STORY STRUCTURE: Novel Structure vs. Screenplay Structure
The term ‘Story Structure’ simply refers to the sequence of events in a story. A writer’s or filmmaker’s goal has to be to create an emotional experience for the reader or the audience. That rule applies whether you’re a romance writer, a a screenwriter, a director or a documentarian.
Certain structural patterns have proven to be effective and consistently present in successful stories, certainly since the beginning of the twentieth century, and some all the way back to Aristotle. My own six-stage structure is just an approach I developed by looking at lots of movies and novels, and working out how they were able to maximize the emotional experience.
Other people have other structural approaches, but what I have found is all our approaches are fairly consistent. We don’t really contradict each other, we just have different ways of looking at it, and mine is developed in a way that I hope will be simple enough that it’s really easy to master, but still valuable enough that it gives new insights and people can really use it.
The basic six stages I talk about are going to be present in any kind of story, so long as it’s a story where there’s a protagonist pursuing a clear goal with a clearly defined end point.
For instance, in a romance novel, the goal of the hero or heroine (I don’t really distinguish between those two terms) is to win the love of another character. So once you have that goal defined (because we know what that would look like at the end of the story), it’s like having a destination to your hero’s journey, and now you can break that down into the steps it takes to get there, and the key turning points that they have to encounter on that journey.
The key difference between novel structure and screenplay structure is that in a screenplay, the turning points always occur at exactly the same place, the same percentage of time into the story. What happens twenty-five percent of the way into Avatar is the same thing that’s going to happen twenty-five percent of the way into Rango. Though usually, the percentages aren’t far off, they are much more fluid when it comes to novel writing. So novelists need only learn the six stages and have the awareness that they can be a bit more flexible about where those turning points might occur.
When I’m teaching a class and I talk about what the mid-point is, which I call ‘the point of no return’, I’ll often ask if anybody has a copy of a novel. Somebody always does, so I’ll turn to the very middle page and read it, and almost always we see that it’s directly related to what should happen at the mid-point of the story.
So this relates to all films right ?
I’d like to know the big difference in a novel than a screenplay? I was just turned down by a publisher because I have my project done in screenplay format.
In short, from what I gather, a novel does not have much dialogue or none at all. And you can freely express your own thoughts while writing a novel. Isn’t a novel mostly all descriptive in telling the story?
Please in short, how do you change a screenplay into a novel?
Have you never seen the inside of a book? Read one? Go to the nearest bookstore or library and pick up a work of fiction. A thick one. Look at the insides. Read it. There’s a HUGE difference in how a book is put together compared to how a screenplay is formatted.
If I could restore a Rolls Royce for the same price as a Smart car concept, I’d probably restore the Rolls Royce it will make more money and be more desirable in the long run, been the more interesting concept.
The market mark up in percentages show this, so the Rolls Royce is clearly the more interesting motor car of the two to work on, whether it needed more work or not, is not important, this is only short term stage for so shall we say…
” The bigger picture”.
Now I suppose this rule could and possibly does change in the B-movie realm, but I have not yet seen a B-movie win a Oscar, for been well written.
Kind Regards H.P
Hello Mr. Hauge,
My colleagues and I have a constant heated debate over Screenplays.
The argument is, if it’s a well written industry standard play will it sell, over a poorly written play with an excellent concept.
Which is true?
Can a studio look past a poorly written spec script and purchase it for its concept alone?
For example : “Divergent”
A Hugely successful franchise film, but it breaks the rules.
No one can tell me what the protagonist character really is.
Where is the arc in her character?
What was her original goal?
What motivated her to make those
choices?
Who are her demons? Not just her fears.
My colleagues admit they felt nothing for the protagonist..
I’ve seen many examples of this in many films, and yet, character rich films are rarely seen or make such box office numbers.
Is there something lost in the novel to screenplay translation?
Or is the Boxoffice just a reflection of loyal followers of the novel who just want to see a skeletal visual of the book that studios are willing to deliver?