The Way of Story. Catherine Ann Jones
where the young boy is brutally taken from his home while playing with his sled named Rosebud. At the end of his life, though now wealthy, his last word is “Rosebud.” Though the world is puzzled as to its meaning, the audience knows that Rosebud symbolizes a lost childhood, a home he was never to find again.
It can also be a major plot device as in Sixth Sense where in the first five minutes of the film we see an intruder fire a shot at Bruce Willis before killing himself. It’s only at the very end of the film that we realize the consequences of the opening event. This is an “aha!” experience, and quite powerful.
Recently I was invited by the Santa Barbara Women’s Club to a screening of my film, The Christmas Wife, which came out several years back. It was confirming to hear, as several of the two hundred women and men approached me, how surprised and moved they were by the ending of the film. Here, too, is an example of set up and pay off. The early scene in the escort service office appears insignificant until the final moments of the film where it provides a startling discovery.
Both Presumed Innocent by novelist Scott Turow, later a film starring Harrison Ford, and LA Confidential have powerful endings thanks to well executed set ups and pay offs. In both these films, the clues to who did it are everywhere, though you can’t quite put it together until the end. Both writers here earned their pay off.
If pay offs are not well executed, they become cheap devices: plot devices which appear from nowhere, leaving the audience with a feeling not of “aha” but of being cheated, manipulated. For the pay offs to work, the set ups must be clearly, if discreetly, there. When honestly done, they are worth their weight in gold because of the emotional power they bring.
When I started writing feature films in Hollywood for major studios, I began to learn the three-act structure. Movies seen in the theatres are generally written with an Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 format.
Here is the breakdown in pages for a feature screenplay, usually about one and a half to two hours:
Act 1: pages 1-30
Act 2: pages 30-90
Act 3: pages 90-120
Later on, I discovered that this was also helpful in early drafts of movies for network television — even though television movies are written in seven acts.
A teleplay for a two-hour television movie will usually be about one hundred and ten pages divided into seven acts, sixteen pages in each act. Why seven acts? Because of the commercial breaks required for television. Once the commercial breaks for television movies were twelve minutes for every two-hour movie — now they are about twenty minutes. This means about twenty minutes of commercials are shown for every two-hour movie.
So, even when writing television movies, I would first write a three-act structured script and only later split it up into the required seven-act structure demanded for television two-hour movies. This is because the three-act structure affords a solid foundation to work from, and, quite simply, you have a better film. I have learned now that the basic three-act structure also serves the play or novel, especially today when media has so influenced plays and novels.
Again, the basic three-act structure for writing a feature screenplay is applicable to all forms of narrative writing. Obviously the page number count given below may differ for other forms of writing narrative. It is interesting to observe that plays were once written in three acts but no longer are. I cannot help but ponder if perhaps we may have lost something when plays became shorter, and de-structured, as it were.
Here again is the basic three-act structure for screenplays with some added guidelines:
Act 1 (pages1-30): Introduction of setting (time and place), genre (type of story), main characters, and the basic problem. The hero knows the problem and what he has to do. Set ups are also laid down here for later pay-offs, i.e., the sled, Rosebud, in Citizen Kane.
Act 2 (pages 30-90): Escalating conflicts resulting in the Final Battle at the end of Act 2.
Act 3 (pages 90-110 or 120): Resolution and lesson, preferably a moral lesson of the main character.
Here is a Script Table for those interested in writing for television or film:
| Approximate Page Numbers | Running Time | Act Length | |
| 30 | 1/2 -hour teleplay | 2 Acts/15 pages | |
| 60 | 1-hour teleplay | 4 acts/15 pages | |
| 90 | 90-minute teleplay | 6 acts/15 pages | |
| 110 | 2-hour teleplay | 7 acts/16 pages | |
| 120-150 | 2-hour feature screenplay | Basic 3-act structure |
Here is a further breakdown of Story Structure for the onehour drama series such as I wrote for the popular television series, Touched by an Angel.
| Page breakdown for 1-hour drama series for television | |
| 1-3 | Cold opening (before credits) |
| 4-18 | Act 1 |
| 19-31 | Act 2 |
| 32-46 | Act 3 |
| 47-56 | Act 4 |
| [52-54 | Revelation] |
If you have ever seen a Touched by an Angel episode, you may notice that the revelation at the end of the show — that is, when Della Reese or Roma Downey reveal themselves to be angels and white light surrounds them, will occur precisely at the same time each week, pages 52-54: Revelation. So when I wrote for this show, I had to honor the above table structure precisely. Perhaps this provides a hint as to why television shows sometimes seem so formulaic and predictable. They are meant to be! Television audiences tend to like what is familiar.
A caution is given here. Though structure is important, even very important, please do not forget that story is much more than the sequence of events. It is the inner psychological state of the main character which fuels or drives the external plot.
Here is a humorous example of how structure pays off from a colleague, Frank Daniel, who taught first at Columbia University and then at University of Southern California Film Department in Los Angeles, where I also taught for several years.
Cohen is sitting at the bedside of his wife, who is dying. Suddenly she says to her husband, “Cohen, I must tell you something.” And he says, “Sarah, please.” But she goes on, “No, I must confess. I was unfaithful to you.” “Sarah,” he says, “don’t get so excited.” She goes on, “But I slept with all your friends and everyone in the town!” Then he says, “Sarah, why do you think I put the poison in your coffee?”
Now, imagine this story told in its time continuity. The audience sees everything and then, as she is dying, she confesses to what we have already seen. Here, it is structure (order of your scenes) that makes the joke or story work. There is a difference between the logic of life and the structure of a good of a good story.
EXERCISE
Take five to ten minutes and make up a story, any story, from your memory or something new that wants to come through. Limit it to one page. Don’t rewrite, just do a rough first draft of the story. Now focusing on structure, play around with changing the order of your scenes. For instance, something revealed in the beginning is now shifted to near the end