It's the SPINE, STUPID!

I'm going to share with you a magic key to the craft of screenwriting.

The sad thing is that it should not be considered a "magic key." Or a big secret. It is a concept that has been at the heart of the art of storytelling since the days of the caveman. Yet, in nearly every book on screenwriting I have read, the authors either seem to be completely ignorant of this concept, or they dedicate only a few vague, mumbling paragraphs to it, suggesting that they do not understand it themselves.

It is called THE STORY SPINE

The central importance of the Story Spine to any form of storytelling, and especially screenwriting, cannot be understated. It is what unites every element in a story, what focuses and gives meaning to events, and what creates the forward momentum which advances the story to its conclusion. More importantly, the Story Spine orientates the audience to understand where the story is going, why things are important, and why they should invest their time and emotions into finding the story's outcome.

In my experience as a script analyst, I can honestly say that over 90% of the poorly-written scripts I have read could have been vastly improved if only the writer understood the Story Spine.

Let me repeat that:

Over 90% of the poorly-written scripts out there could be vastly improved if only the writer understood the Story Spine!

So many books on screenwriting spend a bulk of their pages on Three-Act Structure. But, Three-Act Structure is merely a method of organizing plot. It has nothing to do with what a story truly needs to be well told. I have seen several attempts at screenwriting that followed the Three-Act model to a tee, yet were still unbearable to read because the writer did not know how to construct a functional story thanks to the lack of a Story Spine.

A Story Spine marks the difference between a script that contains a STORY, and one that is just a collection of arbitrary events. The Story Spine is what turns events into a STORY. Without a Story Spine, a story does not exist.

Let me repeat that:

Without a Story Spine, a story does not exist.

Let me repeat it again:

WITHOUT A STORY SPINE, A STORY DOES NOT EXIST!!!

Am I making myself clear on how important this concept is?

A complete Story Spine is made up of five equally-important components:

1. The protagonist's main STORY PROBLEM;
2. The protagonist's STORY GOAL that, once achieved, will overcome the problem;
3. The protagonist's PATH OF ACTIONS taken to get to that goal;
4. The MAIN CONFLICT that stands in the way of the protagonist's goal; and
5. The STAKES that constantly push the protagonist forward in order to reach the goal.

All five components must be present for a complete Story Spine. If one part is missing, your Spine is broken, and a real story will not exist. The five parts of the Spine are like the parts of an engine. If you remove one, it stops working altogether. It doesn't matter how strong the other four parts are. They can never overcome the absence of the missing piece.

The Story Spine can be visualized with this diagram:


1. THE STORY PROBLEM

At their heart, stories are all about problems. At the beginning of every well-told story, something disrupts a character's life in such a way that they cannot go on functioning the way they are accustomed until they do something about that problem. Without a Problem, the character has no good reason to do anything. Everything in life would stay the same and there would be no story. It is this Problem, constantly looming over the character's head and threatening to ruin their life that, firstly, motivates a story to begin, and then afterwards provides the force that prompts every narrative action taken from that point onward.

I've read a number of scripts where the writer neglects to give the protagonist a Story Problem. Of all bad scripts, these feel the most pointless and dull. I call them “Zombie Narratives” or “Wandering Protagonist Scripts.” They basically amount to a character wandering arbitrarily from place to place, situation to situation --for no real story reason-- accomplishing nothing of importance because there is no REASON to accomplish anything.

Whether the problem be something big and physical (alien spacecraft attack the Whitehouse), or something small and abstract (a character feels unhappy about life and wants to know why), the Problem must be something that the character believes they MUST do something about, NOW.


2. THE STORY GOAL

Once a character recognizes that there is a problem, and feels compelled to do something about it, they must decide on some sort of end goal that, once achieved, will overcome the problem and make life better again. Everything in the story from that point on will be about the character's attempts to achieve that goal. Whether the goal be some specific action involving a physical journey (“to travel to Mordor and destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mt. Doom”), or something less physical which the character wishes to achieve but may not know how (“to find happiness,” or “to find a place in the world”) the goal must create a question in the audience's mind as to whether or not the character will achieve it and overcome the problem. (We can call this the "Main Dramatic Question," or MDQ.) This question CANNOT be answered until the story's final climax. Once this question is answered -- either by the character achieving the goal or failing irrevocably -- the story is over. A story starts when there is a Problem, and it ends when the character reaches the Goal. These two components comprise the beginning and end points of the Story Spine.

I like to call bad scripts that fail to create a Story Goal “Whiner Narratives.” These scripts involve characters who have a problem, who recognize the significance of this problem, but never take any decisive action to do something ABOUT the problem. Instead they just whine, and complain, and talk endlessly about their troubled lives. This gets tiresome very quickly, and furthermore, the plot never manages to develop or move forward simply because the character never gets out of the first stage of their Story.

3. THE PATH OF ACTION

If the Story Problem is Point A on the left end of the Story Spine, and the Story Goal is Point B on the right, the Path of Action is the line which connects them. Once your character recognizes that there is a problem, and decides on a goal which will hopefully overcome the problem, the character must then proceed to TAKE ACTIONS in pursuit of that goal. A bulk of any given movie's screen time is made up of characters following their Paths of Action (this includes everything that occurs between the plot's inciting incident and the climax).

Success must not be easy for the protagonist. It must be earned. The Path of Action contains all the trials and hurdles the character must fight and overcome in order to get what they want.

The most important thing about the Path of Action is that it NEVER STOPS MOVING FORWARD towards the Story Goal. The Path of Action is a journey to an ultimate destination. Your character must at all times, in every scene, be involved in something somehow related to achieving the story goal. A story is like a shark. If it stops moving, it dies. The moment you pause your story, stop pursuing the Goal, or go off on tangential material unrelated to the spine, the story tension dies and the audience becomes bored or distracted.

This is where most poorly-written scripts falter. It usually happens in one of two ways. The first are “Lazy Narratives.” In a Lazy Narrative, the protagonist has a problem, and a goal, but never bothers to take much strong action towards achieving that goal. They are usually passive characters, reacting to situations thrust upon them rather than taking action to become the story's agent of change. These scripts are often slow-moving and dull, with only a few scenes which advance the plot and develop the situation in a substantial way. The rest of the script is often filled with unimportant material unrelated to the Story Spine.

Other times, writers will included lines of action that skew off the Path of Action -- tangential material that has nothing to do with the Story Goal. Doing so makes the story confused, unfocused. It weakens the Spine and the story experience for the audience. Some writers go so far off the Path that they create a “Fractured Spine.” The story seems to be going in a clear, focused direction, but then suddenly (usually in the Second Act) splits off along a completely different path. The story abandons the Goal established at the story's beginning for an altogether new and unrelated goal. This is the point where these writers lose their audience. The audience has been orientated to understand that the story was about one thing, then suddenly it is changed to be about something else. Keep your story train on its tracks. Once you establish your Path of Action, stay on that path!


4. THE CONFLICT

The character's journey down the Path of Action cannot be easy. What is dramatically intriguing about watching someone complete a task without any problems? Nothing is less exciting than when things go exactly as planned. Let's say I told you this story: “Early this morning I noticed that my dog Rex was missing. I was worried because Rex is very old and could easily get hurt or lost. I had to find him. So I left my house – and there he was sitting on the front step.” Now, you would probably be staring at me with a look on your face that says Why did you just waste my time with that? How was that in any way interesting? This is because the story had no conflict. I achieved my goal with no problem at all.

We should all know by now that CONFLICT is the lifeblood of drama. Drama cannot exist without it. We should have been hit over the head with the concept by now. (If you don't know this yet, PLEASE hit yourself over the head with it so you do know.) NOTHING is less dramatic than watching things go exactly as people want them to.

When protagonists pursue their goals, there must be some force of conflict opposing them. Someone or something must be dead set against your character and his or her efforts. The conflict can't be some pushover, either. The source of conflict must be just as dedicated to blocking the protagonist from his or her goal as the protagonist is to achieving that goal. The main source of conflict may be the cause of the Story Problem, or it may not, but what is required is a force which directly opposes the main character every step of the way along the Path of Action – from the inciting incident to the climax at the end.

In general, a single, strong source of conflict (such as an antagonist character) tends to be far more dramatic than a collection of smaller sources of conflict. (There's an old Hollywood phrase: “One shark is better than ten barracudas.”) But this is all relative to the needs of the particular story. There are types of stories where the protagonist must fight against a situation rather than a person or a thing. For instance, a story about survival in the wilderness will find conflict from various elements of nature: lack of food and water, dangerous animals, weather. Or, a story where the protagonist fights against the unjust or bigoted views of an entire society may find conflict from a variety of sources in a variety of ways. However, even in these situations, building one conflict up to be the most threatening will strengthen the Spine to a more audience-satisfying level.

Believe it or not, I have encountered many scripts where writers fail to included ANY conflict. Their characters breeze through actions with no problems at all, everyone getting along with everyone else just swell. If any script makes the reader want to slam their head into the wall, it is these. It's a boredom akin to watching eight hours of someone else's vacation videos. There is simply no drama. It is simply not a story.

Another frequent problem I see is writers who, instead of creating one strong main conflict to oppose the protagonist from beginning to end, create many small sources of conflict peppered throughout the script. They have chosen to create ten barracudas instead of one great white shark. These conflicts pop up in arbitrary places, fail to do much to advance the story, and then are easily defeated ten pages later to never be seen again. Approaching conflict this way does not develop your story. It makes it episodic. A feeling of dramatic tension never escalates because conflicts are constantly being thrown in and then killed off before they have a chance to develop. You should think of your source of conflict as your protagonist's shadow. It is always there, dogging his/her every move from the very beginning to the very end.

5. THE STAKES

Okay, now your main character has a problem, a goal, and a path to get to that goal. But with the conflict standing in the way, the journey has now become very hard for the main character; dangerous or even life-threatening. What is stopping the protagonist from deciding that the goal is no longer worth the risk and giving up? This question is the reason why a story must have STAKES. “Stakes” are defined as what is to be gained if the protagonist succeeds or lost if the protagonist fails. A good story demands that there be a very important reason for the character to continue his/her pursuit of the goal. There is either something of great value to be won, or dire, unthinkable consequences attached to the protagonist's failure. Often, the best stories contain both.

The stakes must be BIG. As shown in the diagram, the force of the Main Conflict is constantly pushing against the protagonist. The Stakes are the counter-force constantly pushing the protagonist forward in spite of this heavy resistance. Therefore, for a dramatic conflict to be plausible, the force of the Stakes pushing the protagonist forward must be as strong or even stronger than the power of the Conflict opposing the protagonist. No matter how much pain or misery the Conflict throws the protagonist's way, the Stakes must be large enough to keep him/her fighting on.

Great movies have big stakes. We constantly see movies where, if the main character should fail, they will lose their home, the people they love, or very often their lives. Even if the stakes may not seem very big to the outside world, they should still seem hugely important to the character: such as a story of a character fighting for self-respect, or of a young boy dying to kiss his schoolyard crush.

When a script lacks Stakes, character actions seem arbitrary and implausible. A character will seem to foolishly throw themselves into risky and dangerous situations for no good reason. With each escalating action, the script will turn off the audience more and more because they will continue to ask “Why are they doing this? It's not natural. What's in it for them?”

Stakes are also key when it comes to orientating the audience – the way we communicate why story events are important and why the audience should invest their emotional energy into the story's outcome. If, for instance, the audience is watching a scene and knows that the outcome will decide a character's fate, they will be far more emotionally invested in the events than one where they are unaware of any potential consequences. Without a knowledge of what is to be gained or lost, the audience remains emotionally detached. Many times I am reading a script and everything seems okay – the plot is okay, structure and characters are good – but despite all this I find that I don't give a damn about anything that happens. I couldn't care if the characters lived or died. Nine times out of ten, this is because the script's Spine is missing its Stakes.



Now why is this structure called the Spine? Sure, my diagram sort of looks like a spine, but let's look at a spine's biological counterpart to find out why. In vertebrate animals, (mammals, birds, fish, reptiles...) the spine runs the entire length of the animal, from head to tail. The spine is what unites every part of the animal, joins every limb and appendage, connects the brain to every muscle to control movement. It is the body's system of support, its nerve center through which it moves and functions. It allows the cheetah to run, the shark to swim, and the human being to walk upright. Without their spines, these animals could not function – and neither can your script. Without a Story Spine, your script is a dramatic invertebrate. It is a slug, a worm, an unevolved piece of slime existing at the bottom of the dramatic food chain.

Now which would you rather your script to be? A cheetah? Or a slug?

(Next article: The Spine Expansion Pack, Part 1)