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December 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Syd Field, Screenwriting, and Three-Act Structure

Only the immature artist scoffs at the demands of form. “Free verse,” quipped Robert Frost, is like “playing tennis without a net.” There is a reason why the films of Terence Malick, as brilliantly associative as they are, tax our patience.

Syd Field died on the 17th of this month. He was, along with Robert McKee, one of Hollywood’s most influential “gurus” on the art of screenwriting. Untold numbers of writers have learned from him, among them Tina Fey: “I did a million drafts. And then I did the thing everybody does–I read Syd Field and I used my index cards.”

Syd Field wrote many books on screenwriting, but he is best known for Screenplay, first published in 1979 and revised several times since. In Screenplay Field clarifies the basic three-act structure of the modern film–and indeed, of all narrative art. Field did not invent this structure; we find Aristotle beginning to rough it out in his Poetics. But just as Watson and Crick did not invent DNA, but made known its structure, so Field, while not inventing story structure, made it eminently manifest to a contemporary audience.

Act I. An inciting incident upsets the hero’s plans and he is thrown into an adventure. Act II. The attempt to bring the adventure to a halt only results in further complication. Act III. The hero faces the ultimate obstacle to the resolution of his difficulty–an obstacle he either succeeds at overcoming, or fails.

Setup. Confrontation. Resolution.

That’s what a story is.

Field was particularly insistent upon writers knowing the ending of their story: “What is the ending of your story? How is it resolved? Does your main character live or die? Get married or divorced? Get away with the holdup, or get caught? Stay on his feet after 15 rounds with Apollo Creed, or not? What is the ending of your screenplay?” Field believed that the ending is the first thing a writer should know before writing his or her story.

Sound formulaic? Is Field only giving us a recipe for the conventional film with the “Hollywood ending”?

Consider, then, a more highbrow authority, Gilbert Murray (1886-1957), Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, among other posts. “Most contemporary plays,” writes Murray in The Classical Tradition in Poetry, “admirable in detail and stagecraft as they often are, have weak last acts. Similarly, in the novel…you find a number of writers who can give exquisite studies of character, delicious conversations and individual scenes, but very few who can construct a story with a definite unity of effect and proper climax, or, to use the Greek term, “catastrophe.” One might almost say that they leave that high quality to the writers of detective stories.”

Listen to Professor Murray. The “definite unity of effect and proper climax” is today found most prominently in works of detective and other genre fiction, as well as, we might add, at the movies. Artistes may scoff at three-act structure as the slop of the “masses,” but Murray, notice, refers to it as “that high quality.” It is not a mistake, or in itself a sign of steep cultural decline, that scores of people will flock to their local multiplex this Thanksgiving weekend, rather than hunker down by the fire with Ulysses.

The central reason why three-act structure resonates so profoundly with the human spirit, such that we never tire of its rhythms, is that it allows us, in a most compressed and evident way, to contemplate our lives in miniature. Three-act structure is the structure of life. It is the imitation of ourselves being thrown into an adventure not of our choosing, and of working out a resolution to it in which we ultimately either succeed or fail. Field rightly lays emphasis upon the ending of a screenplay because the whole point of our lives is the ending. Will I realize who I was made to be, or not?

In his work Field gave storytellers not a recipe, but a set of principles applicable in an infinite variety of creative ways, ways as various as the adventures of individual human lives.

Thank you, Syd Field, for your life and work. May you rest in peace.

 

This article first appeared on Aleteia.

 

Filed Under: The (More or Less) Daily Muse Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
April 18, 2013 1 Comment

Action is Character

Celebrated crime author David Corbett has a wonderful post over on Joanna Penn’s blog about writing character and especially how character is revealed by action. Check it out. It’s one of the best pieces on character I’ve seen.

I’ll leave it to you to enjoy Corbett’s entire post, but I’ll at least set out for you the five principles that Corbett outlines–emphasizing that they are principles, meaning guidelines that can be applied in myriad ways, not paint-by-number instructions.

First, character is revealed by someone’s need or want. Someone has to be in motion toward some good he wants to get, or evil he wants to avoid, even if it‘s only Bertie Wooster lying in bed wishing he didn’t have to lunch with his Aunt Agatha.

Second, character is revealed when someone, usually after formulating an imperfect plan for achieving his want, runs into difficulty. Obstacles. Conflict. We wouldn’t have a story or a character if Coraline in Neil Gaiman’s eponymous fable didn’t find herself trapped with her “other” mother.

Third, character is revealed when someone exhibits a (seeming) contradiction. As when Flannery O’Connor’s protagonist Hazel Motes in Wise Blood cannot get rid of the thought of Christ no matter how hard he tries to dispel it.

Fourth, character is revealed when something unexpected happens, when the character makes a mistake that renders him vulnerable. Think about when David realizes he married the wrong woman in Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Finally, character is revealed when we realize that there’s more to the character’s predicament than meets the eye. When it’s clear that the character has a secret. As when in The Great Gatsby Nick Carraway goes to lunch with Gatsby and discovers that he associates with gangsters.

What I find marvelous about these principles is the way in which character is revealed more by action–pursuing some want, running into obstacles, trying to overcome them– than by soul-searching. This doesn’t mean that the interior monologue prevalent in so much literary fiction, not to mention in Shakespeare, is unacceptable; it means that even the interior monologue must focus on real patterns of the character’s action, and not just the articulation of emotion, if it is going to succeed.

I also liked how Corbett argues that the reasons why these principles are so important is because they go to the heart of who we are as human beings. Human beings, after all, are characters in stories.

Because I write fiction so much in the comic mode, it’s also interesting for me to think about how these principles are applicable to writing comic characters. I hinted at one such application in mentioning P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster. But each of us will have to work to find out how these principles are applicable to the characters we are trying to depict.

Please share with us whatever triumphs, or problems, you experience in this endeavor.

 

P.S. Corbett has a new book out on this topic: The Art of Character. I for one am looking forward to reading it.

Filed Under: The (More or Less) Daily Muse, Uncategorized Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
June 15, 2012 1 Comment

Pretty Good Writing Advice

When in the midst of a story I need to refocus on the basic principles of narrative structure, I often (perhaps not often enough) go back to what playwright-screenwriter-director David Mamet, in his book on Hollywood, Bambi vs. Godzilla, calls “The Long Lost Secret of the Incas.” The secret consists in three magic questions. “Anyone who wants to know how to write drama must learn to apply these questions to all difficulties,” says Mamet. “It is not only unnecessary but also impossible to know the answers before setting out on the individual project in question, as there are no stock answers.”

Drama, argues Mamet, is a succession of scenes, and a successful scene must “stringently apply and stringently answer the following questions…”

Are you ready?

Here it is. The Long Lost Secret of the Incas.

  1. Who wants what from whom?
  2. What happens if they don’t get it?
  3. Why now?”

That’s it. As a writer, your yetzer ha’ra (evil inclination) will do everything in its vast power to dissaude you from asking these questions of your work. You will tell yourself the questions are irrelevant as the scene is “interesting,” “meaningful,” “revelatory of character,” “deeply felt,” and so on; all of these are synonyms for “it stinks in ice.”

Mamet’s three magic questions are the concentrated version of the famous leaked memo to the writers of his television show, The Unit, available here.

First principles, however, are not the only kind of principles. If Mamet’s three magic questions are the first principles of good storytelling, then Emma Coats’s 22 storytelling principles making their way around the Internet this week articulate some of the most relevant secondary principles. Coats is a storyboard artist at Pixar, a company that knows a thing or two about good storytelling. The following are the maxims she’s gleaned from her years working at the prestigious animation studio:

1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th–get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on–it’ll come back around to be useful later.

18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool.’ What would make YOU act that way?

22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Mamet’s 3 + Coats’s 22. That’s 25 basic storytelling principles that, if followed–as Mamet tells the writers of The Unit–will buy you a house in Bel Air and allow you to hire someone to live there for you.

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , , ,