Story Structure

Output language = language of the question; terminology is always anchored to the original terms; see sw-workflow/terms.md. Do not invent translations.

I. The Hierarchy of Structure (McKee)

• Structure = the selection and combination of a series of events from a character's life story into a strategic sequence that evokes specific emotions and expresses a specific view of life.
• Event = a change, expressed through value (life/death, love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lies... binary oppositions that can shift from positive to negative at any time). Rain in East Africa is a coincidence, not a story event; only rain created by a rainmaker emerging from conflict qualifies.
• Hierarchy: beat (alternating action/reaction) → scene (action dramatized through conflict in relatively continuous space and time, causing a value-charged situation to turn on at least one dimension; a subtle change) → sequence (2–5 scenes escalating in impact to a peak; moderate change; give every sequence a title) → act (a series of sequences topped by a climax scene containing a major reversal) → story (a series of acts, with the final act's climax serving as the story climax; the change is absolute and irreversible; changes in scenes, sequences, and acts can be reversible, as when E.T. dies in Act Two and comes back).
• There is no scene without a turn: note whether the value is positive or negative at the beginning and again at the end. If they are the same, ask, “Why does this scene exist?” The answer is almost always exposition → delete the scene and weave the information elsewhere.
• Plot = “navigating dangerous terrain.” Every story has plot.

The Story Triangle (determines which kind of structure you write)

• At the top, the Main Plot (classical design): an active protagonist, external opposition, continuous time, causal coherence, and a closed ending—a “mirror of the human mind,” with the largest audience.
• At the lower left, the Minor Plot (minimalism): an open ending, internal conflict, a passive protagonist, and multiple protagonists (Terms of Endearment, Pelle the Conqueror).
• At the lower right, the Antiplot: nonlinear time, coincidence, and discontinuous reality (After Hours, Weekend; once Roger Rabbit turns two-dimensional, it becomes the rule).
• Below the bottom line lies Plotlessness (static).
• The commandments: a writer must make a living from writing, must first master the classical form (Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Altman all mastered the Main Plot first), and must believe in what he writes—“being different for its own sake is as hollow as blind obedience to the laws of commerce.”

Three Types of Structure (Gu Zhongyi, pp. 0169–0182)

• Open structure: presents the plot in full from beginning to end on stage (The Butterfly Lovers, The Merchant of Venice). Its strength is that it has a clear beginning and ending, lively and easy-to-follow scenes, and enough time for characters to develop. Its weakness is that broad scope produces shallow depth: “If you attend to the plot, you cannot attend to the detailed characterization of the characters; adding transitional scenes will inevitably divert attention from the climactic scenes.” The broader the scope, the more refined the selected plot must be.
• Closed structure (retrospective/final-act form): writes only from the climax to the ending, while the backstory is gradually disclosed through recollection and introspection as the plot proceeds. In final-act form, A Doll's House compresses an eight-year-old debt into two Act One conversations; in retrospective form, more than nine-tenths of Ghosts consists of looking back at the past. Its strength is concentration and tightness, with inner and outer action meshing and growing progressively deeper. Its weakness is that it is not lively, may become monotonous, and cannot easily reflect broad social life. Measure: the present should lead and the past should remain subordinate; once the action of the present weakens, the result is a Ghosts-style distortion.
• Tableau play (the portrait-exhibition form): many characters and little plot, “like a group portrait,” with slow progression, latent conflict stronger than external conflict, and no prominent protagonist. Characters who run through the play often merely connect otherwise separate scenes (The Lower Depths, Sunrise, Under the Shanghai Eaves, Teahouse). The loose structure is held together by thematic ideas rather than causality.
• Selection is not a search for the best option: Horod's centripetal force concentrates time, place, and characters extremely tightly to preserve unity of action, while centrifugal force calls for a complete and natural expression of the richness of life—“Every play seems to be the resultant of two opposing forces.” “The material must dictate the choice; one must not cut the feet to fit the shoes.” Self-check: if you cannot say which type you are writing, you have probably forced the breadth of an open structure into the length of a closed one.
• Interface: Gu classifies an entire spoken play as open and a zhezi as closed, and determines that Chinese classical opera contains no tableau play (see

  sw-chinese-opera-banqiang

  ). The tableau play is an interface for the future development of spoken drama, as in Lao She's Teahouse.

II. The Three-Act Paradigm and Plot Points (Field)

Act 1 Setup               Act 2 Confrontation           Act 3 Resolution
Pages 1–30                Pages 30–90                    Pages 90–120
             Plot Point I (pp. 25–27)             Plot Point II (pp. 85–90)

• One page = one minute. A plot point is “an event or incident tightly woven into the story that turns the story in another direction”; a completed screenplay may contain fifteen plot points, but the two at the ends of the acts are “anchors.”
• Before writing, you must know four things: the ending, the beginning, Plot Point I, and Plot Point II. Start with the ending: “You need not know the details, but you must know what happens at the end.”
• The fulcrum-action method (Wei Minglun, p0081) offers another way to begin. First establish an intermediate action as the fulcrum, then push the backstory forward and the ending backward from it. Ba Shan Xiucai uses “burning the books and filing a complaint” as its fulcrum: pushing forward reveals the protagonist's extremely low starting point after years of failed examinations, while pushing backward leads inevitably to death after violating ritual law. The fulcrum falls at the exact center of the play, at the beginning of Scene 5 in an eight-scene work. Failure condition: if the fulcrum action does not violate the character's existing values, it cannot generate consequences in either direction. Self-check: express the fulcrum action in one sentence, then ask, “What kind of person must he be before doing this?” and “How must the world deal with him afterward?” The fulcrum works only if both questions have answers.
• Each of the three acts also has a beginning, middle, and end; each act has one “direction.”
• The first ten pages must establish three things: who the main character is, the dramatic premise (what the story is about), and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the story). Setup is complete by page 30. There are two types of beginning: a strong visual action sequence (Star Wars) or rapid expositional character introduction (Shampoo, in which an anguished呻吟 from the bed is interrupted by a telephone call).
• The beginning and ending are connected: a road begins and ends on the road; a bet begins and ends as a bet; a boxing match begins and ends as a boxing match; “Will they report it?”
• A sequence = “a series of scenes joined by a single idea.” It is the spine of the screenplay (a wedding, a chase, a homecoming, a bank robbery). First define the sequence's governing idea—the cup—then fill it with content—the coffee. Pierson used only twelve sequences for Dog Day Afternoon: first he wrote four (the beginning, the two plot points, and the ending), then added eight.
• Theme = action + character: “A screenplay is like a noun: a particular person doing his particular thing in a particular place.” Action may be overt or emotional.
• Variations: Close Encounters of the Third Kind uses a 40/40/40 structure; in Nashville, the protagonist is the city—“As long as you follow the protagonist, you can find the plot points.”

III. The BS2 Fifteen Beats (Snyder, 110 Pages)

The Board (40 Cards)

• The board has four rows: 1–25 / 25–55 (through the midpoint) / 55–85 / 85–110, with each row ending at a turning point.
• First tack up the most exciting scene → discover the gaps → tack up the three major turning points (first the midpoint, then “All Is Lost” as its opposite, and finally “Break into Three”).
• Common defects: Act One contains twenty cards, all of them backstory, and is eventually compressed into a single “the protagonist appears” card; Act Three always contains only two cards (“the protagonist knows what to do” and “the final battle”)—go back and check the six deficiencies, the B Story, and the list of bad guys.
• Every card should carry +/- (the emotional change in the scene; if you cannot think of one, discard the card) and >< (who has a goal, who blocks whom, and who wins; only one conflict per scene).
• Field's card method has the same origin: a 3×5 array of cards with only a few words on each, divided into acts by color. The process takes one day for Act One, two days for Act Two, and one day for Act Three, followed by several weeks of shuffling and moving scenes. “Believe in your story.” Once writing begins, the board may be thrown away.

IV. The Nine Beats (Hoxter) and the Linear Development Chart

• Act One (<30 minutes): Basic Setup (the protagonist has a problem or desire; the inciting event) → Debate (wants something but does not know how to obtain it; the first promise is weak and unrealistic—in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, the protagonist injures himself by throwing a grenade because the mission is beyond his ability).
• Act Two (≈45 minutes, in two halves): Initial Progress → Raise the Stakes (a wolf follows the hero into a cave where the bear's mother is; the ex-girlfriend is dating the annoying ex-boyfriend, who will become the protagonist's department manager tomorrow) → Midpoint (the second promise, no retreat, and the protagonist becomes a hero) → Commitment (help) → Crisis (the lowest point plus revelation; the first time the protagonist opens their heart).
• Act Three (<30 minutes): Confrontation (the plan is countered) → Resolution (the goal is achieved, the theme is revealed, and the world is changed; “give us a moment to feel it”).
• Different stories emphasize different beats: the “Debate” is longest in Winter's Bone (a family is repeatedly denied aid), while “Initial Progress” runs for more than twenty minutes in How to Train Your Dragon.
• A Story = the main plot, what the protagonist wants, and the surface motivation; B Story = a key relationship, “who will you tell what is really on your mind?” It is strongest in Act Two. At the end of Act Two, the B Story character helps the protagonist formulate a three-act plan; carrying out that plan completes the A Story. Once the theme is determined, it never changes; what changes is the protagonist's attitude toward it.
• “Is three acts right for me?” Six questions: Is it a popular genre? Is it strongly goal-driven? Is it plot-driven? Does the ending provide closure? Does the protagonist undergo a major transformation? Is it intended for a mainstream audience?
• Tarantino's three-act information gap: in Act One, the audience does not understand what the characters know; in Act Two, the two sides are evenly matched; in Act Three, the audience is far ahead.
• Goldman's Ten Commandments: never take the crisis away from the protagonist; never let things go too well for the protagonist; never lecture for the sake of lecturing; never introduce a gimmick merely to surprise; respect the audience; know your world as God knows it; when the elements are rich enough, allow other people to be complex; do not explore merely to bring the characters to their deepest conflict; do not write so directly that every line of dialogue lacks subtext; keep rewriting.

V. Three Acts as Attraction, Anticipation, and Satisfaction (Hicks)

• Act One must create attraction: make the audience willing to follow along. Act Two cultivates anticipation: keep the audience guessing what happens next and guessing wrong. Act Three delivers satisfaction: fulfill every expectation, but not in the expected way.
• Drama is conflict: arrange conflict, compress time, and break events into pieces. In Bonnie and Clyde, the car theft is broken into a parking space, keys, and starting the engine—a chain of small actions, each of which can go wrong.
• Ten-element checklist (complete each item before outlining): subtract from the backstory and retain only what relates to the goal; do not use flashbacks; identify the internal need; identify the stimulus; establish the external goal; prepare the protagonist; make the opposing force stronger; create self-revelation; establish the obsession or concern; require the protagonist personally to win the struggle; solve the problem.
• Every scene does two things: advances the external goal and exposes the internal need. “Less is more.”
• Five questions about the premise: Who? Wants what? Why now? Who obstructs them? With what result?

VI. Structural Techniques for Chinese Short Plays (Lu Jun)

sw-chinese-opera-banqiang

Qi-Cheng-Zhuan-He (起承转合) = Phoenix Head, Pig's Belly, Leopard Tail (凤头猪肚豹尾)

• Qi (起, Introduction): the conflict begins and the first clash ignites it; the appearances and forces of both sides are clearly revealed; it is generally short and embeds exposition within action—steep, striking, and memorable.
• Cheng (承, Development): occupies roughly two-thirds of the work; each link tightens the next and each step climbs higher, winding and turning, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. Hengtuo (亨脱): “Use your foot to kick the horse's belly so it runs forward, but hold the reins so it maintains a natural pace.”
• Zhuan (转, Turn): the peak of the climax, where character and theme reach their deepest expression—“thunderous and earth-shaking.”
• He (合, Conclusion): begins immediately after the turn; brief, with lingering resonance.
• Qi should make the audience anticipate; Cheng should draw them in; Zhuan should shock them; He should leave them wanting more. Even a thousand-character sketch needs all four stages.

Enter the Action Quickly (入戏要快): Three Preferables, Three Avoidances, and Eight Openings

• Prefer proximity to distance—the first cut should land near the climax, and recollections before the conflict should be removed; prefer simplicity to complexity—start directly with one small incident and let it unfold through several twists; prefer action to stillness—open with dramatic momentum, and even a single person can create excitement. Avoid starting too far away, too many focal points, and too many mysteries—drama most fears explanation.
• Eight types of opening:
  1. Conflict method: begin with conflict immediately—“The current village head will not come.”
  2. Battle-array method: establish the conflict situation from the beginning.
  3. Rendering method: build the central event through direct, oblique, or reverse rendering.
  4. Unexpected method: a blind girl arrives to register for an examination.
  5. Opposite-directions method: the lazy man says, “If you are going to notify me, I will come and get it myself.”
  6. Sudden-blow method: the father requires the family to weave three flower baskets every night.
  7. Self-introduction method: use a chorus, host, or telephone call to reduce exposition.
  8. Cornered-into-joining method: the spouse secretly raises rabbits, rides them on top of a wall, and is put on trial.
• A Que (亚却): the opening must “clearly identify the one direction in which dark clouds are gathering on the horizon.”

Keep the Throughline Clear (脉络要清): Find the Core, Then Add, Subtract, Multiply, or Divide

• Rodin cut away Balzac's statue's “perfect hand”: details must be handled with economy, and the guiding principle is emphasizing what matters. In Lu Xun's Kong Yiji, the broken leg receives 150 Chinese characters and the fennel beans receive 500; find a core such as the “childlike heart” and use it as the criterion for selection.
• Expand wherever character is being portrayed (one passage sung three ways, one movement with several twists, one step repeated three times); abbreviate the beginning and ending, the surface, and everything unrelated to the theme.
• Clarify the throughline through four operations:
  • Subtraction: remove characters and events to expose the points of light; have the courage to let go.
  • Addition: supply the social factors and emotional basis for abnormal behavior.
  • Multiplication: magnify a comic element repeatedly until it reaches extreme exaggeration.
  • Division: if the entry point is wrong, discard it and begin again.

Make the Climax High (高潮要高)

• “Never begin unless you have completely worked out the action and dialogue of the final scene”—Alexandre Dumas fils. “I can almost say that I wrote the screenplay for the last scene”—Ibsen. In Bai Yushuang's example, the red bridal gown turns black and settles the character “奠”; once the climax is formed, the eight-scene play can be completed in a single sweep.
• Three paradigms:
  • Driven by character: Zhang Guirong moves from endurance to tearing the whip, taking the land, and declaring, “I am human! I am a citizen of the state! I am not livestock you can support!”
  • Driven by environment: a new system provides the larger context. In The Police and the Thief, the fake policeman enters the role under the real policeman's guidance and finally “catches one”—only to discover that the other is himself.
  • Driven by an unexpected event: the supposedly dead son suddenly returns.
• Four diseases:
  • No climax: three fragments exert equal force, like a shadow play.
  • The climax comes too early: within five minutes, everyone cries, curses, and threatens to hang themselves.
  • The climax is not high enough: the argument is loud, but the plot merely slides without rising action.
  • The climax is artificial: sudden kneeling, divorce, family division, or a slap. Kneeling may be used only when it is inevitable from the character and creates a new relationship, as in Bao Gong Apologizes for Sentiment, where the sister-in-law kneels and says, “You are kneeling not to your third brother, but to the loyalty you have shown to the country and the people.”
• The climax also has drama before it: establish the necessary scene, learn to control delay, and use suppression before release—the magic mirror first turns into a bronze mirror and then flips back for the final reflection.

Make Transitions Smooth (转变要顺): Untying the Knot

• Eight taboos: passing the conflict up to a superior; treating a serious condition lightly; a mismatch between the problem and the solution; long sermons in the Fuzi Ban (赋子板) form; handling the problem backstage; calling in reinforcements; discovering a blood relationship by chance; and using the cliché of entrapment.
• Three methods:
  • The power of environment: subject an incorrigible villain to an irresistible social force.
  • The power of setup: a folk song progresses in layers from a love song to a song of oppression and then to a secret contact signal.
  • The power of action—ideally one masterstroke: in A'er Takes a Wife, weaving a bamboo basket proves the transformation, suits the stage, and echoes the opening.

Make the Ending Decisive (结尾要绝)

• Decide the ending first (Cao Yu). Four taboos: too round, with an aura of imposed idealism; too long, because “end it when it should end” and every extra word in The Necklace weakens the aftertaste; too abrupt, with a deus ex machina that inflates the theme without limit; and too soft, ending with four lines of offstage chorus.
• Eight methods:
  1. Thunderclap method: the climax and ending become one—“those typewriters”; “I am the censor, and I stayed there for three nights”; “He would rather confess”; “I attended the engagement party last month”—followed by the towel falling to the floor.
  2. Unresolved method: ask the audience, “Should I forgive him?”
  3. Extension method: in The Oppressed, “What is your name?” “I—ah—I—”
  4. Rebound method: the singer abandons his suicidal lover—“I still have one minute and ten seconds”—and catches the train; a gunshot sounds offstage.
  5. Eye-of-the-needle method: the fiancée's speech illuminates the entire play.
  6. Echo method: three gong strikes open the play and three close it, with a contrast in weight.
  7. Cycle method: reunion → memory → return to the reunion: “Be careful of the day when the anger of the common people…”; Annie begins writing letters again.
  8. Conclusion method: “a draw” in Chinese chess, or a chorus that summarizes.

Include More Changes (变化要多)

• “Where there is change, there is drama.” Six kinds: changes in character relationships (deceiver and deceived exchange positions), changes in character, changes in fate (three major rises and falls), changes in the conflict situation (a gun passes through four hands), changes in atmosphere (a duel becomes a proposal), and changes in narrative mode. The priority of their sources is: inherent in the character > screenwriting technique > unexpected event > external force. Five or six significant changes in a short play is a passing grade; the fifteen changes in Beating the Bronze Gong are a model.

VII. Inciting Incidents and Progressive Complications (McKee)

Inciting Incident

• Design the five parts: inciting incident → progressive complications → crisis → climax → resolution.
• It must be dynamically and fully developed (moving to Los Angeles is not; a parking-ticket wallpaper combined with a serious-charge arrest warrant and an escape down a fire escape is). It must completely disrupt the balance and push events in a positive or negative direction; the protagonist must react—refusal is also a reaction. It awakens the desire to restore balance → the object of desire → the pursuit. For a complex protagonist, it also stimulates an unconscious desire.
• It must occur on screen, pose the dramatic question, and project the obligatory scene (the shark and the sheriff face-to-face).
• Position: within the first quarter; it may occur in the first second (On the Waterfront) or at 27–32 minutes (Rocky, Casablanca). If it arrives late, a subplot must cushion it. Introduce it as early as possible, but wait until the timing is right—the audience must know enough to react fully (in Rocky, half an hour is needed for “Just him? That screwball?!”).
• Creation method: how the worst thing can become the best thing (Kramer vs. Kramer), or how the best thing can become the worst (Death in Venice); “If the story is to become art, do not tell about the middle.”
• Story spine: without an unconscious desire, the conscious goal is the spine; if one exists, the unconscious desire is the spine, and the conscious goal is allowed to keep changing.
• Hoxter: two types of catalyst—character-driven (a friend suggests substituting in for a class) or coincidence (mistaken identity; a distress signal); hook the reader within ten pages.

Progressive Complications

• Stronger opposition produces stronger conflicts, passing through successive points of no return: each gap eliminates an option of equal force. The “soft big belly” on the belt = the writer repeating action on the scale of Act One. Hundreds of scenes may have to be invented to mine forty to sixty usable ones.
• Law of conflict: “If there is no conflict, nothing in the story can move forward.” The number of conflicts in life is constant, like squeezing an air balloon.
• The gap: the character always takes the smallest, most conservative action from their subjective point of view → the world responds differently or more strongly → a second action carries greater risk. Test the risk by asking, “If the protagonist does not get it, what will they lose?” If the answer is “return to normal,” the story is not worth telling.
• Single-plane complications operate on one level (an action film has only external personal conflict; a soap opera has only a personal level), whereas complex complications turn on internal, personal, and external levels simultaneously (the French toast in Kramer vs. Kramer involves three values across three levels). Advice: do not proliferate characters or locations; keep it relatively simple yet complex.
• Four techniques for dramatizing progression:
  • Social progression: the action's sphere of impact expands outward.
  • Personal progression: it drives deeper into private relationships and the inner self.
  • Symbolic escalation: an image moves from the particular to the universal and must remain invisible.
  • Ironic escalation: six forms—finally obtaining what you wanted, but too late; being pushed away from the goal and thereby led toward it; abandoning something later found indispensable; unknowingly moving in the opposite direction from the goal; trying to destroy something but crushing your own foot; and receiving what you believed to be misfortune and wanted to escape, only for it to be a great gift.
• Every level of failure must teach the protagonist one new thing (Wei Minglun, p0082): the action line of Ba Shan Xiucai is a “four-level petition” → petition for relief → indirect accusation, mistaking a cruel official for an upright one → petition wisely by placing hope in the imperial court → angrily petition the hall and expose the truth. Four levels of deception = four levels of rising understanding; the action line and character line are two sides of the same line. Self-check: after each failure, write the sentence the protagonist has learned (“The officials protect one another” → “Even Sichuan is dark, but the imperial court still exists” → “The court will kill me too”). Delete any level for which no new understanding can be listed. Failure condition: if the protagonist learns nothing between two failures, those two scenes can be merged into one.

Act Design

• Aristotle: the longer the work, the more major reversals it needs. Long works require at least three acts (good → bad → ?). Proportions: Act One ≈25% (with its climax at 20–30 minutes); the Final Act is the shortest (⚠️ this conflicts numerically with BS2's “77% into Act Three”: scaling the 110-page chart to 100 pages makes Act Three 23 minutes, which exceeds this limit. Both are feature-film rules, not a medium conflict; choose the shorter Final Act—move Break into Three to 78–80%, keeping Act Three under twenty minutes. BS2's percentage is a ratio, not law) ≤20 minutes (for acceleration); the seventy-minute Act Two swamp has two solutions: subplots (each with its own act structure) or additional acts (an act climax becomes a four-act structure; five acts and four weddings; seven acts and the theft of the Holy Grail). The cost of multiple acts: proliferating climaxes leads to clichés and weakens impact. The standard is a three-act main plot plus subplots.
• False endings (E.T.'s death, the destruction of the ship in Alien) are generally unsuitable for most films; the penultimate act climax should instead strengthen the feeling that “something more can still happen at this moment.”
• Act rhythm: the climaxes of the last two acts cannot carry the same load (a rise must not follow another rise; a fall must not follow another fall); an ironic ending requires establishing its tendency first and then reversing the penultimate climax.
• Four relationships between a subplot and the controlling idea: contradiction (a sweet love story as the main plot and betrayal as the subplot); resonance (multiple plots share the same root); foreshadowing, filling a vacuum left by a late main plot; and creating complications for the main plot (the most important, as with the love story in a crime film). If it does not contradict, resonate, foreshadow, or complicate, the result is a split story. The center of gravity must remain controlled; in Rocky, the love story must be handled carefully so it does not dilute the sports genre.
• Break convention for only one reason: replace it with something more important. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the inciting incident is delayed until the act climax so that empathy can be established before the transaction is revealed.

VIII. Crisis, Climax, and Resolution (McKee)

• Crisis = a decision; the protagonist has exhausted every action except one; it is the obligatory scene and must be a genuine dilemma (choosing between two goods or choosing the lesser of two evils; a choice between good and evil is not a choice). The crisis decision must be a deliberate, static moment, not something moved offstage or treated lightly (“Walk? What do you mean by walk?” in Thelma & Louise). The crisis and climax may occur in different locations, but they must be intercut and cannot cut away to a subplot.
• The crisis within the climax: during the climax action, pry open another gap (The Empire Strikes Back creates a spiral of three crisis decisions).
• Climax: a peak reversal need not involve noise or violence, but it must carry meaning—“meaning gives rise to emotion.” Pure action speaks for itself. For Aristotle, it must be “inevitable and yet surprising”; for Goldman, it must “give the audience what they want, but not in the way they expect it.” Audiences do not want a happy ending so much as emotional satisfaction; a downward ending can also succeed. Baseline image: write the climax for the eye and give it a single image embodying the controlling idea (the handcuffs in Greed; the apartment being dismantled in Conversation).
• Once the climax arrives, rewrite backward from the end. Test every scene against the climax to establish its reason for existing, and cut anything that has no effect. Ideally, the subplot reaches its climax within the main plot's climax (Rick's one action solves the love, political, Renault, and Strauss problems); otherwise, the least important climax will arrive first.
• “Movies are all about the final twenty minutes”; spend 75% of the effort on design, and 75% of that on the Final Act climax.
• The resolution has three uses: provide a scene for any subplot not resolved during the climax (it may pull the main plot into the resolution to create false complications); show the reach of the climax's effects; and respect the audience—with a final line and a slow fade-out on the last page.
• Hoxter's three climax questions: Does the villain's defeat express the theme? Does the protagonist do something impossible in Act One? Does it simultaneously close the plot lines and account for the entire story?
• Coincidence: introduce it early so that time can give it meaning; do not use it after the midpoint; never use coincidence to turn the ending (“God from the machine” is a lie and an insult, except in anti-structures; comedy may tolerate it, but the protagonist must already have suffered greatly and must never despair).

IX. Nonlinear Structure, Multiple Storylines, and Ensembles

• Nonsequential structure (Reservoir Dogs uses flashbacks to reveal information; (500) Days of Summer awakens memories; Pulp Fiction loops; The Usual Suspects loops as a puzzle). Hoxter: sequence coherence must still be maintained; frame narratives may be circular (The Dyke, 12 Monkeys).
• Multiple plotlines (Much Ado About Nothing, Contagion); segmented narratives (Sin City); ensembles (protagonist-driven, as in 12 Angry Men, or linked by theme, as in Love Actually and Babel, with one inciting event affecting every line); minimal plot (Heaven's Lonely: three places, three acts, and “nothing happens”).
• McKee: multiple protagonists each have desires → multiple plots, held together by resonance (variations on the same controlling idea) rather than causality. For films by Altman and Jarmusch, “the degree of interlocking depends on how well the various threads correspond to one another.”
• Flashbacks: Tony Bill says, “The moment I see a flashback, I know the story is in trouble.” McKee: a flashback must be dramatic—a miniature play with an inciting incident, progression, and turns—and you must first create the need and desire to know. Trotta says, “If the reader does not care about the present, we do not need to tell them about the past.” Hicks: do not use flashbacks; compress backstory into present-tense action.
• For Chekhovian anti-climaxes (even-numbered acts, no central climax, offstage events), see

  chekhov-dramaturgy

  ; for Ozu's “event offstage, reaction onstage,” see

  ozu-screenplay-style

  .

X. Structural Diagnostic Checklist

1. Can you explain what the story is about in one or two sentences (in noun form: who, where, doing what)? If not, you are not ready to write.
2. Do you know the ending, the beginning, Plot Point I, and Plot Point II? Is the midpoint the illusion of victory or the illusion of defeat, and is it the mirror opposite of “All Is Lost”?
3. Have the first ten pages established the protagonist, the premise, and the situation? Does setup run beyond 25 pages? Does the catalyst arrive after page 20?
4. Does the protagonist decide for himself to enter Act Two? Is the protagonist taking action or merely reacting to the environment? Is the protagonist asking questions (a high number of question marks in dialogue indicates a protagonist with a question)?
5. Does the value change from the beginning of each scene to its end? If not, is the scene merely exposition?
6. Does every gap in Act Two eliminate an option of equal force? Is there a “soft big belly” (a repetition of Act One's scale)? Does the story accelerate after the midpoint?
7. At the inciting incident, is the combined force of opposition stronger than the protagonist (the protagonist should be the “loser dog”)? Are the bad guys bad enough (“the bad guys must be worse”)?
8. Is there the smell of death around page 75? Is the crisis a static dilemma? Is the climax “inevitable yet surprising”? Does it have a baseline image?
9. Does the subplot contradict, resonate with, foreshadow, or create complications for the controlling idea? If none of these applies, the story is split.
10. Is the Final Act the shortest? Do the climaxes of the last two acts carry opposing loads? Does the resolution handle the subplot and give the audience room to breathe?
11. Lu Jun's four questions: Does the action begin quickly (a close starting point, a single focus, few mysteries)? Is the climax high (not early, not flat, not artificial)? Are the transitions smooth (not passed upward, not treated lightly, not handled backstage, and not rescued by reinforcements)? Is the ending decisive (not too round, long, abrupt, or soft)?
12. Count the changes: a short play should contain at least five or six significant changes, preferably arising from character.
13. Has Act One already stated the correct answer and had it rejected (the Chekhov/Robasin method)? Is what was foreshadowed fulfilled at the ending, or deliberately left unfulfilled?

XI. Workflow: From Premise to Screenplay

1. One-sentence story (Snyder's four elements: ironic hook + mental picture + audience and cost + title; add an adjective for the protagonist, an adjective for the antagonist, and the primal goal); test it by pitching it to a stranger. Hoxter's logline formula: protagonist + inciting incident + conflict/challenge + stakes + theme. Highlight the hook; it is not a tagline.
2. Determine the genre and the protagonist's position on the Story Triangle; compile a list of comparable films to identify conventions and clichés.
3. Fill in the Ten Elements (Hicks) and the five premise questions; determine the protagonist's need and obstacle.
4. Decide the ending first, then the beginning and the two plot points; find the climax's “baseline image.”
5. BS2 one-page sheet: fill all fifteen beats against the page numbers—theme on page 5, catalyst on page 12, Break into Two no later than page 25, midpoint on page 55, All Is Lost on page 75, and Break into Three on page 85.
6. Forty-card board: mark every card with +/- and ><; Act Three cannot contain only two cards.
7. Step outline (McKee): write one or two sentences for each scene—“He enters the room expecting to see her, only to find a note saying she has left forever”—and mark the structural position on the back. Its purpose is to wreck your own work: sketch a scene a dozen different ways and discard most of them; once the climax is found, rewrite backward from the end.
8. Talk through the story for ten minutes while observing the listener's eyes, and do not show them the outline. An enthusiastic response = a soft exclamation of “Wow,” followed by silence.
9. Treatment (60–90 pages, describing each moment in the present tense and without dialogue, while revealing subtext) → add, remove, and reorder scenes at this stage.
10. Screenplay: five to ten pages a day; dialogue works best at this point. If defects emerge, return to the treatment to adjust foreshadowing and payoff. Skipping the procedure and going straight to the screenplay produces a fake, unexplored treatment and is also the slowest method.
11. The first draft only has to be written down (Field: better too long than too short; 180–200 pages is better than 90) → cool off, compress, and polish. Before ending each day's work, begin the next scene (Hoxter).
12. Revise by objective: examine Act Two first (“Generally, yes”). Snyder's nine revision questions: Does the protagonist act? Does the protagonist ask questions? Does the dialogue narrate the plot instead of dramatizing it? Are the bad guys bad enough? Do the turns accelerate? Is the emotional color wheel present? Can the dialogue survive the test of covering the character names? Do the supporting characters have distinctive limitations or missing parts? Has the starting point retreated? Is the work primal enough?