The Most Important Beat

When Writing a Screenplay, Start It Off the Right Way

N o matter what your wacky creative writing teacher tells you, structure matters. After reading countless screenplays, writing analysis’s, and writing my screenplays, one of the conclusions I have reached is that there is no way around story structure.

Be it Dan Harmon’s story circle or its predecessor Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, when it comes to drama, we must adhere to, as Barbosa puts it, “Guidelines.” Yet, this is no new discovery. The likes of Syd Field and Blake Snyder stand in the shadows of Poetics and the well-made play.

A movie is not a novel. A play is not a poem. No matter what their similarities are, each genre has a different set of rules and regulations and a different target audience. Whether your audience is a group of teenagers who are still lying to their friends about sex or old men in their sixties still lying to their friends about sex, it doesn’t matter. Form matters.

The rules of baseball dictate the way the game is played — the field of football limits what players can and cannot do. The rim in basketball sets the goal.
Drama is the game, and if you wish to write and create within it, you must understand the rules by which you play.

Choosing to write in prose or poetry is like choosing to run the ball or pass. Opting to write a horror film or an arthouse drama is the playbook. The rules remain the same, and the kicker is, just like with sports, that audience’s know them. Although they may not be able to state them explicitly.

Therefore, like Nick Saban or Bill Belichick, the writer and the director must know them better than the audience to manipulate the audience and their expectations at will.

Perhaps more than any director, Christopher Nolan, knows how to use structure to his advantage.

We trust Nolan to guide us through a complex story, and even though he may appear to tell stories that break structure, each and everyone hits each and every story beat. The Dark Knight follows a typical Three Act Structure. Inception is beat for beat a Hero’s Journey. The Prestige, Memento, Interstellar all follow the rules, but they mask them so well, and the story flows within the confines of drama that the audience is none the wiser.

Joker works so well in every Batman story because thematically, he represents the polar opposite of the Dark Knight. Therefore, the dramatic structure of the screenplay or comic is in perfect balance. We are not dealing with just one aspect of the character, but all, and therefore all the other pieces fall into place.

The theme of your story is what the story is about. It is its message simplified. Often, a supporting character or even the film’s antagonist explicitly states the theme to the protagonist.

Time and time again, we breeze past this plot point. We come up with an idea, one for the ages, and we begin writing our masterpiece. Then, somewhere in the middle, the steam runs out. Our creative juices run dry. And suddenly, we can’t figure out where to go next. Or, perhaps, we press on and finish the story, but something is missing.

The theme is not one word. It is not the subject of your topic. Therefore, to say “Love” or “Honor” is the “Theme” of your movie is too generic. And if there is one thing audiences don’t tolerate, it is broad strokes.

The reason this is so important is that it ties all the events of a film together. Two important cinematic beats of a screenplay are the Opening Image and the Closing Image. These beats represent the overarching journey simplified. Where does this story begin, and where does it end? How are these two beats diametrically opposed?

If these two beats are the starting point and the endpoint, then the theme is the message between them. It is the string that ties these two points together.
What is this string? It is the writer’s point of view, belief, or even a question posed to the audience to make them think.

Filmmaker David Fincher describes making a movie like 3-D chess. And he’s not wrong. The level of moving parts in a story and getting it made is vast, and it takes a village to create works such as Fight Club and Gone Girl.
Such a layered game must begin with a solid foundation. Building motifs, images, scenes, and dramatically exciting characters begin with a definite theme because it allows all the game elements to come back to a singular point.

Look, I know writers are born to rebel. As teenagers, we hated the idea of structure. Freedom is what we were after, and truth. As long as we followed our bliss, the story would write itself.

After countless rewrites and hundreds of scripts down, this premise is not true. We are not the first, or the last person, who will use dramatic structure. Drama may be the fundamental medium of life. As Shakespeare put it, we “Hold the mirror up to nature.”

Drama is about why. Why does someone commit murder? Why does someone cheat? Why does someone betray their best friend? Why do we go on quests? The theme is the answer to that question. The screenplay is the surrounding argument.

It is the writer’s job to mask these things so the audience can see them again with fresh eyes. We are not lecturers or sophists. We are not smarter than our audience. We are merely showing them what they already know and surprising them with how they discover it.