On the way to prison, there’s a terrible bus crash and the doctor escapes. The real killer is a one-armed man, with whom he fought at the crime scene. Her husband, a prominent doctor, is arrested and convicted for her murder, but he’s an innocent man. While not a perfect action-thriller, it comes pretty close, especially in terms of structure. Let’s look for a moment at the movie, The Fugitive. They have to know what their objectives are and must be willing to fight (conflict) to reach those objectives. You can’t have your players wandering around for no reason. Structure is a series of goals that lead to an overall goal. The two are so closely intertwined that it would be difficult not to discuss them both in the same breath. Provost was, I believe, trying to describe the nature of conflict in storytelling, and he did it in a way that not only tells us about conflict, but about structure as well. All during the game, the two teams have conflicting goals and will do anything they can to stop the other from succeeding. To reach that goal, they must face the challenge of several smaller goals, traveling from one end of the court to another in order to score baskets and, of course, to prevent the opposing team from scoring. Provost wisely compared a story to a basketball game, in which the players have an overall goal – to win the game. Several years ago I read an article in Writer’s Digest by a writer named Gary Provost. If you’re laying a foundation with a faulty plan or substandard material, you’ll still have your beginning, middle and end, but there’s a pretty good chance that your story won’t stand up to much scrutiny. The trick is knowing where to start, where to end, and what to put in-between. We’ve all seen enough movies and read enough books to know that you’ve gotta start somewhere, end somewhere else and that a bunch of stuff has to happen in between. When people ask writers what structure is, the most common response you hear is this: a beginning, middle and end. You can decorate it to your heart’s content, but without a solid foundation, it’s bound to fall apart. Writing a story is like building a house. And if you’ve spent any amount of time trying to become a professional writer, you’ve heard it before: When my friend told me what his father had said, it brought to mind something very similar that I (and many others) have been saying for years –- about writing, not houses. Can’t have a solid foundation without a foolproof set of plans.”Īnd he was right. His father, a retired firefighter, said, “Can’t build a house without a solid foundation. Pieces of my friend’s dream were scattered from his perch on the mountainside all the way to the Pacific Ocean.ĭespondent, my friend moved in with his parents while he contemplated what to do next. A week later, the storm of the decade washed half of it into the valley. It turned out that the original contractor had used substandard cement that, coupled with a serious design flaw, couldn’t withstand the weight of the house. He was told very matter-of-factly that the only way to fix it was to tear down the house and start from scratch with a new foundation. Alarmed, he pulled the carpet back and felt his stomach clutch up when he discovered a crack in the foundation that ran the entire width of the house – a crack that literally split the place in half.įrantic calls got him nowhere. He explored it with his toes, then crouched down and ran his hands along the bump. It was that impressive.Ī few months after he moved in, my friend was walking barefoot across his carpet when he noticed an odd bump in the floor. People who visited usually stood around wide-eyed and slack-jawed, completely amazed by the place. The house itself was a marvel of wood and glass and filled with just about any convenience you can think of, fully automated by a mainframe computer. At night, he’d stand on his deck and look out at the valley spilling out below him, moonlight reflected on the surface of the ocean beyond. Let me explain:Ī friend of mine had a house built on the side of a hill in the Pacific Northwest. This essay was originally written with screenplays in mind, but I approach my novels in the exact same way. Structure is one of the most important parts of any story, whether it be for the screen or the page.
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