Story Blueprint Overview

Adam: In this episode, we lay out all the events, movements, and acts of your Story Blueprint. What do you need to consider when creating your blueprint? What are the important events of each movement? Join us for a summary of structure, next on StoryOsophy. Hello, welcome to StoryOsophy. This is Adam Jones. And Devin Halden. This week, what happened now?

Devin: You know what gets me is I’ll say my name, and then there’s a really long pause.

Adam: I am all of a sudden realizing, oh, wait a minute. He got his name right this week. His own name. Now I have to say something. You didn’t know what to say. StoryOsophers, Devin will try to catch me with the count-offs, which is our sync for our audio, all the time. He’ll just kick into the five, four, three, two, one. Whenever he feels like it, sometimes it’s in mid-thought, and I have to keep up. And you may not know that’s a game that he likes to play. It’s more of, all right, let’s get on with this. Cut the chatter. I have a tendency to ramble. I’m not going to deny that.

I do. I’m sure they picked up on that by episode 41.

Devin: Yeah.

Adam: Probably.

Devin: I think I’ve rambled plenty during these episodes.

Adam: Passion. When you’re passionate about something. You have a lot to say about it. This week, we will be summarizing the overall structure of the story. Movement by movement, act by act, event by event. Now, we’re going to do this as a summary episode so that anybody, just having listened to the past six episodes and navigating our movement system and our three-act structure here, you have a summary so you sort of get what it’s about. And those just joining us, what is to come is navigating this structure event by event. Meaning, after this, we’ll go the hook scene, the known world routine. And so, we’re going to do a summary.

We’re going to do a summary. We’ll just go in order of events. On this, but that’s really important to know. When I’m brainstorming or building a story personally, or when I’m working on a story with Devin, I always brainstorm and gather ideas, which is not a linear process at all, and then apply it linearly, or rather apply it to this linear outline or this linear structure. I guess my one note to this, and I think we’ve

Devin: Probably said it before, but I’ll say it here, is just follow your inspiration. When you’re driving in the car or you’re taking a shower and all of a sudden you’re inspired or your imagination comes up with an idea for a final scene of a movie, instead of just maybe taking a note about it, you can jump in and actually start scripting it and writing it. Just write it, yeah. Allow your imagination to go and follow your inspiration. You don’t need to have any idea of how you got to that point, what led up to this point, or what could happen after, but as long as you’re inspired to write something like that, or even just a dialogue scene, just jump on your blueprint or whatever you’re using and just write.

You can figure out, and a lot of times that’s going to spawn other, it’s going to trigger your imagination to come up with, oh, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to do that, wow, now I have a character for this. Oh, actually, I have an idea of how they got to this point or what’s going to happen after this point. If you’re sitting down and trying, and there are people that actually can sit down and write a story linearly just from start to finish and that’s how they do it, but if that’s the way you’re trying to force yourself to write or be creative, you’re going to either forget about inspired things and inspired moments of your imagination that could have, from a middle of a story or the end of a story, and then hoping you’re going to figure out how to get there, you’re going to forget about those.

So if you just kind of follow your inspiration and you just write whatever your imagination comes up with at whatever point of that story, and knowing that you can move it around or you don’t need to know exactly what happens before or after it, that’s how stories, especially for me, that’s how my stories come together, where it’s, I just, I write what inspires me. And then usually that’s tipping over that first domino because it triggers my imagination to start coming up with characters or other events that could lead up to or follow that event. I prefer, and maybe it’s not really a preference, it’s just kind of how my imagination works, but I allow my imagination to work that way where I don’t get frustrated that I don’t know what happens before. I just kind of throw it into the Story Blueprint. I’m like, all right, cool. I have, this is an awesome watering hole scene.

And what happened, the dialogue and what actually happens within that might change as you come up with other elements and events of the story, but at least you’re, you’re allowing your imagination to kind of run free. And that’s, what’s really going to spawn other, other great moments for, of inspiration for your story.

Adam: Everything you just said, ditto. I mean, I couldn’t have said it better. It’s one of the most important, maybe the most important thing you can hear when approaching writing a story. Writing and structure is follow your inspiration because that’s going to tell you structurally where to go. The reason why we try to map out things in a, in a, even a rough outline before we really start fully assembling, and I don’t mean writing linearly, but assembling a script is because, and Devin’s right, everybody can write a story linearly. That’s the way it’s been done for a very long time. They may have brainstormed it and figured it out, but typewriters and I mean, there was, We’ve been sort of trained to tell a story linearly. We experience a story linearly. We think we experience life linearly, although it’s a little bit trickier than that. And we’re noticing our brains work a little bit more non-linearly than linearly.

And so when approaching a story structure, if you have it roughly outlined, you can follow that inspiration to whatever event is calling you for that morning, for that night, for whatever time you’ve allotted to give yourself writing time is just you got this outline with a couple scene heading or titles for you know what the event is, you know what it’s about. Maybe you’ve even, as Devin suggested, seized your inspiration. And what do you think? When it came to you like a bolt of lightning, you took the five minutes because it was so exciting and wrote it out. But this is where you look at it and you go, oh, I want to flesh the rest of that out, right? And you finish filling out the scene. Or you look at an event and for some reason your brain says, that looks like fun. And you don’t know what you’re going to write there, but you go there and start thinking about it and open yourself up to that possibility. But following that inspiration, you will have the most fun and you will not encounter a writer’s block. Because you’re not doing it, I have to do this thing next. Like it’s a list of chores. You’re following, you’ve mapped it out and you’re writing by choice. It’s the same thing we talk about with our protagonists and stories. Choice versus a chore. You want to build your stories on their choice and their decision points and their thresholds they cross so that you can track their growth and development and that a character by the end of the traditional three-act story, you’re going to be able to do that.

It’s like, oh, well, they haven’t grown and by the end they’ve grown. What we’re suggesting is in smaller increments that we call movements, you can track a character’s growth bit by bit because we’re hungry as an audience for better storytelling, for more interesting developments and twists and turns. And we’re also moving into an age where a character’s choice and perspective is really important in storytelling. You have a lot of ensemble pieces and we’re looking at everybody’s perspective. So it opens up to new types of story.

Devin: If you could take all of these, take our blueprint and then separate them and lay them in the bathtub is the best way. In the bathtub. It’s the best way visually is what I’m thinking because if you ever, when you’re a kid and you ever try to line something up in the bathtub and they’re just kind of floating around and you’re trying not to make waves because they’ll move around. But I think visually that’s what I’m looking at. They’re kind of floating there and you’re like, well, you know, I can sync this one because I’m not going to, you know.

Adam: I like the idea of the. The non-concreteness of it.

Devin: Yeah, this is just what we’re trying to do is give a little push and by providing this blueprint that’s worked for us, but it’s also it’s, it’s been, it’s based on our admiration and our study of other brilliant storytellers who have shared their structure with us, like Campbell and Vogler.

Adam: And application. Applying those. Applying their models over and over and seeing what works and what doesn’t for us and then try to expand on said philosophy. Exactly. And when we go through, we’ll sort of talk about those moments where we think, where we were confused from other storytelling models and why we sort of develop things in a certain trajectory to help clean up a little bit. I wish I had a model like this, a Story Blueprint model, when I was a novice writer just starting out. And that’s why we’re trying to provide it to our listeners, whoever’s out there listening. Yeah. Because this helps to at least focus you.

Now, for me, and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a moment. For me, these days, I literally just, I do it in a card system, six columns, five cards. Those are my five events for that. And I put in my crisis and I put in my climaxes as like cards, as just basic events. They say climax one, you know. And then I use a very trusty. First act or first movement. Outside of that, these days, I play a little bit. I’m a little more free form. I know that I have, oh, that’s not true. I actually also have my thresholds, my milestones per movement at the end.

But outside of that, there are ones that I choose. As Devin and I have said in many tracking you through events and things, we’ll switch scenes like rules and tools and watering hole. They don’t have to come in a specific order. But even broader than that. It’s like cooking. You experiment with recipes. Once you get an idea of how it’s the know the rules before you break them. We’re going to lay out some really good rules or rough guidelines for you to follow that will help you execute your piece. But one of the reasons I do this, even though I do it freeform now, and I’ll go back to this outline or recipe that Devin and I have pieced together through our philosophies and other folks’ philosophies, I’ll go back to this just to help me out.

And that’s sort of why we’re offering it to you is it really helps to go back and go, well, I can’t stimulate my imagination, I don’t know what to do here, blah, blah. Any excuse that you give yourself not to sit down and discipline yourself to write. Because as soon as you get your butt in the chair and get excited about the scene, you’re off on your wild imagination adventure and it’s a thrill. But you got to find ways to get your butt in the seat. And the last thing I’ll say about this before we kick into each event and movement is here’s why this blueprint is built for you in this sort of like the standard format that we’re laying out for you here.

Each thing is comprised of about five events. Sometimes we have floaters in there, but we have six movements. That’s 30 events. If you wrote from your outline, from your Story Blueprint, on one of those events a day, each event being approximately three pages, in one month you’d have a draft of your script. That to me is how I achieve going from concept in my brain to executed piece on the page. I know I can’t do it all in one day. I know I can’t just wait and procrastinate. And then I’m… Some fantastic novel is going to flow out of me. Some great script is going to come out of me.

I have to regiment that time. And so these are broken up into daily achievable increments as well. Now, again, that’s in screenplay, each movement 15 pages. If you expand it into a novel, there’s a lot more writing. But just think about, you know, 2,000 to 3,000 words per event and that will get you around your page length you want. But that being said, it’s also measurement. As Devin and I have said in previous episodes. So before we go through the summary, it’s important to be able to track this stuff too.

Devin: If I’m just going to free write, like I’m just don’t have a story, specific story I’m working on, I will just take out this Story Blueprint and I’ll be like, I feel like writing a really good call to adventure or call to quest right now. And so I’ll just sit down and I’ll just randomly write a call to quest that has really no specific story to give. But I’ll put it in and then you don’t have to be as organized with this as I am. But I actually have folders on my computer that are just hook scenes, inciting incident scenes, call to quest scenes. And then I’ll just write them.

I’m like, oh, well, that’s I don’t know that hopefully that will go somewhere at some point. But just to strengthen my that muscle for that event, I’ll just kind of. And if I have some that I’m not really strong on, on writing. And there but they’re important. I feel they’re important events to all the stories. I’ll just free write on on a hero’s darkest moment. And I’ll just create a character and I’ll create a scenario and I’ll just write a scene based on that. That moment of of all seems lost in these and that that darkest moment for the hero, not necessarily having any specific story in mind.

But it’s just kind of a muscle strengthening, creative muscle strengthening. Exercise that I’ll use. And that’s how another way utilize this Story Blueprint.

Adam: That’s actually really awesome. And a great point, too. It’s all. And I think a good word for it is prompt. They also served as a really good writing prompt. Yeah. Like you can as you scan through them, they just like I’m telling you guys, it’s magic. If you look through all these events, one of them is going to call to you and go, oh, it’s going to speak to your heart. Your imagination, your whatever. It’s it’s something that’s going to call to you and you’re going to say, I want to write that. The difference is whether you write it, whether you sit down and you do it as Devin saying, follow that inspiration or you don’t because you can put it off and put it off and put it off and put it off forever.

And I also want to say, as far as adjustment, don’t try too hard. That’s why we’re saying. I’ve said this before. My goal is two crappy pages a day. Actually, it’s three per event. Three crappy pages. Crappy because I don’t have to write the best thing. I just have to get my butt in the seat. That’s the bargain I have to make with myself so that I do write good stuff. I’m not going to write three crappy pages, but I’m going to tell myself that that’s the only goal so I don’t set the bar too high just to get myself in the seat. It’s like going to the gym or starting to work out. It also parallels with the way that I look at a hero evolving. I just read this, and it was awesome.

When building muscle, it’s neural adaptation and hypertrophy are the two things that build it. The neural adaptation is every day you do the same routine so your brain gets wired to understand it. That’s just repetition. If you haven’t worked out, do 10 push-ups a day. Your body will figure it out. Hypertrophy is overextending the muscle. You overstress the muscle and sometimes, and usually, well, always, tear it so that the muscle repairs itself, movement for recovery, for those of you who’ve been listening, to become stronger. You’re adapting the brain belief system-wise, movement by movement, from decision point, crossing a threshold, slowly. They’re starting to understand and think differently and have a new belief system and grow.

As far as the other end of it, it’s not struggle that I’m interested in. It’s not conflict that I’m interested in. It’s the challenge or the push of the character beyond what they’ve known before hypertrophy that is the growth I want out of the end of a story. This is how this became very important to me. I want them to make choices, and I want their choices to be… To reflect the results, so it’s not just random stuff. It’s more deliberate. I just thought that was kind of interesting as I read that, and I was like, man, that’s so much like character growth. Slowly, their belief system changes, neural adaptation.

I like that. And then they stress themselves, they push themselves to the limits, and it’s not good enough. Change, in general, is like lifting weights that you’ve never lifted before. So, you can’t imagine yourself in that place. Or position, or role, or lifestyle, or et cetera, et cetera, whatever the characters once in the story are. They can’t see themselves there. Just like when you try to pick up the heaviest weight, and you can’t even lift it. But a week from now, two weeks from now, a month from now, you’ll be able to lift that, and they’ll be that thing. It’s all change and evolution and growth.

Devin: Or when you do your workout, people say it all the time. Like, man, I’m sore. I didn’t even know I had muscles there that are… I’m that sore. Well, it’s the same thing. Using the same analogy, you push your character to a limit that they didn’t realize they had something within them. I didn’t even know I had parts of self there. Yeah. Because in Movement 1, all they’re doing in Movement 1, that known world routine, is if you get up every morning and you do 10 push-ups. You get up every morning and you do 10 push-ups. It’ll become a routine. For 10 years, your muscles aren’t going to be sore because they understand…

You haven’t tricked your muscles into… You’re using the same muscles over and over and over again.

Adam: They’re conditioned. They’re in the routine now. Yeah.

Devin: And then when you do something completely different, you’re like, oh, my God, I didn’t even know I had muscles there. I’m so sore. I can’t walk. Well, now your body is reacting to something out of that comfort zone.

Adam: I was going to… You took the words right out of my mouth. Comfort zone. Atrophy. Ah.

Devin: The opposite of hypertrophy. That’s right. Is if you don’t use something, it dies. Your muscle… Muscle atrophy, I mean, that’s an extreme way. Yeah, that’s pretty harsh, dude. If you don’t use a muscle, it just… It weakens to a point where it’s almost unusable. And so it’s also… Good. I like that analogy.

Adam: This is a good analogy. I’m realizing, especially kicking us into… And I was going to say, yeah, we did go down a rabbit hole. But good ones. Yeah. For the beginning as far as setting this up. And we promised this would be tight and right. So we’re going to get into the events now. So this is a good Cliff Notes summary version of… Of what we’re talking about. I did want to make one comment on what Devin was saying about this first movement. Ten push-ups for a person who doesn’t do push-ups is big growth. That’s hard to do. Your muscles may hurt the next day. Depends on how much weight you’re carrying and what your routine is.

But if you’ve done that for ten years, that’s your routine. For the other person, their routine is lack of exercise. None. And for this person, it’s doing this specific for 10 years. So different comfort zones or known world routines help to set up different character and character lifestyles in easy ways that you can now track once the dramatic question is posed in the call to quest, and then once it’s answered in the climax and resolution in act three, you can get their growth, you can get where they come from. That’s why the comfort zone is important. Where are they comfortable? What muscles haven’t they stretched? Or, as Devin is saying, are unaware of for their own literally body development, but in terms of a character mental and emotional space, too. They’re that development in that mind space and heart space. So movement one, we’re there. We’re actually starting the events now, StoryOsophers.

People are like, God, about freaking time. We said we were gonna start early, man. The two of us get very excitable. We’re like little kids. Movement one is also act one in this model. It is the ordinary world, known world, the known world, act one. And movement one in this particular Story Blueprint model encompasses all of act one. This is approximately in a screenplay, one to 15 pages or minutes. This is when the character transitions from the comfort zone to out of the comfort zone. We’ll sometimes call this the foundation of the story. This is where you want to hit the essence of your character and the theme. You don’t want to go too in-depth.

You’re gonna do that throughout the rest of it. Go into detail. Event one, the hook. Event two, known world routine. Event three, and this is a floater scene, which I’ll explain once we get through. Inciting incident. Number four, call to quest. Number five, refusal of call to quest. And number six, answer the call to quest, which is crossing into the unknown world or the special world of act two. The inciting incident, where we have it situated at event three. I do my best to make the inciting incident either in the hook or in the call to quest as part of the call to quest. Sometimes the inciting incident will be its own separate event, which I’m not sure if that’s…

I’ll let Devin answer to it, but I’m not sure if that’s his preference or not. But for me, I like to… I think most of the time I like to put the inciting incident in the hook. I like it to be the hook. That, I think, is my preference. So we call that one a floater. There’s a couple other events throughout this structure that we call floaters, but it’s important to acknowledge, and if it is independent on its own, that’s where we sort of suggested it should go, right before the call to quest. The thing happens, and then the character is brought into the mix and posed the dramatic question.

Devin: In my story blueprints, I like to separate it out as its own event, even though it could fall into a hook scene or a call to quest scene. But I like to just make sure that I’m aware that that it’s because it’s such an important element, story element, within this movement that I want to make sure that it’s not just blended into… Other elements of a hook or call to quest, because I like the inciting event to be fairly powerful. And then there’s actually another element within this movement that I call a key incident, which is actually the element that makes it specific to the hero for them to make the… To answer the call to quest. So usually that happens somewhere between the call to quest, a refusal of call to quest, and somewhere in there where the inciting incident is impacting the known world, and it’s causing the comfort zone to become uncomfortable. But it may not be specific enough to the hero for them to believe or for them to say, all right, well, I’m the one that needs to go on this.

On this quest to save the world, or whatever the story element is.

Adam: You’re talking about the actual choosal, the catalyst that is the thing that causes the choosal? Exactly. Yeah. And some older models like Campbell or Vogler even, sometimes that’ll be the meeting of the mentor. Yep, yeah. Sometimes the mentor will be the force that pushes that. I like to consider that in the answer to the call to the quest. Yep, I agree. To me, that’s the catalyst that makes that happen. But it is worth noting mentally, what is the thing? Exactly. The catalyst, the event, the thing that makes them. So between the events of Refusal of the Call to Quest and Answer to the Call of Quest, or Choosal, we like to call it Choosal, Choosal of the Call to Quest, what thing happens with the hero that makes them do it?

Now, in some movies. You just may see a scene where the hero is looking out the window at the starry night, considering what has just been posed to them in the call to quest. And they said, no, thank you, it’s not for me. And they’re looking out the window, and then the next day, they’re like, okay, I’m in. And the person may be, may say to them like, oh, why did you change your mind? And they just don’t answer. So now what Devin’s talking about, the catalyst, or the catalyst moment, you can sort of tuck in your pocket and leave till later in the story to sort of use as a payoff or a way to save the world.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. But it is important to note between refusal and choosal, why? You know, what’s the reason?

Devin: The other thing, and we talked about this when we actually went over this specific movement, but we can probably reiterate it, is refusal of the call to quest is one of those events that may or may not fit your story. The reason that Adam and I like to use it is because it is an incredible opportunity. Opportunity. Opportunity. Yeah. To show the inner obstacle of your hero.

Adam: Or hint at it, set it up nicely.

Devin: Yeah.

Adam: Yeah. It’s a great place to plant the seed for, in your climax, that one thing you wanted the audience to really forget about. You can do it subtle enough here and early enough. Did I just crack?

Devin: Yeah, you just went through puberty. That’s great. I did that last episode.

Adam: I know. I loved it. I laughed so hard when I was editing it.

Yeah. The whole point of highlighting this call to quest, refusal, choosal, is you can combine that all into one event and call it the call to quest. Really. And sometimes those three events, very important events, will happen in one scene. There won’t be go away and think time for a hero. It’ll have to happen all in one fell swoop. So we break it apart just to make sure that for character development and plot purposes, Mm-hmm. We can isolate those things for ourselves. Even if, as Devin was saying, sometimes the refusal’s not there. If there’s a call to quest and a willing hero, like, we’ll do it. We’re on, you know, we’re on the case.

Mm-hmm. There’s not really a refusal of call. And in generally in those kind of situations, if you have a gung-ho hero, like in cop shows and stuff, they will just give them some other thing that’s, that could distract them from their quest, like family, an ex-spouse.

Devin: Mm-hmm.

Adam: We’re just going to summarize. So they’ve made the choice to go on this quest to fall in love with this person or to pursue this person they’ve just fallen in love with or, or become enamored with, to go on this treasure hunt, to do this, any trajectory of plot. They’ve made the decision and they’ve crossed the first threshold as a commitment into the unknown world. This is where we start to talk about what we were talking about earlier on with neural adaptation, hypertrophy, all these different things. Different ways of adapting. This is where it all starts. Movement two, movement two, which is the first movement in act two, unknown world, or in some traditional models, they’ll call it the special world of the quest, like Vogler, 16 to 30 pages or minutes, approximately.

Like we’re saying, this is just for measurement. Movement two is from out of the comfort zone, where your hero has transitioned from movement one, from comfort zone to out of comfort zone, you take them from out of comfort zone, and you gradually transition them into the danger zone. Now, Devin and I like to call this movement two, first day of school, or it’s all fun and games. And I think fun and games is Snyder, Blake Snyder, right? Is that what he calls this section?

Devin: Yes, I believe so.

Adam: Vogler calls this area test allies and enemies. And so it’s very loose. And so one of the reasons why Devin and I focus this one is, we thought it was a pretty broad, we needed a little bit more, I don’t know, guidance for ourself and trying to execute what we thought was a better beginning to a second act. And so we realized it was more like first day of school. And that was sort of what resonated. The first event in movement two is, is the first day of school or reaction to movement two. To the unknown world, the world we just entered. Event two is the watering hole.

Event three, rules and tools. Event four, approaching the danger zone. And event five is the milestone of crossing into the danger zone. Sort of like a little hint at the crisis to come. Some event happens where, as we said, it’s all fun and games. And this event is until someone gets an eye poked out. Or maybe not. That’s not that dangerous. So tell me when someone skins a knee. Right? If you’re not doing some horrific move. Like my example. You can always flop your rules and tools and watering hole scenes. Those are easily swappable if you’re thinking about it. And this is your movement to have fun.

Not that every piece isn’t having fun, but this is where you can sort of, if you keep it focused enough, you can play around with your hero and the world and your allies and get to know them in playful ways that we, that endear us to the world. And that’s what we’re doing. That’s what we’re doing. Because it’s not too committed to the quest yet. We’re just in training. We’re just learning. As the title suggests, first day of school. And I’m sure Devin will have a better way of saying this. You have to keep it focused at the same time. We have to keep it moving forward.

That’s the whole point of movement. And so the danger zone may come as a surprise to your hero. But throughout this whole thing, you’re slowly transitioning. You’re slowly building the story from out of comfort zone to danger zone.

Devin: Yeah. The only thing I would add here is rules and tools. Like I was talking about before where I’ll just jump in and pick an event and write, just free write. Rules and tools is one I’ve been lately trying to get really good at. Yeah. Because the rules and tools can be a trap for lazy writing. When you know you need to, when you know you need to get information out, vital information about the world. And tools that you’re going to need in the world, not only to survive, but also to thrive and beat the antagonist. And so a lot of times, and I’ve seen it in a lot of books and movies where, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

But where someone just basically has a monologue of these are all the rules. These are the tools you’re going to need. And so good luck to you.

Adam: And some people do it blatantly like that. And, but do it well. Like the matrix, it is a, it has blatant rules and tools scene. But it’s so dynamically presented. You don’t care.

Devin: Right. The rules and tools are similar to backstory. Think about the relevance of for right now. What, what are the rules and the tools that are relevant to our hero? And if, if it’s an ensemble story and the allies, what’s relevant right now? And also the person or however, we’re getting the information. About the rules and tools, perhaps they don’t necessarily know all of the rules and tools that you need for that entire world or in how to beat the tag. And so allow them similar to how we’re getting backstory from we’re leaking out backstory as far as what’s relevant right now to know about this person’s backstory.

That’s going to allow us to, to continue the story at this stage of the game without them having to know everything about their backstory. And so if you do the same thing with rules and tools, maybe find a character that. Has gotten to a certain point that the certain point of the quest that the, that the hero is on. And so they’re like, this is what I know as far up to this point, but you may need to learn more. And I think that’s, I get a little bit more excited when I’m reading or watching stories that the writer or the director, whoever they’re doing it as a very clever way of providing rules about the world that he may even be wrong at this stage of the game.

We’re only in. Movement too. Yeah. And so we may be getting bad Intel. From someone that’s giving us, and may not necessarily be on purpose, but they just may, like, we don’t need to know everything about this world right now is all basically what I’m getting at. But we need to know enough of the world at this stage of the game for our audience to understand either the dangers of it or how it’s complete, how it’s different than the comfort zone and our known world. I’ve spent a lot of time on this trying to free write. So this is one of that I’ve keep going back to. And I’m like, oh, how, what’s clever ways of, of leaking out rules and tools at this stage of the game? And what are some maybe rules for me as a writer on what to always think about, be cognizant of when I’m at this stage of the game, when I’m when I’m writing the rules and tools scenes is kind of how do I, what’s my blueprint for this event?

Adam: Like movement one is the essence of your entire story. Movement two, this. This scene rules and tools is the essence of your special world. So as an, as a quick example, before we get to movement three gremlins, they very early on set you up with three rules. Now they don’t tell you what happens when you feed them after midnight. They don’t tell you what happens when you get water on them. They don’t go into this big paragraph worth of information, rules and tools wise. It’s just somebody going here, the three rules, boom, boom, boom. And that’s it. That’s the rules and tools scene. And the rest of the.

The rest of the movie is showing you what happens when those rules get broken. So essence, this rules and tools scene is all merely essence because, and I’ll point this out when we go right in here to movement three, there’s another rules and tools type scene that happens and almost echoes across every movement. The whole point of us saying movement one needs to be really tight is once you get movement one and it’s rhythm down, it’s sort of, you can lay it over top of the other movements and you get it. Okay. You need to hook the audience in the beginning. You need to set up sort of the new status quo or where do we, what’s the platform we decide on about the adventure from here?

And then a new bit of information or call to quest or choice needs to be made. The decision point, they, the character must choose, they choose, and they cross a different threshold into a different maybe aspect of the physical world or aspect of inner self. So external or internal, they cross the threshold and it just repeats. Mm-hmm. Simply across every movement. It just becomes more intense or it becomes more detailed or focused in a specific area of that event. And you’ll sort of see what I mean by that as we track through the rest of them. But it, your rules and tools, they may be in the middle of training and practicing and figuring stuff out when the danger zone happens. It may happen during training.

And they’re like, whoa, this is more dangerous than I thought. Or I have more at stake than I thought. Or I may not get the thing that I thought I wanted so easily. Right. Like all these little bits of doubt. Like all these little bits of doubt start to happen in this milestone threshold. And then we move into movement three, which is the second movement in act two, second part of act two, 31 to 45 pages per or minutes approximately. And this would be leaving us all for movement two in the danger zone.

Devin: Or percentage.

Adam: Or percentage. Percentage is for novel. We leave off from the danger zone of movement two and we’re going to transition by the end of movement three into the crisis or the tipping point or as… Devin and I like to call it the fight, flight, or freeze moment. It sort of amplifies our character’s choice and decision-making capabilities and responsibilities. But we also just simply like to refer to this movement broadly as build to crisis or build to midpoint, build to tipping point. This whole thing, each one of these movements is a build to a certain milestone. But this is your center point. And so to me, it has a lot of meaning, like a midterm exam for the final of the climax.

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Adam: So the events of Movement 3, the first event is a close call, sort of a reaction to the danger zone. Whatever happened as the milestone event and the end of the danger zone, this is where the character, the hero, and allies, even antagonists, sort of react to it. They, it’s like, woo, a close call. We almost lost that eye. Or we almost skinned that knee. The, second event, a new discovery, lesson, or information. So once again, it’s sort of like a call to quest, an invite, an inciting incident. New information is being brought about. And this is a great opportunity for a second Herald.

If the story has somehow hit a dead end or stalled. Just bring in another character or bit of information, a messenger, if you will, to focus the story in a specific direction. It’s a neat little trick. Don’t abuse it, you know, but it’s a great place for a herald. Event three, new direction, or the adventure opens up. Event four, approaching the inmost cave. Inmost cave, innermost cave, we mean inner and outer obstacles. We’re approaching something that is dangerous, more than the danger zone to the hero. This is something that is important, dangerous, crisis. Did your throat just gargle? That’s my stomach. I heard it. I’m so hungry. I’m starving.

Oh, God. You stopped. I’m like, I wonder if he heard that. Back on track. Okay. Event five.

Event five is your crisis. Your supreme ordeal, your tipping point, your midterm exam, fight, flight, or freeze moment. It’s the big one. This is probably the second biggest event next to your climax, this one, because it helps to set up your climax for a reversal, but it focuses your story. It helps to focus your audience on what the story’s about thematically. After this point, we cross the third threshold. This event, this crisis is the milestone that we’re building to in movement three. Devin?

Devin: Maybe the only thing I’m going to add is what we were talking about with rules and tools, new discovery lesson or information, this second herald, this could be one of those opportunities to leak out another rule or provide another tool. This is one of those where somebody with a little bit more information can provide, can leak out or dribble out some more information about the, about that world.

Adam: It’s also a nice spot for, as Devin has talked about, and I hadn’t considered much, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since he brought it up a couple episodes back, is multiple mentors. It’s also another place to bring up a mentor, a second mentor. And just for the record, heralds and mentors sometimes go hand in hand and are around the same spots. It’s interesting, I’m noticing. But that second mentor, if you’re doing an adventure quest or something where in traditional mythology where the hero is on a quest or something and they have to go to a certain place and get a certain object and there’s a guardian of the object and this is the guardian, well that’s a threshold guardian for that object. Here’s where you might find out the information you need to go to that thing. And on to the next object we must find. You have to get the sword, the shield, and the helmet. So here is where you’d find out new information that would lead you to the next object. A herald would come and tell you, or a mentor would say, okay, now what we know next, about the myth is. So this is sort of important for if you do longer than a six movement piece, like let’s say you do a 120 minute script, you’re adding two more movements, movement seven and eight to this whole structure. And if that’s the case, you need more builds. So you just insert more movements that build to greater climaxes or smaller milestones that slowly build.

Did you have anything else you wanted to say about movement three? Nope. No. Movement four is the third and final movement of act two in this particular blueprint model. And it runs from about pages 46 to 60 pages or minutes on screen. And if you’re talking about screenplay, it transitions from the central midterm crisis tipping point to recovery. So this one, Devin likes to call Eye of the Hurricane. It’s a good name for it. You could also even think of this whole piece as a one big giant campfire scene. We’ve talked about campfire scenes loosely throughout the podcast. But this is the this is where campfire scenes generally take place. And what we mean by campfire is it’s got a tonal quality to it. And it’s also got a more internal space externalized with the campfire. There’s a little warmth, there’s dialogue, there’s intimacy. So this movement, event one starts out with escape. So much like the close call of the beginning of movement three from the danger zone. Escape is much more frantic and energized, even desperate event than close call. Close calls like, phew, got away from that, you know, got away from that danger, that thing. Escape is, and we’ve talked about this as far as a crisis in previous episodes, an ally might die, a mentor might die, some, the hero may almost die. Some, some big event shakes the hero and the team up.

Whoever, whatever, you consider that to be the hero and the team. And here, they’re just trying to get away from it. Maybe it’s a romantic comedy, and they’ve been really embarrassed in front of the person they’re interested in. And it’s, it breaks our heart, the audience and their heart. And so they just run out into the hallway or get to a bathroom and just cry. So escape can be many different things. But it’s desperate. It’s not as, as relaxed as close call. Event two, aftermath. Aftermath is sort of now taking into account the crisis and escape. Escape, you just have time to get out. You just have time to get away. And aftermath is sort of taking it all in. It leads us to event three, which is hero’s darkest moment, or all seems lost. And that mirrors our refusal of call, answer to the call, or choose of the call of quest that Devin talked about earlier. That key event that is the catalyst. Here, if you have not addressed why that doubt was there, here’s where it shows up in all its glory.

And the hero goes, I knew I shouldn’t have gone on that quest because dot dot dot, whatever the key event catalyst was in movement one. And that’s how you sort of tie these two bits together. But I wanted to illustrate that with at least one thing here to show how setup and payoffs, you can link them, you can connect them. And also, very importantly, measure whatever page you’ve written, your refusal and choosal of call to quest on around 15 ish. About page 50 ish is when you’re going to bring that back up. So you can measure out the distance between the setup and the payoff. I wanted to use one event or a couple events to just illustrate. That’s part of why we break this down into measurements. Just on a glance, you can track how many pages, how much time you’ve given your audience to forget about or stew on said thing.

Event four is another floater event comes after the hero’s darkest moment. We call the fall of the heart wall. And it’s a floater because you can sort of include it, it should actually probably be included in in the third event hero’s darkest moment. It’s when something inside them changes some big moment of discovery, growth, evolution, realization is probably the best way to put it some aspect of what they wanted or what they thought they wanted. They have a discovery and hero’s darkest moment. And they realize if I just let down this guarded armored part of myself, I can easily. See if or I can allow myself to become the person I’m supposed to be choice growth evolution. That moment is very important. And we like that imagery fall of the heart wall because it’s internal, but we have to understand it externally within the world. And so a lot of that comes in events. The final events of this movement, reassessment, or goal refocused, which is sort of the answer to the darkest moment not fall the heart wall. And the last event of this movement is the fall of the heart wall.

The final event of movement for re-choosal of the quest. So you can really see how movement for mirrors movement one in a lot of ways. There’s a refusal choosal and it’s it’s quiet like that, but it needs to be tight. A lot of stories don’t have movements that are as as detailed as far as a recovery movement movement for as we do. But Devin and I really think it’s important to show what it takes to for a hero to go from failure or falling short to where they’ve fallen. They’ve improved or built that muscle up where they can lift that weight or change that belief system. And movement for is where we see that’s where the most growth happens.

And it was sort of like Movement 2. It was sort of just loosely, it’s not really that detailed, and we wanted to get a little bit more microscopic with it. So that’s Movement 4.

Devin: This is where our hero becomes a hero. Because up until this point, if it’s an ensemble story, the hero is kind of another, just another character among the group. And so they’re kind of, he’s blended in a bit. Even though the group may be looking to them as a hero, the hero himself does not look at themselves as a hero. And then after the hero’s darkest moment event, which I think is one of the most important moments in the story, that’s where we come up with our story.

Most important events of the story, they emerge or the phoenix rises from the ashes is another way we put this in previous episodes. But this is where they emerge from that hero’s darkest moment as they believe they’re the hero and their allies also see this transformation too. And so that’s the main, I think one of the main themes of Movement 4.

Adam: It’s like a rebirth of themselves, as he said, like a phoenix and then, and crisis being the ashes they rise from. And the remaining bits, now that we’re re-choosing the goal, it’s the part of the story or the movie or the book where you’re like, oh, now it’s getting, now it’s getting really good. Movement 3, it’s getting good. Movement 5, we’re about to step into, it’s getting really good. And it extends the climax and we now get to see what those changes are in application. And that’s what’s fun about it. We may not even get all of the information about those changes that happen in the recovery movement of Movement 4, but we’ll get to see them play out in the next two movements if we haven’t. So Movement 5 is our first movement in Act 3. It’s about 61 to 75 pages or minutes. Nothing is written in stone, folks. Really important to remember as we always, as we track through these.

Movement 5 takes us from the recovery that happens at the end of Movement 4 to the climax, the height of the climax. So this movement we can also call build to climax. Event 1, and this is pretty simple. Not a lot of description is required because you’ll know what this is. Event 1, putting the plan into action. Whatever the newly focused goals, wants, desires, ways of approaching this problem are, that’s the hero. That’s what the hero is doing. Could be a way of getting the girl back. You know, I don’t just want you to think of like a quest type movie, but in quest, the word question comes into play.

Will they or won’t they? So it’s always good to think of your character’s journey of want as a quest. Event 2 is something goes wrong, things heat up. This is where we’ve underestimated the antagonist, which leads us into Event 3, enemies gain ground. Event 4 in Movement 5 here is Climax 1, showdown. And the fifth event is Climax Part 2, breakthrough. Which is the crossing of the threshold of Movement 5. At the end of each of these movements, there’s a threshold where things change, and you need to gauge where your character’s at. This one, they have a breakthrough moment. I like to call it an aha moment too, because it helps me to think of it differently.

Where it’s instantaneous, and it’s very present that they come up with this idea or solution. And one of the things I wanted to address is, Devin and I have broken up our climax into three parts, and so our first two happen here. Making the cliffhanger-y aspect to Movement 6, and the third part… In the third part of the climax, a little bit more amplified, you’re building to it more. We’re trying, as I said, movement five we consider a build to climax. So now we’re in the height of the climax and movement six will take us from the climax to the resolution. But Dee, did you want to say anything about movement five before I laid out six? Movement five is pretty self-explanatory.

Yeah, I think most people get it because it’s what you’re leading up to. Movement six, act three, movement six is the second movement in act three and will finish us out. It also is where we start to finally see what act three is really about, which is changed world. Movement five is a build towards that and it’s not quite there, although we may see bits as we build towards it. But movement six is really what that’s about. It’s going, okay, now what are the results of our story? So the result of the decision of the breakthrough moment, the aha moment at the end of five, we cross this threshold and we make a decision. Climax event number one and movement six is Climax part three, now or never. A very present made final decision that may not be final, but it’s pretty final. This is your final exam from your midterm exam and your crisis, but it wants to be something that the hero is living presently in the moment, not in the past with regret, not in the future with hope or pipe dreams, but happening right now. Event two is outcome. What happens as a result of this final major decision point? Is the objective obtained or attained or not? And so a lot of times in older storytelling models, they might call this seizing the reward, triumph if it’s triumphant. And event three, journey home, road back, or return. Devin and I also have a variation, which is if they’re not going home, there’s no journey back or road back. We’re moving into the new, the changed world itself. So we’re heading on a new path, a new avenue. Event four, new status quo or changed world. If they do return home, their home is slightly changed by either eliminating the antagonistic force or they’re a changed person and their community returns to their home.

Response to them differently. Changed world, as we said with Star Wars, Luke’s entire world is destroyed before he, at the beginning of his journey, so he has nothing to return to. He now joins the rebels in a new family. So you can have this new world rather than returning to the old world and showing how it’s different. Event five, resolution, closure, or tying up loose ends. This is everything you need to pay off all those little bits you’ve waited to learn. The last little chunk, the last little end, and pulling it all together. This can either end in a clincher kind of wonderful payoff. This can end in like a cliffhanger if you’re doing an episodic something so that you invite the audience to come back. You promise more story. And we have a final event, a sixth event in movement six. We call final image final words, or until we meet again. The promise of more to come. And even though this is usually part of resolution or closure, like whatever the last moment of the resolution is, would be these things, we also keep it as a separate event because sometimes there’s a button. Sometimes there’s its own separate scene. Sometimes there’s an epilogue, you know, sometimes there’s superimposed epilogue on the screen. So it can be its own event too, but you think of it like even, okay, Princess Bride, final image, final words. We’ve used it throughout the whole movie. And Peter Falk is the granddad, turns to the grandson. He’s like, hey, granddad, can you come and read it to me tomorrow? As you wish. And so this beautiful, poetic, loving words that have been built throughout the whole story, we aren’t expecting them. And they’re the final words. And so just take extra care for that.

Last moment. It’s the only thing I wanted to say about that.

Devin: The only thing I would add here is this should mirror the tightness of movement one. Oh yeah. Even though it seems like there’s a lot happening here with the number of events, it can go really quick and you should end it just as tight and satisfying as movement one. And a point for final image, final words, or until we meet again, I just like to remember that what this story, is, is a moment in time of these characters in these, in this, in these worlds. And something’s happened. They’ve lived a life before this, and they’re going to live a life after this. And so we’re, we’ve picked a moment in time with these characters that something big is happening to them. And so we wanted to bring the restore, the writers wanted to bring the audience along for the ride. That said, we, we don’t need to, the, the new status quo or, or coming, the journey home.

Don’t overdo it. Don’t try to show the audience that this is now what’s happening. This is what, you know, and then almost spend an entire story on the new status quo or how things have changed. We’ve just spent an entire journey with these, with these characters. And so I, and this is just personal preference. I personally like to allow the audience to use their own imagination based on who they, their knowledge now of these characters and what they’ve gone through and how they’ve transformed and let their imagination say, I bet this is what’s going to happen after. I bet they’re going to stay together. I bet they’re going to have kids and they’re going to move to the East Coast or they’re the, the.

The, the new world is going to thrive and, and now this hero is going to be, is going to be the, the mayor of this new town, whatever, you know, however it is, but. Allowing the audience to continue to be the storyteller. Exactly. We as storytellers don’t necessarily need to show them that. We can allow them, based on our storytelling and what we brought them through that journey, to imagine whatever they want that’s going to happen. And if we, at, if we do want to write a sequel, think about that too at this stage of the game is, is how do you want to leave this cliffhanger? How do you want to, you know, how do you want to spark that in the audience’s imagination is, oh, you know, they, they gave us that cliffhanger.

I wonder, you know, I can’t wait to see what happens. I can’t wait to come back and visit them in this, in this world. And, and a lot, you know, because that’s like we talked about before, and I think is probably the last episode is. People would like to go to movies and read books to be told a great story and for a little bit of an escape from their known world. And so it’s really important for us as story writers or storytellers to, when they, to not make, to make them not really want to leave that world or leave these characters. And if they do kind of yearn to, or they don’t want to like make them not.

Adam: Devin wants to make them story junkies.

Devin: Yeah, or make them anticipate the next story. Make them desperate for it.

Adam: Make them crave it, baby. Make them crave it.

Devin: But yeah, I think we’ve talked about that at length the last episode.

Adam: So those are the six movements encompassing our three-act structure, our traditional three-act structure, that Devin and I like to lay out as our Story Blueprint, our base Story Blueprint, for not just prompts for writing, ease of writing, ease of navigating, what we consider to be a trusty outline. If I don’t know where I’m going with the story, this is what I’m going to pull out. At this point, Devin and I have gotten to a place where we experiment a little bit more with these events and movements in terms of what we do with them with the story. And you have to sort of… You have to sort of let it be a little bit malleable because if you’re going to do more than a 90-page script or this does break down into two 45-minute episodes for you, things change a little bit.

If this goes to 120-page script, you now have a midpoint that lands at about page 60. So instead of keeping the same movement structure, just insert another movement. Now you’ve got four movements on one side of the crisis, the central, the midpoint, and four movements. On the other side. And you just change what they become. So if you think about an adventure movie where they are questing for an object that is guarded by a such and such, now think of each movement as, okay, at the end of this, they will have gotten that object. That will help with the quest. And each movement is a build to that threshold.

Now, conceptually, I’m sure we all understand what that means in a quest format. But translating that across into another genre, like a rom-com or… A fantasy, a horror, or something like that. Horror movie is probably so many kills per pages. We find out new, more information. A rom-com, it’s how many different attempts or dates do they go on with this person. And each one being a failure or success, one way or the other, could have… I like to transition during movements because I like to flip-flop them. If they have success in one movement, in another movement, they don’t. And so there’s ups and downs. But stretching it out, stretching out a story beyond this basic, like we’re saying, this basic blueprint, this sort of 90-page, 90-minute blueprint for a script, it translates across a novel.

We’re doing great. It translates across a novel in different ways. Devin looks at it in percentages. I try to look at it these days in terms of word count, because to me, that’s sort of how many words make up chapters and breaking it up, it’s a little easier for me. But you still want to be able to go, like, each one of these events could be a chapter. A chapter could be two events. An event could cover two chapters. You can do so much more with a novel because it’s not just dialogue and action, as in a screenplay. That’s a, it’s a, you know, a blueprint for performers, directors, designers, producers, all to expand on. A novel, you’re giving the whole world. So you can take the time, you know, you can take the time to explore your world. So it will change and it will grow.

Devin and I have our own little laboratories, story laboratories, where we nerd away and try to figure out different ways to structure and do stuff. I’m saying, I know I do, but I’m, I’ve not seen his, but I guarantee you he’s got one. Yeah. Guarantee you. I’m sitting in it.

Devin: The only thing I would add to adding movements, because I don’t, sometimes I don’t think it’s, it may not be, even if it’s 120 page script, there may be, oh, that’s a big, that’s a big jump. But if it’s even more than 90, like there’s going to be some movements. Oh, bleed over. And events. Yeah. There’s going to be bleed. But I would say don’t, I would, the additional… The addition of movements would, is in it, probably going to be happening in between, from movement two to movement five, somewhere in between there. I would keep movement one and movement, or… Exactly. Or the first and whatever, the first and last movements tight and right with bite.

Adam: And I don’t, I wouldn’t encourage people who are just starting out to even try this. Keep, stick to the blueprint like this until you learn a rhythm and then break the rules. The reason why, and maybe I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. When I suggest that, when I need to extend a script, that’s what I do. But I also know that I can invent a whole new movement that means something else and build on it. Like I can sort of free form structure stuff more easily than when I was younger and was a novice and didn’t really know what I was doing. And could have used a template, could have used a blueprint. But Devin’s right. Some of these scenes are not going to be three pages, they’re going to be four pages. Some of them are going to be longer. Some, and you’re going to realize, oh, it’s not 15 pages or minutes. It’s more like seven pages.

17 here and less over here. And it’s, oh shoot, it’s 20 over here. And it will end up being a, you know, a certain amount. If it goes over too much, just track how much fat you’ve got in that movement. If it’s, if it’s moving, don’t worry about it. But if you’ve wasted time with a dialogue scene, that’s, that’s, you know, it’s like every other scenes is a smooth three to four pages. This one, it’s five, six pages long. Let’s examine it. If it’s that long, it better have movement to it. Right. And if it doesn’t, you need to, you need to gut it. And so the whole point of the movement system too is having, and for me, like I say, for me, it’s 15 minutes. Sometimes it’s nine, if I’m doing a 45 minute episode, you know, but I break them up into rhythmic chunks so that I can track it diagnostically. Okay. Whatever I’ve written, does it work? Well, this is pretty long here. And this is pretty short. Did I get my point across and can just examine a 15 page chunk?

And go, yep, that works. Check. Well, that’s one sixth, if I’m doing six movements, of what I have to achieve. I don’t have to look back to it right now. You know, I know I’ve got that, those things done. It’s about measurement, achievement, percentage, tracking yourself so you can keep yourself disciplined to write a little bit each day and reach a goal.

Devin: Maybe don’t worry about page, numbers of pages when you’re right, right off the bat and just analyze your story to make sure, to make sure it’s, it’s moving. And if once you, once you write the story and you then analyze how long it is, that’s when you can go back and be like, all right, well, like, like Adam said. Is this dialogue scene, one, and then go through a little checklist, is everything they’re saying here very relevant to the story at this moment to these characters? If I can take a chunk of what they’re saying here and move it to a different spot because I don’t need to leak that stuff out or dribble that out right now, then you can see how your pages and if you’re actually mathematically looking at your story that way or measuring your story that way.

You can kind of move things around that way as long as but just always maintaining that is it is it is it tight? Is it everything? Is it moving the story moving? And is everything here relevant? And then you can kind of from there, you can kind of move things around or eliminate or like I said, kill some babies if if even though it seems it seems like it’s an awesome dialogue or dialogue scene. But because of everything you’ve done before and after it, it’s relevance has kind of faded, then maybe you don’t need it. And you can save that for a different story or or meant to be there or there, right?

Adam: There are a lot of times where you can take a dialogue scene that’s, it’s a good scene, but it just stalls the action and going, can I take this same interaction between these two, three characters, whoever’s in the scene, and move it to? A car chase in a car instead. Now, now your stakes are up, you’ve got actual stuff going on in your story. That’s part of an event. That’s not just like three people sitting around chit chatting. Now the fact that they’re arguing over, they can’t remember where they left the TV remote is so much more interesting when it’s not in their living room, because it’s in this freaking car chase. It’s a horrible example, probably the worst example I’ve ever given in my life. But

Devin: I don’t know, I think it’s kind of funny.

Adam: Well, I’m glad you liked it. Audience of one. Thanks, everybody. I did want to address this thing of traditional American cinema tends to have a delayed crisis. It tends to happen right at the end of act two. And it’s what the story uses to break into three, which means that a lot of traditional American films or American cinema has a really bloated beginning of a first of act two. So when act two starts, it’s just a long period of. And so part of the reason why we like a midpoint crisis is because it helps to focus the story better. But there are examples of a lot of the stories. If you’re a listener in the States, there are a lot of stories you’ve seen, for the most part out of Hollywood that are of this example. And I don’t really like it because it’s sort of like up to a mountain and we’re done up to a climactic point and we’re done. And Devin and I sort of like the up and down roller coaster ride. It’s more fun. But if you’re doing that, and you’ll see it a lot of times, you’ll see it.

Of times, they’ll do it in a lot of superhero movies too. Sometimes they don’t have a midpoint crisis, they’ll have a delayed crisis, end of act two crisis. But here’s what generally happens. I’m going to use the superhero movie as an example. If it’s the first Iron Man, if it’s the first Captain America, if it’s the first origin story movie, the beginning, it’s going to have that delayed crisis. The beginning of it is going to be spent a lot more time on them, on their ordinary world, their known world, the discovery of who they are, the training, the exploration of the abilities, and it’s going to extend all of your training first day of school stuff a lot.

Then it’s going to have, once they get the powers, they sort of just don’t quite get it right. Still a recovery movement, but not nearly as much, and then climax. In later movies, once they have established all their powers, and we know Iron Man and Captain America, they tend to have more of a midpoint crisis and more time in recovery. So we can get to know the characters more. But in origin story stuff, they tend to delay that crisis. And you can do both, but it is dangerous to do so, delaying the crisis, because you can lose your audience, and you can also, as a writer, lose your way really quick, and start writing filler stuff. And I can tell you for a fact, as a writer learning how to write, a novice writer, that was one of the biggest things for me, is act two, I don’t know what to do here.

It ends up being an extended act one, that’s really crappy, an extended movement one, and then my movements two and three, they’re not that great. And by the time I’m actually Finally into the most exciting part of my story, we’re 70, 80 pages in almost near the end. And so it’s sort of like writing what you’ve seen. My errors in how to approach an act two, part of them came from watching stories told in that pattern. And Devin and I explore this a good bit. When we started exploring stories with a midpoint, with a focus midpoint, for me, it started to feel more natural as a story structure and exciting.

And also, as far as writing scripted content for filmed media, having something that runs approximately 90 pages and being able to comprise two episodes, so two 45 minute episodes, could be a lot of fun. And so for me, that became important to now move that crisis midpoint as well. Because now I have an end of an episode, a cliffhanger, a clincher, a crisis moment at 45 minutes in my feature, or at the end of episode one, if it somehow becomes a series or vice versa. Like I say, there’s an American way of, they also call it the male and female orgasmic cycle of storytelling.

Devin: Okay.

Adam: The American model is a male orgasmic cycle, which is climax and resolution. And the European model is a female, which is cyclical. You return to the starting point, or return to new status quo. So whether you’re finishing up your walkthrough of the movements in the past episodes, or about ready to start with, you do not have to finish that part of the book. This is the last part of our event by event breakdown in our podcast here. This episode should serve you as a quick and easy reference point to all the events and how they fall in order. And as we go through, we will talk a little bit more about variations. Like we said, we’re not married to the rigidity of the structure. We just want to have it serve as inspirational and imagination inspiring events or prompts for your writing and help you to organize your stuff non linearly.

So you don’t feel a slave to the linear progression of your story, needing to write it in a specific order. You can follow, as Devin said quite astutely earlier in the podcast, you can write via your inspiration. You can follow your inspiration to whatever you’d like. So, and I would say this as a final thing. I know I said three pages a day at these events. If you wrote one a day, you’d have a draft in a month. Keep that in mind. This is how I operate. It’s just for me to get, make sure that I can get something on the paper, as we’ve said it before, puke it on the page, get it on the page. First draft, just get it on the page. Figure out what works, what doesn’t, and revise. I would say to all you story authors, if nothing else, as we go into these events, event by event, I’m going against my linear, nonlinear statement, but take the time when we talk about the hook scene, and just take that time right after you listen to that episode, write a hook scene. Next event, a known world routine, write a known world routine scene. Use the episodes per event, listen to it, get inspired by it, and then just write one.

And if you do that, even if it’s not three, you know, three pages a day for 30 days, and you got

You. You will have disciplined yourself to have written a first draft. So take the time and figure your way out of measuring that out for yourself, but dedicate yourself to a little bit of writing and structuring daily. And we’ll be here cheering you on.

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