In this blogpost I'll show you the trick to build a good story, by using examples of real Hollywood movies. I'll explain to you how to build up your story from scratch, and how to construct storylines, character arcs, plot devices etc. So let's get started!
The origins of storytelling
To make a good story for your movie, we first need to understand where stories come from. What are the origins of stories and storytelling? Why do people enjoy stories? Well, first of all of course, because they're entertaining. But that's not how they started. Stories go ages back, to a time long before movies, television, radio, even books. Stories come from a time before the written word. Stortelling has been used for thousands of years, to pass one story on to the next generation. Sometimes the same story, or sometimes a new story with the same basics.
The goal of telling a story was conveying a message to the people the stories where told to. You could of course try to lecture someone, but that would be rather boring. And just telling someone to do, or not to do something, without giving them reason, or any understanding why, would be ineffective. So in order to make people understand why they needed to do something, or not to do someting, they wrapped it around a short story, displaying the reason why to do it or not to do it. For example: I could tell someone not to touch the fire. But not giving them a reason why not to touch it, you can just wait until they're going to try and find out for themselves why they should or should not do it. But if I tell them a story of a little boy who was obsessed with fire, and his parrent always told him not to do it, but he still wanted to do it, and in the end he touched the fire and burned his hand, which now looks like a potato. Now we can understand why we don't want to touch the fire. Or perhaps we could end the story, leaving the people to think what could happen to the boy if he touched the fire, and let the audience think for themselves, and draw their own conclussion, without pressing your opinion or conclussion onto them.
This basic is the basis for every story told in every medium. Whether you're reading a book, listening to a radio play, watching a tv show or movie, or playing a video game. Every story has this basic of sending people a message, or making them think about something. This is the goal of every story, telling your audience something, or asking them a question. It could be personal, general or social critisism, but you have to try and tell something with your story. Without that, you're just telling a story just to talk, without any reason, and you'll notice soon that nobody wants to listen to you anymore.
Sending a message
So now that we know we have to send them a message, how do we do this in a movie. Well, let's look at some examples. Let's take the first Spider-Man movie from 2002 directed by Sam Raimi. The message of the story is obvious: 'With great power, comes great responsibility.' That's the message of the movie.
It's a universal message that works for everyone across the world. Whether you're a garbageman in China, or the president of the USA, we all have to learn, that the more power we have, either physical, political, mental etc. we have to take our responsibilities for them. For instance, if you have a son or a daughter, you have the power over your child, since it's your child. But that also means you have to take care of that child, take your responsibilities and feed it, dress it, nurture it, love it. And the same thing goes for the president of the USA, he has much power, but also has a lot more responsibilities, because he has the responsibilities over everyone in the USA, and that's quite much.
Let's do a pop-quiz. I'll write down here some movie titles, and you have to guess what the message of the movie was. The answers are at the bottom of this blogpost.
1. Spider-Man 2
2. The Matrix
3. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearle
5. Batman Begins
6. Jurassic Park
7. Finding Nemo
8. V for Vendetta
9. Star Wars IV A New Hope
10. Inception
There's no such thing as a bad or good message. Because in the end, the message you're trying to convey in your story is your own personal message, it's your story, and therefore cannot be right or wrong. The only thing you can do wrong is not incorporating a message at all. You can talk about anything you want, as long as you keep the message or question in the movie the basic of your movie. This means that everything in the movie has to be based on sending this message across to your audience. Any scene you write, any character in the movie, has to add something, some importance to message of the story you're trying to tell. Your message in the movie is ultimately connected in some way to the goal of your main character.
And easy way to check if you have any scenes or characters that are not adding something to the story, is to take out the scene or character completely from the story, and see if anything important changes to your story. A good example of trimming out characters or scenes are the Lord of the Rings movies. People who've read the book have noticed a lot of scenes are missing, or sometimes altered, or sometimes even complete characters from the book are missing. This is because the characters and scenes that are missing from the book, in the end, did not add any importance to the story or the goal of the main character.
Character arc
An easy thing to remember, is that the message of your movie is also the question or quest of your main character. Your main character is the one that has to experience this, and find out the message of your movie for himself. This message he has to experience is connected to the goal of the main character.
If we take again the first Spider-Man movie as example, it's the main character, Peter Parker, that has to find out during the story that with more power comes more responsibilities.
This means that at first he has to get more power, than not take responsibility to experience what happens if you don't take the responsibilities, and after that of course to make the right choice, and do take responsibility to show what happens if you do take responsibility.
Now, let's check if this also matched with what happens in the movie Spider-Man. He get's more power (gets superpowers from being bitten by a spider). He doesn't take responsibility (he should've stopped that thief who stole the money with all the power he has, but he didn't). Experience what happes when he doesn't take responsibility (Uncle Ben got killed by the thief that he could've stopped). Make the right choice and do take responsibility (he becomes Spider-Man and saves people on a daily base). Show what happens when you do take responsibiliy (the whole city of New York loves him in the end, and he wins the heart of the girl of his dreams by saving her multiple times).
Always remember that whatever you want to tell to your audience, whether it's not playing with fire, taking your responsibilities or something else, it always happens to the main character. He or she is the one that your audience can identify with, as you tell the story through the eyes of the main character.
Therefore also the story arc is also the main characters 'character arc'. The journey your main character takes is the message of the movie. And once you understand this, you can begin to see how we need to construct a story.
Story arc
In order to build a good story you have to understand the three acts. Every movie, book, theater play etc. consists out of thee acts. The first act consists out of your character introduction (in a movie this takes about the first 20 minutes), followed by the introduction of our plot. The plot is basically what drives the movie, it's our quest, our goal. The plot is what sets our main character into motion, and guides him towards the message of the movie. It doesn't matter how simple or complex the plot is, as long as it gets us where we need to be, namely to get our message across to the audience. The plot will test our main character.
At the end of our first act, our main character will start to slowly slide down a negative spiral, not very deep, just a little bit. This is the point in where our main character hasn't understood or learned the lesson (our message) of the movie yet. To do that, he first needs to change. Untill he changes, things will start to go worse and worse for him.
This brings us to the second act. Some people might describe this as bringing your character to hell. You want to bring your character to the lowest point possible. Everything he tries to do, has to fail, because he hasn't understood the message of the movie yet. The lower you'll get your character, the bigger the uprise will be in the third act, and the bigger the excitement and climax will be at the end of our story. Try to bring your character to the bottom, destroy everything what's important to him, both physically, financially and emotionally.
The third act is where our main character gets to be the hero. After all that failing in the second act, he has finally understood the message of the movie, and applies it in a way how he can prevail from his demise. His chances will turn swiftly back into his favor. He will not just win, beat the bad guy and win the girl, more importantly, he will be changed according to the message in our story.
If your main character is not affected by the events in the movie, you're missing something. In the end your main character needs to change. And whatever that change is, is the message you're trying to tell. Characters that don't change are never the main character.
Constructing a story
Now let's say you have a good idea for a movie. You want your to make a zombie movie. But how do you construct a story around that. Well, first of all you need to think of a message you want to send to your audience. Zombies and all are nice, but in the end, your movie needs to have a heart, a message that makes sense to everyone. In the end people are looking for something to connect to, so we're going to give it to them. Let's say we want to talk in our movie about never giving up, no matter how hard. So no matter how difficult things may seem, never give up upon yourself or others. Always keep believing, no matter how hopeless things may seem. Because once you give up, it's easy for other people to win, and you'll certainly loose. If you give up without a fight, that doesn't just mean you give up because you don't think you can do it, but you're surrendering yourself. This is perhaps a message that all filmmakers should keep in mind, while working on their movies, to never give up.
So now that we have this message, we can start working out a story. If our character needs to change following this idea, that means that in the beginning he needs to be the opposite of what we want our character to end like. So in this example, he needs to be someone who gives up easily. That's his major problem, he gives up things way to easy, and it hasn't gotten him anywhere.
So once we set up the character in the first 20 minutes of our movie, our character introduction, we can begin by setting the plot into motion. Now the plot is nothing more than a bunch of obstacles in the story to land us where we want to go. So it's important that we place them very carefully in our story, to send us in the right direction.
Let's say that our main character constantly gives up on things too easy, and he starts loosing things because of it. Still he doesn't do anything. But when we begin with the plot, which are the zombies, things start to change for him. The zombies are threatning the girl he's in love with, but saving her is going to be difficult. And because our character is someone who gives things up too easy, he already begins to back away from it. He runs the entire movie away from the zombies, yet in his heart still wants the girl. He keeps running, and running and running. Untill he's backed up against the wall. Then our character has no choice anymore. Now we're already at the end of our second act. We've taken our character, took everything away from him, and things look very grimm for him. He may even not make it.
But then he finally decides to fight for it. He isn't gonna give up that easy. He fights, and hey(!), he wins! He beats the zombies, and perhaps he could even save the girl. But saving the girl isn't going to be easy. But fighting the zombies has tought our main character something. When he was backed up against the wall, and he was about to die, he decided to change himself. He wasn't going to give up easy anymore. He wasn't going to let the zombies get to him that easy, and he fought. So our character starts to believe that perhaps he could save her, even though things are not looking good. He fights the zombie, saves the girl, and in classic Hollywood fashion, the girl loves him for it and the story ends happy.
Now we've executed a perfectly good story, in where we took our main character with flaws, and in the end changed his flaw into a hero. He's learned that fighting against all odds is worth something. That no matter how grimm things look, there's always a chance. And that every chance is one worth fighting for, now matter how small the chance is. Our character isn't going to give up easy anymore.
I hope these examples make some sense for everyone, and that this helps in constructing a good story. Remember, there are no wrong stories, only stories without a story. Once you get that, you're on the right track. And you'll also notice, that once you've picked a subject for your movie, a message, that you're story is forcing you into one direction. I always like to think, that if you give two different people the same message for in their movie with the same type of movie (zombie movie, or perhaps something else), that in the end you get the exact same story. Perhaps character names are different, and places are different, but the same basic things happen in both movies, despite the fact that they where made by two completely different people.
And now here are the answers to the pop quiz:
1. About sometimes giving up things you really want, to do your obligations 2. About believing in yourself, and not having doubts if you can do things 3. That family and friends are more important than any treasure in the world 4. That making the wrong choices in life, for the right reasons, can be the right choices in the end, and vice versa 5. It's not who we are underneath, it's what we do that defines us (talking is not enough to say you're like this, you actually have to do it as well!) 6. Don't mess with nature, because it could bad! 7. You cannot protect your childeren forever, once you'll have to let them go and trust they'll be allright. 8. Goverments are their for their people, and not the other way around 9. Trust in your own insticts and learn not to be to dependent on technology around you 10. What would you prefer more? A horrible truth, or a fake dream world?
The origins of storytelling
To make a good story for your movie, we first need to understand where stories come from. What are the origins of stories and storytelling? Why do people enjoy stories? Well, first of all of course, because they're entertaining. But that's not how they started. Stories go ages back, to a time long before movies, television, radio, even books. Stories come from a time before the written word. Stortelling has been used for thousands of years, to pass one story on to the next generation. Sometimes the same story, or sometimes a new story with the same basics.
The goal of telling a story was conveying a message to the people the stories where told to. You could of course try to lecture someone, but that would be rather boring. And just telling someone to do, or not to do something, without giving them reason, or any understanding why, would be ineffective. So in order to make people understand why they needed to do something, or not to do someting, they wrapped it around a short story, displaying the reason why to do it or not to do it. For example: I could tell someone not to touch the fire. But not giving them a reason why not to touch it, you can just wait until they're going to try and find out for themselves why they should or should not do it. But if I tell them a story of a little boy who was obsessed with fire, and his parrent always told him not to do it, but he still wanted to do it, and in the end he touched the fire and burned his hand, which now looks like a potato. Now we can understand why we don't want to touch the fire. Or perhaps we could end the story, leaving the people to think what could happen to the boy if he touched the fire, and let the audience think for themselves, and draw their own conclussion, without pressing your opinion or conclussion onto them.
This basic is the basis for every story told in every medium. Whether you're reading a book, listening to a radio play, watching a tv show or movie, or playing a video game. Every story has this basic of sending people a message, or making them think about something. This is the goal of every story, telling your audience something, or asking them a question. It could be personal, general or social critisism, but you have to try and tell something with your story. Without that, you're just telling a story just to talk, without any reason, and you'll notice soon that nobody wants to listen to you anymore.
Sending a message
So now that we know we have to send them a message, how do we do this in a movie. Well, let's look at some examples. Let's take the first Spider-Man movie from 2002 directed by Sam Raimi. The message of the story is obvious: 'With great power, comes great responsibility.' That's the message of the movie.
It's a universal message that works for everyone across the world. Whether you're a garbageman in China, or the president of the USA, we all have to learn, that the more power we have, either physical, political, mental etc. we have to take our responsibilities for them. For instance, if you have a son or a daughter, you have the power over your child, since it's your child. But that also means you have to take care of that child, take your responsibilities and feed it, dress it, nurture it, love it. And the same thing goes for the president of the USA, he has much power, but also has a lot more responsibilities, because he has the responsibilities over everyone in the USA, and that's quite much.
Let's do a pop-quiz. I'll write down here some movie titles, and you have to guess what the message of the movie was. The answers are at the bottom of this blogpost.
1. Spider-Man 2
2. The Matrix
3. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearle
5. Batman Begins
6. Jurassic Park
7. Finding Nemo
8. V for Vendetta
9. Star Wars IV A New Hope
10. Inception
There's no such thing as a bad or good message. Because in the end, the message you're trying to convey in your story is your own personal message, it's your story, and therefore cannot be right or wrong. The only thing you can do wrong is not incorporating a message at all. You can talk about anything you want, as long as you keep the message or question in the movie the basic of your movie. This means that everything in the movie has to be based on sending this message across to your audience. Any scene you write, any character in the movie, has to add something, some importance to message of the story you're trying to tell. Your message in the movie is ultimately connected in some way to the goal of your main character.
And easy way to check if you have any scenes or characters that are not adding something to the story, is to take out the scene or character completely from the story, and see if anything important changes to your story. A good example of trimming out characters or scenes are the Lord of the Rings movies. People who've read the book have noticed a lot of scenes are missing, or sometimes altered, or sometimes even complete characters from the book are missing. This is because the characters and scenes that are missing from the book, in the end, did not add any importance to the story or the goal of the main character.
Character arc
An easy thing to remember, is that the message of your movie is also the question or quest of your main character. Your main character is the one that has to experience this, and find out the message of your movie for himself. This message he has to experience is connected to the goal of the main character.
If we take again the first Spider-Man movie as example, it's the main character, Peter Parker, that has to find out during the story that with more power comes more responsibilities.
This means that at first he has to get more power, than not take responsibility to experience what happens if you don't take the responsibilities, and after that of course to make the right choice, and do take responsibility to show what happens if you do take responsibility.
Now, let's check if this also matched with what happens in the movie Spider-Man. He get's more power (gets superpowers from being bitten by a spider). He doesn't take responsibility (he should've stopped that thief who stole the money with all the power he has, but he didn't). Experience what happes when he doesn't take responsibility (Uncle Ben got killed by the thief that he could've stopped). Make the right choice and do take responsibility (he becomes Spider-Man and saves people on a daily base). Show what happens when you do take responsibiliy (the whole city of New York loves him in the end, and he wins the heart of the girl of his dreams by saving her multiple times).
Always remember that whatever you want to tell to your audience, whether it's not playing with fire, taking your responsibilities or something else, it always happens to the main character. He or she is the one that your audience can identify with, as you tell the story through the eyes of the main character.
Therefore also the story arc is also the main characters 'character arc'. The journey your main character takes is the message of the movie. And once you understand this, you can begin to see how we need to construct a story.
Story arc
In order to build a good story you have to understand the three acts. Every movie, book, theater play etc. consists out of thee acts. The first act consists out of your character introduction (in a movie this takes about the first 20 minutes), followed by the introduction of our plot. The plot is basically what drives the movie, it's our quest, our goal. The plot is what sets our main character into motion, and guides him towards the message of the movie. It doesn't matter how simple or complex the plot is, as long as it gets us where we need to be, namely to get our message across to the audience. The plot will test our main character.
At the end of our first act, our main character will start to slowly slide down a negative spiral, not very deep, just a little bit. This is the point in where our main character hasn't understood or learned the lesson (our message) of the movie yet. To do that, he first needs to change. Untill he changes, things will start to go worse and worse for him.
This brings us to the second act. Some people might describe this as bringing your character to hell. You want to bring your character to the lowest point possible. Everything he tries to do, has to fail, because he hasn't understood the message of the movie yet. The lower you'll get your character, the bigger the uprise will be in the third act, and the bigger the excitement and climax will be at the end of our story. Try to bring your character to the bottom, destroy everything what's important to him, both physically, financially and emotionally.
The third act is where our main character gets to be the hero. After all that failing in the second act, he has finally understood the message of the movie, and applies it in a way how he can prevail from his demise. His chances will turn swiftly back into his favor. He will not just win, beat the bad guy and win the girl, more importantly, he will be changed according to the message in our story.
If your main character is not affected by the events in the movie, you're missing something. In the end your main character needs to change. And whatever that change is, is the message you're trying to tell. Characters that don't change are never the main character.
Constructing a story
Now let's say you have a good idea for a movie. You want your to make a zombie movie. But how do you construct a story around that. Well, first of all you need to think of a message you want to send to your audience. Zombies and all are nice, but in the end, your movie needs to have a heart, a message that makes sense to everyone. In the end people are looking for something to connect to, so we're going to give it to them. Let's say we want to talk in our movie about never giving up, no matter how hard. So no matter how difficult things may seem, never give up upon yourself or others. Always keep believing, no matter how hopeless things may seem. Because once you give up, it's easy for other people to win, and you'll certainly loose. If you give up without a fight, that doesn't just mean you give up because you don't think you can do it, but you're surrendering yourself. This is perhaps a message that all filmmakers should keep in mind, while working on their movies, to never give up.
So now that we have this message, we can start working out a story. If our character needs to change following this idea, that means that in the beginning he needs to be the opposite of what we want our character to end like. So in this example, he needs to be someone who gives up easily. That's his major problem, he gives up things way to easy, and it hasn't gotten him anywhere.
So once we set up the character in the first 20 minutes of our movie, our character introduction, we can begin by setting the plot into motion. Now the plot is nothing more than a bunch of obstacles in the story to land us where we want to go. So it's important that we place them very carefully in our story, to send us in the right direction.
Let's say that our main character constantly gives up on things too easy, and he starts loosing things because of it. Still he doesn't do anything. But when we begin with the plot, which are the zombies, things start to change for him. The zombies are threatning the girl he's in love with, but saving her is going to be difficult. And because our character is someone who gives things up too easy, he already begins to back away from it. He runs the entire movie away from the zombies, yet in his heart still wants the girl. He keeps running, and running and running. Untill he's backed up against the wall. Then our character has no choice anymore. Now we're already at the end of our second act. We've taken our character, took everything away from him, and things look very grimm for him. He may even not make it.
But then he finally decides to fight for it. He isn't gonna give up that easy. He fights, and hey(!), he wins! He beats the zombies, and perhaps he could even save the girl. But saving the girl isn't going to be easy. But fighting the zombies has tought our main character something. When he was backed up against the wall, and he was about to die, he decided to change himself. He wasn't going to give up easy anymore. He wasn't going to let the zombies get to him that easy, and he fought. So our character starts to believe that perhaps he could save her, even though things are not looking good. He fights the zombie, saves the girl, and in classic Hollywood fashion, the girl loves him for it and the story ends happy.
Now we've executed a perfectly good story, in where we took our main character with flaws, and in the end changed his flaw into a hero. He's learned that fighting against all odds is worth something. That no matter how grimm things look, there's always a chance. And that every chance is one worth fighting for, now matter how small the chance is. Our character isn't going to give up easy anymore.
I hope these examples make some sense for everyone, and that this helps in constructing a good story. Remember, there are no wrong stories, only stories without a story. Once you get that, you're on the right track. And you'll also notice, that once you've picked a subject for your movie, a message, that you're story is forcing you into one direction. I always like to think, that if you give two different people the same message for in their movie with the same type of movie (zombie movie, or perhaps something else), that in the end you get the exact same story. Perhaps character names are different, and places are different, but the same basic things happen in both movies, despite the fact that they where made by two completely different people.
And now here are the answers to the pop quiz:
1. About sometimes giving up things you really want, to do your obligations 2. About believing in yourself, and not having doubts if you can do things 3. That family and friends are more important than any treasure in the world 4. That making the wrong choices in life, for the right reasons, can be the right choices in the end, and vice versa 5. It's not who we are underneath, it's what we do that defines us (talking is not enough to say you're like this, you actually have to do it as well!) 6. Don't mess with nature, because it could bad! 7. You cannot protect your childeren forever, once you'll have to let them go and trust they'll be allright. 8. Goverments are their for their people, and not the other way around 9. Trust in your own insticts and learn not to be to dependent on technology around you 10. What would you prefer more? A horrible truth, or a fake dream world?
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