Film Courage: Jill we often hear that story structure is easy and
that it doesn't require much effort. Do you agree?
Jill Chamberlain, Script Consultant/Author/Writer: Well I mean I think it's to get the right
structure for your story is that's 90% of the work is it easy to do that well it depends on
how good you are with story structure but it's I mean it's everything right I mean I obviously
was not the first person to say this but story is structure and and to get it right is all the
difference between a story being effective and not being effective or you know drawing Us in or
boring us like that's what it is I had a you know people have a real or some people have a have a
real hangup about the idea of structure like even the word seems to offend them and I was at I was
at a party one time where I ran into a student of mine and she introduced me to a famous documentary
filmmaker who I'm not going to name and introduced me as her teacher who wrote this book on story
structure and his attitude to me was a little bit like "structure schmuchture!" you know and
I was amused and I said you know let me understand something for your for your document documentary
films do you just stick a camera on one person and like have talk for an hour and a half without any
edits you know no cuts and he said of course not you know we employ editing we have b-roll you know
we do all these things to tell a story and I said well if you're employing editing and a b story
and b-roll you're employing structure that that's all structure is it's the events that you choose
to show in the order you choose to show them in that's all it means so I mean it it constitutes
I think 90% of the work now how good you how much you're going to put into it or how long
that takes you it really depends you know so many people come to me and they say you know structure
is my weakness and I say well you came to the right place because structure is my strength I'm
really good at that but it's a it's a really good skill for all writers to understand because once
you have the structure like that's the maybe not as fun part but it's the scaffolding that makes
it easy to write your script if you know the structure it's not it's no problem writing the
the script it shouldn't be a problem you're not going to have the issue that so many people have
where they're halfway through and they run out of steam I hear that all the time right people get
to page 60 they Peter out you're not going to pet her out if you have good story structure to begin
with where you know where you're going it's going to it's going to support the whole thing and then
most writers I would imagine I maybe I'm wrong are right brain people and it seems like structure
is a very left brain activity and and really you can't what is the saying you can't sort of break
the rules until you know the rules exactly exactly I mean I guess I'm maybe I'm a ruled person or
maybe or it was easy for me I was eager to learn the rules in order to break the rules I think I'm
a bit of a mix of the left and the right and so that's why structure is a lot easier to me than
it is a lot of writers I still do some writing the writing is really hard for me but structure
structure is easy like I it's become intuitive to me at this point that I can pretty quickly
pick out what's working what's not and tell you why not and and and that's structure that that's
how I know these things you know I can see you're you're picking a choice in your climax that I saw
coming from the very beginning and let's find you a different Choice you know those are those are
the kinds of things that we can do with structure and when you have a firm grasp on that it just
makes the storytelling so easy why do you say that 75% of screenwriters creative effort should go
toward structure because structure is everything it's going to make your life easy you know what
what we're doing with structure particularly when I'm using my method (my Nutshell Technique
method) is I'm setting up things helping you set up some things that happen in the beginning and
that happen in the end and those things aren't random they're they're connected and if we set
them up properly it does all the heavy lifting of holding up your story holding up the bulk of
your story where which is the the middle the the second act which is twice as long as As the first
act or the third act it's twice as long but if we have the right structure it's going to hold it up
even though I don't have any structural elements really in the second act as long as we found the
right elements and so you know that's why I am a big proponent in putting the time in advance
to figuring out the structure let's figure it out a lot of writers don't they just they just write
and that's the way to discover the story and you know that's okay as long as you are going to be
happy with being told maybe you have to throw out a draft because you didn't discover till the end
of it it was like oh actually I should have Maybe started the story towards the the end and gone
further instead of exploring this those kinds of things I'm not that kind of person I can't stand
writing additional drafts and so I just think it's easier we can set up these things to understand
the structure without writing a single page and in fact it's easier to do it that way because it's
you know my form is a one page Nutshell Technique form that you know we could see right on the form
what's working and what's not and if it's not it's really easy to fix because it's on one piece of
paper when you have written 120 Pages it's a mess to fix it so you know that's why I say get that
work out of the way in the beginning the other stuff's easy sure and it's almost like a game
of Jenga or dominos that if you take one little piece the rest of it will collapse so it's not
just that easy yeah or even if you have a vague idea of what your structure is like you said is
you know one piece can make it collapse you get in a certain way and you realize oh this isn't
actually working the way I thought it was and but now you've written yourself halfway through and
you know do you want to go back to the drawing board a lot of people don't and what do you say
to students that well I know you do in-person classes in Zoom I think I do Zoom classes and I
do yeah and I do everything on Zoom now actually my classes and my consultation what do you say
though to students that say you know what this is taking all the joy out of writing I I'm an artist
I want to create and just let it I want to bleed on the page yeah you know I think that they the
first thing I would say if they were a student of mine would be first of all I want you to try it my
way right you've signed up for this class this is you know class about the Nutshell Technique I want
you to try it my way and I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised that in fact it's freeing
it's not constrictive it sounds very constrictive to those who don't understand structure and it may
feel that way at first it really and I know people feel like they're you know shoehorning things into
fitting them into my boxes but once you have the structure you know figured out you can you know
I exaggerate it a little bit but it's like eight words on a Post-It essentially you can stick on
your monitor and then you write with the joy and you know you're not going to write yourself into
a corner you can trust that you've done the heavy lifting you've done the heavy thinking and figured
out the structure already and so now you can have joy on the page you know now this you know as the
scenes come alive I don't have to worry about oh am I writing myself into a corner I've already
figured that out I can live and breathe on the page along with the characters so it's you know
it's forcing you to think about those things upfront it's forcing you to think about really
what your story is about that's what it is I mean you know a story is not just a bunch of
events after each other right or a premise that you're not sure where it goes a story is going
to impact us and and it has meaning and it's not likely you're going to randomly come across that
meaning and so I think it's really worth investing the time UPF front to figure out the structure and
by the way I use a very loose sense of it you know I don't use a beat sheet approach I don't tell you
you have to hit all these pre-prescribed beats I have a couple of things that are grounded in
linear time I mean you have to have a first scene you have to have a last scene there's something
that happens at 25% and there's something that happens at 75% but other than that my elements
of structure are not linear it's it's not about time it's about the connection between these four
things and so if you figure that out in advance then then you're going to be able to have joy in
the page then you're not going to have anxiety in the page or or end up writing 140 pages that end
up you know being a long situation that doesn't really have a point to it you've already figured
out what the story is about ahead of time and so now you can experience the joy of letting
the characters come alive.