I read STORY by Robert McKee…

…I started playing “He’s the killer!” or its endless variations such as “She’s actually the hero’s mom!” “They’re going to die in a few scenes!” and “OMG he’s sleeping with one of his students!”

… and I wrote ten short films without dialogue and ten short films with, and shot three out of the 20.

Now I feel pretty good about my grasp on structure, or at least that it’s growing at an appropriate, not-stunted rate.

Because when you come down to it, a “weakness when it comes to knowing what the right scenes are in the right order” isn’t a structure problem, it’s a confidence problem. It’s only a structure problem if your scenes are in the WRONG order, at which point you’ll have a specific, identifiable problem which you, as a good writer, will address. Your problem isn’t that you’re getting it wrong, it’s that you don’t feel certain; you don’t “know.”

People who love writing dialogue often suspect themselves of being bad at plot or story. I agree with John’s idea of writing in a different genre, but for a different reason–I think the more you write heists and mysteries the more “structury” you’ll feel since those are the “structure” genres.

On my site, I’ve posted a few great books that I share with my workshop participants. They all give different viewpoints on one of our oldest activites: storytelling. If you don’t find one that works for you, just try another. Listen for the voice that speaks to you. Then get your notebook out and start breaking down films you love, minute by minute.

Here’s the site: http://story.fatbrain.ca [[ The Story Spot ]]

Look for THE READING LIST in the right column. /diane

Seriously though you’re always learning, even after getting work picked up you never stop. Our company usually has lots of things in development, but we still do training and research for each project. Growing in skill sets as we go.

Talking to other writers and industry professionals helps a huge amount, as many comments here have said. As I’m pretty new to the commercial film scene I’ve found out so much from dealing with other professionals.

There are lots of people out there with books to sell, theories to uphold at all costs, and axes to grind. If you take each theory with a grain of salt, rather than as gospel, you can get some useful ideas from them. I recommend reading so many of them, that you internalize the general similarities and forget all of the “your script absolutely must have a man wearing a hat on page 16 or you will be a colossal failure and die lonely” types of specifics that too many of these books contain.

Doing your own analysis, by writing cards, outlines, or similar notes for films that inspire you is even better. If you can’t even start that without having a theoretical construct to guide you, pick a couple screenplay structure books that look interesting and start there — but I feel you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you just pick one theory and apply it at all costs.

Such are the two pennies I’ve thrown into the hat!