Dramatic writing is generally considered the most elusive of all the literary disciplines. It’s slippery, it’s unpredictable, and it’s hard to pin down. The ability to utilize structural technique on a partially-formed story is a crucial part of making scripts work because you have to dramatize the story, adapt it for a theatrical presentation, whether that’s film, television, stage, or digital content. So you’re bringing precision tools to bear on a living, evolving, organic story. But how do you actually do that? How do you grab hold of a story and steer it or shape it?
It’s interesting to look at how other disciplines do this. You see it in medicine with high-tech equipment brought to bear on a little-understood new disease. In astrophysics, a theoretician utilizes cutting-edge mathematics as a central component of thinking wildly outside the box to explore new ideas. My grandfather was a chief engineer at Kellogg’s, building factories all over the world. He said one of the first things they had to design was a machine to grab each kernel of corn and extract the germ of oil because it goes rancid and ruins the flavor. Think about how you’d make a machine that can grab a kernel of fresh corn and pluck a tiny globule from its base, and to do it reliably on billions of kernels over decades. No easy task. 
<div id="attachment_31088" style="width: 365px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31088" class=" wp-image-31088" src="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/sten-ritterfeld-yPk-KUY8LtY-unsplash-1024x769.jpg" alt="" width="355" height="267" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/sten-ritterfeld-yPk-KUY8LtY-unsplash-1024x769.jpg 1024w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/sten-ritterfeld-yPk-KUY8LtY-unsplash-150x113.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/sten-ritterfeld-yPk-KUY8LtY-unsplash-250x188.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/sten-ritterfeld-yPk-KUY8LtY-unsplash-768x577.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 355px) 100vw, 355px" />Photo by Sten Ritterfeld</div>
Part of the trick with this process in writing is to precisely define your terms. This gives you a constant in a sea of variables and helps grapple with partially-formed stories, which can be like grabbing smoke in a bucket. Precision use of the tools gives you a set of claws and teeth that help you get an edge. In my apprenticeship program for scriptwriters we constantly build scripts using seven powerful tools, each of which is extremely specific.
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<h3>Dilemma Of Magnitude</h3>
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One tool is to trap our protagonist in a Dilemma of magnitude. A Dilemma forces a choice between two equally unacceptable alternatives which paralyzes our protagonist, who truly can’t choose in either direction. Did you ever have to choose between your spouse and your best friend, so that if you choose one you lose the other? It’s a serious situation and you don’t want to lose either one, but they’re both adamant and demand an answer. There is no right answer. You genuinely cannot pick either way, and you’re stuck. 
Say that we’re developing a script about a reformed safe cracker who has sworn to never do another crime but gets offered a job with a massive payout that would be stolen from his mortal enemy. He’s vowed to his new wife that he will never crack a safe again and he can’t trust those who would be his partners, but this enemy murdered his last wife and got clean away with it. Now our guy has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to strip all his enemy’s wealth, the only way to get back at him. Our protagonist is damned if he does the job and damned if he doesn’t, and he’s truly short circuiting between these two equally painful choices. Because we care about him, it’s compelling to see him torn in this way. We experience his emotions.
The precision involved with this tool is that the two unacceptable choices must be equal. If one way out is easier than the other, then you have a path of least resistance. As you build and amplify the Dilemma while developing the story, you must keep them equally unacceptable so that it remains impossible to choose.
In Training Day, look at how Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) is trapped for most of the movie between his ambition and his moral compass. It’s not until he makes a Decision and Action in the face of Crisis after Alonzo (Denzel Washington) tries to have him executed that he has made a concrete choice that thrusts him into a fight to the finish with Alonzo. 
But not all tools are designed to help you control the material. Often they just help you ride its natural force and steer a bit to maximize the experience. Having boogey boarded 25-foot waves in Hawaii, my tools were a good boogey board and fins. I could swim fast enough with the fins to catch the wave in its sweet spot, and with the board I could cut into the wave to maximize my ride. The tools did not in any way enable me to master or control that 100,000-ton wave, but I could get right in it and work it for an electrifying ride. Isn’t that a lot like how it feels to tap into the driving energy of a truly great story? 
This ability to ride an idea is crucial to working in the creative chaos of starting an idea from scratch. It can be a time of explosive creativity, with cascading arrays of story possibilities, adventurous play, and intuitive exploration. The more powerful your tools and craft as a dramatist, the more fearlessly you can chase your ideas with reckless abandon. You know that no matter where the story takes you, you can probably make it work. You want to be in over your head. If you’re not in trouble as a storyteller, then you’re just playing it safe, making easy choices that the audience has probably already seen. 
Tools can help you stay oriented. When I wiped out on a monster wave and was getting massively whip-sawed and rag-dolled underwater, I was okay when it ended, because even though I had absolutely no idea which way was up, the boogie board strapped to my wrist floated up, pointing the way to air. A simple enough function, but look how crucial a compass can be to a hiker lost in the woods.
<div id="attachment_31089" style="width: 576px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31089" class=" wp-image-31089" src="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/iu-3-4.jpeg" alt="Creative Screenwriting Magazine" width="566" height="375" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/iu-3-4.jpeg 540w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/iu-3-4-150x99.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/iu-3-4-250x166.jpeg 250w" sizes="(max-width: 566px) 100vw, 566px" />Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington) &amp; Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) in Training Day</div>
The tool, the 36 Dramatic Situations, can be extremely helpful when you’re in the furnace of white-hot story creation. The 36 Dramatic Situations are elements that all stories are made of, like Madness, Disaster, Ambition, and Rivalry of Superior and Inferior. It can help identify elements that came with your story’s raw material, and it can help experiment with new story elements that might expand on the story and amplify its raw power. In Training Day, Jake is extremely ambitious — in fact that’s why Alonzo chose him. Jake’s Ambition is very strong, and it cuts both ways; his drive to clean up the streets vs his temptation to cut corners to get ahead. How deep is that Ambition and how strong is it when faced with Alonzo’s Madness and Disaster? An Enemy Loved is central to that story because Jake idolizes Alonzo and Alonzo uses that against him. But Jake also knows more and more that he’s a serious enemy. It amplifies Jake’s Dilemma even more.
Pretend that you’re writing Training Day and look at it through the lens of the situation, Conflict with a God. Who is the god in this arena? Obviously, Alonzo is the local deity, but just how powerful is Jake when push comes to shove? How will Jake resolve his Dilemma between his ambition and his moral compass? Which one will win out? Rivalry of Superior and Inferior is very active in that story, but how far can you take it? In what ways is Alonzo superior and how is Jake superior? Why? What’s the most dynamic way to play out the story? How do you maximize the raw power of the story and the inherent contradictions within Jake? In this way, you are receptive to the great raw material in the story, and you can use the situations to steer it and shape it and dynamite it to amplify its power.
Another way that a tool interacts with the story material has to do with separating the Necessary from the Unnecessary. Scriptwriting is an extremely stripped-down literary format, and anything which does not directly move the action forward just weighs it down and kills it. So by working backward from the ending and chaining back from each Effect to its Cause, you’re able to create tight Cause and Effect. 
At each step you only want to know what caused a given effect, rather than what merely happened before it. In this way A causes B which causes C, and you have tight plotting, an essential part of a script that works. This is an example of a tool really cutting into and shaping the material by stripping away the dead wood and letting its strengths operate unhindered. 
The more precise you can be with the tools and techniques, the more you get a grip on slippery aspects of a story. If you can stop it in its tracks, then you can adjust it and improve your story. Like a bike mechanic truing up a wheel so that it spins without wobbling, you can affect various parts of your story, building up its strengths, flow, coherence, clarity, and intensity, while gradually correcting its weaknesses, flaws, and trouble spots.
The tools create certain distinctions, and you want to utilize those distinctions for mechanical advantage. For instance, here’s the best way to get in touch with the Theme that’s emerging organically from your story. The way in which the protagonist resolves the Dilemma expresses the Theme of the story. That which is organically being said by the story comes through at the point where the protagonist conclusively resolves the central challenge. 
For example, in Tootsie, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) resolves his Dilemma by becoming honest, whole, and solid as he tries to win back Julie (Jessica Lange). This points like a compass at the Theme of Tootsie — that becoming a woman made a man out of Michael Dorsey. The distinction that gives you this clarity is to look at Michael’s Resolution of his Dilemma, and to look at the way in which he resolves it. There you can put your finger on Theme. Even if you’re unable to articulate it then, you know it emotionally, you know it in your gut. Then you can stay focused on that as your understanding gradually gels and then crystallizes.
You use that handle as a powerful tool that affords you a grip on a notoriously slippery object. As each tool gives you a different way to grab the story and shape it, both centrally and subtly, you gradually structure the story to make it work dramatically. No matter how clever a story, if the audience doesn’t like it then you’re dead in the water.  The tools help you make crucial distinctions, which add clarity, insight, and impact as a storyteller. You don’t want to muddy those distinctions every time they become inconvenient because then you lose their power. You need every edge you can get trying to make a living turning stories into actable performances that will grip an audience.

Where Structural Technique and Pure Storytelling Meet

The quest for a great story involves chewing through hundreds of ideas trying to find one with that magic something. And not only do you have to find an idea, but you have to evaluate its power because the ability to tell gold from fool’s gold is crucial to having a sustained screenwriting career.
Wasting time building a script around a weak idea gets you nowhere. But a so-so idea might work if you collide it with another idea. Let’s look at the story creation process of the great writer, Alfred Bester, author of The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man. A blurb on the cover of The Stars My Destination says, “Generally considered by many SF writers to be the single greatest science fiction novel ever written.” His work is explosively creative so it’s fascinating to look into how his mind works. 
<div id="attachment_30609" style="width: 406px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-30609" class=" wp-image-30609" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-1.jpeg" alt="" width="396" height="398" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-1.jpeg 848w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-1-150x151.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-1-250x251.jpeg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-1-768x772.jpeg 768w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-1-50x50.jpeg 50w" sizes="(max-width: 396px) 100vw, 396px" />The Stars My Destination</div>
He discussed an idea about a sophisticated android that goes crazy and kills someone, so its owner has to go on the run and disguise the android’s capabilities so it can keep working to make him a living. But then it kills again, and he has to run even farther and hide its abilities even more as a manhunt heats up. Bester said he wasn’t satisfied with the idea, saying it just didn’t have enough juice to be great, so he put it on the shelf. 
Several years later he stumbled onto information about a psychological delusion in which one person believes themself to be another person. Bester was fascinated with the possibilities and went back to the crazy android story and, in his words, collided the two of them together to see what would happen. And it worked wonderfully. Not only is the android going crazy and killing on a regular basis, but it’s exhibiting a delusional mental illness in which the android thinks it’s its master. It added a dynamic complexity to the story’s chemistry and made it a classic. 
Written in 1954, Fondly Fahrenheit is widely considered one of the best-ever science fiction short stories. Here’s a comment by blogger Eric McMillan, “But the story is narrated by&#8230; well, it&#8217;s hard to tell at any particular point who is narrating, for the killer android&#8217;s playboy owner, James Vandaleur, has been absorbed into the machine&#8217;s personality. Or is it the other way around? Or both? In any case, the first person keeps jumping back and forth between the two, or encompassing the two.” 
So how do you do something like that for your screenplay ideas? It’s partly about collecting ideas and partly about being able to evaluate them with a professional eye. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean, said the single biggest problem they see with scripts that don’t work is that people spend all this time building scripts around weak original ideas. So it’s crucial to be able to judge the quality of your work. Obviously, it’s hard to be completely objective, but there has to be some serious critical facility. You see that in Bester’s appraisal of his original malfunctioning android idea — he knew it was not good enough. As you collect ideas, a healthy percentage of them will be weak or partial ideas. You play with them and explore their possibilities, and take them as far as you can. Sometimes you can collide one with another partial idea to make something great.
Suppose you’ve played with a comedy about stupid bank robbers, but it never really caught fire, so it sits on the shelf. Then later you hatch a time travel plot that’s promising but doesn’t have enough horsepower on its own either. But what if you collide them together like an atom smasher? What if your dumb robbers break into an inventor’s workshop and steal a quantum time teleporter, then use it to pull off the greatest robbery ever? Maybe it’s Dumb and Dumber robbers meets Bill and Ted for the crime of the century.
<div id="attachment_30617" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-30617" class=" wp-image-30617" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/head-shot.jpg" alt="Creative Screenwriting Magazine" width="300" height="449" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/head-shot.jpg 427w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/head-shot-100x150.jpg 100w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/head-shot-200x300.jpg 200w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/head-shot-150x225.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Jeff Kitchen (Photo by Matt Reagan)</div>
You’re playing Mad Scientist with explosive chemicals, trying to concoct something worth writing about. What are the extremes? How stupid can you make this story? How funny? Is there maybe a serious science fiction thriller lurking in there? Maybe playing around with it triggers a cascade of ideas that leads in turn to a fresh new idea that grabs you by the throat and won’t let go. You can go write that and then come back to this wacky comedy idea. 
The main point is to not be afraid to bang some eggs together to make an omelet. Ideas are not sacrosanct. They’re not delicate things that can’t be shaken up. Sometimes you have to go off the deep end to make things work. Maybe you get a parking ticket and come home to write in an irrational rage. Use that foul mood to attack your story and make decisions that seemed hard before, but now you can plow right through them because of your fury. 
Maybe you throw out your third act and explore a wildly fresh way to make your story work. Experiment with bold choices, volatile emotions, and counterintuitive character motivations in order to throw a monkey wrench into something that previously seemed untouchable. It’s easy to make a fresh copy of a story that you can experiment on because the original is saved separately.
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<h3>Go Bold</h3>
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It’s all about Attack as a Storyteller. You’re in the Entertainment Industry and the key word is Outrageousness, so make bold choices, get in trouble, get crazy and outlandish. And that doesn’t just mean to blow up more cop cars or have another billion zombies invade the city. It means to dig deep and take a hard poke at the collective human couch potato, to challenge it to become a wild animal again, even just for a few hours. Maybe you’ll get through to people at a deep enough level to change how they think forever. 
One great tool for this kind of exploration is the <a href="https://creativescreenwriting.com/jeffrey-kitchen-on-screenwriting-part-i/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">36 Dramatic Situations</a>, a collection of storytelling elements like Madness, Disaster, Ambition, Loss of Loved Ones, and Rivalry of Superior and Inferior. They’re generally considered the core components of all stories, similar to the Periodic Table of Elements in chemistry. 
There are two main functions to the 36— identifying the active elements that are already in your story, and playing with possibilities for complicating and amplifying your story. There may be more active elements in your story than you suspected, and identifying them can help maximize its power. Say you know that Ambition is central to your story, but you hadn’t focused on it enough, and now that you drill down into it the ramifications of how deeply ambitious your character really is triggers substantial new story possibilities.
The 36 Dramatic Situations are also great for playing &#8220;What If?&#8221; with your idea. If you’re writing a murder mystery, then What If you threw in Madness? It’s an obvious choice, but let’s play. What If your killer is crazy? How does that manifest? Does it solve story problems for you or create them? How crazy are we talking? Is your killer suicidal? A black-out drunk? Have multiple-personalities? Worse than Hannibal Lecter? Demonic? Or the smoothest-talking friendly person who shows no signs of being a deranged maniac? We’re just playing with possibilities. And What If the detective is crazy? What Of that? 
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<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-30611" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-2-1.jpeg" alt="" width="980" height="250" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-2-1.jpeg 980w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-2-1-150x38.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-2-1-250x64.jpeg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iu-2-1-768x196.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 980px) 100vw, 980px" />
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What if your character is in a Conflict with a God? That doesn’t need to have any religious connotation at all; it can just be a kid vs the playground bully. So is there some great power that your killer is up against? There are many possibilities. Maybe your killer is out to kill a Mafia don on the side, as a personal hobby? A ripple like that can add a layer of the unexpected to a predictable story. What If your killer feels persecuted? What If she knows she’s being used by her new client, and has to pull off the job or her parents will be killed—but she also has to find a clever way to take out her boss? 
What if she’s crazy and feels persecuted? Now we’re colliding Madness and Conflict with a God, and there are all kinds of warped possibilities in there. I’ve taught this tool in my screenwriting courses for many years and it can torpedo any idea into unexpected realms, just to shake things up, to explore raw possibilities, to violate an idea’s predictability. 
It’s a way to collide ideas, to play Mad Scientist, to be a fearless, aggressive storyteller who takes no prisoners. To pour a dangerous catalytic chemical into a story that you know needs something. Take a quick stroll through the list of the 36 Dramatic Situations and see if any of them trigger ideas. One situation, like Slaying a Kinsman Unrecognized might stop you in your tracks and trigger a solution for your third act. It’s all about making fearless choices, refusing to stay on your side of the yellow line, and even violating your own storytelling rut. Start at white heat and build from there, make complex choices, not simple ones. If you’re not in over your head as a writer, then you’re not doing your job right.

Where Structural Technique and Pure Storytelling Meet

Colliding Two Story Ideas Together To Make One Great One

Reverse Cause and Effect

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