A clear distinction should be made between plot points and scenes. A plot point is the working unit of the plot line: certain things have to take place at specific points in the story if the story is to have a cohesive structure. Each plot point is developed with a scene or scenes that are shaped by the conventions of the genre used. In screenwriting scenes have only two components: statements of action for the actors to follow and dialogue. Novels and short stories have descriptions of the scene and narrative comment in addition to action lines and dialogue.

Basic structure begins with an opening section in which the hero and the main characters are introduced, the tone of the story is set and the specific details of the genre are provided (the old west in Winchester ‘73, the ore mines of Io in Outland, the rainforest of Africa in King Solomon’s Mine, for example). The first act introduces the problem that the hero must solve, provides a catalyst that propels the hero to confront the problem, debates the options open for the characters to deal with the problem and builds to a transition point for the second act. In Lord of the Ring (the film, not the novel), in the first act we meet Gandolf, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin. We learn that a magic ring created by the evil lord Sauron must be destroyed in a molten pool of lava in the heart of Sauron’s kingdom. The difficulty of getting from the Shire to Mordor provides the events that form the complication of the story.

In the second act, we meet all of the other characters with their individual subplots. Gimli has lost one half of his people in a war between the Orcs and dwarves in Moria. Aragorn is a half man, half elf who has abandoned his claim to the throne of Gondor because he has fallen in love with Arwin, an elfin princess who must sacrifice immortality if she marries him. Boromir is a caretaker prince of Gondor worried that he will lose his governance if Aragorn claims the throne. Broadly, act two is the section where the author pushes the plot forward by exploring all of the other stories that populate the world the author has created.

Act Three begins as the problems faced by the hero close in, forcing the hero to confront the ultimate problem presented in Act One. Even in a comedy, the bad guys have to confront the hero. In You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly loses her bookstore to Joe Fox’s mega store, Joe loses his longtime live-in roommate, his father loses his fourth or fifth wife to a lesbian girlfriend as Kathleen breaks up with her boyfriend. It doesn’t sound very funny does it? Read George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words”: it isn’t funny on paper. Indeed, it’s rather grim until the master of comedy takes the stage to deliver it.

Good storytelling relies on the three act structure (or the Blake Snyder beat sheet for screenplays) to deliver the story so that the reader/audience can readily absorb. Indeed, the basic structure of storytelling shouldn’t be varied much, even if one begins in medias res or tells the story using a series of flashbacks (Memento, American Beauty, and Pulp Fiction all follow a traditional structure despite the inflicted time-lines each use). The scenes that give life to the structure of the story have their own structure. In comedy, we complement the “comedic timing” of the performer: he/she is demonstrating an understanding of the structure of the bit (or scene) offered. Jack Benny had the best timing of any comedian. For the younger crowd, Jack portrayed himself as being unbelievably stingy, a trait that he developed in radio during the 30’s and 40’s when unemployment was rampant and money was hard to come by. In one of his classic routines, Jack is held up at gunpoint. “Your wallet or your life!” the robber demands. Jack stares at the audience deadpan which provokes titters at first and crescendos into belly laughs as he remains frozen. The thief, tired of waiting, breaks the spell: “I said, your wallet or your life!!!” Jack just continues to stare at the audience until the audience is in pain from laughing. The robber, in abject frustration, demands, “WELL???” and Jack delivers the punch line, “I’m thinking it over!” The dialogue isn’t that funny; the delivery makes it work; but without understanding the underlying structure of the joke—set up, pause, and punch line—the joke can’t work no matter how it’s delivered. The same is true for writing any scene.

All scenes have a beginning, middle and an end or transition. By understanding what the scene is to accomplish at a particular beat, the writer then develops the action and dialogue that accomplishes the purpose of the scene. The scene will be developed utilizing dialogue that can simply tell the audience what it needs to know, or (better) by showing the audience. In Runaway Bride, Josanna McGibbon and Sara Parriott have the task of introducing Ike, the lead played by Richard Gere. He is a well-known Chicago columnist who writes diatribes against the vagaries of women’s behavior. They could have opened the scene at the bar with the bartender asking Ike about his next column and then commenting that his wife always complains about Ike’s point of view. The screenwriters didn’t because they could show his status effectively by having Ike walk down the street and have a random woman whack him with a newspaper. This shows that Ike is famous and that his writing humorously affects women negatively.

Later in Runaway Bride the beat calls for a transition in which Julia Robert’s character must abandon her frustration with Ike for having called her a man-eater in his column and show that she is falling in love with him. To change the basic tone of the story momentarily, the series of scenes that delivers the beat opens with Maggie helping her drunken father leave the local bar. [Indeed, the scene becomes so muted in tone that that joke imparted by the name of the bar, Inn Hale Tavern, doesn’t work.] Having a drunken father is depicted as a serious problem for Maggie and is not parodied. Walter sleeps it off in his pick-up, allowing Maggie and Ike to go for a drive while he does. The car breaks down. Ike and Maggie cross a cornfield to a farm to get tools. They encounter a low fence they must climb over. As Maggie pauses as she swings her weight over the fence, Ike helps her and the pause shows the audience that they are becoming romantically connected.

Garry Marshall thought that the scene took too long to develop but kept it because he could do a comic bit about snakes in the grass that required Richard Geer to do a bit of shtick, something Gere normally isn’t required to do. While Marshall is right, the scene does take its time, think about what the screenwriters are required to do within the context of the story to make this critical beat work. All romantic comedies are built on the concept that the lovers have a problem with each other before they fall in love. If they didn’t have a problem that keeps them apart, there’d be no story. In order for them to fall in love, they have to have an excuse to be alone. Since the thrust of the relationship prior to the beat (which is usually the transition from Act Two to Act Three) has been comedic animosity, the tone must move from satire/farce/slapstick/jib-and-thrust—pick one—to one of brief seriousness. McGibbon and Parriott uses drunkenness in a side character to do it. Earlier they played the alcohol problem as tipsiness allowing Paul Dooley to deliver some good one-liners. Being tipsy is one thing; being blackout drunk is another, and the writers follow this turn faithfully later in the story by fundamentally changing the relationship between Maggie and her father. Once the purpose of the beat is complete, we can go move on to the next beat.

In the opening of the Third Act, the bad guys move in until nearly everything is lost. In RB, Ike and Maggie confront the reality of their love at the wedding rehearsal, lose their love as Maggie bolts (thus fulfilling the premise of Ike’s original column), and Ike experiences the “dark night of the soul” back in his New York apartment having been humiliated in the manner he once mocked. In the latter scene, he enters his room and turns on his answering machine. In an earlier rendition of this scene, Ike’s tape says something like: this is Ike-leave me a message-if you want to fax me something, buy me a fax. The message is flippant because Ike’s character is charmingly flippant earlier in the film. Here, the message is: this is Ike-leave me a message. The fax machine bit is dropped because the tone of the scene is dark: a man alone with his cat.

The scene is developed by considering these critical elements: what is the scene to accomplish, how does it move the story forward, can the purpose be shown rather than delivered in exposition, which character(s) can be used best to develop the scene, how can the dialogue be shaped with minimal use to effect the scene, and how can the setting (place, time of day, color scheme, time of year, weather, lighting, etc) reinforce the purpose and tone of the scene. All of these elements must be provided by the novelist or short story writer as economically as possible, removing everything that is not necessary. Since the screenwriter provides only the name of the setting, action lines and dialogue, the rest of the elements must be suggested either by the tone of the lines or by the action depicted, counting on the director to fill in the rest. This is why screenwriters like to move into directing, and directors like to write their scripts.