I don’t like screenwriting gurus. Because they suck. But I came across something that I find amazingly useful. The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. I’m not going to explain it, except that its a list of beats 15 beats in a movie. Google it.

Okay lets get to this.

Question: Why does this blake snyder beat sheet encourage me, while all other attempts to create a formula piss me off.

Answer: The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet strikes the right balance of specificity.

I’ve read books that talk about formula; on the 3rd page you make a character state the theme – boring generic shit, and it really doesn’t fit because you’re basically just forcing these elements in there. The audience looks at film and goes, yes you included all the right elements, and there is a story happening around them, bravo, bravo! No they look at the screen and go, why are there pieces of shit in my cereal. The moral of the story is, great cereal and great fertilizer do not create great cereal/fertilizer.

On the other hand, I’ve read books that go the other way and talk about arcs and theme. Theories that are so top down and overhead that all the characters look like ants. You can’t see what the hell they’re doing there, but somehow this is supposed to help you divine your story. It doesn’t help.

Both these ends of the spectrum inspire nothing from me.

But for some reason this beat sheet, is inspirational material. I feel like I can take any rough story idea that I want, put it next to this list, and the combination of the new story and the set structure would just spark ideas as if by magic.

This is the first thing I’ve read that made me think that story and structure can be separated. And because they can be separated, you are free. You can take a story, and give it several different structures. Or you can take a structure and apply it to several different stories. All with different awesome outcomes.

But do I think this blake snyder beat sheet is THE WAY to make films? No. But it points at this idea: you can take structure from whatever story you want, and apply it to your story to get a new way of telling a story.
Structure helps you think of where to take the story next. And you need that when working on a feature film. It’s either that or instincts. Relying on your own instincts to write a screenplay isn’t just wishful thinking, its lazy.

Unless it works – and that’s the real test of any theory.