Global Scriptwriting

——————3——————

STRUCTURE

 

Structure is the narrative strategy that has dominated thinking and writing about script for the past twenty years. My goal in this chapter is neither to support nor attack those notions that have held sway in the universities and in the profession. Rather, I acknowledge structure as a critical narrative strategy, as I pointed out in Chapter 1, “The Basics.” In this chapter and in Chapter 4, I will explicate this endlessly fascinating but all-too-mysterious strategy and set it in the context of an important set of choices for the writer.

Structure is essentially four macroelements. They are the three-act structure, plot, the character layer, and, finally, genre. Genre is sufficiently large in scale that I will address ...