Of course, there are countless variations on the three-act structure, but ultimately, it’s tried and tested and most Hollywood blockbusters stick to it slavishly.
As do novels.
And reports in newspapers.
And scientific experiments.
But not cucumbers, for reasons that I hope are obvious.
However, to show that I don’t harbour any ill will toward cucumbers (I am completely over the time one stole away my true love, despite her always saying she didn’t even like cucumbers, which is the reason why I was quite happy to get postman in the ‘reasons why she will leave’ sweepstake), we shall construct a story with a cucumber as the hero.
This cucumber’s a cop. He probably plays by his own rules and even plays fast and loose with them. But he’s not a loose cannon, he’s a cucumber. Called Reg.
So, what’s our plot? Well, Reg is out to take down the local druglord, Rodriguez the Melon. Why? Because Rodriguez the Melon killed Reg’s family and ran over his pet kumquat.
How we would structure such a story? Well, we covered the question of showing versus telling in the previous column, so let’s play safe and show the key dramatic moments of the story:
1. Rodriguez the Melon killing Reg’s family and running over the kumquat.Not a great story. Not even Reg diving in slow motion firing twin Uzis and crashing through a crate of cabbages is going to elevate this story above perfunctory.
2. Reg taking down Rodriguez the Melon in a gunfight at the local greengrocer.
Why is it failing?
For a start, the death of Reg’s family has no impact. We may cringe at the visceral depiction of their slaughter, but it’s the slaughter of strangers. We may sympathise with Reg’s loss, but we cannot empathise with it. So, let’s add a new scene at the start:
1. Reg laughing and joking as he celebrates St Celery’s Day with his family.Better, though the massacre comes rather out of the blue. We need the audience to understand that Reg is a cop and he’s investigating Rodriguez the Melon’s egg-nog trafficking business. This gives us a good opportunity to start the action in medias res (which is latin for: ‘start your story with gunfire and shit blowing up and you won’t go far wrong, my son’):
2. Rodriguez the Melon killing Reg’s family and running over the kumquat.
3. Reg taking down Rodriguez the Melon in a gunfight at the local greengrocer.
1. Reg raiding a ship bringing in an illegal shipment of egg-nogYou’ll have spotted I added two scenes here. The first shows Reg doing cop stuff, the second sets up Mr Melon. His response to the news serves two ends: show he’s a nasty piece of work by the way he despatches that pineapple and provide the missing link in the chain of events that leads from the egg-nog raid to the cucumber slaughter.
2. Rodriguez the Melon getting annoyed by the lost shipment and decapitating the pineapple who relayed the news
3. Reg laughing and joking as he celebrates St Celery’s Day with his family.
4. Rodriguez the Melon killing Reg’s family and running over the kumquat.
5. Reg taking down Rodriguez the Melon in a gunfight at the local greengrocer.
The problem now is the end. Jumping from the killings to the showdown gunfight makes things far too easy for Reg. Rather like we couldn’t empathise with his loss before seeing his family laughing and joking prior to their demise, we also can’t invest emotionally in his quest for revenge if he duly extracts it a few seconds later.
Thus, we throw some obstacles in his way:
1. Reg raiding a ship bringing in an illegal shipment of egg-nog
2. Rodriguez the Melon getting annoyed by the lost shipment and decapitating the pineapple who relayed the news
3. Reg laughing and joking as he celebrates St Celery’s Day with his family.
4. Rodriguez the Melon killing Reg’s family and running over the kumquat.
5. Reg going after Rodriguez the Melon in a restaurant, fails to kill him.
6. Reg suspended by his captain for landing the department a hefty repair bill.
7. Rodriguez the Melon receives a phone call suggesting that discrediting the grieving Reg would serve as a better revenge than simply killing him.
8. Reg sitting on his bed, looking at a picture of his family and downing a bottle of Carrot Juice.
9. Wakes up with a hangover next to a murdered banana.
10. Goes on the run for a murder he didn’t commit.
11. He makes contact with his partner, says he was framed. Is told the banana worked at the infamous Cauliflower Lounge.
12. Reg goes to investigate, but the police are waiting - his partner sold him out!
13. Reg confronts his partner in an allotment near Swindon and finds out Rodriguez the Melon will be at the local greengrocer at twelve o’clock the next day.
14. Reg takes down Rodriguez the Melon in a gunfight at the local greengrocer.
And that is precisely how easy it is to write a direct to video action movie featuring assorted fruit and vegetables.
Now, without really trying, we’ve followed the three-act structure.
Act 1 – scenes 1 to 4: Set up the characters and context in the first three scenes, then light the touch paper with the inciting point of the murders in scene 4.
Act 2 – scenes 5 to 11: Raise the stakes for the hero by throwing obstacles in his way.
Act 3 – scene 12 to 13: Conclude the show.
Now, we could be all arty by swapping some of these scenes around. Why not kill the family and then show the happier times through flashback? Well, flashbacks tend to be less dramatic and involving because they dealing with then rather than now. Putting things in chronological order is also nice and straightforward for your audience, who, let’s be honest, might not all be as smart as you.
Conventional quest-driven novels work pretty much the same way, though as they’re longer than screenplays, Act 2 is usually longer. Alternatively, some sub-plots are thrown in to pad things out. These sub-plots end up getting structured in the same way, they’re just interwoven with the main narrative and can start and end at any point.
Okay, let’s get reductive. Is that a Black-Eyed Peas song? No, it’s not. There is an underlying principle here and it goes right to the very heart of storytelling.
The world is like this, something happens… then what? Did that something have any effect? We don’t know. We learn nothing.
The world is like this… the world is now like this. Why? We know a change has taken place, but we don’t know what. We learn nothing.
Something happens, the world is now like this. But what was the world like before? We don’t know and so again, can’t judge that something’s effect. We learn nothing.
We learn by testing the world around us. What happens if I do this? What changes as a result? This allows us to build up an understanding of the rules that govern our existence.
You’re a baby. You cry. Your mother comes to comfort you. You learn that crying delivers comfort.
You’re a baby. You cry. No one comes. You learn that crying does not bring comfort and, eventually, you stop crying.
But we can also learn from the actions of others. We can watch someone else make a mistake and learn not to do it ourselves. We can read about rules of cause and effect in a book and add that knowledge to our own experience. We can deduce cause and effect from abstract concepts that have no physical reality – if I add 2 and 2, I get 4.
We evolved the ability to do this so we wouldn’t get eaten by bears.
We watch Bob poke that sleeping bear with a stick and then see the bear wake up and maul Bob to death. We watch Pete do the same thing. We then watch Meryl spy the bear (which is asleep once again), pick up a stick and walk over to said bear with a facial expression that expresses poking intent.
And, with a fair degree of confidence, we can predict the future.
I’m going to repeat that, because it is possibly the most astounding ability any creature could evolve to help ensure its continued survival: we can predict the future.
This is why stories have been around since homo sapien pushed homo erectus off that cliff while no one was looking. They are constructed using the same grammar that our brain uses to understand the world. They can teach us complex new patterns that we would struggle to observe in the world around us, patterns like: ‘good always triumphs over evil in the end’ or ‘the bonds of friendship can overcome the ravages of war’.
Okay, let’s come up with a structure based on a pattern instead of a plot. We’ll pick the pattern ‘good always triumphs over evil in the end’, because it’s easy and trite. We’ll also start calling the pattern our theme, because that’s what all those books on writing call it.
How can we structure a story to illustrate how ‘good always triumphs over evil in the end’? Well, to keep things simple let’s assign good and bad to a couple of characters. Maybe we call the good guy ‘Reg the cucumber’ and the bad guy ‘Rodriguez the Melon’. To illustrate our theme then, we have to show Reg triumphing over Rodriguez. But we’re not going throw away what we know about showing and telling, so we need to show that Reg is good and Rodriguez is bad. Hmm, we could do that by making Reg a cop who treats his friends and family well and Rodriguez a drug baron who murders Reg’s family and runs over his kumquat…
You get the idea. Even with a completely different starting point – theme instead of plot – we can still come up with the same result, because the structural principles are the same whichever path we take.
The stock in trade of a writer is words, but a storyteller’s art lies in mastering structure and theme. Unfortunately, while problems with words are easy to identify and fix, structural problems are a more elusive beast.
Failing to show Reg with his family before they get killed is a structural problem. The prose can be slick and effective, but the story is crippled. The reader may not know why, but when they finish the final page, they’ll know this tale was simply less satisfying than the remarkably similar one they read last week that also featured a crime-fighting cucumber, but this time he was called Roy and he enjoyed a barbeque with his family and pet kumquat before they were killed.
Or maybe we forgot to put a scene in showing how bad Rodriguez is. Our theme is good triumphing over evil, but without that moment of character development, the theme becomes good triumphing over some bloke, which isn’t nearly as powerful a message.
But what if you don’t know that your theme is good triumphing over evil? How would you tell in that case that a lack of demonstrable evilness is the problem?
Well, you couldn’t.
You might guess and get lucky, or experience might guide your hand in the right direction without you being aware of the reasoning behind it, but to conduct a conscious appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of a story, you have to understand theme and structure (subtext). These are both revealed through plot and character (the narrative), and communicated to the reader through words (the easy bit).
I will end with this article with a warning. In a story the storyteller is God. You create the world and everything within it. You decide:
Thus a storyteller can be a dangerous individual indeed.
Now, without really trying, we’ve followed the three-act structure.
Act 1 – scenes 1 to 4: Set up the characters and context in the first three scenes, then light the touch paper with the inciting point of the murders in scene 4.
Act 2 – scenes 5 to 11: Raise the stakes for the hero by throwing obstacles in his way.
Act 3 – scene 12 to 13: Conclude the show.
Now, we could be all arty by swapping some of these scenes around. Why not kill the family and then show the happier times through flashback? Well, flashbacks tend to be less dramatic and involving because they dealing with then rather than now. Putting things in chronological order is also nice and straightforward for your audience, who, let’s be honest, might not all be as smart as you.
Conventional quest-driven novels work pretty much the same way, though as they’re longer than screenplays, Act 2 is usually longer. Alternatively, some sub-plots are thrown in to pad things out. These sub-plots end up getting structured in the same way, they’re just interwoven with the main narrative and can start and end at any point.
Okay, let’s get reductive. Is that a Black-Eyed Peas song? No, it’s not. There is an underlying principle here and it goes right to the very heart of storytelling.
With those three pieces of information, we gain understanding of the world around us. If we’re missing any one of them, we understand nothing.The world is like this.
Something happens.
The world is now like this.
The world is like this, something happens… then what? Did that something have any effect? We don’t know. We learn nothing.
The world is like this… the world is now like this. Why? We know a change has taken place, but we don’t know what. We learn nothing.
Something happens, the world is now like this. But what was the world like before? We don’t know and so again, can’t judge that something’s effect. We learn nothing.
We learn by testing the world around us. What happens if I do this? What changes as a result? This allows us to build up an understanding of the rules that govern our existence.
You’re a baby. You cry. Your mother comes to comfort you. You learn that crying delivers comfort.
You’re a baby. You cry. No one comes. You learn that crying does not bring comfort and, eventually, you stop crying.
But we can also learn from the actions of others. We can watch someone else make a mistake and learn not to do it ourselves. We can read about rules of cause and effect in a book and add that knowledge to our own experience. We can deduce cause and effect from abstract concepts that have no physical reality – if I add 2 and 2, I get 4.
We evolved the ability to do this so we wouldn’t get eaten by bears.
We watch Bob poke that sleeping bear with a stick and then see the bear wake up and maul Bob to death. We watch Pete do the same thing. We then watch Meryl spy the bear (which is asleep once again), pick up a stick and walk over to said bear with a facial expression that expresses poking intent.
And, with a fair degree of confidence, we can predict the future.
I’m going to repeat that, because it is possibly the most astounding ability any creature could evolve to help ensure its continued survival: we can predict the future.
This sequence of cause and effect constitutes a pattern and our brains are pattern-matching machines par excellence. If we see the pattern: ‘sleeping bear, poked with stick’, we can deduce ‘mauled to death’ will follow.The world is like this.
Something happens.
The world is now like this.
This is why stories have been around since homo sapien pushed homo erectus off that cliff while no one was looking. They are constructed using the same grammar that our brain uses to understand the world. They can teach us complex new patterns that we would struggle to observe in the world around us, patterns like: ‘good always triumphs over evil in the end’ or ‘the bonds of friendship can overcome the ravages of war’.
Okay, let’s come up with a structure based on a pattern instead of a plot. We’ll pick the pattern ‘good always triumphs over evil in the end’, because it’s easy and trite. We’ll also start calling the pattern our theme, because that’s what all those books on writing call it.
How can we structure a story to illustrate how ‘good always triumphs over evil in the end’? Well, to keep things simple let’s assign good and bad to a couple of characters. Maybe we call the good guy ‘Reg the cucumber’ and the bad guy ‘Rodriguez the Melon’. To illustrate our theme then, we have to show Reg triumphing over Rodriguez. But we’re not going throw away what we know about showing and telling, so we need to show that Reg is good and Rodriguez is bad. Hmm, we could do that by making Reg a cop who treats his friends and family well and Rodriguez a drug baron who murders Reg’s family and runs over his kumquat…
You get the idea. Even with a completely different starting point – theme instead of plot – we can still come up with the same result, because the structural principles are the same whichever path we take.
The stock in trade of a writer is words, but a storyteller’s art lies in mastering structure and theme. Unfortunately, while problems with words are easy to identify and fix, structural problems are a more elusive beast.
Failing to show Reg with his family before they get killed is a structural problem. The prose can be slick and effective, but the story is crippled. The reader may not know why, but when they finish the final page, they’ll know this tale was simply less satisfying than the remarkably similar one they read last week that also featured a crime-fighting cucumber, but this time he was called Roy and he enjoyed a barbeque with his family and pet kumquat before they were killed.
Or maybe we forgot to put a scene in showing how bad Rodriguez is. Our theme is good triumphing over evil, but without that moment of character development, the theme becomes good triumphing over some bloke, which isn’t nearly as powerful a message.
But what if you don’t know that your theme is good triumphing over evil? How would you tell in that case that a lack of demonstrable evilness is the problem?
Well, you couldn’t.
You might guess and get lucky, or experience might guide your hand in the right direction without you being aware of the reasoning behind it, but to conduct a conscious appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of a story, you have to understand theme and structure (subtext). These are both revealed through plot and character (the narrative), and communicated to the reader through words (the easy bit).
I will end with this article with a warning. In a story the storyteller is God. You create the world and everything within it. You decide:
You can weave patterns so subtle that your reader might not even realise they’re being taught new ones.The world is like this.
Something happens.
The world is now like this.
Thus a storyteller can be a dangerous individual indeed.
8 comments:
I feel bad for the poor kumquat
What about the dealings of Rodrigues the Melon with Don Vito Luigi, the Tuscan Tomato?
I clearly don't have the skill to handle such complex plotting. Death to the cukes and kumquats!
Jack - ha, I feel a series coming on. ;)
Lois, i'm going with the blow stuff up and don't worry about it theme myself.
I think Don Vito agrees with you. Whack 'em out before the sludge gets too thick.
I find the cuke hero ap-peeling.
Do the cuke & the kumquat get together? :D
I'm groaning here folks. Please spare me the puns!! ;p
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