Alternate Movement Structures

Adam: In this episode, we’re talking about alternate movement structures. How can you use the movement system to break down, diagnose, and remedy story problems? How can you use movements to develop an episodic series? Next on StoryOsophy. Hello. Oh, let me start that again. Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Hello, welcome to StoryOsophy. This is Adam Jones. And Devin Halden. This week. Holden. We’re, yep, Holden. You got it this time. The,. Holden. This week, we’re going to be talking about alternate movement structures. How to diagnose your story if it’s having problems using the movement system that we’ve just been laying out event by event across the past, across season two.

And as we’ve discussed, it has about six movements, that will fit in with these, the three act, the traditional three act structure. If your story is lacking in an area or is a little swollen in another area, like it’s like, ah, it’s too long here. They talk too much or this happens or you, and nothing eventful or, or plot driven is happening. This is a good way to, first of all, diagnose those areas and go, oh, this is, you know, measurement wise, page length wise, especially in terms of, screenwriting, teleplay, that kind of stuff. Novel, it, it can sometimes be a little trickier because of the.

Just switched into percentages. Yeah, exactly. And then you, you’re, yeah, you’re right because the way you measure it’s still the same, which we’ll get into. That’s the most important thing you can take probably from this episode is how to measure your story to figure out if it’s working and use the diagnostics of the movement system to sort of figure it out and diagnose your problem. Right. We’re rounding out season two where we’ve been talking about structure, both, very broadly. And then we zoomed in to talk about movements and then each specific stage or event in your story that creates the chain of events, otherwise known as your plot.

These last five episodes of season two, which is going to be, rounding us out at episode 80 are going to be about how to refine this first draft that you’ve been building. Building with the Story Blueprint Challenge event by event. We’re going to go through them and talk about what’s important about them, ways to fix your story. If there is a problem, we’re not just going to leave you stranded. And then talk about how to prepare yourself a little bit for feedback because we’ve talked about several of these things periodically throughout this podcast, just as side notes, feedback, co-creation, polishing a draft, different movement structures.

But here we’re going to focus in on each one. So we may repeat ourselves a little bit, but for the most part, we’ve left those conversations aside for the end of this season.

Devin: We’ve said it throughout the entire podcast, but we also like to reiterate that we’re not teaching a class on writing. Like, this is how you’re supposed to do it. This is what you do. Do it this way or else type of a thing. There isn’t a secret recipe to write the perfect story. And some stories may be perceived as perfect by one person and extremely flawed by somebody else. So don’t try to write the perfect story for every person. All we’re doing is StoryOsophizing. You know, we are trying to take other people’s ideas that we’ve read and we’ve tried to implement throughout the years of writing.

And we’ve created or we’ve discovered what really works for us. And even between Adam and I, different things work for us. And all we’re doing is trying to. Come at it and shine a light on and be like, hey, if you’ve never thought about this type of structure or structuring something this way, it’s it’s helped us in writing stories where we were able to break it up, where the act two with the traditional three act structure is where I always got lost and breaking it up into six movements and and looking at structure the way that we’ve created with Story Blueprint is an option. It’s providing an alternative.

Structure to the traditional structures that you may have implemented in your own writing throughout your writing career. But it’s we’ve talked also the there’s something there’s an elusive or the the mirage of perfection. Don’t try to make your story perfect for everyone. You’re going to get feedback from hopefully a bunch of different people that have different perspectives and they’re going to provide different feedback. So feedback doesn’t mean make changes or implement those changes and try to mold your story around what they want. It means listening on take take what their feedback is and be like, all right, well, I understand I can actually solve this problem they’re having by making this part a little bit more clear inserting some dialogue here.

Adam: Yeah, you got to process it. Yeah, you got to listen and process. There’s two steps to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Devin: And a story is a story is ready for an audience when you the writer. And your imagination feels it’s ready. And I didn’t say the story is finished. It never feels finished. Because I don’t think any story is ever really finished. You know, we’ve just finished telling our audience this part of the story. And I didn’t say perfect. Like I said before, because it’s perfect is like the Loch Ness monster. You hear about it. People say they’ve seen it or experienced it. But evidence that proves its existence has never been discovered. Perfectionism.

Adam: I can’t remember what football team NFL football team. There’s a coach. That’s. He said, I wish I could remember it. You know, in the sports gaming where they use the football. He said, give me a little more information. I could probably help you out a little bit. He said, we will always be chasing perfection on this team. That was the intention. Right. That they would always be chasing perfection, knowing ahead of time that it was never achievable. But in chasing it, they would experience moments of exceptionalism in their performance. Because they’ve challenged themselves to elevate their craft to the next level. Right. And I’m like, that’s exactly how you want to think of perfectionism.

Perfection is an illusion. But you want to keep moving towards what you. You have to be realistic about it or else you’ll never finish a piece because it’ll never be perfect.

Devin: Football is a good analogy, actually, for what we’re doing. So you can take. It is. Because if you take a football, say you take the football coach and the football coach is like, all right, we’re playing. This team this Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Friday for high school, Saturday for college, Sunday for pro. This is our game plan. This is how we’re going to structure our game plan for this team, because this is what our structure needs to be to provide the best opportunities to beat this team on this day. Right. And so if you take that analogy and you put it into your stories, because when I write personally, each project or each story typically has a very different structure than the last. I mean, sometimes it’s vastly different, but there have been a few stories that I completely changed the structure, either as an experiment or because it was the structure the story told me it needed.

And so it’s like, this is every story that you write is going to be different. And, you know, there you may get into a. A pattern or a flow where you’ve you’ve created your structure and you stick with that structure. But what happens within each of those events and, you know, what happens within that structure is going to be vastly different for every story. And so it’s taking that project by project basis. When the software comes out, Story Blueprint software, that was one of our biggest features that we wanted was, though we have created Story Blueprint and we have these events, we have six movements. Every story is different. Every writer is different. So they have to be able to customize that. They have to be able to remove some of these events and add their events.

Adam: The events could be in a different order. Exactly. Yeah. Events in different order. Add an event, like you’re saying. Also, if the story gets longer, because as we talk about three, if you’re doing three pages per event in a movement, you’re going to end up around 90 page screenplay, right? For six movements. And those scenes can be longer, but longer scenes sometimes don’t survive because. They just need to be moving in different directions. How do you deal with a script that you know? A historical epic, for instance. There’s a lot of detail. There’s a lot of information, stuff like that. A series. It requires more pages or more screen time for those things.

And so you can’t just, if you took those events and those movements and you stretch them out, you’d have like 10, 15 minute events, which works in the over arc of a. Of a season. If you’re looking at the arc of a season, you want to look from event one to the final event for the whole season. But within each episode, within the entire series, even broader, you want to have a rhythm. As we talk about measurement, it’s better to say measurement, because then you can have a sense of what’s happening, especially in filmed media, which it’s a page per minute. So you can measure out when events are actually happening in your story.

A novel, you don’t quite know when the person’s going to put down the book or, you know, put the bookmark in, go to sleep. So you want to make sure you get them chapter by chapter, which is sort of what movements do. They’re the cliffhangers. And one of the things that you just said, Devin, that’s important is some of this, when you’re listening to the podcast, it may sound instructional. And in some ways it is only because we have young readers. And so when we feel like they may not know a simple reference. That, you know, more seasoned writers who are listening do know, we’ll explain it a little bit. And so it may feel instructional. And even the way we’re breaking this down, almost analytically, diagnostically, it may seem like we’re trying to be instructional with it.

But really the whole point behind the movements is it’s meant to be a system or a model of thinking, of designing your story, of approaching your story nonstop. So that you don’t have this act to desert or ocean where you’re lost. There’s measurable pieces. A lot of times people will use the word sequences, which is fine. And we do sequences sometimes with the, even within movements. But I think sequences has a different connotation to it for me. Movements is more like music. It’s also gives a sense of what should be happening during this piece. Okay. There should be movement from this piece to this piece. We do talk about how movement one, act one, they’re pretty reliable, those first events. I would say that’s my trusty go-to. Like I know I can lean on the foundation of that, movement one and act one. But even those get reordered.

For beginning story authors, this may sound a little daunting, but when I’m working on a new story, me personally, where I’m at, where I’m coming from. I will put up movement cards, and the cards below them will all be blank. I won’t use necessarily events first, because I want to see what comes from my imagination and where it tells me to place it. This is only after years and years of trying to work on a reliable structure. And even building this system and model out of that frustration. Like Devin was saying of. The Act 2, you sort of get lost sometimes. But the blank cards for me allows me to go, what if the structure isn’t the way that would create that perfect 90-minute three-act structure screenplay? What do you do with that stuff, you know? And so that’s a little more, that’s like freeform, you know, putting up blank cards and just being like, whatever comes, let’s see where it goes, baby.

I’m dancing with the devil. Before or after, switch them around. The whole point is it’s meant to be a malleable system. So it’s not, it may sound instructional in some ways, but a lot of it’s just advice. And as Devin is saying too, we have varying, for those of you who’ve been listening for a while on our StoryOsophers, that we have different opinions and preferences in the way we approach story, but we also have different advice that we would give in approaching an event, a scene, an act. Just because we think differently. It’s awesome, by the way, to have someone who is thinking differently than you. It’s an awesome thing to have because that’s, I think that’s one of those challenges that we’ve had too, Devin, in co-creating. And a lot of people get into trouble this way because someone thinks different, they butt heads. That’s a bad move.

If you can think differently with someone, but still have communication enough to negotiate the ideas, the stuff will be much better because there’s stuff you didn’t think about that they did. And they didn’t think about that you did. Like I said, we’re not doing an instructional thing, as Devin was saying. If it sounds that way, sometimes it’s explaining to a viewer or a listener that doesn’t quite know what’s going on. And also advice or our personal preferences in approaching it. But you’re dead on, man. Art in general, creating something from the imagination, there is no hard, fast rule or way to do it properly. Everyone does it differently.

It just so happens that we’ve discovered nonlinear building is a gift. Like linear, when you first start out, you start writing a story and you write it linearly. That’s the first time you try a story. And that’s hard. And usually you screw up a whole bunch. But after several stories, like the ideas don’t come linearly. They come just randomly. You’re driving in your car, you get an idea and it happens to be at the end of the movie. Well, what do you do? Make a little note and wait to the end of the movie? You can. Or you can, on that day, write down everything you know and are feeling and imagining because it’s right there, accessible. You got the magic of the universe right there and you’re just pulling in all those ideas because you’re tapped in. Write the scene then. Write the summary then. Write your notes then. And plug it into a system like Story Blueprint where you’re like, okay, it probably fits here.

And then by the time you’re, I would say, more naturally gathering ideas instead of forcing yourself to linearly create. You’re just getting them as they come naturally, which is way more fun anyway, I just have to say. Yep, I agree. Yeah, right?

Devin: Mm-hmm.

Adam: You’re following inspiration, which is the key. But Story Blueprint, you have a place to put them and organize them. What we want to do with this episode is talk about how once you get to this place and you’re looking over your draft in a broad view of, now, how do I go about fixing this? Here’s where you start. When I do it, the first thing that I do is I go, I’ve usually built it this way, but if I’m reviewing a script that wasn’t sort of story architected or story designed, I will break it up into 15-minute or 15-page chunks. About, here’s my reasoning, too. About every seven minutes, the human brain gets distracted.

And so you need to be, you need to re-engage it somehow. If you’ve done that in the middle of this, like your hero is suddenly faced with a new decision. And by the end of it, they’ve crossed a threshold. You’ve covered two seven minute chunks. So that, that will change of course, that measurement, but that’s my go-to. That’s my, that’s my basic. And sometimes I’ll do like, if I’m playing with a 45 minute episode or something, there’ll be nine pages long. You know, it’ll, it’ll change. It’ll vary. If you’re doing a sitcom, everything gets even more compressed. Like these events are not happening in three pages. They’re happening in 30 seconds or a minute. That’s how fast, and that’s what makes comedy fast paced and exciting. And then there are stories where it gets longer and there’ll be 20 minutes, but my go-to is, is 15. And I do, I break it down that way so that I can see at those points. And those points should be your thresholds, your movement, one threshold, two, three, four, five, to see if by that threshold stuff has actually happened in my story or more important way to look at it is if I were an audience member and I was watching this and I was At 15 minutes, would I be satisfied with this story or Or would I be like, come on, let’s get to the meat of the story.

Let’s go. Come on. I know. I get it already. Let’s go. If I’m impatient like that for that story, it means that the beginning is dragging. And I need to cut down on that to get to act two or movement two sooner.

Devin: Exactly.

Adam: So, breaking it up in 15 minutes, it’s measurable in your brain too. That’s why I do 15 minutes. Because everybody can easily measure 15, half hour, 45, hour, hour and a half. Right. But experientially, you can sort of get it.

Devin: The common theme of this episode when we’re talking, the common theme of structure period is measurement. Like that, I read somewhere, just in reading this article, I knew they were probably either a blogger or journalist. Like they weren’t a novelist or screenwriter. Because they started it off by saying, well, acts, the three act structure or acts are just arbitrary in story. Because I would. And I understand arbitrary is probably has more of a negative connotation when it comes to most things. And I understand like the Greeks and the Romans. Because people think it’s like unnecessary and it’s not. Yeah, right. It’s slightly different. Yeah. They were talking about like, well, Greeks and the Romans didn’t necessarily structure their plays around three acts.

And I mean, three acts for Greeks and five acts structure for Roman plays. But they needed a play. They needed a place to pause, to let people stretch their legs. And so they didn’t, you know, they weren’t sitting for three hours. So that’s why the structure, there was a structured story there. But they still wanted to make sure that the audience came back after they stretched their legs.

Adam: So there’s a cliffhanger before intermission.

Devin: They ended it with a bit of a cliffhanger.

Adam: Yeah.

Devin: Exactly. Right. And so, and that was usually, back then it was usually a question literally posed to the audience that created enough curiosity. Philosophically. Yeah. That made them. Come back. And, and so I’ve also, I’ve also read, this is ridiculous. It’s not ridiculous, but I, I get the, I get the argument, but not when it’s the argument is related to structure where they, people say, well, the audience doesn’t watch acts. They only watch characters. So don’t worry about structuring your, like, don’t worry about three act structure. Worry about your characters. And I’m like, well, of course that’s what they’re doing. Because again, these. I’ll probably, I say these arguments are probably not from a novelist or a screen screenwriter, in my opinion.

But if we write well thought out stories comprised of well-developed characters and worlds, then our audience is entertained. They’re focused on the characters and the action that happens within those worlds. They don’t see the seams of the structure. That’s not, it’s not why we write. We structure anything. We don’t want the audience. To understand that there is a structure. That’s the point. Only nerds like us see it. Right. That’s the point. However, you know, in, from a writer’s standpoint, structure, whether you use a traditional three act structure, the Roman five act structure, or our Story Blueprint six movement structure, what you’re doing is breaking your story into measurements.

Yes. Those measurements help us as writers identify moments in our story that, that Adam was talking about that lag or stretches in our story where nothing happens. There are checks and balances. On exciting and important events that will strengthen our characters in our worlds and increase or decrease tension. Increase or decrease pace and action, etc. All of the events and the components of story that seamlessly weave our story together so our audience doesn’t see the movement or the acts, you know, or that structure. That’s what this is about. It’s so we understand what Adam was just talking about is what sparked this thought in me was we are using it as writers as a measurement because what our contract to our audience is to make to entertain them and to leave them satisfied when they close the book or they leave the theater. And this is how we try to add an insurance policy to what we’re writing me like, all right, well, if I wouldn’t have structured this in some way, however you want to do it, whether you’re just doing 3x structure, you’re using our movement structure, and our events, you might not have identified that lag or that long moment where nothing happens, where you could have lost the audience, someone could have put the book down and moved on to a different book like that, those, those moments. And so that’s what we’re trying. When we, we talk, we talk about and we StoryOsophize and we talk about different structures, not not just the ones that we use, but other people’s structure, all of that is, is meant as a measurement, it’s meant as a guidepost for for us writers, to make sure that our what our stories are as entertaining and our stories are the best they can be for our audience. And it’s not meant to. So our, our audience is like, well, cool. Now we’re in act two. Now we’re at three. Now writers, of course, all of us, when we’re watching a movie, we can see those were like, oh, wow, they look at how seamlessly they moved from, from the known world to the unknown world, or how they did a specific event or moment brilliantly, a twist on a turn on. Yeah, yeah. Or reorganized it or reordered it to be non chronological. Exactly. You know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. But most audience members that aren’t actors and not directors, they’re not, they’re not filmmakers and storytellers, they’re not writers. All they want to do is sit down and be entertained by a movie, of course, they’re not going to see the structure, you know, actually happening and playing out on screen, because we as writers, that’s what we’re, we’re not supposed to show that it’s we have a seamless story that just entertains them. And that’s it. That’s all it’s meant to be. So of course, you know, going back to my, this article is like, of course, audiences watch characters and don’t care about actors.

Adam: They shouldn’t, they shouldn’t care about the structure of a story, they should just be your job entertained by what we create. Yeah, that’s your job. Yeah. And here’s the reason why we’re encouraging also self diagnosing these movements and stories and breaking them down into achievable, discernible pieces that you can work with and adjust is so that when you give it to someone else for feedback, you’ve already done some of the fixing, right? Don’t just create a draft, and it’s really sloppy, and you hand it over to someone else. You hand it to somebody else and go, no, you fix it. That’s lazy. Take at least a pass and see if you can fix some of the stuff that you’ve figured out. Now, I’m not saying like that people do that with me in consultations, a lot of the drafts that I get are well done. But what I’m saying is, first time writers, they just want to be done with it. This is me, I wasn’t making fun of anybody else. I’m making fun of myself. Like my first draft, I’ve done this thing. I’m like, here, someone else read it. I can’t look at this filthy thing anymore. I’m done.

You have to give it to someone else. Oh, I’ve been there.

Devin: You can use this movement system in a way. I don’t know how to, this will never be a 90-minute movie. This is, all of this has to be here. It’s 312 pages. Yeah, I know.

Adam: It’s like, it’s so, all of this is important. But that’s what I’m saying, too, too. If you break it down into 15-minute or 15-page chunks, you can at least every 15 minutes go, man, this is, like, I’ve just spent- It’s moving, good pace. All of 15 minutes in writing. One location, and they’re talking about something that has nothing to do, they’re talking about chicken nuggets, and it’s not The Wire. The Wire can get away with a 15-minute chicken McNugget speech because we’re already wrapped up in the characters, and plus, they’re using it as an analogy for the drug-dealing hierarchy, about the guy who invented the chicken McNugget is still in the basement making chicken McNuggets, and someone else is profiting off.

So they can have a conversation about it because it’s brilliant. But if you find a script that you have, and 15 minutes is being spent talking about something like chicken nuggets, and you don’t, and it’s not going anywhere, that’s probably a section to consider cutting. Right? Or go, why, what was I trying to do here? Was I literally just letting my characters talk? Great. You discovered their speech rhythms and you discovered the way they interact because you just let them talk in a scene that we’re not going to see in the story, but you know how they talk outside that scene. So now you have a sense of how they communicate with each other. It’s, it’s not a loss. If you decide to cut something, you can, you can do that. But if you do that every 15 minutes, you’ll start to find pieces that are like, oh, I don’t know why I have this scene because I do the same scene later. I do the same type event or thing that I do here later on. So one of these has to go because I’m sort of repeating myself. And you’ll, you’ll find it will solve itself if you allow yourself to, to zoom out and be broad-minded.

Devin: Just being open-minded with all aspects of what we’re taught, what, what this is, is whether you’re the writer or you’re the one giving feedback is important. Is be open-minded because it’s the, the more you resist the feedback because you did, you just spent, and again, these people that are giving you feedback don’t necessarily know how you’ve been at your wits end for months or years writing this. You’ve just asked them to give you feedback on a story and that’s all they’re doing. And so. What’s on the page. A lot. Yeah. And a lot of times you’ll get instant defensive. You’ll get instantly defensive if you, when you’re getting feedback. And so a lot of, most of the time it’s good to, just like when you’re writing, step away from the story, step away from it. Don’t even think about it. Go for a drive, leave it alone for a week or two weeks and then go back to it.

And don’t try to think of the solution. And then same thing with feedback is sure. Get the feedback and read it and then just put it away and, and don’t respond to it right away. Yep. Don’t reply. Don’t reply to them. You’re like, oh, you’re an idiot. You couldn’t figure that out. Nothing. Just say, you just read through it thoroughly and then shut it down and walk away from it.

Adam: And if you’re getting verbal feedback, just write it down in notes. If you have questions, ask them, but don’t defend. That’s the key.

Devin: Or punch them. Yeah.

Adam: Yeah. Don’t punch them. Just punch them. Or do punch them, Devin’s saying. Okay.

Devin: Oh, do. I mean, do because you can always go back later and apologize. Right? So. Can you? Get that anger out of you. I mean, it depends. Wait, wait, no, wait, wait a minute. No, don’t punch them. Oh, okay. Don’t punch them. That’s what it is. That was your note. Yeah. I was just wondering. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. My bad. I just couldn’t read that. Chicken scratch. Yeah. Don’t. Don’t punch.

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Adam: Let’s look at the movements as we have them right now. We put them under Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, but if I’m honest, I don’t use Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 much for myself. I know that Movement 1 and Act 1 are almost the same. They are the same thing to me. When Devin and I write, sometimes we experiment with letting Act 1 sort of absorb some of the events of Act 2. Because you can do that. Jumanji did it. The refusal of the call happens once they’re in the…

So sometimes these things cross over. But my whole point is I don’t look at acts. I look at movements now. Movement one, act one are the same thing. Movement one, comfort zone to out of comfort zone. Perfect. I know what I need, what needs to happen with my hero. I need to set up the comfort zone and then get them out of it by a call to adventure and inciting incident. Movement two, it’s about them acclimating for the story ahead and our audience too, for that matter. From out of comfort zone where we just left off and we’re transitioning or moving into the danger zone. And movement three, danger zone to crisis. Now each one of these has, as Devin was saying, the intermission break or even modern commercial break, threshold, cliffhanger, and bring the audience back.

So even if you’re doing a feature film that has no breaks, it’s nonstop, if you still employ that technique, your audience is always engaged every 15 minutes. They’re reengaged. The story’s taking a new turn. During that movement. Because the character’s moving in their decision-making skills and improving about halfway through at about seven minutes or seven pages of that progression. The character is, is faced with a new decision or path in some way. Now that’s seven minute rule. That’s a, that’s something that Mamet sticks to, David Mamet. He writes in his dialogue tends to be a little long running, but he’ll write in seven minute chunks.

The next half, and I’m saying half because the, the, the thing I’m going to say after this about measurement is important is movement four, five, and six, right? Four being crisis to recovery. That’s the movement there from almost losing life or companionship or whatever, to figuring oneself out a little bit. And movement five goes from recovery to climax. This is basically having a new plan at the end of movement four. That’s the threshold and building to the climax. Movement six is simply the climax to the resolution. That last punctuating moment, the objective attainment. And then how do we wrap up the story? If you just take those concepts in general, they’ll work out for a 90 minute piece, 120 minutes. You may be stretching your events out too long. And so if that ends up happening, we’re going to talk about how to fix that. We’re also going to talk about movement four. A lot of movies will make that really short. The dark night of the soul, the fall of the heart wall, that stuff. They want to keep that really short. And so if that section is short in your story, what do you do?

How do you still make it short? You make your 90 pages and things like that. Here’s the key, as Devin was saying about novels percentage wise earlier. Measurement. We know that a story is built of beginning, middle, end. That’s act one, act two, act three, technically. But we know it’s beginning, middle, end. So what does that mean? Well, the end is climax to resolution, obviously. And the beginning is the introduction of the character and the world and sending them on their journey. But the middle, as we’ve said in previous episodes, can sometimes be the muddle. And what you want to do is figure out approximately how to do that.

How long your story is going to be. A 90 minute feature, an episode, 45 minutes, 120 minute feature, a novel. Like let’s say you have 200 page novel, 300 page novel, right? How do you measure this? Same way, beginning, middle, end. If you’re like, okay, I know I need so many thousand words to do for a novel, right? And I know my aim is this genre. So the page count or the word count rather for certain genres of novels is, you know, there’s a general, average for most. Sci-fi tends to go much longer because there’s world building and the audience will read it. So you have to know what your page length is going to end up being, but then you just half that. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got your story in two parts, the beginning to the middle, your midpoint, your crisis, and the middle to the end. And then you take your pages and keep splicing them up. When you break it up into these smaller chunks, you can build to the center. And the center, as we’ve said, is like a midterm exam for the climax.

Devin: From a novel standpoint, if you, if you do a percentage wise and you want to stick with this 15, every 15 pages equals 15% of a hundred page novel, well, then you just, you can just Whatever the final page count of your novel is, you just figure out what that 15% is, you know, so if you want to do it into percentages like that, and then if you want to, you know, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be exactly 25, and then it’s at 25% could be, could be page 33, or it could be page 103, depending on how long your novel is, you know, so which could become an issue.

Adam: Like you’re saying, it has to switch to percentage, but I mean, even in a novel, I’d probably track 15 pages at a time, I’d just do more mental movements for myself, where the movements would get, less would be covered in a single movement, and I, you know, because chapters, they tend to get much larger because of the prose and description and all that, so you’re still covering the same events in a way, but just with more detail, but to use, I was just commenting on the percentage, But it’s easier for me to illustrate with a feature.

Devin: Oh, yeah.

Adam: Much easier because that’s sort of the main go-to for this. So, with a six-movement structure at 90 pages, halfway is 45 pages minutes. That’s your crisis. That’s the end of movement three. And then if you split that up into 15-minute builds, movement one… Is 15 minutes. Movement two is 15 minutes, 15 pages. Movement three gets you to 45. And then, of course, four, five, and six, you’ve got 60, 75, and 90 page marks at your thresholds. That’s easy to measure for a 90-minute piece. And like I said, a few pages here or there, it ends up being 93 minutes. 96 minutes, whatever. There will be places where you need to dedicate more time. There will also be places where you haven’t spent enough time and you may need to build. Now, let’s say you want to build something bigger. Like I was saying that the piece is more of 120 page slash minute piece. The middle of the piece would be the crisis would be at 60 minutes and then you just break it up into 15 minutes and movement one still be 15, movement two would still be 15 and then you would add an additional movement to build and usually these kind of movies have to do with, I’ll give an example in a minute, sports or quest oriented stuff where movement two Movement 2 sort of gets double the play. Movement 2, you get assembling the team. And then another whole Movement 2 build of training. So, rules and tools almost becomes its own separate movement in these type movies. You’ll also see this sort of structure in a television series, episodically. But instead of having…

Movement 1, Movement 2, Movement 3, and that being the crisis, you would do an overall structure of… At least this is what I do. An overall structure of 8 movements. Where the end of it is still Recovery to Climax and Climax to Resolution as your last 2 movements. And the center is still Danger Zone. But you have additional builds or complications on either side. So there’s a longer training sequence where the Movement 2… You could call it Movement… I would label it chronologically, but for the purposes of saying this, in terms of referencing our current movements, Danger Zone to Crisis. Movement 2 would be like Movement 2 and Movement 2.5.

So out of Comfort Zone into Unknown World, right? You get the first day of school, you get the watering hole, you’re assembling the team, that kind of stuff. Like in a sports movie, you may meet the rival team there, right? And that’s a bit of a complication. Your training and your rules and tools and all that stuff can even be its own separate bill, what we would tentatively call right here Movement 2.5, right? That would show training and rules and tools and things like that and maybe not doing well. And a sports movie is good to imagine because the next movement, 3, would be the playoffs, a sporting event where you would need to qualify for the championships. That would

Devin: Be the climax. The key is if you’re moving from a 90-page to 120-page, so you’re adding that 30 pages. Add two movements. You’re essentially adding two more movements of 15. They’re necessary for your story, which is one of the alternate structure options, but they’re still compelling enough where from a measurement standpoint, you’re able to measure for the excitement. Not the excitement, but the necessity of it for an audience too. You’re able to see that structure however you want, however you structure your stuff. You’re able to see it within your story as here’s a cliffhanger into moving into here. There isn’t that lag or because it’s 120 page script, you’ve cut out all the fat and all that meat needs to be in there, but you’re able to, because you’ve structured it in a way where like Adam’s talking about at eight, you move from six movements to eight movements at 15 pages a movement.

You still want to build. That measurement is.

Adam: Yeah. And you’re still going to be a build. Yeah. When you add those two movements, you’re almost like, you don’t want to photocopy the movement before like movement two and just photocopy to movement twos. Cause it’s just going to be repetitious in your story, but you can extend it. You need that same sort of build rules and tools. Well, yeah. And if anything, the best way to do it, if you’re going to add a new movement, if you’re going to add an additional movement or two with this 90 minutes to 120, simply take act one or movement one’s events and lay them in and let them guide you.

Devin: That’s the key movement. Yeah.

Adam: Yeah. Because it starts with a hook. Which means it engages your audience right after that threshold commercial break starts with a hook. You establish the status quo of this part of the story, this movement, and then you complicate it. There’s a new inciting incident or call to adventure, a choice to be contended with a decision point to be contended with by your hero. And then they negotiate it. Refusal, choosal, they negotiate that thing. And then once they’ve chosen it, they’re across a new threshold of change. So if you do add in an additional movement, that’s my suggestion as to, well, I don’t know what needs to go here. You don’t need to right now. Just lay movement one’s events there.

And don’t marry yourself to them, but let them guide you for a good, strong one, two, three rhythm, status quo, decision point, decision. When you’re building a series Bible for a television series or an online series, an ongoing long form, whether it’s episodic or chapter based. Peace it, the, the number of episodes may vary. Now, currently online, it’s about eight, eight to 12 is the rough number of episodes. Usually it’s about eight. So eight movements is eight episodes, but still episode four is a good one to have be your central crisis and then rebuild from there. Just like any. You can even think of your episodes as the movement title. So episode one, comfort zone to out of comfort zone to out of comfort zone to danger zone. So you have an idea of the arc of the season just by using what happens within the movements. Now, like we’ve said, of course, within each sub story, each episode, each chapter, you’re going to have.

Have a movement one, two, three, four, five, six, right. Or an act one, act two, act three, however you want to look at it. If it’s a 45 minute or an hour long show, you’re going to have, as Devin was saying before, closer to the traditional five act structure, which you find in like, like you’re saying Roman and Shakespeare. But the whole point is you’ll have an intro, a cold open, act one, act two, act three, act four, five is the summary. And each one of those approximately nine pages gets you to 45 minutes. So that’s how traditional episodic television with commercial breaks rolls as far as their structure. But if you still use the movie, movement system, you get the same thing. The breaks will just be more condensed. But with a cold open in a show, cold opens are one of my favorite things. I love them. Just get to it.

Yeah. That’s your hook. That’s your act one. If you’re in an episodic TV, we know who the characters are. We know their status quo. So get the hook. That’s your cold open.

Devin: Older films had more. More of the extended intro. 25 pages. Everybody wants to make sure that their name is superimposed on the screen. So there’s some, I’ll use arbitrary here, arbitrary footage of just stuff that really isn’t establishing anything. And so I think that. Title sequence. And it’s, yeah, the title sequence is just long and nothing is really, you’re not even starting the story. It’s got.

Start right in. You start right in. You actually start, and it’s just completely black, and they’re using the radio chatter of 9-11 happening, but you don’t, they immerse you in the story immediately, and they don’t even want to take you out of the story a little bit by putting, well, this is directed by Catherine Bigelow, this is produced by, you know, based on screenplay. They don’t do, they don’t give you any of that. No, that’s at the end.

Adam: They’re focused on the immersion first.

Devin: Yeah, and then, but then you take films like Seven, who use this… This title sequence to introduce the antagonist and introduce a little bit of the story, which is brilliant, but basically what I’m getting at is you have one to two minutes that some filmmakers decide to waste and maybe even write, depending on how it’s written, and then it’s translated and editing, but when you should be right off the bat immersing your audience into the story somehow and introducing things and using that, and I think we’ve talked about that before, is like, take advantage of the story. Take advantage of every single page, every single minute, every single line of your script, then, you know, different for novels, obviously, but even that, don’t dink around too much.

Adam and I both like a very quick act, well, act one, but translating into our structure, movement one, where a lot of traditional three-act structures that you’ll be taught that are online that you can find, it’s like, well, page one to 24. That’s your act one. I’m like, well, that’s a lot. That’s… 25 pages is a lot for an act one. Like, there’s a lot of dilly-dallying that you can do in 25 pages.

Adam: Well, and… But Marvel movies and stuff, when you got a lot of characters, sometimes that act one needs that amount of space, and so I get it.

Devin: Oh, it depends on the story, obviously, everything, but…

Adam: And I get needing them that long for that piece, but every other time… Like, people use that as an excuse. It’s like, well, I want to get to know the character. I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. For those movies, I agree, but for every other movie…

Devin: Or I had 25. I had 25 pages, because that’s what they told me. I needed to have my act one, so I had to throw in a bunch of stuff. Exactly. It’s like, ugh.

Adam: Smartest audience ever in the world right now. We know more and see more stories than any other humans in history. Don’t dilly-dally. Get to the point. Hook us and get us in the story. And if you can do that… Like, I know I’m sort of speaking to attention span, but it’s not really that. It’s more like, I already know this. I’m bored. Yeah. And it’s not… It is attention span, but it’s more like boredom. It’s expectation. It’s not… Yeah. Here’s the other thing. If you did do a 120-page or 120-minute thing, your act one might end up being that long. But here’s the key. Split your…

If your act one, you notice, and it’s necessary for all this historical development and all this… If you decide that it’s necessary, break that up into two movements. Give the act one at least some turning points if you have to make it that long, right? Yeah. In Marvel movies, if you’ve got multiple characters, they each get a dilemma. So we get these sweet little setups and promises in act one. They’re not just trying to build a world and we’re going, where’s this going? They know how to use withheld information to build those things. We’ll say it again and again and again. The whole point of the structure is measurement.

If I’ve broken up a story into six, a 90-page script, six movements, each 15 minutes long, I can remember 15 pages. I can remember 15 pages worth of story. My brain can do it. I know what happens in this sequence. It’s this scene, this scene, this scene, this scene. Okay. If I need to recall anything in the story, I know, okay, that happens in movement six, which means it’s at 80 some pages. You can mentally map 90 pages worth of work just by breaking it up into six subsections. If you go back through and diagnose 15 minutes worth of your story and you go, actually, this one’s pretty good.

Like Devin and I have done this. We go through a script and we’re like, yeah, these pages are tight. They work. Great. What I do then is I literally cover up or gray out that whole section and assume it’s done. Now I have five things to look at and it simplifies the mapping in my brain like we’ve talked about throughout the conversation we’ve been having about events, this chain of events, the plot, each event. If you want to take movement one and movement four, which sometimes mirror each other, especially in the re-choosing of the quest, the fall of the heart wall will highlight the refusal of the call from movement one, you can sort of gray out or block out the other movements and look at your setups and payoffs that are separated by 30 to 45 minutes.

The whole point of doing that movement structure, and I do it in columns, that’s how I try to compare it, because if I run them down, I know the bottom of it is close to 15, so I know the bottom of movement four is close to 60. I can at least sort of mirror the times in my brain of when certain events are happening in your story. But what that also allows you to do is, as we were saying, measurement being the key, you can tell if your setup or your payoff has had enough time for your audience to forget about it or not. And sometimes you want setups forgotten about, and sometimes you want instant payoff.

But you can track the measurement, and the reason we dwell on setups and payoffs so much in this podcast is because that’s the satisfaction for your audience. They’re investing time, absorbing information, and hoping that it all matters and means something by the end. And if you do make it mean something, in big moments of discoveries and reveals, i.e. payoffs, that’s where they’re going to love you. But you’ve got to map it out, or else they don’t exist. Like Devin was saying, I think it was last episode or episode… Sometimes you’ll be writing, and you’re like, I don’t know what to do with this scene. I’m going to put this placeholder thing in.

They pick up this book, and now the audience reading the story linearly thinks this book has meaning. But in the end, they’re looking for the meaning of that book. Well, you’ve got to track back and either, A, remove the book so that it doesn’t have unnecessary meaning, and replace it with something else. And no matter what, that still should have a payoff, whether you remove this book or add another item to replace it. It still needs to have that payoff of meaning for an audience. Why did I spend my time watching this or taking in that information? And being able to do that across the movement is what’s really, through measurement, is what’s really important.

Devin: Structure, this is something that frustrates me when I hear this from people who are against structure. Because their main argument is it inhibits creativity. It inhibits imagination. And I’m like, oh my god, it bothers me to my core because… It’s sort of the opposite. Because it’s not… It is. It frees you to not worry about meandering off into another world that you won’t be able to find your way back from. And you’ll have to start over. You’ll have to… It will confuse everybody because it’s even confusing you. You won’t be able to finish whatever you’re writing. But it’s also the… It’s like saying that when you’re building a house, starting with the framing of the house, affects how you decorate the house, the inside of the house.

It’s like, no, the structure, the framing of the house is what gives you something to decorate. It’s what allows you to put up drywall so you’re not going to see the framing, the wood framing, that is actually the structure of your house. Because once you decide how you want to decorate your house, or even how you want to structure the layout, then you put up walls. You put up… You put up the drywall and you paint the walls. You put in whatever flooring you want. You decorate it with whatever kind of furniture you want, whatever paintings you want. However, do you want granite countertop, marble countertop?

When you invite people over, they see your creativity in that house. They don’t see any of the framing that is holding that house up, that’s allowing all of that stuff to be inside that house. The structure is the framing. That’s all it is. It’s allowing you to have a story that you can invite people into. However you decorate that story, that’s all of the creativity. That’s the imagination. That has nothing to do with the structure of it. And so the argument for me, it just holds no water because they’re different elements of story building. That’s all, you know, so they’re not one in the same and they’re, or one doesn’t prohibit or inhibit something else. It, if anything, they work together, you know, they, they, without one, you can’t have the other, you know, of course it’s in, in, from an audience standpoint, going, entering this house or entering this story, we’re expecting the house not to fall on us once we’re inside it.

And that’s what we’re doing. It’s, it’s like, well, we got, I got to the middle. The house and then the floor fell out and I didn’t know where to go. Or all of a sudden I turned around, I got lost. I didn’t even know what was going on anymore. I didn’t even know if I was in the same house. Well, that’s because that’s what we’re doing with story. I mean, we’re, we, you want to make sure that the, when you’re inviting an audience into something that you’ve built it, they, they feel comfortable. They’re, they’re oriented, but none of that, none of the structure part of it is going to inhibit your creativity.

Your imagination can run wild. No matter what. It’s just allowing, it’s just giving you a, you and your audience a bit of a, a roadmap or a blueprint. So they understand and they’re oriented in this world that you’ve created. That’s all it is.

Adam: And I know we both probably experienced this when we were like first trying it out. You really want it to be done. You want it to be easy. Like anything that challenges you. I mean, Devin and I were maybe a little different. We, things that challenge us, we just dove face first into. But a lot of times you want stuff to be easy and you don’t want to learn extra stuff. You just want to run with your imagination and do. So a lot of people were like, don’t want to deal with structure. I hate to say it. They’re not being artistic. They’re being lazy. Even if you’re someone who is extremely artistic and don’t want to follow a specific.

And here’s the key word. This is what most people label act one, act two, act three Hollywood fair with is formulaic. It’s a formula. And that’s what I think. Devin is trying to say at the beginning of this podcast. This episode two was we’re not trying to create a go-to formula. The system of measurement is what we’re trying to encourage to create better stories, better design and architecture of stories. That’s what we’re encouraging Story Blueprint. The default events tend to be a little bit. They, they, they’re a somewhat like a paint by numbers way of referencing a story so that if you’re lost, here’s a suggestion.

But like I said, when I approach a story these days, I don’t use that structure I use because it’s organic to me. I know it in my brain so I can just put up blank cards because I’ve got the stability of having written several stories with a traditional or close to traditional structure. Now I can experiment. So it’s like if you’re going to ignore structure and you want to try something different, know the rules. Before you break them, don’t just discard the rules because you think you’re, you know, so talented of an artist, you can do it on your, because you’re going to end up with a sloppy story.

I hate to tell you, that’s, what’s going to happen. You can learn about it and then let it go. It’s like your analogy of a house. You’re right. So we all know what a house is. We know what rooms are supposed to be. This room is the bathroom. So you don’t put a stove in the bathroom unless you’re an idiot or it’s a very tiny space or you spend a lot of time there or you spend a lot of time there. There is. There are, there are exceptions. Of course, always every rule where someone does put a stove in the bathroom and people call it art because they thought differently, but they thought differently in a specific way.

There was an intention behind the decision. They knew the structure. They knew the set dressing of that other part of the room and said, well, what if I put a toilet in the living room?

Devin: What if that’s exactly what if that’s exactly what I’m saying about that house, that house analogy. It was like, that’s exactly what I’m saying. That’s your creativity. If your imagination is, I’m going to put a stove in the bathroom, do it. Invite the audience in and be like, hey, look, I put a stove in my bathroom.

Adam: But know that their reaction is going to be, it’s not going to be like, oh, we understand this. They’re going to be confused by that choice. Know that. Right. Make it deliberately, you know, don’t make it on accident. Yeah, right. It’s design. It’s design. The blueprint and the house building is always a great analogy because you can navigate and walk through a house and it can be any financial range of house. It can be a low-budget movie. It can be a small one-story house. It can be an epic Marvel cinematic universe. The Winchester house. Martin Scorsese’s pretension. Did you hear about that? This would be a while back.

He said the Marvel movies are not cinema. I read a headline. To me, that is the definition of artistic pretentiousness, is saying what I do is art and what you do is not. Yeah, that bothers me.

Devin: And I’m like, I love Scorsese, but I’m like, dude. It’s also like Spielberg saying that Netflix movies can’t be up for Oscars because they’re not in theaters. That’s exactly right. It’s not a very calculated comment by someone who relies on people that who love Marvel cinematic universe to see their movies too. Because you know, there’s gonna be people that are like, oh, I’m not gonna go see, like, they’re so diehard Marvel fans that now they’re just going to boycott Scorsese movies.

Adam: I love what they’re doing, that level of broad storytelling. And I just cannot believe. Yeah, it’s impressive. Well, and James Gunn was the first one to say something. He was like, it saddens me because I do put my heart and soul into the movies. And I love the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, especially the first one. I love them. They’re funny to me. They’re absurd. They’re strange. They’re music. It’s, I love it. I don’t feel like it’s not okay for me to quote, go on an amusement park ride as entertainment and art because it’s artfully done. And anyway, I just, I expected a little bit more out of Martin Scorsese because he’s a cinema historian.

Devin: He knows every freaking movie in the world. It’s too bad that he says something like that because of the amount of people that are involved in telling those stories. Like we were talking about last episode about the editor is the untold hero or the, they don’t get as much credit as they deserve as storytellers because yeah, they’re sitting with the director and directors helping them sequence the story to put the linearly, put the story together. But the editors have a ton of input when it comes to how the story is told and what shots are used and how they do them and how the music. And then also like the people that write the score, there’s so many people involved that, but especially, especially the Marvel movies, because you add an element that a lot of Scorsese movies don’t have.

And that’s that, that CGI element, that impressive storytelling element and component.

Adam: The technological.

Devin: Exactly.

Adam: Yeah. And he used it in stuff like Hugo and stuff. He used it for stuff like that, you know, but. No, I’m not saying he doesn’t use CGI. But not to the degree that they’ve been perfected it and done really well with it. And, and he discounted the performances. He said, you know, they’re performed good enough, or well enough. And I’m like, dude, like it’s emotionally awesome. You really feel it. Yeah. I’m like, how can you discount the emotional, even when it comes to Robert Downey Jr’s 10 year performance as Iron Man? Come on, man. And I’m, I’m, I’m not huge into all the Marvel movies, but they are some of the most fun I’ve had watching a story in the past 10 years. I’ve enjoyed them.

Right.

Devin: It’s such good performance. Like how can you. It’s beyond, it’s beyond whether you like, like, like the movies or not. It’s under, especially somebody who isn’t ignorant of what goes into writing a story, translating the story onto screen and all that. Like he, of all people should just be like, look, I’m not a big fan of, Well done. Of the comic book genre, but holy crap, what you’re able to pull off and the story you’re able to tell and the, the, the amount of people that love those movies. Like that’s, that’s an achievement. It is. It’s an achievement, no matter what. There’s a ton of movies. I can’t stand it, but I’m still like, holy crap. Good. Well done. You finished the movie. And I think it’s for, especially from you and I, and, and we’ve come from an independent film world where we’ve been involved with a lot of movies, some that got made and some that didn’t. And we understand the struggle it takes.

Yeah. Just to. To take something that’s been written, well, the struggle it takes just to write a screenplay, if you can finish a screenplay, well done. That is an incredible achievement…

And make it make sense. And then moving that from it just being on a bunch of pages to actually- To a production. The production being on screen. And that is an incredible achievement.

Adam: Well, production, and then you move it to editing and see, and hopefully it works out that everything you’ve shot somehow resembles the screenplay that you initially wrote. Right. Like, there’s so many stages where stuff can go wrong. It’s the same thing you were saying with Spielberg, where he was like, online feature films, basically, it shouldn’t be up for Oscars and this. And I’m like, that’s a very limited-minded viewpoint from someone. And this is, I think, the reason why it upset a lot of different people. And I- Sort of took notice, was, I think you expect more from those two gentlemen.

Devin: Right. And that’s the thing. It’s those two where I was like, they’re the last two people I would think had- It was a little disappointing. Critical of something like that. Yeah, it was very disappointing.

Adam: Yeah. If anything, celebratory and going, thank God we’re producing more cinema. Right. And stories. And some of it may be bad because we’re exponentially increasing the output of doing it, but- Right. Aren’t we a little more- We’re a little more excited that human beings in this day and age are embracing an industry of imagination like storytelling rather than other industries that are not as beneficial for people or good-paying jobs for people. Like, we should be celebrating this. In the next few episodes, we’re going to be continuing to talk about how to tidy up your script and talk about feedback. This one is specifically for diagnosing your story.

Look at it. Break it down. Start to look at where parts of your story are. Too big or too small. And be brave enough to consider cutting them. Now, that’s not the solution, necessarily, but you need to go in with that mindset. Next week, we’re going to be talking about scene building. How do you take a single scene or an event and run what we have a list of probably 20-some questions to ask yourself? This is one of the main tools in Story Blueprint is the scene builder where you get to examine these things. Start to look at your script. Break it down. Look at what happens in each thing.

Break it down 15 minutes and make a subheading of what happens in each scene or event. And gauge sort of how many pages you spent on it. And by doing that, you should be able to, as an overview, figure out where you’re lacking or where you have too much. And as these last five episodes go, we’re going to be prepping you for feedback. You’ve got to have confidence and openness when you’re finished tidying up your script. You’ve got to have the script to hand it to someone. And you’ve got to pick the right people, as Devin will probably tell you as well. You’ve got to know that not everything is going to be perfect.

It’s only a first draft. Be extremely proud that you got to the end of it. Pat yourself on the back. And try not to make excuses with people when they read it. Or be defensive, like we were saying before. Try to be open. If they’re giving you verbal feedback, write it down. Put it in a drawer for a week and then look at it. If they’ve given you written feedback, read over it. Put it away for a minute. Go for a walk. Consider solutions. What you really want to find out is what your reader’s lack of clarity or interest is. Where those places are in your script.

And if anything, ask them why. Like, what didn’t you understand about that? Or what seemed to drag there? What was boring there? Because if you can identify those, then you have the topic on where to spend your brainpower thinking of solutions. Please subscribe and rate us on iTunes. Follow us on social media. Share with your friends and send us your questions and comments. For additional resources and links to films, series, and books we talk about here, visit our website. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter for updates on story building tools and special offers at StoryOsophy.com.