Writing Love: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors II: Story Structure for Pantsers and Plotters (Screenwriting Tricks For Authors (and Screenwriters!) Book 2)

– Leap Year is a romantic comedy, but the structure of the story is a road trip: the action of the story is a journey across Ireland. And if you’re writing a road trip story you can learn a lot from taking a look at road trip stories in all genres: Planes, Trains and Automobiles, It Happened One Night, Thelma and Louise, even Natural Born Killers.

List # 2: The Master List The other list we’ve already talked about: that list of your ten favorite movies and books in the genre that you’re writing, or if you don’t have a premise yet, ten movies and books that you wish you had written.

The writers often just have the characters say flat out what we’re supposed to be afraid of. Spell it out. It works.

The Midpoint is also often called the MOMENT OF COMMITMENT or the POINT OF NO RETURN or NO TURNING BACK: the hero/ine commits irrevocably to the action.

SETUP, big HOPE, FEAR, and STAKES. Eliza is in love with Higgins and he’s just using her for a bet. There’s a huge TEST coming up at this ball, and we saw excitable Eliza fail miserably in her first public test at the Ascot races. There’s a penalty of prison for impersonating a lady, so there are not just the emotional stakes of a possible broken h

The game-changing action of the Midpoint will very often cause the hero/ine to have to recalibrate the PLAN.

And often the hero/ine will LOSE SUPPORT FROM KEY ALLIES when s/he begins to cross the line. ESCALATING ACTIONS/ATTACKS BY ANTAGONIST

You need to create your list, and break those stories down to see why they have such an impact on you — because that's the kind of impact that you want to have on your readers.

In lighter romance, the All Is Lost Scene is very, very often a scene I call THE LOVER MAKES A STAND. In this scene the Lover, the one who loves most deeply, basically says to the Loved One: “I’m not going to take your bullshit any more. Make up your mind. Either commit to me or don’t, but if you don’t, I’m out of here.”

In all of the above scenes, the Lover’s Stand forces the Loved One to step up and commit just as deeply as the Lover is committed. But it seems that very, very, very often, it’s one character, the Lover, who has to force the issue.