E.C. Henry at 2010-03-12 18:47:16:

I'm more of free form writer. I don't think it makes for fresh writing to write for structure, and fill out familiar story beats that have been done a million times before. Never been a slave to the line of thinking that instists that act breaks MUST FALL on such-and-such a page. I think structure is more-less just a part of establishing meaning, and spoting markers for arriving at an intended destination.

Plot points are means by which a story changes in trajectory. A key part of structure, the study of plot points -- and fining intersting ones is WAY more interesting then getting bogged down in boring discussions about structure.

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

meg at 2010-03-12 19:29:24:

I love how the right brain and the left brain come together to create a screenplay.

Free form from the right brain lets my story dance -- the left brain provides a way for everyone to follow it.

I think it's fascinating how creative I can be when I am forced to fit a certain structure. Ask me about my day and I might give you 1000 words. Tell me I have 500 words I'll be even better (I leave out the parts where I walk down the hall, answer the phone or say hello). Say I get one page to grab you and I have to distill it even more. Ask for a logline and I have to work even harder at capturing the core of my story. Give me 140 characters and there's no room for boring.

Frank Conniff at 2010-03-12 22:59:33:

I think that what Seltzer is saying applies to the very early part of writing something. The free form flow of ideas is important, the best stuff, the inspired stuff, is all in our subconscious and what he may be getting at is the idea that we sometimes have to get out of our own way and get as many of those crazy, unstructured ideas down on paper as we can. But later, as you take the material and give it a form, that's where structure comes in and for a screenplay the 3 act structure seems like the most tried and true way to take your ideas, give them a form, and make them ENTERTAINING. I guess what I'm saying is that in my experience of developing my ideas early on I don't always have the structure right off the bat. I know how important it is, so I have to find the structure that will best serve my story, so sometimes being as loose and unstructured as possible is the best for me to find my ultimate structure. I think that both Seltzer and the guy who rebutted him make very valuable points. It doesn't have to be either/or, but for a screenplay you do have to end up with a solid structure that you can build all your crazy shit on. To me, a good example is the Pixar film "Up." The filmmakers set the foundation of a very emotional, very relatable and very involving story, and then by third act, when all sorts of crazy shit like dogs firing machine guns out of biplanes was happening, the audience bought it and were completely involved emotionally. I wouldn't be surprised if the image of the dogs flying the planes came to the writers early on in the brain-storming process of the film, but they had to build a solid screenplay to make that stuff work. Yes, in the end a good 3 act structure works better than free-form, rambling stuff like, oh, say, for instance, this post.

Cinema and Fiction at 2010-03-12 23:11:44:

I think ideas of structure, formulae, paradigms etc. can be useful for screenwriters to avoid a screenplay reading like a confused or unfocused mess.
Some writers clearly benefit from such ideas to help focus their writing, but it can also be limiting.
Many put structure ahead of content, trying to 'perfect expression of the structure' with cliched results.
I think anyone using a structural approach should ask themself how THEIR SPECIFIC USE OF THAT APPROACH offers something original. If you use a popular structural approach, you're in the same boat as millions of other people - but how does your screenplay stand out from all the others?

meg at 2010-03-12 23:59:47:

I don't think the use of the screenplay structure inhibits original ideas.

When I watch a movie that seems unoriginal/not very good I don't think it's because it's following a formula. I think that it's not a very original idea -- that writer can't write--someone screwed up--etc.

If I watch a movie and the structure is obvious--like I can shout out Blake Snyder's beats as the movie plays it's not the formula so much as the writer doesn't have the skill to make it seamless. I read a screenplay one night to study it and got to the last page and realized I hadn't taken one note! It completely fit into the typical screenplay structure but it was so well done I didn't notice because the story grabbed me.

Structure keeps I M Pei's work from imploding. Screenplay structure keeps my outline and my million ideas from suffocating my story.

My mom would laugh at me 'defending' structure! But in this case for storytelling in our society today it works.

itstartedwithawindmill at 2010-03-13 02:34:23:

Maybe structure is something imbedded in our DNA. Kind of how we're all drawn to sit around fires, laughing, joking and cooking something. And for thousands of generations storytellers sat around those fires repeating the stories of heroes and villains, Gods and demons, paradise and calamity. Those stories must have had a structure for those storytellers too.

jcarends at 2010-03-13 05:15:29:

In this week when it was announced that DeNiro is going to play Lombardi, it's fitting here to quote the the epitaph on The Coach's tombstone: "Discipline is Freedom."

My only nit with CrashDaily's rebuttal is that he was too hard on poets. It was Frost who famously said, regarding structure and the creative act (paraphrasing): writing without a structure is like playing tennis without a net. What's the point?

sean1 at 2010-03-13 09:32:02:

Great, great line about life itself seeming to have a three-act structure to it. I thought it over and realized, yeah, even the simplest life stories (how I spent my day) have a first, second and third acts.

Now, although I pretty much feel the classic three act structure is fine, I have a problem with some of the overly busy specs that have sold over the past year or two.

Without giving away titles, I've read at least two red-hot specs that sold for a lot of money that felt as if they contained 500 acts a piece.

Granted, they were both good reads. In fact, one was VERY good. Still, they were both so tightly constructed, both so structurally BUSY, that I felt writing them must have been torture by way of tedium.

Alex at 2010-03-13 13:11:14:

interesting thread. i have personally "freed myself" from thinking about structure as an enemy. i think this is because i now see structure as the manifestation of character, something that comes from inside the story, rather than something i force onto a story.

so really, when i think about structure, i think about the things that interest me the most -- the world of the story, the people in that world, and how i can challenge them and test them in new, difficult, strange ways.

on a practical level, i absolutely hate prose outlines, but i do love charts and diagrams.

Alex at 2010-03-13 13:27:32:

also, a very good friend of mine is a poetry student at a very prestigious program, and we had a long talk about poetry workshops the other day. and one of her biggest frustrations, i gathered, was that poetry can be SO esoteric and experimental and "whatever you want it to be" that it becomes hard to know whether what you are writing really works or not -- because defining whether a poem that "works" is exceedingly difficult to do.

scriptwriting is almost on the flip side, where the basis of the discussion is rock-solid. and so the question is not some overly cerebral discussion about "what is a script" but rather, "what is the execution of the script."