Structure is a Puzzle

Structure is a Puzzle This week, we’re going to be talking about screenplay structure in what may be a different way than you have experienced it before. Usually, when people talk about screenwriting structure, they might be talking about outlines, or plot, or the kinds of things that might have to happen, or Three Act Structure, or Seven Act Structure, or The Hero’s Journey, or any of the millions of other permutations by which people try to understand structure with their intellectual brains.  What we’re going to be talking about instead today is a simple metaphor that might help you understand the process of finding structure for your screenplay and how to do that in an organic and intuitive way.  Sometime in your childhood (or in your adulthood!) you probably have had the experience of putting together a puzzle. I want you to imagine 1000 piece puzzle, one of those really complicated ones with a lot of intricate detail and a lot of pieces that maybe look similar or even the same. On the cover of the box, there’s a picture. You’re trying to create that picture.  When you’re just looking at 1000 puzzle pieces, it can become completely overwhelming. In fact, if you just start trying to put random pieces together, you’ll probably just get overwhelmed and quit, just like most screenwriters do when they try to figure out the structure of their screenplays. You need a process to group those pieces so you can start to make sense of them. When you’re putting together a puzzle, you’re going to start, usually, by looking for the corners. You’re looking for pieces that have a very specific shape, a shape that makes sense, a shape that can be a central building block for your puzzle.  What’s nice about the corners is that in pretty much any puzzle, you’re only going to have four of them. So you do have to sort through a lot of pieces to find those corners, but you don’t need to actually find a lot of them to start building. Once you find those corners, you can start to place them.  In screenwriting, we also need to look for those corners. We need to look for those corners in order to find the shape for our structure.  But our challenge is a little bit different than the challenge of putting together a simple puzzle.  See, with a simple puzzle, you always have that picture on the box. It’s not a vague picture. It’s not a general picture.  It’s not a picture that’s clouded by your subconscious mind, or your dreams. It’s not a picture that’s shimmery and changes as you think about it, and maybe first looks like this and then looks like that.  In putting together a puzzle, we have a picture that looks like a picture and we have pieces that look like pieces. They already look like pieces. And we simply have to sort through the pieces that already exist in order to find those corners. In screenwriting, we have to make the puzzle pieces that we will build the structure of our screenplay. We have to actually create the pieces! And even as we create them, though we may have a sense of what that final picture looks like, we don’t have an exact image to build towards. We have to develop our own image along the way.  Screenwriting structure is like putting together a puzzle. But it’s like putting together a puzzle where you have to make the pieces and where you don’t know exactly what the final image is going to look like.  That means you need some different skills in order to succeed. What a lot of people do is try to figure out an outline for what they imagine the “image on the box” will turn out to be. They try to say, okay, there’s going to be a puppy dog in the bottom left corner, and there’s going to be a cute little Victorian cottage up to the right.