Compiled notes.
Five
e Plot Point Breakdowns
“A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest of it exists to give those moments their impact and resonance. The script exists for that. Everything does.” – Robert Towne
When breaking down a film’s structure, generally speaking, “The Eight Sequences” framework is the standard: two in Act One, four in Act Two, and two in Act Three.
But the number 8 is only part of the equation. If the sequences are what shape a screenplay’s three-act structure, then the five major plot points are the building blocks behind sequence construction: Inciting Incident, Lock In, Midpoint, Main Culmination, and Third Act Twist.
A dramatic character is only dramatic when confronted by a problem (or a problem disguised as an opportunity in comedy) that carries with urgency an increasing risk. It must be acted on quickly otherwise it carries the potential of getting much worse. The dramatic character seeks bring about some transformation of the problem, either by overcoming it or rerplacing it or destroying it or thrusting himself or herself towards some objective that will bring about a rectification or reinstatment of a frustration or desire. For more on all this, please see http://www.wheresthedrama.com/plot.htm
Story Structure 101: Super Basic Shit
By Dan Harmon.
Storytelling comes naturally to humans, but since we live in an unnatural world, we sometimes need a little help doing what we’d naturally do.
Draw a circle and divide it in half vertically.
Divide the circle again horizontally.
Starting from the 12 o clock position and going clockwise, number the 4 points where the lines cross the circle: 1, 3, 5 and 7.
Number the quarter-sections themselves 2, 4, 6 and 8.
Here we go, down and dirty:
. A character is in a zone of comfort,
. But they want something.
. They enter an unfamiliar situation,
. Adapt to it,
. Get what they wanted,
. Pay a heavy price for it,
. Then return to their familiar situation,
. Having changed.
Start thinking of as many of your favorite movies as you can, and see if they apply to this pattern. Now think of your favorite party anecdotes, your most vivid dreams, fairy tales, and listen to a popular song (the music, not necessarily the lyrics). Get used to the idea that stories follow that pattern of descent and return, diving and emerging. Demystify it. See it everywhere. Realize that it’s hardwired into your nervous system, and trust that in a vacuum, raised by wolves, your stories would follow this pattern.
I will talk in greater detail about this pattern in subsequent tutorials.
Story Structure 102: Pure, Boring Theory
This isn’t a tutorial. It’s just a bunch of theory. The pragmatic or impatient among you can skip this one.
Why this ritual of descent and return? Why does a story have to contain certain elements, in a certain order, before the audience will even recognize it as a story?
Because our society, each human mind within it and all of life itself has a rhythm, and when you play in that rhythm, it resonates.
THE RHYTHM OF BIOLOGY
The universe around us is dying, moving from a state of high energy to low. On Earth, however, things tend to move in a contrary direction. Eggs turn into chickens. People turn into more people. Flesh heals, stupid becomes smarter, and the planet, once cold and empty, is now so full of life that you can’t leave bread on the counter. How has life managed to cheat a dying universe like this?
Through death.
This planetwide creature known as “Life on Earth” has been able to grow and thrive through an evolutionary arms race between the various parts of itself. The more advanced parts of life EAT the less advanced parts, thereby becoming more plentiful until a more advanced part consumes it. This causes all life to advance and spread. The ongoing battle between eaters and eaten is responsible for that state-of-the-art biological weapon you call a brain, and it may even lead, one day, to humans flinging themselves like spores, to dead planets and bringing those planets to life.
To you and me, consciously, death may be a bummer, but to Mother Gaia, to life itself, unconsciously, it is absolutely essential- 50% of how shit gets done.
What do I mean by consciously and unconsciously?
THE RHYTHM OF PSYCHOLOGY
Your mind is a home, with an upstairs and a downstairs.
Upstairs, in your consciousness, things are well-lit and regularly swept. Friends visit. Scrabble is played, hot cocoa is brewing. It is a pleasant, familiar place.
Downstairs, it is older, darker and much, much freakier. We call this basement the unconscious mind.
The unconscious is exactly what it sounds like: It’s the stuff you don’t, won’t and/or can’t think about. According to Freud, there are dirty pictures of your mother down there. According to Jung, there are pipes, wires, even tunnels down there that connect your home to others. And even though it contains life-sustaining energies (like the fuse box and water heater), it’s a primitive, stinky, scary place and it’s no wonder that, given the choice, we don’t hang out down there.
However, your pleasure, your sanity and even your life depend on occasional round trips. You’ve got to change the fuses, grab the Christmas ornaments, clean the litter box. To the extent that we keep the basement door sealed, the entire home becomes unstable. The creatures downstairs get louder and the guy upstairs (your ego) tries to cover the noise with neurotic behavior. For some, eventually, the basement door can come right off its hinges and the slimy, primal denizens of the deep can become Scrabble partners. You might call this a nervous breakdown or psychotic break, it doesn’t matter. The point is: Occasional ventures by the ego into the unconscious, through therapy, meditation, confession, sex, violence, or a good story, keep the consciousness in working order.
This is the rhythm of psychology: Conscious-unconscious-conscious-unconscious-etc.
THE RHYTHM OF SOCIETY
Societies are basically macrocosms (big versions) of people, only instead of “consciousness,” a society’s upstairs is “order,” and its basement is “chaos.”
Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego’s regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society’s longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.
In their most dramatic, revolutionary form, these people are called heroes, but every day, society is replenished by millions of people diving into darkness and emerging with something new (or forgotten): scientists, painters, teachers, dancers, actors, priests, athletes, architects and most importantly, me, Dan Harmon.
Societies are macrocosms of people in another way: Eventually, they die. There is competition between different societies. The losers are eaten and the winners reproduce.
Like people, societies become neurotic and can eventually break down when they make the mistake of thinking the downstairs shouldn’t exist. America is a terrific example of this, as our fear of the unknown continues to create more unknowns and more fear. It’s now punishable by bombing to have a problem with America’s bombing policy. In a human being, the equivalent would be diagnosable as symptomatic. Our basement is brimming with creepy crawlies, the pressure on the door is building. There has never been a bigger need for heroes and they have never been in such scarcity.
One of two things is going to happen. Someone’s going to open that door and go down there, or that door is going fly off its hinges. Either way, social evolution will not be cheated of its rhythm and it’s going to get sloppy. We all know it. We all walk around with that instinctive understanding in our unconscious minds.
The rhythm of society: Order-chaos-order-chaos-etc.
RESONANCE
Now you understand that all life, including the human mind and the communities we create, marches to the same, very specific beat. If your story also marches to this beat- whether your story is the great American novel or a fart joke- it will resonate. It will send your audience’s ego on a brief trip to the unconscious and back. Your audience has an instinctive taste for that, and they’re going to say “yum.”
We’ll get back to the nuts and bolts in the next one, elaborating greatly on the circular model and applying it to the 5 minute Channel 101 pilot.
22 comments
You might want to add a MUSICAL theory to your existing theory. Tonality (the music most of us like to hum and sing) starts out somewhere, goes through a journey and ends up in the beginning place (or a place relate-able to that). Much modern classical music does not offer a tonal system and suffers unpopularity.
August 31, 2015 by A Fandom user
174.49.255.5
“The universe around us is dying, moving from a state of high energy to low.”
This is entirely wrong. It was what was believed, maybe, 20 years ago? In fact, the Universe is expanding, and nothing is dying.
Death is a necessary part of evolution, but but evolution is driven by diversity, not death. Smart things don’t eat stupid thing. Unless you believe a bacterium is smarter than you. Good writer. He should stick to his field.
January 14, 2015 by A Fandom user
69.246.95.132
read basic physics man… The universe expanding is our death. We’ll expand to the point of a cold lifeless universe. And yes energy always moves from a higher state to lower one, we haven’t figured out how to bottle the energy from a nuclear reaction, we still just use the steam of nuclear energy to drive turbines. Increased entropy and the loss of energy in a system are 2 fundamental parts of our known universe. And yes death also is a huge part of evolution. If neandrathal hadn’t been wiped out through breeding and death they would be competing for the same resources we are and therefore our evolution would become stalled. Horse + donkey = mule you can’t move the horse or the donkey forward in evolutionary terms (ability to survive better) by simply breeding them together. Only by breeding the best horses with the traits we like does evolution occur. Just as if man and neandrathal were still getting it on we wouldn’t be producing superiour beings. Not that we are now because humans have left survival of the fittest for sexual evolution, what seems attractive to you sexually is what you try to breed with as oppose to the partner that would provide the best physical attributes to say stave off a harsh winter or carry heavy things long distance. These are no longer considered desirable traits to most and therefor we have entered a new type of evolution. A stagnant one. Dan Slam! Just kidding, but seriously don’t mess with my prophet anymore! His words are near holy! -Matt
January 15, 2015 by A Fandom user
131.111.111.54
I don’t know about the physics side of things, but the way you (Matt) are characterising evolution is… not right. Evolution is the change in heritable phenotypic traits over time. You say:
“If neandrathal hadn’t been wiped out through breeding and death they would be competing for the same resources we are and therefore our evolution would become stalled.”
Yes, there would have been resource competition, but that would simply have meant different selection pressures – perhaps for traits useful in resource competition and holding, or to take advantage of different resources / occupying different ecological niches (see, for example, a recent study on rapid evolution in Anolis lizards http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41309/title/Rapid-Evolution-in-Real-Time/ ). Evolution doesn’t become ‘stalled’, unless you think it has some target or end point (which it doesn’t).
“move the horse or the donkey forward in evolutionary terms (ability to survive better)”
Natural selection acts on genes; it is the ability of an individual to pass their genes into future generations that denotes their ‘fitness’. Who cares if a horse or donkey ‘survives better’? If one horse is super sexy and mates with ALL the females, and they all have his babies, he can die the next day and will have much higher fitness than a long-lived male who gets no mates. Why doesn’t such a horse exist? There’s likely a trade-off between individual investment in survival and reproduction – especially as females produce only 1-2 foals per year – meaning there’s selection for horses that can persist across a number of breeding seasons.
“Only by breeding the best horses with the traits we like does evolution occur.”
No, breeding the best horses with the traits we like simply creates artificial selection for these traits; however, this doesn’t always work due to the quirks of genetics (dominant/recessive alleles, linkages between traits that constrain their evolution, etc).
“Just as if man and neandrathal were still getting it on we wouldn’t be producing superiour beings.”
What do you mean by ‘superior’? Sexual reproduction provides recombination, enabling genetic diversity, which – as the original commenter stated – underpins evolution. Genetic variation is the fuel that, through selection, powers evolutionary change. We don’t know what would have happened if we had continued to interbreed with Neanderthals rather than them going extinct; I don’t think there’s even particularly clear data on why they went extinct while Homo sapiens flourished (although I may be wrong on this last point).
“humans have left survival of the fittest for sexual evolution, what seems attractive to you sexually is what you try to breed with as oppose to the partner that would provide the best physical attributes to say stave off a harsh winter or carry heavy things long distance. These are no longer considered desirable traits to most and therefor we have entered a new type of evolution. A stagnant one.”
You make a number of strange assumptions here, most of which seem to stem from perhaps a misunderstanding about the definition of evolution. Sexual selection and natural selection are hugely powerful processes in evolutionary change. What are desirable traits now? What were previously desirable traits? Is there no crossover between these? Is there no crossover between traits considered attractive and traits involved with – for example – carrying heavy things long distance? How does our mating system (generally speaking, particularly in Western cultures, socially monogamous) affect the strength of sexual selection?
Sorry about this wall of text. I’m a big fan of Harmon, but also I have a PhD in evolutionary biology so I couldn’t stop myself…
January 21, 2015 by A Fandom user
31.123.100.36
I think Harmon’s view of evolution is a very, very broad one. He has zoomed out a long way, if that makes sense, and from his perspective the evolution of life conforms beautifully to the pattern he is talking about. If death wasn’t involved, I.e. If life forms didn’t go around killing and eating other life forms, then there would be nothing driving life forms to change over time, so we could never have gone from single cell organisms to humans. So yeah the overall shape of the thing is a cycle of life and death, just like Rafiki told us. Of course it doesn’t explain the details. If you’re looking for a more in-depth explanation of evolution then yes of course you need to ask an evolutionary biologist and not a storyteller.
September 26, 2015 by A Fandom user
81.244.95.180
> The universe around us is dying, moving from a state of high energy to low.
The amount of energy in the universe is constant, it doesn’t go from high to low. It’s also not dying but it is evolving. What is changing is tge amount of entropy, that goes from low to high.
October 25, 2014 by A Fandom user
110.175.162.231
Freud and Jung’s theories have more or less been largely debunked by modern psychological research. I love these tutorials and I think they are hugely useful, but there are some MASSIVE generalisations that require some MASSIVE assumptions about psychology and sociology that are not really supported by the research provided by actual experts in these fields.
I’m not trying to be a hater, like I said, I think these tutorials are an awesome resource for story tellers of all kinds.. but I think we need to be careful with making huge jumps between personal theories and statements of fact. Otherwise we run the risk of contributing to the huge sea of misinformation who main feeding river is the internet.
October 21, 2014 by A Fandom user
Story Structure 103: Let’s Simplify Before Moving On
Here are those steps from tutorial 101 again, boiled down to the barest minimum I can manage while still speaking English:
When you
have a need,
you go somewhere,
search for it,
find it,
take it,
then return
and change things.
Less focus on English, more on importance:
You
Need
Go
Search
Find
Take
Return
CHANGE
Sounds like a caveman giving you an order. That’s what it is. Behind (and beneath) your culture creating forebrain, there is an older, simpler monkey brain with a lot less to say and a much louder voice. One of the few things it’s telling you, over and over again, is that you need to go search, find, take and return with change. Why? Because that is how the human animal has kept from going extinct, it’s how human societies keep from collapsing and how you keep from walking into McDonald’s with a machine gun.
If you were hired to write a script for a race of super-evolved spiders, you might find that they prefer a more linear model. In the spider version of Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack might build his own beanstalk, find a sandwich at the top of it, eat some and save some for later. The End. That’s not really inspiring to us. We like us some circles. We like big ones, we like little ones, and given the choice, we’ll take a shitty one over a lack of one, but, unless you’re writing for some other species, it will pay for you to keep things fairly round.
Jack goes up the beanstalk, Jack finds some cool shit, Jack steals it, runs back down, and gives it to his Mom.
We need go search- We need get fire, we need good woman, we need land moon- but most importantly, we need RETURN and we need CHANGE, because we are a community, and if our heroes just climbed beanstalks and never came down, we wouldn’t have survived our first ice age.
I know you still don’t believe this has anything to do with your five minute episode of “Laser Fart.” Hang in there. The goods are next.