issue 73
October 22nd, 2021
Some events have natural structures: If you want Z to happen, X and Y come first.
A story that feels loose and directionless might benefit from picking an internal, natural structure from a related event to set some dramatic boundaries.
It All Comes Down To This: Big Goals
In Scriptnotes episode 480, John and Craig were joined by Aline Brosh McKenna to talk about wedding tropes. For some ideas about how to use the to-dos leading up to the big day as a springboard for plot elements, check out this wedding planning calendar.
Maybe your characters are building toward a big show, like in the films and tv shows collected here by TV Tropes.
A personal battle with disease has clear stakes and structure (from diagnosis to potential recovery), as explained in this interview about Will Reiser’s 50/50. You can also read through Robert A. Clark’s overview of how 20th century movies depicted cancer.
Outbreaks and epidemics have a similar structure, but a different set of stakes. Bill Albertini looks at the contagious disease narratives of the 90s to better understand what they have in common.
A Certain Time of Year
There are plenty of films set around holidays as part of their structure, locking the story into a specific time and place. James Grebey wants to know why there aren’t more Thanksgiving films.
There are also larger spans of time that can create structure for a narrative, like the school year. Summer vacation stories offer opportunities to try out new identities and have adventures within a limited time, or there might be something important about the transition in your characters’ lives as they get ready to leave high school for what comes next.
How the Game is Played
Aside from clear goals and the stakes of winning or losing, Lucy V Hay has a list of reasons you may want to write a sports movie.
Warren Cantrell shares some favorite victory scenes from sports films, highlighting the readymade climax that comes from competition.
For some deeper dives into the wide world of sports, Leger Grindon analyzes the boxing film and its regularly used structures.
What's The Standard Procedure?
If what’s happening in your story happened in the real world, what would be the obvious next steps?
Is there a checklist for how someone should act? Are there rules to follow? Rules that need to be broken?
One of the cards in the Writer Emergency Pack (Standard Procedures) asks you to question how characters react to the situation they’re in, and how it’s important to remember that one character’s crisis might be another character’s regular day at the office.
You can find out more about the Writer Emergency Pack via its site, or follow for regular writing prompts on Twitter or Instagram.
Other Cool Things
Want to explain to a child what television was like last century? Check out this 90s TV simulator.
Emoji may seem universal, but some emojis take on very different meanings in other countries.
For a speedy text-based browser game where you nudge the fate of prehistoric civilizations across the galaxy, try Epitaph.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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