Four Principles: 2. Structure

Structure is everything.

Mar 11, 2024

I believe in agency. The success, impact and eventual fate of what you make, in terms of how well it reaches people and resonates with them, is way more within your control than you think. Not through gaming distribution systems, tips and tricks for the platform-du-jour, creating ever-more lurid packaging or brain-stem-targeting editing but through connecting more deeply to core principles of how art, entertainment and content WORK. The principles in this short series are four of the most important and fundamental that I’ve encountered.

The Four Principles

Clarity
Structure
Insights
Elevations

Depending on the situation, I could fit any of these into the construction “X is everything”, but between them, if I had to pick one to crowbar into triteness and hyperbole, it would be structure. Structure is everything.

On Structure

Structure isn’t what happens, it’s how what happens happens. Structure isn’t genre or format, but it underpins both. Structure isn’t sequence, but the order in which you put things is pretty important. If a story or show or video or film is a machine for delivering meaning, the structure is the arrangement of cogs and struts, pistons and pulleys that make it go. Structure is all about which pieces do what and how well they do it. Structure alone isn’t why anyone watches, but it makes a viewer’s decision to watch and keep watching much, much easier.

These four principles match up with stages of The Attention Journey - by the time a viewer is interacting with structure, they’re past the attention-grabbing phase, somewhere between initial consideration and a proper appraisal of whether this is worth their time. There’s a moment where they ask “how’s all this going to work?” Structure, like genre, injects a certain predictability into things. It gives the viewer that feeling of safety they need before allowing themselves to be swept along on a journey. Think of it like the safety bars that come down when you get on a rollercoaster - you want it to feel solid, stable, well-crafted. You want to feel like you’re in good hands.

Designing Structure

There is no one ideal approach for designing a structure. Of course there isn’t. Here’s an array of storied screenwriters (compiled by Behind The Curtain) explaining their wildly different relationships with outlining and structuring in the world of feature film - from Alex Garland building everything out, in stages, from the initial structure through Tarantino’s “only as far as the middle” approach to Vince Gilligan’s structural fundamentalism, something you can sense in every compelling beat of Breaking Bad, in the precision with which the writer’s room set everything up to gloriously knock it down. Through all of these perspectives, it should be noted, the importance of structure goes unchallenged.

Consider your concept, whatever it may be. Think about three core aspects of it.

What do you have to do? What are the sine qua nons? What’s essential for it to even make sense? Which parts of it make it do what it’s supposed to?

What do you want to do? What’s important to you creatively? What inspires you about making this particular thing? Which parts of it would you not want to even make it if it didn’t have?
What are the potential audience for this thing going be most receptive to or excited by? What is it about things like this that people most respond to? What is it about this genre or vertical or approach or format that makes people love it?

Lay all those essential pieces out in the simplest possible form - your ingredients, your components, your cogs and pistons. Now consider what a viewer needs to know to understand what’s going on. What’s going to make them care? How will they know, early on, what sort of journey they’re in for? As the Coens pointed out, “if the author doesn't know where the story is going the audience can't possibly know.” How does each piece support the others? How well do they flow together? Often it’s best to make the most efficient, simple, powerful version of a structure at this stage using the fewest elements - create a bold, clear, clean prototype and start stress-testing it against imaginative hypotheticals and eventualities.

A common mistake that otherwise wonderful creative people make is picking a structure off a shelf then spending their valuable energy trying to fill sections of it inauthentically, passionlessly. Early on in the process, possibly even in “ideation”, they recognise that the idea has many of the qualities of a familiar structure and start to let the creative decisions be determined by the well-worn grooves of cliche and habit. New team-members join and, like the Microsoft paperclip of old, say “it seems like you’re making a…” - further dragging the project into comfortable and unpromising homogeneity. It may well be that you want to make a by-the-book trivia show or absolutely bog-standard romcom or a beat-by-beat recreation of a trending challenge video, but the chances are that your structure needs to serve more complex goals. Bespoke structures are invariably stronger, clearer, more meaningful and more rewarding to make.

Misconceptions of Structure

I have no beef with Joseph Campbell. I have no personal animosity towards Robert McKee, Syd Field, Blake Snyder or Christopher Booker. The three act story makes perfect sense. So do the five act story, the seven basic plots and the thousand faces of the hero. Applying different traditional models to your nascent structure can be an amazing and clarifying exercise. Getting intimate with big fundamentals is always a good idea. It does, though, get weird when people begin to see these useful frameworks as immutable laws. I’ve seen charming but misguided experts tie themselves in knots trying to make a YouTube tutorial or interrogative documentary fit to the stages of the hero’s journey. In the world of “optimized content”, there’s an epidemic of forced and broadly ineffective “tension and release”. In fact, outside of the boundaries of the meaning you’re looking to convey, there should be no limits to the number and variation of structures you could create and apply.

Really take a moment to consider successful structures you’ve encountered or enjoyed - there’s deepening rabbit-holes, structures that unfold with surprises, that compare and contrast, go back and forth, structures that use a process of elimination, a straight line to goal or multiple perspectives on a point of focus. There are structures that take the shape of diaries or encyclopedias, spirals or concentric circles, line-ups or parades, that follow a single linear transformation in all its nuance and detail or examine a thousand subjects through the same lens.

The power of a structure is not in how well-worn it is, but how well-defined. How sharp, clean, strong, tight, sturdy, palpable, sensible. How fit for purpose, how distinctly it announces and declares itself. How well each section does what it’s supposed to and thereby supports the sections around it. I’ve struggled to communicate this quality, as you may be able to tell. When I’m describing it to someone in person, I find myself hitting my right fist onto my left palm, urgently trying to get across that sense of structural strength, solidity and reliability.

There is a propensity to sometimes see well-defined structure as indistinguishable from gimmick. From a distance, I admit that it can be hard to tell. It’s only once you get up close and look at how well the conceit fits the meaning and purpose of the piece, how well it delivers on its promise, that you can tell them apart. Gimmicks are bolted on - pointlessly floating on top of generic content, disconnected from the value of the work. A good structure accentuates appeal, ensures effectiveness, keeps you watching, provides propulsion through the narrative and helps you kick back and enjoy the ride.

Screen Theories

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