A student submitted the following question for discussion to my colleague, Larry Guest, for one of the college classes he teaches. The question was: What is the relationship between character, plot and setting? The student also provided an answer for the question he submitted, suggesting that character determines plot and setting. Larry reminded him that a writer cannot simply dump a character into any setting and expect the plot to develop, and yet, there’s a grain of truth in what the student said. To a great extent, character is the means by which plot develops.

My good friend Joan Newcomb, an avid reader, reviewer—if it’s any good, Joan has read it—is a novelist and author of children’s stories. Joan usually begins a story because of something a character has said or because a character’s personality strikes her as unique and interesting. She simply follows where her character takes her. Joan’s technique works for her, but it is not how most writers structure plot. Indeed, most of us think of a plot line first and then develop characters to fit the story.

Regardless of the inspiration that lead to the primary story concept, the initial step in writing plot is to determine what it is that the protagonist must overcome. The author’s first chore is to think up a single, ultimate event that will allow the hero to either succeed and return to an ordinary world or fail, exiting the stage while the audience writhes in cathartic relief that the poor slob’s agony is finally over. At the end of Hamlet the audience has been imbued with more superlative word-smithing than seems possible; but, truth told, many of us are simply counting the bodies and are happy we got out alive.

Plot demands that we take our leading character and move that individual out of their ordinary experience. We must present the protagonist with another character, a concept, an enemy or a task that propels and bedevils him/her. We must pile the problems on until there is a single event that will make or break our hero. For example, in The Wrestler Randy has to deal with a broken body, a child that refuses to rethink their shattered relationship, and the fact that continuing in the only vocation that he loves will eventually kill him. Randy is a train wreck that manages to keep rolling down the track of self-destruction. The audience is cheated seeing his end, however: instead, his end is suggested as he climbs the ropes one more time to crush his opponent. It is his will to do so that is fascinating, a will that is both admirable and horrifying simultaneously. The plot is developed directly as Randy confronts his flaws, flaws that define him and make him interesting, particularly when one realizes that as brutal as he is as a wrestler, he is essentially a gentle person.

“How does one do this,” you ask. “How does one come up with the great, climatic idea?” I don’t know. It’s the one thing that no teacher, no colleague, no mentor or anyone else can give you. The great idea, the unique entertaining concept, is nearly the only writing skill that cannot be taught. If you have the great idea, all the rest can be supplied. If you don’t, then everything else is virtually worthless.

So, where did the dgm boys come up with their ideas which we, and hopefully the next producer we talk to, deem to be great? Wilson and Mark have always had an interest in the Civil War and post civil war era. They were fascinated with the idea that the only known survivor of the battle at the Little Big Horn Valley was a teen age Crow guide. A Matter of Coincidence came out of a recurring fascination Wilson has with the way groups of people interact in unusual settings, in this case, initially a gay bar where a guy that isn’t gay hangs out. Our director of photography, Jon Neeley, had an idea for a short film about an unusual mugging that eventually sprawled into the script we are currently finishing for production in April or May. Another comedy we’re writing came about because my wife, Jen, said something that was crunched in the air between her mouth and my writing partner Mark Gallistl’s ear. She repeated it, and out came a weird phrase, “three days bad cheese”. I wrote the outline for that one, and off we went after Mark took my initial idea and moved it half way around the world.

Ideas come out of observation. The cliché is: being a good listener is one of the greatest of skills. It isn’t a cliché, and the difficulty with it is that we don’t teach “listening”.

Once the idea is discovered, I’m a firm believer that structure is of paramount importance in developing the idea. If you want to write a screenplay, Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat is the most important guide to use. If a story is told in time orientation, it will begin with the so-called normative state in which nothing odd is happening. Most of the time we condense this in screen writing for an opening image that sets the tone and theme of the story. Knowing in advance what the climax is, complication is formed that presents a series of problems and opportunities for the hero that will lead inevitably to the climax. In Victor Victoria, Victoria Grant is a starving coloratura in Paris who, in stealing a meal at a seedy Montmartre bistro, meets Toddy who suggest the cross-dressing transgendered persona “Victor” who becomes an overnight celebrity, and therein creates the complication since Victor falls in love with King Marchand, a very straight nightclub owner. Here again, Hans Hoemberg who provided the concept and Blake Edwards who wrote the script simply followed the natural progression of problems that such a situation suggests. Plot is developed out of character.

Now, back to the Cat. Pay attention to the three-act concept: the “A” story is simply a statement in action of the basic plot problem that is presented in the first act. Act two takes the characters away from the basic plot in the “B” story that allows the characters to interact, allows the writer to present the back story, and creates a setting for other concepts to be developed that present depth to the main problem presented in the “A” story. The third act brings the conflict closer to the protagonist, entrapping our hero in a quagmire of difficulties that are narrowed to the climax. King Marchand will lose his nightclub to the mob because he is engaged in a homosexual relationship with Victor unless Victoria will come forward and prove that she is, indeed a woman. Using the beat sheet provided by Blake Snyder allows the author to make certain that the underlying structure of the story supports the characters and leads the audience in a satisfying journey through the complication to the climax. Structure isn’t story, but many a good story has been weakened because the author ignored an important structural component.