Broken Frontier

It seems like everybody can come up with a system for writing. If you’ve been to that section of the bookstore lately, you know exactly what I’m talking about because you’ve seen the titles: The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes; How To Write a Movie in 21 Days; 500 Ways to Beat the Hollywood Script Reader; The DC Guide to Writing Comics and far too many others to mention. All of these books seem to promise a “magic formula” for writing. Many of them seem to imply that if we simply follow their recipe, we’ll end up with good writing.

Of course I don’t believe that’s possible. I certainly hope you don’t think that’s possible. But I’ll also readily admit that there was a time in my writing career when I did think if I could just learn the secrets of the published professionals, I, too, would become a published professional.

But writing doesn’t work that way. At its best, writing is a living, breathing thing. Sort of like a good relationship. I know what my story needs and I know how to give it to her. My story knows what I need and she knows how to give it to me. There’s no way I can break it down into lists of “Do’s and Don’ts,” but for some reason we keep trying to. (We even try to do the same thing with relationships.)

So although I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a magic formula for good writing, I do believe in ideas for approaching the blank page. Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at a few of the most basic ones (such as objective versus subjective drama and a way to make your storytelling more dramatic). This week I want to start an extended series of columns on the best total approach to dramatic writing I’ve ever found.

It’s called the “sequence” approach and it comes from screenwriting theory. If you’ve read any books about screenwriting, you are probably familiar with what is known as “three-act structure.” The idea behind the three act approach comes from our notion that a story has three parts: beginning, middle and end. The sequence approach breaks this down further and suggests that while each screen story has three acts, each of those acts can be divided into smaller pieces called sequences. Each sequence also has its own beginning middle and end, which is built from scenes. (And yes, even scenes have their own beginnings, middles and endings, but we’ll get to that in more detail later.)

Strange as it may sound, I think the sequence approach can be applied to almost any form of fiction writing: screenplays, teleplays, stageplays, novels, short stories and, yes, comic books. Over the next few weeks, I hope to help you see how.

The first thing we need to deal with, however, is the idea that screenplays are fundamentally different from comic books because the screenplay has an ending while the comic book is likely (and hopefully) an on-going story with no end in sight. While that may be true in a grand sense, the fact remains that even on-going stories must be broken into smaller stories called “arcs” which deal with particular situations over a number of issues and then move on. So let’s look at the sequence approach as it can be applied directly to the creation of story arcs.

In general, one page of screenplay equals one minute of screen time. Although a screenplay can be anywhere from 90 – 140 pages, most professionals would agree that the so-called “golden mean” for a screenplay is 120 pages. Break that into three acts and you get: Act 1, from pages 1 – 30; Act 2, from pages 30 – 90; and Act 3, from pages 90 – 120. You’ll notice that the middle of the story is twice as long as both the beginning and the ending. This happens because the middle of your story should be the area with the greatest number of complications.

Sequence structure proposes a “golden mean” of eight sequences (although you can have more or less), each being approximately 15 pages (again, more or less is possible). Thus, Act 1 has two sequences; Act 2 has four sequences and Act 3 has two sequences. For the purposes of our discussion here, I am going to propose an eight issue story arc, in which each issue equals one sequence. (I know this is starting to sound perilously close to the kind of magic formula I told you I don’t believe in, but stick with me.)

The essence of each sequence (and, indeed, of all dramatic writing) is the posing of the dramatic question. Although there are many possible dramatic questions, the simplest form is “What’s going to happen next?” The sequence approach is one way to help you keep the focus on the dramatic questions.

Besides this basic function, however, each sequence also has a unique purpose in driving the story forward. In the columns that follow, I’ll describe each of those in more detail.

For those of you both inclined and in the financial position to do so, I highly recommend the purchase of the two best books about the sequence approach to screenwriting: Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, by Paul Gulino, and The Tools of Screenwriting, A Writer’s Guide to the Craft and Elements of a Screenplay, by David Howard.

Until next time, keep writing.