In “The Dramatist’s Toolkit,” Jeffrey Sweet discusses different ways to structure a play. One is to structure a play around a character. The character structured play tracks the protagonist as he or she achieves, or fails to achieve, an objective. Another method is to structure a play around an event. In a courtroom drama the event is a trial. The play tracks the course of the trial till its end. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s “Inherit the Wind,” a fictionalized account of the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” is an example of the event structured script. Another example Sweet gives is the disaster movie, tracking the course of a natural disaster and the human response to it. But there are plenty of other examples, both in plays and other media.
What about the slasher movie? The slasher movie tracks the slaughter of camp counselors—all save one, the “survivor girl.” Then there’s the war movie, like “The Longest Day,” that tracks the course of a battle, in this case, the Normandy Invasion. And what about all the movies depicting planetary threats?—from asteroids, nuclear missiles, self-aware machines, Bond villains, space aliens, zombies, etc. They’re also event structured.
But, wait, you may ask, aren’t these movies also character structured? Yeah, in “Friday the 13th Part 2,” we’re rooting for Mark to someday get out that wheelchair, but he gets a machete in the face long before we get too attached to him. “Rocky” is basically character structured. Rocky’s goal is to go the distance with Apollo Creed. But the last act is event structured, tracking the course of the Balboa-Creed fight. Like most movies, “Rocky” is both character and event structured. But the movie ends when the fight ends. And that’s the great thing about the event structured script: You don’t have to rack your brain trying to come up with an ending. The script ends when the event ends.
And that leads me to why I suggest beginning writers start with event structured scripts. I’m not saying they’re easy to write. Nothing is easy to write. But they’re relatively easy to structure. The form, by its very nature, suggests a structure. Take the disaster movie. There’s an inferno in a skyscraper. Various characters mount a response. They either escape or die before the building goes up in flames. Beginning, middle and end. The organizing principle is easy to comprehend, much more so than Syd Field’s three act schema, with plot points on pages 30 and 60.
My advice: Try it. See if it isn’t easier to structure your script around an event. I think you’ll find that it is.
