I do a lot of thinking about story structure, and the ways in which these structures can be used to help construct almost all forms of communicative media—not just novels or films, but also things like fundraising letters and interviews. All of these mediated interactions can benefit from reflection on the structures of story.
Here in western storytelling culture, some of the simplest structures arise when we say “a story has a beginning, middle, and end.” In screenwriting, this is also referred to as a three-act structure. In such a structure, each act has a specific role to play in moving the story forward. And the role that Act I plays is to build the world of the story.
This worldbuilding is vital, because (though we often might want it to be) as much as a movie or story might resemble the world that you and I live in, it is not identical to our world. Because of this, worldbuilding has to accomplish two things simultaneously: It has to demonstrate the ways in which the story world resembles the world we know, and it also has to demonstrate those parts of the story world that differ from our world.
Moreover, it has to accomplish this dual action in a relatively short period of time. Of course, films like those in the Star Wars franchise just start out with a long crawl of exposition, which gives viewers the opportunity to ‘catch up’ on whatever has happened right before the film starts.
Most films, however, don’t have the luxury of this sort of exposition. Instead, they have to come up with a couple of scenes that demonstrate the world the characters are living in. These scenes create what we can refer to as the story’s normal. The normal of a given story is all the similarities and differences between the story world and ours, combined with the rules that need to stay consistent and inviolable for those of us in the audience to stay in that willing suspension of disbelief.
Staying with the Star Wars example, we quickly establish that space ships in the Star Wars stories do not act in any way like the space ships in our world. The space ships in Star Wars have natural gravity, and do not have difficulty with reentry through any atmosphere. These may seem like small differences, but that leads to a fully reconfigured set of the laws of physics.
Once such a story world is established, the task of the storyteller is to move the story along into the actual things that we care about: the characters and their conflicts. But underneath this, we have a fundamental responsibility as storytellers to stay consistent with the basic ground rules of the story we have established.
This doesn’t mean you can’t ever have new revelations or surprises as the story unfolds. Quite the opposite. But deft storytelling will often navigate this by hiding the seeds of these twists in plain sight, there in the first moves of worldbuilding. At the early part of his career, M. Night Shaymalan was a master of this technique, giving you clues to the resolution of the plot of the movie right there from the first moments of a film like The Sixth Sense.
As we continue to think about the creative process, we’ll explore the ways that the second and third acts develop these ideas into the structure of a well-made story. For now, it’s enough to have us think about the worlds we build. We owe it to our audiences to think through the strongest aspects of the structure and to make them as sturdy as we can.
That means keeping the world we build as close as we can to the world the audience knows—unless there are parts that need to change to make this new world feel as coherent and real as possible.
As Carl Sandburg used to say, when you build, build strong.
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