Is a Story a Triangle?

I’ve been told I need to give my blog a personal touch so my blog followers will get to feel they know me. Okay, let’s get that out of the way. I have a cat named Willow. I’ve taught her to run alongside me up two flights of stairs by giving her a snack treat when she gets to the top. This is not a fat cat, friends.

At this blog, however, there's a theme -- I hope it’ll be mostly about creating stories, if not All About the Story.

Early in my writing career, I found myself sitting across the desk from a network executive. This was when it was still acceptable to smoke. So, I’m listening, he’s filling his pipe with Flying Dutchman, and telling me how much he likes the script my writing partner and I had turned in the week before.

“I love the milieu,” he says, “All that rodeo action with the dusty arena, and the Brahma bulls. Dialogue’s great. Might have to clean it up a bit. I love the characters...thinking of Blair Brown for the female lead …but…”

Uh-oh, I thought.

“Somehow the story isn’t quite there. I’m not sure what it is exactly. We’ll have to work on it.”

I confess to you that it would be a long time before I learned how to create a really successful screen story.

Along the way, I became a one-trick pony for a while. I discovered that if I created a triangle of three characters to start with, the script usually turned out okay.

And I clung to that trick like a shipwrecked sailor on a scrap of decking. But all along, I had the guilty feeling that I was faking it. So, finally, I committed myself to discovering secret of creating a really successful story

I started by throwing away everything I’d been taught in school and university. I pretended I’d never heard of anything like inciting incident, rising action, climax, denouement, three-act structure, turning point, catharsis, hero’s journey, etc. etc. All of it -- into the dumpster.

So I thought, if I’m successful when I build my story around three central characters, the key to a successful screen story might be, not in the way the events are created and structured, but in the relationships of the characters. I decided to analyze movies, dig into how the three main characters interacted with each other.

[Next Blog] The Magic of Three