Creating a story out of thin air is never easy. That’s why so many stories wind up feeling incomplete or half-polished. The solution is simple. Always (yes, always) make sure the beginning of your story is the complete opposite from the ending.
By making the beginning the complete opposite of the ending, your hero must change dramatically. The more dramatic the change, the more memorable the story.
In “Little Miss Sunshine”, the hero, a little girl, is stuck with a dysfunctional family that’s tearing itself apart. By the end of the story, the hero has compete in a beauty pageant and brought the whole family together. Because the contract between a dysfunctional family and a loving family is so great, there’s plenty of time for each character to change.
In “Twisters”, the hero is a tornado chaser whose plan to weaken a tornado fails, causing the deaths of several of her friends. By the end of the story, the hero has modified her plan, saved a town from a tornado, and found love at the same time.
In “Top Gun: Maverick”, the hero is a daredevil pilot who keeps antagonizing his superiors with his reckless flying skills. Yet by the end of the story, those flying skills help the hero complete a dangerous mission and repair his relationship with the son of his best friend.
By simply defining the beginning and ending of your story as complete opposites, you create the framework for telling an engaging and compelling story. Study a bad movie and notice how the hero often lacks dramatic change from the beginning of the story to the end. Without dramatic change, there literally is no story.
In “Don’t Worry Darling”, the opening scene shows the hero as a happy housewife at a party. Then the ending scene shows the hero stepping through a portal as she leaves the virtual world of her seemingly happy life behind.
Huh? Notice that the opening and ending scenes don’t match and this alone shows how muddled the entire story is in “Don’t Worry Darling”. When you study movies with flawed story structures, you can see the obvious mistakes they make that could have been avoided by simply making the opening and ending scenes complete opposites of each other.
The ending scene should not only be the complete opposite of the opening scene, but should also answer the initial question posed by the opening scene. In “Groundhog Day”, the hero begins as an arrogant, lonely man, but by the end scene, he’s become a far more caring man who has finally found love. The initial question posed by the opening scene is whether he’ll ever win the heart of his co-worker and by the end, he’s a changed man and has won the heart of his co-worker.
This does not work in “The Maze Runner”, where the opening scene shows the hero entering a maze and the end scene shows the hero leading a bunch of boys out of the maze. However, the opening scene posed the question, “Why are the boys stuck in a maze?” Then the end scene fails to answer this question.
So make sure your opening and ending scenes are the complete opposite of each other, and make sure the end scene answers the initial question posed by the opening scene. When writing your own screenplay, start by outlining how your story begins and how it ends where the beginning and ending are complete opposites. Just this step alone will elevate your story above the mediocrity of the masses.
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