The Invisible Structure
Every story has a structure. Every story must have a structure. If it doesn’t, then it’s not a story—it’s something else.
The Invisible Structure is the structure we can’t see. Okay, “invisible” kind of gave that away. But this is not just a play on words—it is literally true. And it is true because of the nature of the Invisible Structure; it is an intuition, a feeling, a tangible intangibility. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the Invisible Structure feeds the creative process by revealing the embedded structure present in any story as we make choices along the story development path: when one story idea resonates with us more than another idea, and we get that unmistakable feeling that “this is it,” that is the Invisible Structure talking to us. We create with it, and it creates with us. This co-creative relationship is at the heart of the imaginative process and fundamental to all great storytelling.
The Invisible Structure is an archetypal structure, and as such our job as writers is to discover it, not presuppose it or take it for granted. Archetype means “primal stamp,” or “original pattern,” sourced from the original Greek arkhe, “first,” and typos, “model.” What this means is that when something is archetypal, we are working with a pattern of nature that is accessible to all human beings because all human beings use archetypal structures as part of living life. The famous analyst Carl Jung made famous the idea of the collective unconscious, that part of human nature that is shared by all human beings, and through which the Archetypes (Magician, Trickster, Animus, Anima, etc.) are accessible by every man, woman, and child. For example, Christopher Vogler’s story system called the “Hero’s Journey” is based on Jungian archetypes and the research of the celebrated mythologist Joseph Campbell, who described the universal mythic structure of storytelling in his famous work The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The Invisible Structure is another of those archetypal patterns, and as such is available to any story—in fact, it is required for a story to be a story.
“Stories are not about things, stories are things.”1 This quote from Bret Johnston at Harvard University, sums up concisely this idea: that stories are tangible and objective and not whimsical human inventions or flights of fancy. “Stories are things” means that they have substance, form, and structure, and this substance exists not because we give stories those qualities; it exists because stories bring the substance with them as part of their very existence as stories.
When you as a screenwriter have an idea for a new script the following happens: you get the idea, you stop what you’re doing and have an “ah-ha” moment, you begin to get emotionally excited about the idea, you then decide that this is something that you will spend the next 8, 12, 18, or more weeks developing and writing. An idea “drops into you” and you get so excited that you commit to the writing process.
Really—based on what? Because you got excited about an idea? How many ideas do you have in a day, and how many do you get excited about? I would bet more than one. So, something special happened with that one idea that made you decide to commit time, energy, and money toward writing it out as a screenplay. Something separated that idea from the twenty other ideas you had that day, to make its voice heard amongst all the competing voices in your creative subconscious. That “something” was the Invisible Structure. When you have a story, then the Invisible Structure is palpable. We know instinctively when a story is present because over the eons human beings have become “hard wired” to storytelling and this archetypal Invisible Structure.
The Blinding Ball of Information
These are the components of the Invisible Structure:
- Character
- Constriction
- Desire
- Relationship
- Resistance
- Adventure
- Change
These are what “drop” into your conscious awareness when you get inspired to write a new story. The problem is that they don’t present themselves in a nice, neat, and orderly fashion, like the bulleted list above. No, the Invisible Structure drops in as one, big, ball of information. The ball is like a blinding, bright light. You know you have something, but you can’t see the pieces making the whole. This is why the individual components are invisible—you can only see the big picture, not the pieces that make up the picture. What you get is a massive gestalt, i.e., “…a structure, configuration, or pattern…so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.”2 Consequently, each of the seven components is more of an impression, an intuition, not a fully formed thing. This is why it is so challenging to wrap your head around the concept of the Invisible Structure. It is abstract, beyond words, but not unknowable. In this “invisible” state, all seven components work together to create the feeling of a story and the sensation that there is something of substance present. The sensation is literally physical; many writers talk about how they feel it in their bodies when a new idea kicks into their consciousness. The final form of the story may be unknown, but the writer knows they have a story, because all seven of these components make themselves felt. The presence of the Invisible Structure, or its absence, is the reason why some ideas inspire you and others leave you flat.
Every story has a structure, every story must have a structure, and that structure is the Invisible Structure.
The Invisible Structure
Let’s look at each component individually to appreciate the role each plays in creating this “feeling” of a story.
Character
When the Invisible Structure drops in, you get the impression that a human being is at its core: not a sport, not a chocolate cake, but a person. Why do I give such silly examples like a sport? Because this actually happened to me after a talk I gave to a writers group in California. After the talk a man walked up to me and was all excited because he loved the information about premise development and wanted to tell me all about his novel. The main character was golf. When he told me this, I thought for a moment and asked, “So your protagonist is Mr. Golf?” assuming he was talking about a human being. “No,” he replied, “The sport of golf. I am a golf nut and wanted to write a novel about the sport. Golf is the main character.” I told him he could not have a sport as a main character in his story, because inanimate objects are not characters, they are things. The man was not happy and summarily dismissed the entire experience of the evening’s lecture, which just a moment before had him excited and enthused.
The point here is that he did not have a story because the idea that dropped into him did not give him a real sense of a human focus, i.e., a human character. If he proceeded with pages on his “golf” novel, he would quickly land in the story flood plain because there was no substance to his structure.
So, when you get an idea and the Invisible Structure is present, you get a sense of person, or an anthropomorphized representation (Harvey the Rabbit, Jiminy Cricket, etc.) for a human being. You don’t know if it is a man, or a woman, or a child, but you know this impression feels central, essential, and the center of attention of the idea. There is also a sense that this person has a forward or backward motion in the space of the idea. You don’t know what that means yet, but there is a sense of motion and a centrality of this person to the fullness of the idea. If you are thinking that this character is probably your protagonist, you would be correct. But more on this later.
Constriction
Along with a sense of a central person, you get a feeling of constriction. Something breaks the inertia of the idea; something disturbs the peace of the idea. There is a tightness, a pressure that is undefined, you know it’s there and it is not random, it belongs to the character. You don’t know how it belongs, but you know it would not be there unless it was part of this idea. This constriction is impactful to and dependent upon this character. This moment of constriction results in the character moving from one line of action to another. You may not know exactly what happens, but you sense that they will be squeezed or pushed by something off their current line to a new line or action. This is what is meant by the inertia of the idea being broken; the character is moving along some dramatic line and then, as with all objects moving in a line of action, they are acted on by some force and moved to new action. It’s basic physics, and basic story structure.
In theater, this constriction is called the point of attack; in literature and film/TV, it is called the inciting incident. There are also other terms used for the same moment, but the function is the same: the character is forced by events to change dramatic direction.
Let’s use Joe the bank robber as our example. (He will be our test dummy throughout this book to illustrate points.) Joe is happily living his life, poor as a church mouse, but wanting more. His ne’er-do-well cousin Vinnie knocks on his door and says, “Hey, let’s go rob a bank!” Sounds good to Joe, who’s fed up with sitting around watching TV. Joe was following a specific line of action (being poor and watching TV all day), until that fateful knock on the door. Events constrict Joe into making the fateful decision—it is not an expansive moment, it is a constrictive one. If Joe did not answer the door, he would not have become a bank robber. Answering the door marked the beginning of the adventure.
Now, when the constriction drops into you, around your idea, you will not have all this specificity. I’m just using Joe to illustrate structurally what this constriction represents in a story. How it plays out and what it looks like on the page is the creative writing part of your job. But, if you have a story, then this constriction will be there and you will sense it strongly. This constriction is also connected to another key element we will talk about at the end of this part of the book: the moral component, which we will look at in chapter seven.
Desire
Along with a constriction, there is also a sense of want. The character has a desire. It’s not clear what specifically that want may be, but he-she wants something. It is the wanting that you sense here, not the thing they want, just the function of wanting. Wherever you have a human being there will be desire, and you sense that desire in its generality, not in its specifics. I say that you may not know the specifics, but this is not wholly true. Often this is so strong a component in a story that it makes itself known even at this stage. But, it is not necessary at this point to know specifically what the character wants, just that they want something.
This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many scripts and novels I’ve read where the protagonist had no desire whatsoever. They just moved from scene to scene, buffeted by episodic events with no direction and no dramatic compass of any kind. This leads to a specific problem called episodic storytelling, which is a kind of storytelling where scenes or groups of scenes can come off as standalone episodes, almost as little stories within stories with their own beginnings, middles, and ends. Episodic writing can be jolting to viewers or readers, leads to uneven development, and can even alienate audiences. But, here at the Invisible Structure level, the story will give you a sense that there is desire present and it is human desire.
Relationship
Wherever you have a human being you also have relationship, and you sense that here as well. You don’t know the nature of the relationship; all you sense is relatedness. There is a sense of interdependence; the character cannot exist in a void. Stories are not monologues, they are dialogues, even if you can’t tell who is having the conversation. The best stories always involve a protagonist in relation to one or more other characters—they never exist in a vacuum. At this level of the story, you sense your character and you know he or she is going to be in relationship with someone else, or a group of people. You don’t know their names yet, or who they are, or what that relationship is based on, but you know it’s there.
Resistance
More than a constriction, there is also a sense of serious pushback. Something opposes the forward movement of the character, and this force—unknown—creates a sense of friction. You don’t know yet how this will play out in action at the scene level; all you sense is the feeling of opposition. And it will lead to chaos, not order. You know that this is not going to be a neat and tidy affair. You don’t know how messy it will be, or what that will look like in action, but you know bedlam, confusion, and turmoil are on the way. This opposition may have a face, but more likely it will just be a sense of antagonism, and that is enough.
Adventure
Entropy is defined as the tendency of all things to move toward disorder and chaos. Along with resistance, relationship, desire, and constriction, you sense there is disorderliness to it all. Even while the movement of the character may be forward or backward (all characters don’t move forward in their journeys), the tendency is chaotic and unruly. This is the heart of the adventure, you don’t know what that adventure is exactly, but you know it is there and it will be rowdy. This also feels like the middle of your story, not just a moment or a few scenes. This adventure/chaos is going to take some story time.
Change
As in life, there is order in your idea’s chaos. You may not see the endpoint, but you sense this character will not end where he-she began. There is a direction in all the mess and disorder. While the middle may be a blur, there is a sense of beginning and end. If there is such a sense, then there must be something present that allows for these two points. That “something” is the phenomenon of change. You may not have a clue what change is possible, but you have a gut feeling that this idea of yours will not end up in the same emotional space as it began. Change is essential for a story to be a story, and if you have a story, then change will be present—even if all you sense is that it is there in the abstract.
Einstein’s Cows and the Invisible Structure
Sit back and let me tell you some stories.
Albert Einstein had two dreams as a teenager; one was a literal dream and the other was what he called a “thought experiment,” a kind of waking dream. The latter he had in 1896 at the age of 16, where he pondered what it would be like to chase after a beam of light. Already a student working on the problem of special relativity, this “dream” posed some paradoxical issues that disturbed him greatly, with him ultimately admitting 46 years later in his Autobiographical Notes:3
From the very beginning it appeared to me intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest…. One sees in this paradox the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained [author emphasis].
Some years later, still a teenager, he had a literal dream—about cows. He was walking near a meadow and saw a group of cows huddled against an electric fence. Obviously, the current was not on. Down the way, he saw the farmer who also saw the lazy cows leaning against the fence. Being the kind of guy he was, the farmer flipped the switch and electrified the fence. Einstein then saw all the cows jump away at the same time, in unison.
He remarked to the farmer in the dream that his cows were well coordinated to move in such a way. The farmer, still being a jerk, argued back that Einstein was crazy, they didn’t all move together. What the farmer saw was each cow moving one at a time, jumping back from the fence: first one, then two, etc. Einstein argued back and forth with the farmer to no avail. They saw the same event, but saw completely different things.
Einstein awoke from this dream perplexed and confounded. How could he and the farmer have seen the same event so differently? Both the light beam “dream,” and the literal dream about cows, haunted him throughout the nine years he took to construct the famous theory that would rock the world, and that we all recognize as E=mc2.
Another little story: Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz was a remarkable figure in the history of organic chemistry. One night in 1865, he had a dream that helped him discover that the Benzene molecule, unlike other known organic compounds, had a circular structure rather than a linear one, solving a problem that had been confounding other chemists:
I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress…. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed…. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish…long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke…4
The snake seizing its own tail (an archetypal image known as an ouroborus) gave Kekulé the circular structure he needed to solve the Benzene problem!
And one final story (though there are many others):5 Elias Howe, the inventor of the Singer Sewing Machine in 1845, long held the idea of a machine with a needle that could go through a piece of cloth, but he couldn’t imagine how it might work. One night he dreamt he was taken prisoner by a group of natives. They were dancing around him with spears. As he saw them moving, he noticed that their spears all had holes near their tips. When he woke up he realized that the dream had brought the solution to his problem. By locating a hole at the tip of the needle, the thread could be caught after it went through cloth, thus making his machine operable. He changed his design to incorporate the dream idea and found that it worked!
What does any of this have to do with story structure? Everything!
It is not news to anyone who creates that dreams are important for the creative process. There are myriad books, classes, teachers, and gurus who make very nice livings leveraging this basic and well-known truth: dreams are central to creative output. What is not well known, however, is why this is true. And this is what Einstein’s cows, and Kekulé’s ouroborus, and Howe’s spears with the holes at the wrong end all teach us. When we dream the solution to a problem, be it a night dream or a day dream, we are tapping into the Invisible Structure, and it is working with us to create our vision of whatever it is we are trying to create: a new motorcycle, a better toothpaste, a new light bulb—and yes, even a new story. The Invisible Structure is everywhere; it is part of how we create.
To quote Kekulé to his colleagues, “Let us learn to dream!”
Backing Into the Story
These are the seven parts that constitute any story’s structure, and consequently are the building blocks of any story premise, because a story premise is a container for the structure of your story. So, they drop in all at once, blindingly bright, but leave the writer with an unmistakable excitement and sense of hope for a new project. But most writers don’t have the story skills necessary to deconstruct that bright light into its constituent parts to build a coherent premise. Excitement turns to anxiety, and anxiety turns to panic, “What do I do now? I have to do something, or I might lose the moment,” and writers do what writers do: they start writing. And here is where the trouble begins. Rather than sitting with the discomfort of the moment, we try to control it to relieve the anxiety. The only way writers can relieve that kind of anxiety is by writing, so pages commence, or voluminous character studies, backstories, and all manner of index cards on cork boards follow. In time, you will uncover the Invisible Structure components, because if you have a story they will be there (they must be there). But, jumping into writing to relieve anxiety will only lead you into the story flood plains, and most writers will find themselves lost and drowning after weeks of writing. This, in turn, will lead you to the moment when you realize you are lost and that you must backtrack, i.e., back into your story to find where it went off the rails. You will retrace your steps, trying to find where—in the dialogue, or the middle, or perhaps deep in the ending, or maybe all the way back in the opening pages—everything lost its form. You will keep backtracking, looking for breadcrumbs and hints on where to pick up the right storyline once again, but ultimately not finding it. In the end, you will end up back where you started, at the beginning—at the premise idea itself. This process I call backing into the story.
This is the most natural recovery strategy a writer has—and everyone does it—everyone—when they get lost in the story flood plain. If you can’t find the Invisible Structure of your story idea, if you stay blinded by that “big ball of information,” then backing into the story is waiting for you and your script. It is unavoidable, it is inevitable, and it is what happens—every time you get lost—unless you know how to make the invisible visible and the abstract concrete. If, however, you are armed with the most powerful tool available to any writer (the premise line), then you can bridge the crevasse between the right, true, and natural structure of your idea and a tangible story form that you can use to write a screenplay. But, before you can bridge that crevasse, you have to understand what making the “invisible visible” means; what “concrete” refers to. In this context, what we’re talking about is the Visible Structure.