by Linda Seger
4. The stakes in these stories are clear. There is nothing ambiguous about what will happen if the protagonist doesn’t resolve the problem—hundreds, perhaps thousands, will die, justice won’t be done, our hero will be killed, there will be massive destruction of life and property. Chaos will reign.
5. The main character’s action is integrally connected with the story line. The protagonist causes the story line to be resolved. There is no passive hero here, but an active fighting hero who changes the direction of the story and makes the climax happen.
Almost all of the action of the hero advances the story. The main character has a strong intention. We know what he wants, and we root for his character from the very beginning. Again, there are no ambiguities.
This is not to say that you can only adapt heroic action-adventure stories. But it is important to understand what makes an easy adaptation and why, in order to tackle more complex story problems. Films need movement, and movement comes from the story line. If there is no story, character and theme by themselves cannot carry the movie.
Let’s look at Die Hard 2 in more detail. In this film, both the A story and the subplots (particularly the B story line about hero McClane’s wife) are clear.
ACT ONE—The terrorists arrive. They begin their preparations.
FIRST TURNING POINT—They destroy the control tower, leading to …
ACT TWO—The stakes get higher. McClane runs into conflict with the authorities at the airport. Development focuses on trying to save the planes and trying to stop the terrorists by finding their headquarters and capturing them.
SECOND TURNING POINT-Shows McClane discovering terrorists’ headquarters as they prepare to get away in a 747. This discovery leads to …
ACT THREE—McClane chases the terrorists, confronts them, and fights with them as their plane starts to leave; he finally blows up the plane, thus destroying the villains in a grand climax.
This A story line is reinforced by a B story line about McClane’s wife, who is on one of the airplanes that is running out of fuel.
This B story also has a three-act structure:
ACT ONE—Establishes the wife on the plane.
ACT TWO—Shows that fuel is running out, the plane can’t land, and the weather is getting worse.
ACT THREE—Shows the plane almost out of fuel.
CLIMAX—The plane lands and McClane is reunited with his wife.
Not all the events in the film are exactly the same as in the book. Characters are changed (in the book, the main character, named Malone, is divorced), the setting is different (the book takes place at a New York airport, the film in Washington, D.C.), and even the subplot is different, since in the book, it is McClane’s daughter on the plane, not his wife.
For the film, the subplot was expanded by showing more of the wife and by creating a relationship between the wife and a reporter whom she disliked. This B story is very workable, since it personalizes the story, provides tension, and contains a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Sometimes the story you’re adapting doesn’t have the beginning, middle, and end in chronological order.
In the short story “The Greatest Gift,” the basis for It’s a Wonderful Life, the entire story takes place on the night when George contemplates suicide and an angel gives him the opportunity to reflect on the importance of his life. In this case, events had to be reordered to create a beginning, middle, and end and to expand the story into a two-hour film. This meant looking for clues about events that had taken place in the past. Since George was married, it implied a subplot about meeting, courting, and marrying his wife. Since the story mentioned his business, this could imply a subplot about coming into the business, having problems with it, and resolving the problems.
What if your story doesn’t have a clear beginning, middle, or end? What if it has a third act that slows down and fades out rather than building to a dramatic climax? What if much of the story contains episodes that don’t add up to a cohesive story line?
Don’t despair—yet. If it’s difficult to find the overall shape, begin looking for the smaller shapes that are in the story. Instead of starting with the big picture (the beginnings, middles, and ends, the three-act structure), begin with the smaller picture. Begin with the story arcs.
FINDING THE STORY ARC
Sometimes a story arc or the dramatic arc is the same as a story spine. In the beginning of C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, Rose tells Alnut that she wants to blow up the boat The Louisa. At the end of the book, they do. This connection between the beginning and the end of a story line is a story arc. If I were to sketch this dramatic arc, it would look like this:
All the events within this story arc are connected to the objective (to blow up the boat). All the events bring us closer to the climax.
In A Room with a View, there’s an overall story arc that is also the same as the story spine. This spine or arc is established by asking a question toward the beginning of the film, (“Will Lucy marry George?”) and answering the question at the end (“Yes”).
Notice that the story arc focuses on a particular story and connects the beginning with the end. The strongest dramatic stories will combine the story arcs and the story spine so that they are interchangeable.
But there are variations on this idea. Within the story spine (or overall story arc) will be a number of smaller story arcs.
The buffalo hunt in Dances With Wolves would be considered a smaller story arc. It takes up about fifteen to twenty minutes of screen time. All the events from the time that Lieutenant Dunbar hears the buffalo until he eats the heart and retells the story of killing it are part of that particular story arc.
This story arc about “hunting the buffalo” is part of a larger story arc about “developing relationships with the Indians” (the Act Two story arc) and it’s also part of the story arc that is the same as the story spine—about Lieutenant Dunbar on his journey of discovery of the outer and inner frontier.
When you can’t find the largest story arc, begin looking for the smaller ones. A story arc has movement and direction, and can begin to form a story line. Gone With the Wind has a series of smaller arcs and a rather subtle overall arc to its story. If you were the original adaptor of Gone With the Wind, you might begin by looking at the series of arcs within the book. For instance, it, like the film, is divided almost in half. The first focuses on the war, the second half on Reconstruction.
One might say that by the end of the book, an old era of the South was gone, but a new era that was to define the South for the next hundred years was beginning. This gives an overall arc to the book. Within this arc are three smaller arcs that could be sketched this way:
But the book itself is 1,024 pages long. What happens in the last fifty pages? Bonnie dies, Melanie gets pregnant again, Melanie dies, Scarlett (finally) realizes it’s Rhett she loves, Rhett leaves her.
These are all relational stories that end the book, and that also have their own story arcs. Sometimes these are called “character arcs,” but technically a “character arc” has more to do with character transformations than character actions. Here we want to focus specifically on story arcs that refer to events that create a story line.
In Gone With the Wind there are a number of different subplot story arcs that revolve around specific characters. The Ashley-Scarlett story arc begins almost immediately in the book, on page 5, when Scarlett expresses her interest in Ashley, and it continues until page 1,016, when she says, “I never loved Ashley.”
The Rhett relationship line begins on page 98, when they meet, and ends on page 1,023, when he says, “My dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The Melanie relationship line begins on page 5, when Scarlett is told that Ashley will marry Melanie, and it ends on page 1,001, when Melanie dies.
Think about the film for a moment. What is your overall impression of the film when you reflect on Part One and Part Two? Personally, I find the first half of the film more dynamic, with cleare
r direction, and a stronger context. Why? Certainly this sketching of the dramatic arcs has shown that they move well throughout the story. Why, then, would Part One be stronger than Part Two? It is because some of these arcs have stronger intentionality from the characters. This intentionality gives more direction to the story, and creates stronger story arcs.
INTENTIONALITY
Intentionality can best be defined by asking the question “What does the character want?” Characters with strong desires usually take strong actions to achieve them. They go after their intention, or goal. When a character declares what she or he wants, that declaration begins a story arc that won’t be completed until the intention is realized.
This intention can create a story arc that is the same as the story spine (as we mentioned with goal-oriented story lines), or it can create smaller story arcs. In Driving Miss Daisy, Hoke wants to drive Miss Daisy. He gets the job, and she finally allows him to drive her. This story arc, established by his intention, takes up about ten to fifteen minutes of screen time.
In order to understand intention in relationship to the dramatic arc, it’s first necessary to separate plot line (or story) arcs from subplot (or relationship) arcs.
For the first half of Gone With the Wind, the story arc is for the South to win the war. From the time when the war breaks out until it ends we are carried through the story by this intention, which is reinforced by Scarlett’s love of Tara. The destruction of the South implies the destruction of Tara and all it stands for.
When Scarlett returns to Tara after the burning of Atlanta, she vows to save it—and puts considerable effort into doing so. She searches for food, learns to milk a cow, kills a Yankee soldier, offers herself to Rhett (who has said he’s not a marrying man), and even marries her sister’s rich beau—all to satisfy her intention to save Tara. The intention of the South, and the intention of Scarlett, is quite clear for the first half of the book, and about two-thirds of the film.
What happens after the war is over? The overall arc of the story becomes less clear, less dynamic. In the book, there is clearer intentionality for the last half of the story because there are stronger story lines about Rhett and Scarlett’s courting of the Yankees to regain some of what they’d lost. There’s a strong story arc about the creation of the Ku Klux Klan (Ashley and Scarlett’s husband, Frank Kennedy, and most of the other Southern men are part of the founding of the Klan). And there’s a story arc that shows the men’s intention to get the Yankee Republicans out of power and have more say in the new Southern government. All of these smaller arcs in the book add up to a larger overall arc of the Southerners’ desire to regain some sort of dignity and power over their lives, to regain at least something of what was “gone with the wind.”
In the film, however, the relationship arcs are the focus of the last third of the film. And relationship arcs rarely create as much movement as story arcs. As you watch the last third of the film, look for places where the story arc is working well, and others where it seems to dissipate and lose direction. For instance, there’s a rather clear, nicely worked out arc when Scarlett is attacked at the shantytown. As a result, that night the men (Ashley, Frank, and others) go to clean out the place, Rhett discovers that the Yankees have a plot to catch them, he warns them, Frank is killed, Ashley is shot, Belle Watling, the madam, helps give the men their alibi, and in the last scene of this arc, Melanie personally thanks her.
Notice how every scene advances the action. Compare this strong story arc with scenes that have less movement and intentionality, such as scenes of Rhett showing off Bonnie, taking Bonnie to Europe, or teaching Bonnie to ride. Although these scenes reveal character, from a story viewpoint they are more episodic and don’t have the same forward direction.
Keep the story arcs going until the end of the film, even though some of them may be small. Anytime an audience is within a story arc, they’ll be paying attention because every action is related.
You might want to look at the end of Dances With Wolves to see how one additional story arc at the end of the film kept it from lagging. The beginning of Act Three shows Lieutenant Dunbar’s capture. This forms an exciting story arc that continues until he’s rescued by the Indians. Now, notice, we’re near the end of the film, but the story arc has ended. How is the writer going to continue to keep us attentive? He waits a few minutes while Dunbar comes home, reflects on his experience, and thinks about what he’s going to do about it. Then one more story arc is begun, which might be called “Getting Ready to Leave.” There are only about three minutes between returning home and getting ready to leave, but just when the audience could have lost interest, a new story arc is begun. This story arc then shows preparations, saying good-bye, the exchange of gifts, and Dunbar and Stands With A Fist riding away. This story arc has additional excitement because it’s intercut with a story arc about the soldiers looking for the Indians’ winter camp.
Dances With Wolves felt shorter than its three-hour length partly because of a strong structure and a good use of story arcs.
LOOK FOR SCENE SEQUENCES
Once you know the structure of the plots and subplots, and have identified the story arcs, begin looking for scene sequences within the story. A scene sequence can be defined as a series of scenes on the same idea with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The shantytown scenes in Gone With the Wind create a scene sequence. So do the scenes about the escape during the burning of Atlanta, and the “Melanie has her baby” sequence. Scene sequences give the maximum momentum to a story. Momentum means that each scene implies the next one—one leads to another. Each scene advances the action. Each scene goes somewhere.
For example, when you construct your screenplay, you’ll usually have some A story scenes (plot line) interrupted by subplot scenes from the B, C, and D story lines. In Gone With the Wind you’ll see some scenes about the war (A story scenes), followed by a scene about Scarlett and Rhett (a B story scene), followed perhaps by a scene about Scarlett and Ashley (a C story scene). If you were to label the order of scenes in your script, the interrelationship of scenes might look like this:
A C C B A C B A A C B A B
In Gone With the Wind you notice almost immediately that there’s an A story scene that mentions the war, another A story scene shows further discussion of the war at the party, a third shows the call to enlist, a fourth scene shows the men leaving, and a fifth shows the women receiving the news that one of the men has died. Notice that all of these scenes are connected. Each scene logically leads to the next.
But ordinarily these scenes are scattered throughout the film. It may take thirty-five minutes of screen time to play these scenes because they are interrupted by the B story scenes about Rhett: Scarlett meets Rhett at the party, he overhears her confession to Ashley, he meets her again later, he reenters her life during the war.
And they’re interrupted by C story scenes about Ashley: Scarlett hears he’s getting married, she decides to confess her love to him, she does so and he refuses her, he marries Melanie.
Most scenes in films are played this way, moving back and forth between the plot and subplot scenes. This is a simplified analysis, since some scenes have material from the A, B, and C stories in one scene, others have scenes that are only A story or B story scenes. But for the purposes of our analysis, you might find it helpful to imagine each of these as separate scenes.
You gain momentum from the story line because each A story scene implies the next A story scene, each B story scene implies the next B story scene, and so on.
A scene sequence plays all the scenes from one story line in a row, without interruption from other subplot scenes. You can have a scene sequence of A story scenes, or of subplot scenes.
The scene sequence will have a beginning, a middle, an end, a rising dramatic line, and a certain amount of tension implied within this dramatic line. Scene sequences in Gone With the Wind include “Melanie has her baby,” “The burning of Atlanta,” “Rhett saves Ashley from the Yankee
.” These scenes are not interrupted by subplot scenes, but focus on one main action.
A scene sequence needs to be long enough to create a rising dramatic line, but short enough to sustain interest. Generally, scene sequences are usually about three to seven pages of script. Most psychological thrillers and action-adventures will have several scene sequences, since they give the most movement and drive to a story. But you can find them in any genre, including comedy, sci-fi, fantasy, or horror.
You will probably want to use any scene sequences you find within a story, since they’re intrinsically dramatic. Look for any group of scenes that has a smaller story arc with a beginning, middle, and end.
In Stand by Me, the boys begin walking across a bridge and are almost hit by a train. This creates a wonderful scene sequence that, on film, plays for about three and a half to four minutes.
In the book, it reads like this. I’m writing it out in this way in order to show the implicit three-act structure within the story. I’m also cutting a sentence here and there for the sake of brevity.
ACT ONE—Establishes the situation. “The rail was mute … . We went out onto the trestle single file … . I started to feel dizzy and disoriented … . I squatted and made a fist around the rail on my left.”