ABSTRACT
Structuring the elements of your story and timeline is how the story you wish to tell and create can become a journey, a unique point of view, a specific itinerary and therefore a narrative. But what logic should you follow? A literary one? A dramatic one? A cinematic one? And what exactly is a structure? This chapter explores this in detail.
Most screenwriting books encourage authors to structure their screenplays in three acts. But must screenplays always have three acts? Not at all. Can one reconsider what several people see as the “three-act dictatorship”? Of course! This is what this chapter offers: We propose to revisit the use and origin of three-act structure’s overrated reputation in order to encourage nothing less than the creation and exploration of new types and forms of narrative structures. We will question how an idea can become a story that in turn can become a narrative that greatly exceeds the three-act structure and renews storytelling practices.
We will describe several different ways of structuring a narrative and describe many different types of structures: linear, retrospective, anticipatory, fragmented, in a loop, non-linear, choral, reverse chronology, reflective, the sudden twist, the open structure, etc.
