The Visible Structure

The Visible Structure is the structure you see; it is the concrete expression of your story that plays out on the page or on the screen.

You should have noticed something subtle and important in our discussion of the Invisible Structure in chapter three. We began that discussion in the abstract, and then we slowly moved toward the concrete. All seven of the component elements of the Invisible Structure were introduced as almost impressions and feelings—not literal or fully formed things. As we moved through them, however, the words and the metaphors I used to illustrate and express these impressions became more substantive, i.e., concrete. This was no accident. This was not just a learning technique. This was an unavoidable evolution of the discussion, because any story follows this same path in the development process; every story moves from the abstract to the concrete. It moves from your mind as a mental image, impression, and feeling onto the page as characters, scenes, story beats, and plot. The path from the abstract to the concrete is the journey of building your premise and uncovering the structure of your story. Like you, I have no choice but to follow this same path, as I describe the two structures needed to tell any story: the Invisible and Visible Structures. I have shown you the abstract. Now we move to the next step in the journey; we move to the concrete.

Your story cannot stay in your head; it will pester you to get free and find form, but it will do so in its own sweet time. We’ve all had this experience with stories, they will not be forced or cajoled, or born prematurely. When left to their own devices, they come in their time, and sometimes that timing takes years. I have stories in my head that have been there for many years, and when they finally decide to emerge into the light, nothing I can do can stop them from finding their outward appearance. This was the case with a boxing story I’d had for almost nine years. I will never forget the day it decided to be born. A story that had only been accessible to me from forty thousand feet suddenly pulled me down to ground level, and I saw it fully formed and whole. That’s how it felt; my creative mind literally dropped like a stone and I was staring at this thing eye-to-eye, and I could see every blemish, every imperfection, and every character wrinkle. I wrote the first draft in five weeks and it needed very little rewriting. There was no struggle, no bouts of writer’s block, no temptations to get onto social media and distract myself; no, all my usual ploys to avoid writing fell away, and the story just flowed and didn’t stop until it was done. Another writer would have said that the story just wrote itself, because that’s how it feels in these magical moments. But that is not what happened—stories don’t write themselves. I wrote it; but at the time, there was no question in my mind that it and me were working co-creatively together. That story was the best writing partner I’d ever had. I tell you this personal anecdote to illustrate the point. This is what happens when the Invisible Structure wends its way from your subconscious into the conscious mind.

While there is value in allowing the creative process to work its own schedule, most of us do not have the time or the patience to allow our stories to ferment for years like a good wine. We have deadlines, contract obligations, or rent to pay. Fortunately, using your knowledge of the Invisible Structure, the Visible Structure, and the Anatomy of a Premise Line (chapter five) you can “induce labor” safely and facilitate your story’s birth on your calendar.

The Invisible Made Visible

It should come as no surprise that the Invisible and Visible Structures are intimately connected. Each has seven components, each conveys the structure of the story, and each is necessary to tell any story. The seven components of each structure form a one-to-one relationship, as shown in Figure 4.1:

Figure 4.1 Invisible-Visible Structure Connection

Looking at these two structures side by side should give you an intuitive appreciation for how they are connected. Each component of the Invisible Structure has its “mirror” component in the Visible Structure. The moment you feel the need to write, the moment you find yourself trying to give form to that “big ball of information”—that is the Invisible Structure working on you, pestering you to find the physical expression it will finally take. Each and every time this happens, the form it seeks is the Visible Structure.

Knowing what you know about the Invisible Structure, let’s look at the seven corresponding components of the Visible Structure to better understand this fifth foundation stone of the “7-Step Premise Development Process.”

Protagonist

Your general impression of a character being present in your story idea with the Invisible Structure matures into an actual person with this component. The character you sense in the abstract is almost always your main character. It’s possible you might get a sense of another character upon your initial excitement over your idea, but the longer you work with the Invisible Structure, the clearer the protagonist will emerge from that original abstraction. I would never recommend telling anyone to assume anything when it comes to story development, but in this case it’s a safe assumption that your Invisible Structure character is your protagonist. And, as I stressed in our discussion of the character component of the Invisible Structure, this protagonist is human. It is not a setting, or a philosophical idea, or some ethereal theme. Remember, stories are about human beings on a journey, not inanimate objects or ideas on a journey.

Moral Component

Chapter seven is devoted entirely to this important and critical topic, but I will describe it briefly here to put it into context with the Visible Structure. This component corresponds to the constriction of the Invisible Structure. Recall that the constriction is the event or incident that pinches the character to change course, to begin moving toward the adventure that will be your story. It is a constriction because this pinch forces the character to make a choice to move off their current line of action onto a new line of action, moving from pre-story time into story time. In other words, the character had a life before your story opened, then they have their constriction and it forces them, or lures them, to leave their “life before the story” to engage the new adventure. This constricting event should not just be some random incident; it should be connected to this thing called the moral component. The constriction generates an action by the protagonist (they move in the direction of the adventure), propelled by that character’s moral component.

The moral component is made of three parts (moral blind spot, immoral effect, and dynamic moral tension); for now, let’s just deal with one part—the rest will be discussed in chapter seven. The piece that is relevant here is the moral blind spot. The blind spot represents a core belief that the protagonist has about himself or herself, which he or she is blind to, and that is fundamentally a lie. This lie, or self-deception, drives all their significant choices, decisions, and attitudes throughout the story. It’s a blind spot because the protagonist doesn’t see it, but others can.

Take our test character, Joe the bank robber, as an example. Remembering our discussion about Joe from chapter three, he is self-centered and entitled. He steals other people’s money because he feels the world owes him, so he’s unconstrained by conventional notions of right and wrong. Underneath this motivation is a core belief driving his actions: a belief that he is special, better than everyone else. He feels he’s the exception; consequently, he deserves more than an average person. Joe does not see himself as special on the outside, but that’s what he feels in his heart of hearts. This is his blind spot, and it has a moral component because it motivates him to act in the world in such a way as to damage others. He gets hurt too, but as you will learn in chapter seven, “moral” is more about how we hurt others than how we hurt ourselves.

So Joe has a distorted belief about himself that is motivating actions that are harming those around him, and the belief is a lie: he is not special, he is not entitled, and he is not the exception. Therefore, the constricting event that pinches Joe into the action story of robbing banks cannot be some random event. It needs to be related to his moral blind spot. It needs to be dramatically consistent with his overall motivation, otherwise Joe’s launch into the adventure will not be in sync with his true character—his action will feel false, and audiences will spot this falseness immediately. In other words, whatever pinches Joe to move off his “life before the story” narrative and onto the “let’s rob banks” narrative has got to be something that supports and reinforces Joe’s false belief about himself—i.e., his moral blind spot. This is how the abstract constriction of the Invisible Structure grows into the more complex moral component of the Visible Structure. This is incredibly hard to do, and most stories fall short in this regard. Most screenwriters do not take the time, or have the development skills necessary, to craft a constriction that is deeply tied to their protagonist’s core motivation. But when this is done, the ensuing drama can be seamless, leading to breathtaking storytelling.

Chain of Desire

Broad-spectrum desire in the Invisible Structure leads to specific desire in the Visible Structure. In the abstract, you sense that there is human want; you don’t know what, you don’t know how much, you don’t know if it’s vegetable or mineral, but you know that your character wants something. This sense of wanting distills out into a specific form, as something tangible that can be achieved in the Visible Structure. What’s more, the specific desire reveals many of the building-desires that make the overall goal achievable. A “building-desire” is a subordinate goal that relates to the protagonist’s overall desire, and without which the final achievement of the main desire would be impossible to realize. Once again, Joe the bank robber illustrates how this chain gets linked together. After deciding to join Vinnie in his heist, Joe does the following:

• contacts the old gang to act as the getaway crew,
• cases the bank and studies the comings and goings of the staff,
• sets the plan to execute the heist,
• covers his tracks to make sure there is no incriminating evidence in his old apartment.

All of these have a sub-desires associated with them. Joe wanted to get a reliable getaway crew, he wanted to be prepared for the bank logistics, he needed a set plan for the robbery, and he wanted to cover his tracks. Each of these “wants” supports the overall realization of his ultimate goal: to get the money. All of these sub-goals are also sourced from the same place inside himself as his main desire; they all come from his mistaken belief in his specialness. I cannot emphasize how subtle and intricate it is for a screenwriter, or novelist, to link together a chain of tangible desires that builds to an ultimate objective, while maintaining dramatic consistency with the moral blind spot. This is a complex development task, but when accomplished, it assures that the middle of your story will not only hold together with scenes that build one upon another, but the integrity of your protagonist’s inner motivations will remain front and center, influencing even the smallest of dramatic interactions and character moments.

Focal Relationship

You know that your story is about relationships, because stories are conversations and not monologues. You know further, because of the Invisible Structure, that your story’s protagonist will be working in relationship with one or more other characters in the story, and this relationship is central and significant to the telling of the story. The focal character is the personification of that relationship. This character (or characters) focuses the narrative, through the core relationship driving the middle of the story, by acting as a window into the protagonist’s moral blind spot. The focal character reflects back to the protagonist some aspect of their own self that either reveals the light or dark side of their inner moral conflict. We will talk more about “reflection characters” in part three, but understand that the focal character acts as a lens, through which the audience or reader can more clearly see the inner dynamic driving the protagonist forward (or compelling them backward) in their change process. The strongest stories have a single focal character, but it is not uncommon to have two or more, especially in an ensemble story (Crash, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, The Big Chill), where many characters can act as windows into a specific point of view.

Some genres have built-in structures that assure a clear protagonist-focal character relationship: romantic comedies, buddy stories, love stories, parent/child stories, etc. In these cases, the focal character is almost always the other lover in a love story, or the other buddy in a buddy story. The focal relationship is the relationship that you first sense when you are at the Invisible Structure level—unformed and foggy—that then takes on a clearer form when you decide who the players are in that relationship.

The focal relationship is critical for your story, because it is what holds the dramatic center of your story’s middle together. It is this relationship, supported by the chain of desire, that helps you avoid mushy middles and episodic writing. Besides your main character’s personality, the focal relationship is your audience’s other main window into the true-self of the protagonist. Every time you open that window through this key relationship, the audience becomes more invested in the hero or heroine, and their experience of the story deepens. The focal relationship makes the difference between having a formulaic, paint-by-numbers middle, and a complex and rich story experience.

Opposition

The generic sense of pushback and resistance sensed in the Invisible Structure gives rise to a human opposition focused on stopping the protagonist from getting what they want. The opponent structure of a story can get very complex, as there are many kinds of opposition in a story. It is beyond the scope of this book to detail all the various opponents that can populate a story, but there is one kind of opposition structure you absolutely need in order to develop a sound premise line: the central antagonist. This same construct is also required for a great situation, if you forego developing a story.

The central antagonist is the main resistance facing the protagonist in a story. This is the character (preferably a single person, but it doesn’t have to be) that wants to stop the hero-heroine from getting their desire achieved by the end of the story. This opposition is not abstract, i.e., Nature, God, the inner self, Cosmic Consciousness, ego, or some other ethereal notion. Remember, we are trying to move from the abstract to the concrete in order to tell a visual story—not the other way around. Even when there is a lot of subtext and subtle innuendo, the writer still has to show that subtext on the screen in some kind of action or demonstration. Ideally, this antagonist has the same overall desire as the protagonist, but is driven for different reasons. The main antagonist can be a cookie-cutter bad guy who is trying to stop the protagonist from finding the ticking bomb that will blow up Manhattan (The Peacemaker); or it can be the other lover in a love story that is struggling with the protagonist to understand the relationship and the meaning of love (When Harry Met Sally); or it can be the other buddy in an action-adventure shoot’em-up where the protagonist is oil and the other character is water, and they have to learn how to mix if they are to defeat the bigger peril threatening their shaky collaboration (Lethal Weapon).

The central antagonist is the personification of the abstraction that you sense in the Invisible Structure—it gives a face, or multiple faces, to the pushback you know is there, but cannot yet see.

The strongest stories have central antagonists who are familiar with the protagonist. Knowing the hero-heroine personally allows the opposition figure to know what personal buttons to push and what vulnerabilities to exploit as the hero-heroine and the antagonist race to find the bomb, or get the girl/guy, or save/destroy the world. It is in the personal attacks against the protagonist (or in the personal miscommunications) where drama is created and the stakes are raised. The more acquainted the protagonist is with the antagonist, the more opportunities there are for dramatic conflict or comedic moments. These personal attacks aren’t generic insults or challenges; they are always related to the protagonist’s moral component (i.e., blind spot). The central antagonist’s main job is to continually test the protagonist, forcing them to make choices that expose more and more of the big lie they are living, i.e., the core belief about themselves that is actually false. Whether a demonic despot trying to take over the world, or a vengeful girlfriend trying to win back her man, the central antagonist knows the hero’s moral blind spot, sees it, and takes advantage of it to gain leverage in trying to control the protagonist’s fate.

Certainly, you can have a total stranger be the opposition character to the protagonist, but at some point you will have to have that opposition do their research to uncover protagonist weak spots to manipulate during the middle of the story. If you don’t, then how will they stop the protagonist from winning, beyond using formulaic maneuvers, tricks, and traps? If the antagonist doesn’t get under the protagonist’s skin by using personal knowledge against them, then the drama will be shallow, predictable, and boring. Either way, as an intimate or as a stranger, a central antagonist bent on stopping the protagonist from achieving their ultimate desire is essential for any story.

Plot and Momentum

In the Invisible Structure, you sensed the chaos that was present. This sparked images of adventurous moments, or scenes of conflict, or high drama. You got a sense that there was an adventure to be found in this big ball of information that dropped into your awareness. And, there was a sense, vague as it may have been, of direction. Your story idea had a forward motion to it; there was a sense of movement. You may not have seen where it was going, but you “knew” that it was going somewhere; there was more waiting to be revealed. Knowing that plot is character in action, and having a sense of your story’s narrative drive, you knew you had connected to your story’s plot and momentum.

The adventure-chaos of the Invisible Structure gives way to the physical expression of the middle of your story—i.e., how things play out on the page, the nuts and bolts of connecting story beats to scenes, to sequences of scenes, to story milestones, and to a resolution and ending. The plot-momentum component of the Visible Structure relates directly to the “middle problem,” i.e., the problem of what is going to fill up pages twenty through one hundred. This is the wasteland where most scripts (and novels) fall apart: great openings and closings but mushy middles.

Plot-Momentum speaks to a broader consideration of actual planning out scenes, or creating set pieces, or plotting story milestones, and outlining action. These are not premise development issues; these are script development issues. Consequently, from a process perspective, while related and certainly relevant to the overall story premise, the plot-momentum piece of the Visible Structure needs to be open ended and less defined for the writer. This is where you can bring in your pet story system (e.g., Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, or the “Mini-Movie Method” by Chris Soth), or whatever tools you use to build out the middle of your story.

Whatever writing tool or system you use to solve your middle problem, there are at least four milestones every middle should try to hit in order to maintain a good pace and build narrative momentum. Any good writing teacher will mention these milestones, one way or another. They may use different language and terminology, but the same functions will almost certainly be included in any good middle-problem solution.

1. Overall Midpoint Stakes

This is the point in the story, usually around halfway, where the stakes get raised for everyone in the story. For example: Bill and Mary are secret agents chasing a terrorist who is going to blow up the subway station in lower Manhattan. As they close in for the kill, Bill discovers the bomb is actually a dirty bomb, and not just a little pipe bomb, and will take out the whole lower half of the city. So, rather than just a limited disaster in a subway station, the bomb will kill thousands. The stakes are raised for everyone in the story. Raising the overall story stakes lifts the tension, heightens the threat, pushes the narrative into a new level of drama and consequence, and re-engages the audience by giving a new level of mystery, suspense, or danger to look forward to.

2. Protagonist Midpoint Stakes

Ideally, this occurs at the same point in the story as the overall midpoint stakes, but here the stakes get personal for the protagonist. Continuing with our Bill/Mary example: besides realizing the bomb is dirty and all of lower Manhattan is in danger, Bill also discovers that the bomber is his former best friend and ex-partner at the CIA, now turned rogue, and also Mary’s long-lost brother whom she loves, and Bill is going to have to kill him, thus threatening his passionate love affair with Mary. Not only will thousands die, but Bill might have to lose the love of his life. Again, not far from what many (bad) action movies do, but you see the power of coordinating the lifting of these two levels of stakes simultaneously. Bill will get tested, his love will be tested, and he will have to fight the nemesis of his past who is soon going to look him in the eye and do everything he can to push Bill’s buttons and manipulate Bill into making a bad moral choice. None of this would have the dramatic power it does without the stakes rising to a higher level for Bill and the entire city. Most stories lift one or the other stakes and leave it at that. The best stories push the boundaries with both: overall stakes and protagonist stakes.

3. Doom Moment

This is the point in the story, generally between pages eighty and ninety (or in the last quarter of a novel), where it looks like all is lost: the protagonist will not get what they want, they become isolated and alone, find themselves on the run, etc. It appears the main antagonist has won the day. But, this is also the moment where the protagonist regroups and begins their moral revival. From this point to the end of the story they are slowly rewriting that internal belief about themselves; the moral blind spot is becoming visible to the hero-heroine, and they don’t like what they see. They have not completely rewritten the lie, but the change has begun. It is this doom moment that is the critical first step in the protagonist’s coming evolution or de-evolution.

4. Final Resolution

Some call this the dénouement, or climax moment, or resolution, or final battle. Regardless of the terminology, this is the point in the script, usually twenty or fewer pages from the end in a script, and certainly within sixty or fewer pages in a novel, where the protagonist and the central antagonist have it out over the protagonist’s fate. Everything has led them to this confrontation and the protagonist’s character will be tested once and for all: will he-she change, or will they be destroyed? Two things happen during this resolution; one is metaphoric and the other is behavioral. The metaphoric event is that the protagonist achieves their desire; they get what they have wanted throughout the whole story. This is a literal moment in the story where they get the girl, or the money, or save the world, but all of these are metaphors for the behavioral change that happens when the protagonist finally heals their moral component. Often at the end of the story, the protagonist will get what they want but discover they don’t really want it anymore because they’ve changed; instead, they get something they need, something they’ve been blind to throughout the story (hint, hint: moral blind spot).

The protagonist has been slowly changing since the doom moment, but this final showdown with the central antagonist forces them to see the ugly truth about themselves and realize they were wrong all along. They change; they grow; they become their truer self. Or, they go in the opposite direction and become even more entranced in their self-delusion and fear (a la Michael Corleone in The Godfather). There is no rule that says your protagonist has to change for the better. The final resolution can be fireworks, explosions, and worlds colliding, or it can be two people sitting at a bus stop having a quiet conversation. The form of the resolution is a creative writing problem, that it occurs at all is a structure problem, one that every good story needs to address.

Evolution-De-Evolution

This is simply the change that occurs as a result of the crucible the protagonist has been through since page one. Whereas the Invisible Structure gives you the sense that your story will lead to some change, the evolution-de-evolution component of Visible Structure defines exactly what that change will look like. Your protagonist will grow or they won’t. But if they don’t grow, they must disintegrate and get more obsessive, fearful, or controlling (whatever is their personal peccadillo). The reason for this is that nothing stands still in a narrative, characters are either moving forward or backward in their development. Even if a character doesn’t change in a story, that is a metaphor for backward character development, in the same way that not making a choice is a choice.

A subtle but famous example of this is presented in the film My Dinner with Andre (1981), written by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory (each starring as the leads). This is the story of two men: Andre, who embraces life and lives to the fullest; and Wally, who just wants to survive, pay his bills, have his Times delivered to his door each morning, and live with his girlfriend, Debbie. Wally and Andre sit and have dinner, and as Andre extols the virtues of esoteric acting workshops with an eccentric Polish director and being buried alive on Halloween, Wally becomes more and more frustrated with the building tension between the two men. Wally is being asked to look at how robotic his life has become (even though he finds pleasure in “the little things”) and to be more alive. He doesn’t have to go to the extremes of Andre to engage life more, but he needs to be more open to really living. After dinner, Wally takes a cab back to his apartment and muses a bit about the memories filling his head as he drives though familiar streets, and then when he gets home he tells Debbie all about his dinner with Andre.

In this story, Wally is a good example of how a character can choose not to change. In his cab ride home, Wally decides to just tell his girlfriend about his dinner, not to let the dinner change him. His fear of change wins, and this demonstrates how having a protagonist not make a change—i.e., choosing to stand still—is actually a step backward into constricting patterns of old behavior.

The Premise Line Connection

You now know the two structures needed to tell any story: the Invisible and Visible Structures. We began our discussion in this chapter talking about how stories move from the abstract to the concrete, from the imagined to the physical image, from idea to printed word (or moving picture). But the actual dynamic that moves something like a story idea from an abstraction to a realized thing is not readily obvious. In fact, without a serious understanding of story structure most writers can only guess at how they can productively move from an idea to an actual story. Story structure theory is wonderful and intellectually fascinating, but without practical tools to bring the theory into practice, all this is just academic research, not real story development. Fortunately, this book—and everything you have learned to this point—is all about bringing theory out of the ether and down to earth. This is why the next step in this process moves from story theory to storytelling by introducing one of the most important tools any screenwriter can learn: the premise line tool. The premise line is the primary means that every writer can utilize to turn the abstraction of the Invisible Structure into the concrete experience of a physical story recognizable to any human being, anywhere on the planet.