Story Structure from Working Professionals

Recently, I finished Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. It’s a book on writing screenplays. I found it similar to Story Engineering by Larry Brooks. Make no mistake, they are different books, but they describe the same thing: fundamental story structure, though using different terms. This story structure has been with us for centuries, and we’re used to seeing it.

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Kill Gilligan! or Why Do Characters Do That?

From 1964 through 1967, Gilligan’s Island was produced and broadcast. I saw the show in syndication when I was a kid.

Virtually every one of the 98 episodes involved the castaways attempting to get rescued with Gilligan screwing it up somehow. The question wasn’t if he’d screw it up but how.

Now, the show was a comedy, a farce really. It was mindless entertainment. It was absurd. Taken for that, the storytelling was fine.

However, if you’re writing this story and not doing it as a comedy, what would the characters really do? At a minimum, they’d tie Gilligan to a palm tree until they were rescued. Perhaps one of them would kill Gilligan. Does that sound harsh? How many attempts would the sanest person see fail because of one man’s idiocy until he helped that man meet with an accident?

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