you do before you actually write the story proper. So before you write your novel or before you write your play or before you write your screenplay or whatever. Prewriting will often include making an outline or writing up a synopsis or something like that. In screenwriting, we'll do something called a treatment, which is essentially a prose version of our movie that we're writing. Might be five pages, might be ten, might be 50 pages. But generally speaking, it's a good idea to at least do some kind of an outline. I like to write, just some bullet points when I write a story, just to get the main turning points onto a page so I can see how the story is going to be structured. So I can understand what order am I going to put the scenes? Are there moments when I want to jump to a subplot? Do I want to go to another character's point of view here? Do I want to do a flashback? What scenes do I need? What scenes do I not need? What are the main beats I need to hit? An outline can be really useful. The other thing I would really recommend is writing what's called a log line. A log line is a one or two sentence summary of your story. So, the log line of the movie Rocky might be something like this. A small time boxer gets a chance to fight the world champ, and in doing so, faces his own self doubts. It's pretty simple and straightforward. It tells us what the main conflict is. We have a sense of who the protagonist is. A log life for Hamlet might go something like this. When he finds out that his father, the king, may have been murdered by his uncle, who is now the king, a Danish prince sets out to get vengeance by feigning madness. So there are really two reasons why a log line is useful. One is because you can use it to help sell your story. The other reason why I think a good log line is really useful is that it can help you as a writer, stay focused on what the main point of your story is, stay on track and not go off on a bunch of irrelevant tangents. I would very much recommend do some prewriting. Write a log line, write an outline. If there's more that you want to do, great. There are all kinds of other things you can do. You can write a character bio. You can write a description of the world of the story. If you're doing like a fantasy or science fiction film. Maybe you want to break down how the government works or how the economy works or how society is structured or how technology in that story world will work. But regardless, I would very strongly recommend do some pre writing before you do the hard work of putting it all into the actual format of the novel or the script. 12. Closing: All right, so we've come to the end of our course on story st. We've talked about why structure is important in stories. We've talked about fundamental elements like beginning, middle, and end, goals, conflict, stakes. We've talked about turning points, in signing incidents, midpoints, climaxes resolutions. We've talked about set up some payoffs, the hero's journey, we've talked about pre writing, all of these things. Hopefully this will help you in structuring your own story. Looking forward to seeing some of your outlines of the project gallery. Good luck with your writing. Have fun with it.