It took me a long time to appreciate the delights of structure. For the first few years of my adventures in scriptwriting, I somehow managed to get by without studying it, and write pieces that followed whatever patterns made sense to me at an instinctive level.

I got away with that loose approach for quite a while with a reasonable degree of success – some of the script samples on this site come from that era. But as I began to take screenwriting seriously, it became apparent that structure was going to be the key to its success. Various authors I read and people I spoke to referred to three, five, and more act structures. Turning points. Reversals. Mythic structures, whether from Vogler’s study of Joseph Campbell’s work, or the pioneering studies of Vladimir Propp.

And it fascinated me, all this stuff about structure and form. Suddenly I’d got a vocabulary to talk about what I did. But was it a vocabulary, or mere jargon? And did all this debate on structure make me a better writer, which was surely the goal? Well, the answer to that is yes, but also that it took time to integrate the lessons from other peoples’ views on structure into my own writing.

I like things to be as simple as they can be, and no simpler. And from that perspective, the most useful approach I’ve found to structure comes from writer, producer and development consultant Claire Ingham. It goes like this:

NORMALITY

This is how your film opens, and the world it introduces us to. ‘Normal’ here doesn’t mean mundane, it simply refers to the state of play before the story really kicks off, and that’s as true in a science fiction epic as a family drama.

In Star Wars, this is the period of the story when Luke is a farm hand living with his aunt and uncle.

INCITING INCIDENT

The action which leads one or more characters in the story to change their behaviour, and which contains a question of implicit relevance to them, though typically this question is not directly stated.

The Princess Leia hologram compels Luke to set on a quest, confirmed when he finds his aunt and uncle killed. That quest leads Luke initially to Obi Wan, who plants the seeds of Luke’s Jedi heritage: but can he live up to it, or is he just a farm boy?

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

The course of action that the protagonist and his/her allies embark on to resolve the issues raised by the inciting incident, and which takes up the majority of the screen time of the story as it unfolds. Think in terms of actions and consequences.

Luke, Han Solo, Chewbacca and the droids have fun in space, meet Leia in the flesh, and receive sage advice from Obi Wan while learning to stay one step ahead of Darth Vader. Many merchandising opportunities are encountered.

CLOSURE

The resolution of the question that was raised by the inciting incident. Depending on the nature of the story, it may be a positive experience, and may be a negative one.

Luke trusts the Force, implicitly connecting with his heritage, and in doing so destroys the Death Star.

ENDING

In which loose ends are tied up, and minor matters dealt with before the credits roll.

Princess Leia gives everyone medals and they have jelly and ice cream.

Now, I appreciate structure in a different way: it’s the means of making the story you want to tell the right and inevitable one. And the template I just described is something I work with organically, implicit in most of the stories I want to tell unless for some reason I choose to tell them differently.