The Comic Toolbox (Patreon)

I was GTAing today and, in my down time, I decided to work on my screenplay's structure a little more. Structure is HARD ya'll. Or at least it is for me. In the past six months I think I've read, like, five books about how to structure a story. And it's all very good and helpful but it's also DAUNTING AS FUCK. There's stuff about primal questing and three acts that break up into four parts for some reason and your story must drastically change at least three times. It was all a little much for me and I felt lost.

It's weird writing a story based on your life because you know the story is there, you just have to sift it out and change some stuff. But which stuff? What's the important bits? What's the stuff that really happened but is too unbelievable to put into fiction? What's the stuff that meant a lot to you and how do you get other people to care about it as much as you did?

I took a break from structure books to read The Comic Toolbox because I'd also like to be funny someday (like, when I mean to be. Too often it just happens by accident.) I was, of course, greeted with more story structure. But this seemed a little easier to handle. The hero wants one thing and secretly needs another thing. An opportunity to get one or both of those things comes into the hero's life (sometimes in the form of a disaster.) The hero takes control in a way that kind gets them what they want, but not exactly what they need. Some curveball is thrown their way to fuck things up further. Everything goes to hell. The hero has to make a choice (this often comes in the form of choosing between what they want and need. Or choosing between the thing The Old Them would do and The New Them would do) and then they take a big risk which proves that they have become The New Them.

Finally, a story that could be summed up in a paragraph. A structure that didn't give me a panic attack! So I wrote out this summary for all of my characters and even found an addendum to this formula (If the "opportunity" comes in the form of a disaster, there must be a period of EVERYTHING GOING HILARIOUSLY WRONG before the hero takes control.) And suddenly I had new ideas for scenes, better ideas of how the characters interacted and changed through the story, a faster timeline, and a brand new ending.

I'm not sure when I'll have time to write them, but I'm glad I have more ideas now.