Once Upon a Time

Part of my awakening as a person came as a result of a writing experiment.

Isn't that silly?

Have you ever wondered which story structure holds the best way to tell a story? Well, after a decade of not only attending writing seminars and spending thousands of dollars on classes and books, but also having my students ask me the same question, I decided to find out for myself. So I spent time (and more money) writing a script according to every single structure I could find. I wanted to prove once and for all which one reigned supreme, and which ones existed because someone needed a paycheck.

So I rewrote the same story (and characters) following the one, three, four, and even the fourteen-act structure, as well as popular and more modern ones... like from books with felines on the cover. The result? They all turned out the same way. I had a dozen copies of the same story, down to the paragraph and dialogue! Shocked, I decided to continue the experiment by sending the scripts to contests as well as producers to see what they thought. Again, no difference whatsoever. That's when I decided to get crazy.

I'd never written an hourlong TV pilot before, and to be honest, was always a little intimidated by them. I mean, they had to be a different beast altogether, right? Surely you couldn't just take the first sixty pages of a feature and turn them in as a pilot... right?!? So that's exactly what I did. Here is an official review of the result. [This isn't to badmouth the company in any way, shape, or form. They do amazing work helping new writers get their start in the industry and my career benefited as a result of connecting with them.]

"Masterfully written and focused around an instantly compelling protagonist,

this pilot has enough action, drama, and politics to sustain many seasons of high stakes intrigue.

The visuals are endlessly stunning - a boy chained in a crumbling necropolis,

the armada of Roman ships on the English Channel, the circle of Druids raising the fog,

and only build upon the already addictively compelling show.

With characters you will fight for, story you will beg for and worlds you will fear for,

this pilot exudes enough atmosphere, myth and mysticism to win anyone over."

You see, humans are slaves to semantics, nomenclature, and hypotheticals. We've condemned, scapegoated, and gone to war over them. We assign a label to everything, and then call the people who have invented or memorized said nomenclature "experts." The problem with this type of thinking is that experts don't exist and all nomenclature is fake.

Descriptions aren't explanations, and all labels are disempowering.

There are dozens of bestsellers filled with all kinds of nomenclature promising you the secret to success. But they're all just saying the same thing, and this is true regardless of which sphere of influence or occupation the writer is speaking from. And since we've been programmed with an "us vs them" mentality, we divide ourselves along exoteric demarcated lines and tribes, each swearing that our expert, savior, or guru is the best and most knowledgeable, and completely miss the esoteric truth veiled behind what those wise men and women were saying to begin with.

We mistake the map for the territory.

Story is in your DNA. Studies in epigenetics and phylogenetics show this. This is why a single myth or poem can influence and affect people, regardless of where they're from or what beliefs they adhere to.

Story is your birthright, and it's the writer's job to help us remember.

PS - I will say this... While the structures all produced the same result, the Sequence Approach was by far the easiest to navigate and felt the most natural to write. Do with that information what you will.