Story Structure

Showing 671 - 680 of 1516 results

The Main and Secondary Genre

March 26, 2018

Genre defines an audience’s expectations. If you have a horror story, horror fans expect to see people fleeing from a monstrous villain of some kind...

The Ambiguous Ending

March 23, 2018

There are three types of endings. The most common is the happy ending. Far less common is the tragedy which creates a sad ending. Think...

Make Your Setting Stress Your Characters

March 19, 2018

The setting of any scene should never be arbitrary. Every scene setting should be chosen to maximize conflict and stress between the characters involved. Rather...

The Story and the Real Story

March 13, 2018

Every story consists of two stories that correspond to the hero’s physical goal and the hero’s emotional dream. The hero’s physical goal is what the...

Character Arc

March 5, 2018

In every scene, there’s a character arc. That involves three items: Change Goal Conflict Change means that the character’s situation is different at the end...

The Emotional Dream of the Hero

March 3, 2018

Every hero typically has a physical goal and an emotional dream. The physical goal is what the hero wants. The emotional dream is what the...

The Initial Question

February 28, 2018

In the beginning of every story, there’s an initial question defined by the hero’s emotional dream. By the end of the story, this initial question...

Four Ways to End a Story

February 25, 2018

The purpose of the ending is to answer the initial question posed by the beginning. In a typical romance story, the initial question is always,...

When to Use Montages

February 22, 2018

In a previous post (https://15minutemoviemethod.com/to-montage-or-not), I listed reasons why montages may not work. However, that doesn’t mean that montages can’t work. Montages are simply a...

Parallelism in Story Telling

February 19, 2018

If a story keeps introducing new elements, then you risk overwhelming the audience with so much information that doesn’t have any connection or relation earlier...

About Wallace Wang

First place winner in Scriptapalooza’s 2023 screenwriting competition for the supernatural horror screenplay titled “Nightmares From a Past Life”. Author of “The 15 Minute Movie Method”, “Story Starter”, and “Writing Scenes for Screenplays” in addition to over 50 computer books. Writer of “Three of a Kind”, a situation comedy produced by San Diego State University’s film class that won a student Emmy award. Designer of the board game “Orbit War”, published by Steve Jackson Games, that simulates satellite warfare in the near future.