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 Story Structure Gurus

By Todd Coleman

In a nation of optimism, pragmatism and self-improvement, it is no surprise that the self-help industry has found a healthy niche market in the thousands of would-be screenwriters pouring from its universities each year. Fueled by reports of million-dollar spec script sales, these media-bred baby boomers have spawned a multimillion dollar cottage industry of screenwriting books, classes, seminars and software.

With over three dozen screenwriting books in print and no scarcity of classes-many of them now being exported to Europe and as far away as Africa and South America-questions abound. Has all this new "technology" resulted in better scripts, as some claim, or in formulaic writing-by-numbers? Has it improved story meetings, creating a common language for better communication, or has it made the proverbial hell of development even more hellish?

At the center of the debate are four teachers who, of all the so-called "story structure gurus," have had the greatest impact on screenwriting in the last fifteen years: Syd Field, Robert McKee, John Truby and Linda Seger.

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One can be forgiven for mistaking Syd Field for a guru. With the placid demeanor of an Eastern master, Field gently encourages the eight aspiring writers gathered around a long wooden table at his Beverly Hills home. His thirty-something students shuffle their 14 index cards and take turns reading each others' new pages, while Siddha Yoga chanting plays in the background and a cat strolls leisurely across the table. Photos of Baba and Gurumayi, meditation masters to whom Field has dedicated two of his four books, smile benignly as Field speaks of a certain character's "dharmic behavior," and of the flexibility of structure: "It's the tree that bends in the wind but does not break."

L.A. native Syd Field's three-act "paradigm" (for which he is today both esteemed and maligned) emerged full-blown during a screenwriting class he was teaching at Sherwood Oaks Experimental College in 1977. A student asked, "What is a screenplay?" and Field answered: "There's a beginning, middle and end, and there's a point at which the beginning turns into the middle, and a point at which the middle turns into the end." Two years later, with a midpoint added to the two "plot points" separating the three acts, Field's watershed book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting was published, and became an immediate bestseller. The first popular book to analyze-and provide a language for discussing-the structure of motion picture scripts, Screenplay was quickly adopted as the new bible of Hollywood, and became required reading, not only for Screenplay 101 students, but for executives and-by necessity-writers, who suddenly found their feet held to the fire of a new set of perceived "rules."

Field became a hot ticket on the lecture circuit, spending much of the early '80s traveling across the U.S., Canada and Europe, teaching a two-day version of his class, while continuing to lead longer writing workshops at home. Out of those workshops came his next book, The Screenplay Workbook, which was published in 1984 and has since sold almost 200,000 copies.

That same year, another Sherwood Oaks writing teacher went public.

If Syd Field's California roots are showing (his first book has a Special Acknowledgement to Werner Erhard and the folks at est), the same can be said for his direct opposite, Robert McKee, a pugnacious, street-smart Irish-American from Detroit. It is no wonder McKee has become so closely allied with Casablanca, the film he analyzes in detail on the last day of his three-day "Story Structure" class: His persona is not unlike Bogart's-bluff, tough, but under the crusty exterior, a heart of gold... maybe.

A throwback to the pre-sensitive male, McKee offsets his gruffly conservative persona with a liberal use of expletives and sexual metaphors, always to comic effect. A born contrarian, he delights in tipping sacred cows, and is disappointed if the PC police don't hiss at him when he refers to The Piano as "radical feminism illustrated." Women students in particular can be heard grumbling about his sexual politics and well-developed ego-though the majority of his students continues to be women.

The heart of McKee's teaching is classical design/structure, which for him is a combination of the "classical" five-part narrative structure (inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax and resolution) and the three-act story. He takes great pains to defend classical structure, contrasting it with minimalism and the avant-garde (which he defines as reduced structure and anti-structure-i.e., you have to know the rules to break them), and also defending it against feminist and PC critiques (classical design is not "Western" or "male," but a mirror of the human mind).

McKee boasts a solid resume both as a professional theater actor/director and a professor of film and theater arts, and his background as an actor has obviously served him well. Alone on the stage with a cup of coffee and an overhead projector, he manages to keep 250-plus students entertained for 30 info-jammed hours, and he almost always receives a standing ovation at the end. Not surprisingly, actors (hoping to write better roles for themselves) make up a large percentage of his classes.

If the hero is only as good as his opponent, then the advocates of three-act structure have met their match in mild-mannered John Truby, a former squash pro and philosophy major who has been crusading against the Syd Field paradigm since first teaching "Truby's Story Structure" in 1985.

Comparing and analyzing literally hundreds of films after college, Truby came up with his own version of the "classic" story structure, in this case, with seven major steps: problem/need, desire, opponent, plan, battle, self-revelation, and new equilibrium, with the hero now at a higher or lower level. To flesh out those steps in greater detail, Truby developed another 22 Building Blocks, as a tool to create a hero-driven, step-by-step plot in which all scenes are organically linked and motivated by the hero's need. The 7 + 22 steps, says Truby, add up to a kind of map that allows for more detailing in the middle of the script than the three-act structure can allegedly give.

"The normal three-act structure tends to give you a story with very few revelations. Instead of compressing the story and trying to get as much plot as possible, you tend to stretch that story over the three acts and over the two act breaks, and make two or three major reveals. Hollywood films in the last few years average anywhere from six to ten major plot points per story, depending on how you define 'plot point,' so if you're doing this two or three plot point thing, you're not even in the game."

Today Truby's Writers' Studio is a virtual school of screenwriting, offering "classes" (on audio or video tape) on different genres (crime, horror, comedy, action, etc.), on TV sitcoms and one-hour dramas, plus his Great Screenwriting, Advanced Screenwriting, World Myth and Story Doctor classes (for development and rewrites).

More than any course, what Truby is most proud of is StoryLine Pro, an "interactive story development software" introduced in 1991 and expanded and upgraded every year since. The program combines Truby's script consulting experience with his 22-step methodology to create a kind of direct and indirect story coach-questioning, prodding, and reminding the writer, and allowing him to view his/her story from many different angles at the same time. The program allows a split-screen comparison of the hero to any other character, for example, in terms of desire line, moral need, psychological need, etc. Action beats, "reveals" and character arcs can be pulled out and tracked separately from beginning to end, and an upgradable "library" of other films can be referenced at any time to see how other writers have solved similar problems.

If McKee is the rougher edge of the urban Midwest, Dr. Linda Seger (pronounced Say-ger) reflects its gentler, pastoral side. Though best known for her first book, Making a Good Script Great (1984), the self-effacing author/teacher from Peshtigo, Wisconsin (pop. 2,500) has always focused primarily on script consulting; her books (four) and seminars (worldwide) are mere sidelines to what she considers her real job: script doctor. Seger's methodology is based almost entirely on her 1976 doctoral dissertation, which analyzed why and how theater scripts worked-or didn't. Her method is oriented toward rewriting rather than original creation-an important distinction from her peers' approach. "People tell me that there is a flexibility to my method that makes it impossible to say, 'This is the method.' What it is really saying is that all art has an organic shape that it is striving for, and that in dramatic storytelling, the story is trying to move someplace. So the shape has to be strong enough to support the theme and the characters and the movement of the story. One is not imposing a shape; one is looking at the story and simply trying to pull out the shape that the story is trying to take.

"What I'm always looking for is a way of looking at a script that is general enough that it can deal with many, many different kinds of scripts-for example, not all scripts are hero scripts. That's why I think in terms of beginnings, middles and ends, and what is the focus of the beginning and what is the focus of the middle and the focus of the end."

Within the three-act structure, Seger focuses on eight sections, including (but not limited to) the setup, the development of act one, a first turning point, act two (together with a midpoint which are found in many, but not all, scripts), a second turning point, a climax and a resolution.

Seger and Truby butted heads last summer in a series of articles ("The Three-Act Structure Wars") in Screenwrite Now! magazine. In response to a Truby article attacking three-act structure as a dangerous myth, Seger offered a defense and a conciliatory "Can't we all just get along?" Truby responded by offering his own method as a much-needed "revolution in writing," as dramatic an innovation to writing as the Stanislavsky method was to acting. Seger chose not to respond, and is the only one of the four who not only speaks well of all her colleagues, but occasionally even recommends them to her students.

"I tend to feel it's very good for people to take classes from a lot of us," says Seger. "Because what I emphasize might be different than what McKee or Truby emphasizes. And eventually every creative person devises their own system. You listen to me, you listen to them, and then you just do what you want."

Says Seger, "All it is, is semantics. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I looked at John Truby's 22 points and I found that a lot of what he's doing is what I do-but I'm calling it something totally different. Teaching is finding a vocabulary to explain a concept, to explain something that works."

Meanwhile, boys will be boys. McKee, Truby and Field have purposely avoided being "infected" by their colleagues' teachings, and take it as a point of pride that they haven't read each others' books, heard each others' tapes, etc. This, of course, doesn't stop them from having very strong opinions about each others' work, nor from engaging in the kind of guru-bashing and stereotyping of that work that they themselves complain of.

Gurumania reached its most frenzied pitch about five years ago, when every screenwriting teacher in the country seemed to have a book deal and an ad in the trades for their new and improved screenplay class.

An inevitable backlash set in, and all teachers great and small got tarred with the same brush-off: You guys are charlatans, making a fortune off of wannabe writers. You've never sold a script, but you deliver your wisdom like oracles from on high. You reduce the creative process to a fill-in-the-blanks formula, and are dumbing down the general quality of scripts. Worse yet, the executives are taking your courses, and they're using your theories like clubs, beating up the real writers, who are now expected to follow your mechanistic rules.

True or false?

True, there is something off-putting about a roomful of adults scribbling furiously, as if in junior high, while an unproduced writer stands at the front "teaching" the gnostic gospel that he alone has discovered. True, the teacher's authoritative tone (necessary to justify the cost of the course) can at times be annoying-even if the information itself is good. But even if the theories are interesting and true, are they useful in the actual writing process?

Can writing be taught?

"Both here and abroad, the assumption is that it is just instinct and the Muse and pure talent, and that writing cannot be taught-this is, of course, an absurdity," says McKee, whose most recent credit is TNT's Abraham. "Talent can't be taught. Hard work can't be taught. Taste can't be taught. Judgment can't be taught. But what can be taught is the same sort of thing that gets taught in a music school or an art school: the abstract, underlying principles of an art form, the study of the masters, how principles are applied in previous existing works-to build up a depth of understanding in the student as to what the craft and the elements of the art are and how they, in fact, work in beautiful models."

McKee, who has signed on-for a $200,000 advance-to expand his Story Structure class into a book, finds the majority of screenwriting books "appallingly shallow." "I think the screenwriter is being done a great disservice by some of these books, because the books treat screenwriting with this sort of you-too-can-be-a-hack attitude. Occasionally I find some insight, but inevitably, it's not a book on screenwriting, it's a book on novel writing or playwriting."

Among the heavyweight teachers, McKee is the champ in terms of sheer income, grossing almost a million dollars a year from his weekend classes alone. In the U.S. he averages 250 students per weekend at $425 a head, teaching eight times a year in New York and L.A., plus a few times a year in London (where he lives and owns a country home), and in various other cities around the world. Even after subtracting auditorium rental, two paid organizers, promotional mailings and 3,000 cups of coffee per weekend, there would seem to be a bit left over. The question is: Will McKee be able to teach his class at the current rate once people can buy the same information at their local bookstore?

The financial success McKee has enjoyed is the exception, not the rule, for writing teachers, says John Truby.

"There was a myth that everybody was making a lot of money from teaching classes. Three or four years ago I counted about 25 different courses and teachers doing classes at that time. Today you'll see maybe three or four. That tells you that people got into it and lost money... because it's expensive to do a class."

Truby changed from an 8-week class to a 6-week format in 1988, lowering the cost from $265 to $200. Attendance averaged from 50-60 people, with a minimum of 35 people needed to break even. Although Truby believes that a weekly class is the ideal format for learning (giving students time between classes to digest material), because of time constraints, he switched to weekend seminars in 1992 (as McKee did in 1987). Both McKee and Field have expressed admiration for Truby's marketing skills. This winter Truby began publishing Working Writer, a newsletter-cum-catalogue featuring a story breakdown of Jurassic Park and a mail-order listing of his audio and video classes, software program and upgrades, etc. Truby has developed his own distribution network, and is thus able to direct-market his products, including a spiral-bound copy of his one book, Great Movies: Why They Work.

Syd Field is leader of the pack in terms of book sales. Screenplay, which Field estimates has sold over 250,000 copies since 1979, is a regular part of the curriculum in many film school classes. By contrast, Seger's Making a Good Script Great, more likely to be found in advanced screenwriting classes, has sold about 55-60,000 copies. But even with Field's first three books together selling half a million copies, his total annual income is less than $200,000-modest by Hollywood's inflated standards.

But the important question is not whether writing teachers are making money, but whether students are getting value for their money. Are screenplay teachers profiting from the pipe dreams of the artistically challenged?

"I don't sell false hopes," says Field. "If people want to take the class, that's their business. If they want to write a spec script, should we say, 'No, don't write that script'? People want to learn. That's the inherent ability of humankind-to progress, to evolve. We wouldn't be here if there was not a market for people who were interested in learning." McKee: "I open the doors, and people come in. How do I know some clerk in a video shop isn't Quentin Tarantino? But once they're in, I don't bullshit them. One of the things I do over that weekend is to make it abundantly clear just how fucking hard it is, and to therefore save these poor dilettantes years of frustration. And indeed it works."

The opening message in Truby's Working Writer (Winter '95) takes a different approach: "I believe that anyone with intelligence and commitment can write for the entertainment industry. New opportunities are flooding the market. Demand is stronger than ever. But to succeed you have to know your craft."

Speaking at his comfortable but modest home in Westwood, Truby seems impatient with the whole debate. "What would people have me do? Say, 'Because most of you won't succeed as screenwriters, I'm not going to teach this class at all'? I believe that I give the best screenwriting class there is...and I guarantee it. I say, 'If in the first two hours you don't think it's the best class you've ever taken, I'll give you your money back and pay you $20 for your time.' I've given that guarantee for ten years, and I've been taken up on it maybe four or five times."

Field and Truby have cut down on the number of classes they teach, and are devoting more time to their own writing, both working with writing partners. Truby, who served as Story Editor on 21 Jump Street for the '89-'90 season, reports that he has been hired to write a freelance TV script this summer. Field, meanwhile, is exploring producing, and has plans to co-produce a Mexican film with director Luis Mandoki (in Spanish, though he doesn't speak the language). By coincidence, Field's one produced feature credit is a Spanish-language Western, Los Banditos, shot and produced by an Argentine company in the late '60s.

Much of the bad press the screenplay mavens have received has come from the rampant stereotyping of their teachings-often by people who have never taken their courses, but also by students themselves.

"Any tool can be misused, and classes in screenwriting are no exception," says Truby. "There is sometimes an effort to simplify what we say to its simplest level: 'These are the 22 steps, and if I just do them in this order I'll have a good script.' I probably say ten times in the class, 'Don't do that. Have some flexibility in using this. These steps don't have to happen in this order. You don't have to have all of these steps.' I say that constantly-but people will still do this."

Syd Field in particular is criticized for being overly tied to page numbers. "I get calls from people saying, 'Oh my God, my plot point 1 is on page 32-what do I do?' And I say, 'So what?' People think that I'm locked into a formula that doesn't allow anybody to do anything. But it's form, not formula. They don't read what I say-I say it occurs "approximately" 25 pages in, but I also say that most first acts now are about 23 minutes. So the form of beginning, middle and end is what I propose. The page numbers are only a guideline."

One well-known screenwriter accosted Field at a party, "You son of a bitch, how could you do this to me? In my contracts now from the studio they tell me now I have to write a three-act screenplay!"

Executives and lawyers are now taking the courses...too literally. Italy's RAI network inserted elements from McKee's Rome lectures into their contracts with writers-until McKee called them, and they backed down. But Hollywood executives, he says, are no better.

"They toss terminology at the writer-what's the controlling idea, what's the spine?-not in an effort to develop the screenplay, but in an effort to impress and intimidate the writer that they've got some kind of knowledge, which they don't have."

Though known for their books and classes, most of the story gurus have a healthy sideline business in script consulting. Even though McKee says he has tried to price himself out of that market, he still has two major studios that hire him to be the last-and highest paid-"reader" before the film goes into production.

At $2,000 a script, Truby makes more money consulting than teaching, though his clients tend to be independent writers and producers, rather than the major studios-who tend to avoid story consultants. After all, isn't that what studio executives do?

"Development people say: We do what you do," says Seger. "But what I do is not really development; it's a certain kind of crafting and shaping of what the development people or what the writer want to see in that script. My method is designed to complement the development process."

Seger, unlike her colleagues, has no ambitions to be a screenwriter. Does this make her less qualified to consult on scripts?

"It's an advantage, not being a writer. To be a consultant and to be a writer are two very different thinking processes. The writer has to be very creative and to work from the inside out. The consultant has to have the ability to be objective, and not to get their ego in the middle of all that. When a consultant is also a writer, he is acting like a co-writer, saying, 'How would I do it?' But how they would do it is irrelevant."

Seger's rates vary from $750 for a more general script overview, to $2,500 for a detailed, page-by-page analysis, and up to $5,000 for all of the above plus "on call" duties during preproduction and into actual production.

One of the more surprising revelations of the script consultants is that some very high-profile and respected screenwriters use them-under condition of absolute secrecy. The stigma of visiting a script doctor is not unlike the stigma once associated with psychotherapy: a kind of insanity by association.

"When I started, nobody would tell anyone that they had come to me," says Seger. "That has totally changed. In fact, a lot of people not only say it but I think they're really pleased about it. They realize that that says something positive about them, that they've put that extra bit into their script."

Often writers will visit their gurus in secret, not wanting their producers to think that they are anything less than brilliantly self-sufficient. But just as often, it is the producers sneaking in the back door, not wanting the writers to know they have sought out a second opinion on the writers' scripts.

Considering the radical about-face that Hollywood has taken toward psychotherapists in the last few decades, one can anticipate a day when every writer will have his own personal story doctor-and visit her weekly.

"The job of a script consultant is really exactly the same job as the acting coach or the athlete's coach or the writer's editor in novel writing," says Seger. "It's to provide objectivity, to bring a different point of view, and to get that last 10% out of that person, that thing that they hadn't thought of that's going to make the difference between something that is very good versus something that is truly great."

Seger has consulted on 35 produced features (including Miramax's Picture Bride, this year's Audience Favorite at Sundance) and almost 20 television shows, but her greatest impact may ultimately be felt internationally.

Five years ago the New Zealand Film Commission hired Seger to train twelve N.Z. script consultants in her extended method. The twelve disciples were then to be assigned to work with the writers, directors and producers of all N.Z. state-funded films. Says Seger, "The New Zealanders wanted to break into the international market and start competing internationally. They had a lot of talent, but not a very strong sense of story."

Seger likes to think that the recent prominence of New Zealand films like The Piano and Once Were Warriors is evidence of a ripple effect of her teaching, and she now plans to train script consultants in Germany and other countries.

But why would she create her own competition? "If there are 25,000 projects registered every year at the Writers Guild-and that's not counting Europe-then there's really enough to go around. And if my ultimate objective is better movies, and if I can train other people to help make better movies, then I'm getting my ultimate objective."

Syd Field was the first to teach internationally, travelling to Canada and Europe as early as 1980. His first book, "Screenplay," has been translated into 14 languages, and he has now expanded his teaching to South Africa, South America and Mexico (sometimes spending as much as four months of the year out of the country). "The governments are smart," says Field. "They're putting up all this money [for state-funded films], and they want to make sure that they don't lose it."

Working independently of each other in the late '70s and early '80s, Truby, Field, McKee and Seger have helped create-a decade later-a phenomenon that now reaches across the globe, and that has no parallel in the history of storytelling.

The history of art and art criticism is a dialectic of thesis and antithesis, a series of movements, each arising in opposition to the last. However commercial the current screenwriting "industry," we may be looking at a new field of study, not unlike the new science of psychology, whose next step must inevitably be the synthesis of the different teachings, thus creating new storytelling models.

Or maybe it's just the Muse.