There was a good article in yesterday's Guardian by Frank Cottrell Boyce, which can be found here. As a little teaser, here's what he has to say about the three act structure...
All the manuals insist on a three-act structure. I think this is a useless model. It's static. All it really means is that your screenplay should have a beginning, middle and end. When you're shaping things, it's more useful to think about suspense. Suspense is the hidden energy that holds a story together.
Oooh, controversial!
I've been thinking about structure and pacing quite a lot recently, and this little article is helping me frame some of my thoughts in a wider context. I may well post some of this meandering old nonsense at a later date, but in the meantime, hop over to the article and have a gander.
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2 comments:
I've done a lot of thinking and reading about scriptwriting lately and I concur with Mr. Cottrell Boyce. Every script should have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Now if I could only work out which order they should go in, I'll be laughing.
Wyndham
Howdy Wyndham - I've got a bit of a problem at the moment as the treatment I'm writing begins with the middle, goes back to the start and ends with the end (as you'd expect really). I think it's up to you as to which order they go in (I mean, look at Pulp Fiction). In all honesty, there's a lot of guff written about structure - I think it has more to do with pacing than anything else, but FCB is certainly onto something here...
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