I've been having some correspondence with a writer who has written a film that has multiple  storylines and multiple protagonists but been told by a number of people who have read the script to pick a hero or heroine and make the film about just that character. I thought readers might be interested in the issue since it’s one that often comes up.
As you’ll all be aware I am a great supporter of films that involve multiple protagonists and multiple storylines. I think scripts are often wrecked because a script that has its interest specifically in being about a group is turned into a story about one of the group - with the other members of the group simply appearing from time to time being, well, colorful.  This is a bit like turning the The Full Monty into a story about one man putting on a striptease show not a group, or perhaps making The Magnificent Seven into The Magnificent One. 

Some stories are about groups, full stop, and they won’t work with a ‘one hero’ structure.

But films that use multiple storylines each with their own protagonist are not always the answer.  Many fine films consist only of one hero on a single linear chronological journey. It depends on the  story you want to tell.  Content dictates structure.  If you do decide to use multiple storylines (and there are many different types of structure that will permit you do that ) you will hit all kinds of challenges. These include the need to have connections between your storylines (or your audience will rightly be asking ‘what is all this about? Why these characters and no others?’) and you will always have a battle to create and maintain pace, meaning, closure and how and when to jump between stories - simply because all parallel narrative scripts do. It’s the nature of the beast. 

But there are many types of multiple storyline structure
Note that I said there that there are many types of structures that use multiple storylines and multiple protagonists, not just one. For example, Pulp Fiction has multiple storylines and multiple characters but it's structured very differently from The Full Monty or Traffic, both of which also have multiple storylines and protagonists. This is an important point to remember because conventional screenwriting theory lumps together all types of film that don't fit the one-hero-on-a-single-chronological journey. They are clearly not all the same. I stress, the  plotting and character problems in a film like Nashville are completely different from such problems in a film like Pulp Fiction.   In The 21st Century Screenplay I have isolated six categories with many subcategories (for example, there are many different types of flashback).  But meanwhile, hybrids are appearing all the time and we must expect more. Screenwriting structures are diversifying all the time.

Here is what the writer said:

Writer to Linda 

• Any of [the 6 characters in my film script]has a strong enough story to build an entire film around...yet I'm being pushed to 'pick a hero/heroine', which feels wrong & unnatural. I'll stick to my guns, but is there a section in your book that throws light on aforementioned? 
• Each person that's read script identifies with a different character according to (reader's) gender, sexuality, colour, educational/cultural values & personal/sexual prudery = for me this is a positive, it's what I aimed for.

• Ergo it's logically impossible for me to 'please' all readers.

• There isn't ONE main protagonist - each character/character's storyline is strong enough for a film in its own right = for me a positive

Linda's reply
Sticking to your guns...
First of all I’d say don’t  stick to your guns about anything before you’re very sure that the people picking the problems are wrong. Maybe they’re right and you do need a one hero storyline because the story material is really mostly about one character. Alternatively, assuming that what you are intending to transmit does require a group of characters, maybe your readers have picked inadequacies in the way you are creating your group story but are offering the wrong solution.  Very often when people tell a writer to focus on one hero and not the group it’s a case of there being something wrong with the multiple protagonist script but the wrong solution is being offered.   Perhaps your multiple protagonist films is indeed coming over as characters in search of a plot and you need to invent a  plot that unites and explains them.  Maybe there is, generally, insufficient connection between the storylines so that they feel random.  Maybe you are just not getting what’s in your head on to the page. You are certainly not convincing your readers that your film is at present holding together as you feel it is. 
I was given this very good piece of advice many years ago by a very good and very experienced producer: ‘If one reader thinks there’s a problem, it might be just their idiosyncratic view.  If two people have the same problem, sit up and listen. If three readers have the same problem you have some fixing to do’ 
 
'Logically impossible to please all readers?'

The writer says:
Each person that's read script identifies with a different character according to (reader's) gender, sexuality, colour, educational/cultural values & personal/sexual prudery = for me this is a positive, it's what I aimed for. Ergo it's logically impossible for me to 'please' all readers.

I'd say - not necessarily. If the characters are sufficiently connected and all contribute towards an interesting message you may be able to please them all. They are clearly not pleased at the moment, so you have a choice either to  dismiss their opinion and seek another audience or to do something to make them enjoy the script.

Not one main protagonist
The writer adds
There isn't ONE main protagonist - each character/character's storyline is strong enough for a film in its own right = for me a positive.

Fine!  Lots of great films have multiple storylines and multiple protagonists, but there needs to be a connection between them that answers the question: ‘why these six characters and not another six characters?’or your audience will get restless and irritated.  They will be asking (and who can blame them?) 'Why these characters? What’s the connection?  What’s the intention of the film?' 

Is the writer confusing multiple protagonist form with tandem narrative structure?
I haven't read the script, but the more I look at the writer's comment  that 'each character/character's storyline is strong enough for a film in its own right'  the more I think the writer might be confusing what I term 'multiple protagonist form' (which is about a group of characters on a joint 'adventure' which is either a quest, a reunion or a siege, social or physical) and another sort of group story which I've termed tandem narrative, which also has multiple storylines, each with its own protagonist, but which is very different and needs handling in a very different way.  What is tandem narrative? I've explained this as 'equally important storylines running together in tandem in the same time frame on the same theme'. It's the form of films like Traffic or Nashville, where characters have separate storylines – rather than being involved together in a joint quest, siege or reunion. Tandem films follow individual characters off on their own journeys.  Sometimes these characters don't even know each other.
From the sound of things I think the script is a tandem narrative. But I think the writer might be trying to think of this according to the guidelines I've set out for multiple protagonist form, which don't apply. I'll discuss this further later. First let's look at the issue of connection in these films.

Connection in Multiple Storyline films,

Whether you're using tandem narrative or multiple protagonist narrative (or any other kind of parallel narrative for that matter) it's not enough simply to have fascinating characters. From the audience’s point of view the issue is not that the characters are each individually fascinating.  It’s why the filmmakers have put these particular characters together in a film. The audience questions are, as I've said : ‘why these characters and no others?’ ‘What is the connection?’  ‘What is the intention behind  the film?’  And crucially: 'Why am I sitting here watching this?’  

If there is no proper connection, people will feel resentful.  For example, many people reject the film Babel out of hand because they felt the Japanese girl’s story was insufficiently connected to the others. No matter that they loved the rest of the film.  Babel by the way is in the form  I've termed a 'fractured tandem' film, that is, it has equally important stories on the same theme but is fractured.

How to make connections in tandem narrative films
Tandem films are normally connected by a theme.  For example, a simple type of connection in  film about six people having very separate adventures would be something like: all six are versions of ‘a bizarre person living in London’ with the theme being: ‘bizarreness in all its forms is difficult to cope with but is something we need in this world’. 

Typically in these films connections are made in some or even all of the following ways.

1. connections through date (e.g. six differently bizarre people are having their separate adventures in London on the same day )
2. through place (e.g. six differently bizarre people are having their separate adventures in the same part of London on the same day)
3. through an object (e.g six differently bizarre people are having their separate adventures in the same part of London on the same day and they all, one after the other, sit in the same seat on the same bus as it travels its designated route up a major road in their area).
4. connections through plotlines – that is, characters might appear in more than one storyline.
5. conections through a 'Macro Plot'.  There is often what I call  a macro plot, that is, an umbrella plot line on the same theme as all of the other stories, but one that links all of the differently bizarre characters together physically AND by theme.  For example  London is blanketed by a terrible fog (symbolic of the confusion and anonymizing aspects of city life which makes us need more bizarreness in our lives),  that is causing pneumonia and traffic accidents to the populace, including the bizarre characters.

The writer concludes
I will however fight with myself to form a character hierarchy & see what that brings forth...
My issue is character democracy 

Let's pause here.  You're not being asked to create a character hierarchy. This comment is another reason that I feel you might be getting confused with multiple protagonist form, in which you have  a range of different version of the same type of protagonist, including what I've called 'the instigator', that is, the protagonists who causes the story.  The instigator in the multiple protagonist film The Full Monty is the Robert Carlyle character, the man who has the idea of the striptease.  I'd say your issue is to explain what is similar about your characters, why they have not been chosen at random.  
Regarding 'character democracy' I think you have to ask yourself here: ‘to what end?’  What is your intention in putting these particular characters into a film together?  Sometimes it helps with this sort of thing to ask yourself what the audience is supposed to be thinking and feeling and discussing when they leave the cinema. Sometimes this can clarify your intentions. 

Or is it consecutive stories form?
There are, as often happens in these parallel narrative forms, different ways to tell our story.  We could, for example, tell the stories of our six differently bizarre characters in yet another way. Let's imagine we use the idea of each of the six using the same bus seat on the same day. You could construct the film by following each of the characters in turn off the bus and into their own story.  Once that story is complete or semi-complete, you could return to the bus with the next bizarre character getting on. You'd then somehow unite the characters at the end.
That structure would be a form I've given the name of 'consecutive stories'.  You can have that in simple or fractured forms. My  hunch is that our writer is thinking of a tandem narrative structure.

But do you need to invent a hybrid?
 More and more I'm being asked to help with complex film scripts that are blending different types of parallel narrative.  You may need to create your own particular hybrid.  How to do this?   I'd suggest you start by looking at what I've isolated, checking my guidelines in The 21st Century Screenplay and seeing how you can merge them, always keeping an eye on pace, connection, meaning and closure.  That is usually a lot of help. After that, unfortunately, you are on your own.  Writing alas isn't easy.  Ever wondered why top writers can command such large sums?  You get the picture.

To sum up... 
In conclusion, for anyone wrestling with this sort of problem, I suggest checking out first the many articles on this site under the tab Practical Writing Advice  then look at my chapters in The 21st Century Screenplay on parallel narrative, particularly the chapters on Tandem Narrative and Multiple Protagonist narrative. These explain what plot and character components work in successful films of each kind.  Also read the section in that book entitled 'Lost in the Telling'.  This includes discussion of Multiple Protagonist and Tandem films that don't work - and crucially, why.Make doubly sure that you have chosen the particular structure that suits  the story you want to tell. 

The AWG NSW Committee invites you to an evening’s interview with internationally acclaimed screenwriting guru, Linda Aronson.

Some years ago, as a professional writer, Linda was exploring how to construct flashback and ensemble films. At the time, none of the screenwriting books explained it, insisting all good stories contained one hero and one chronological storyline. She knew this was wrong because at the time she was creating multiple storyline works for TV.

Since no one was providing answers on nonlinear and ensemble, she had a go herself, and wrote Screenwriting Updated: New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen. The book was an immediate international hit and, along with its much-expanded successor The 21st Century Screenplay, is now used by professionals and leading film schools across the globe. Linda is now bringing her famous two-day seminar on New Structures in Scriptwriting in film and TV to AFTRS.* 

Come and explore why so many professional writers find the conventional Hollywood three act one hero chronological script model insufficient.

“Linda Aronson is one of the great and important voices on screenwriting”
Linda Seger author of Making a Good Script Great

"Anyone who has heard Linda Aronson speak about screenwriting knows that the insight that she can offer YOU, about YOUR screenplay, is extraordinary. I have personally heard all of the so called ‘script gurus’ speak, and I can tell you, if you want advanced professional script insight, Linda is the person for you. This is especially true if your story is struggling to fit into the traditional three act structure, or if you have multiple protagonists. "

Chris Jones, organiser/ Academy Award Nominee London Screenwriters' Festival


When: Thursday 13 February, 6.30 for a 7.00pm start

Where: The Edinburgh South Room, upstairs at The Harlequin, 152-156 Harris St, Pyrmont

Cost: $10 AWG members, $15 guests

Bookings: Please call AWG National Office on 9319 0339 to book
 

The NSW Committee thanks Screen NSW for their outstanding support

* This AFTRS course runs Sat 22 Feb  - Sun 23 Feb. AWG members get a 10% discount on AFTRS courses, quote "AWG" when you call 1300 065 281.

Screen editors are the unsung heroes of the screen world. We writers complain but we get a lot more kudos than screen editors, who are all and have to be, natural storytellers, natural structuralists.  They're frequently being called upon not just to finesse story structure, but to do a massive rescue job.  You could call them the search and rescue specialists of the industry.  
Anyway, I've always felt an affinity with editors and it's often occurred to me that my work on how to structure complex films would be of use to them. I've kept meaning to make contact with their organisations but haven't.  Interestingly, I've recently started to get screen editors contacting me, saying that my work as explained in my books is of a lot of use.  Which is great. 
So now that I'm about to give a couple of 2-day seminars in Australia, I thought I'd get the ball rolling and make a special effort to reach screen editors.  Hence, I'm writing a post here specifically for screen editors in Australia.  This way they'll  get to hear about what I do and, if they think it worth it, they can attend  one of the two Australian seminars, which are hosted by the Australian National Film School in (Sydney 22-23 Feb, Melbourne 1-2 March.   These seminars are entitled 'New Structures in Screenwriting.'
For enrolments and further information

I hope other editors around the world will also find it useful.

My article for the Australian Screen Editors' Guild
My name is Linda Aronson and I am what’s commonly known as a screenwriting guru (horrible term). I teach and consult all over the world and I am about to give two 2-day seminars in Australia hosted by AFTRS for writers, directors and producers in film, TV and documentary (Sydney 22-23 Feb, Melbourne 1-2 March
The topic is New Structures in Screenwriting, that is, how to construct and fix complex story structures, including how to use nonlinear stories to fix problem films and TV works. I’m writing this article for the ASE newsletter because there wasn’t enough time to organize a talk for you and I think screen editors in Australia, like their colleagues in the USA and UK might find my ideas useful.  Thanks for giving me space here. I’m afraid this article can be only an introduction because the material is  complex, indeed, in the seminar I refer to more than 80 films. In Germany my seminars usually run five days, so you can see we cover a lot and keep a cracking pace.
Complex story structures
What I mean by complex story structures are films, TV,  documentaries and cross-media projects that involve elements like flashbacks, multiple storylines, fractured storylines (along the lines of Pulp Fiction or 21 Grams or Amores Perros), and ensembles of various kinds. I refer to this sort of thing by the umbrella term: ‘parallel narrative’. 
While parallel narrative is everywhere these days in film and TV, surprisingly (and I continue to find it surprising) I’m the only ‘guru’ to properly isolate and provide any practical assistance on constructing these parallel narrative forms. The prevailing wisdom is that the only type of structure is ‘one hero on a single linear chronological journey’.  I think the one-hero-three-act chronological model is excellent for some stories, and forms the basis of the parallel narrative forms, but it’s clearly not the only structure. I think there are at present six main families of parallel narrative, all with subcategories, meanwhile, hybrids are occurring all the time.  For example, an interesting hybrid is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which employs two different types of parallel narrative. It has a flashback story about the lovers Joel and Clementine which spans the past and enters the present, and another story, a group story in the present that runs alongside the flashback story, about the people in Lacuna company.
In my seminars I explain each type of parallel narrative works to clear patterns based on multiplying, and/or fracturing and truncating the chronological three act structure in very specific and predictable ways.  The patterns are so clear and so common in films from all cultures that we can use the patterns as templates. Why am I so sure?  Well, quite simply, the patterns and rules are present when the films work. They’re not present when the films don’t work. Want to create a structure like Eternal Sunshine?  I think I can show you how. 
  If you want greater detail,  my book The 21st Century Screenplay goes into all of this in a very detailed way. My books are required reading at NYU, Berkeley and many leading film schools around the world, with Polish and Czech translations in the pipeline, so people get something out of them. You can also check out some videos and get further written information in the section on practical writing advice  You can also sign up for my newsletter in which I write more on parallel narrative (and yes, I really should get a life, shouldn't I).   Meanwhile, here is a quick tour of my theories.

Understanding parallel narrative
If screenwriting experts talk about flashbacks and Pulp Fiction structures and multiple storylines and the other contents of parallel narrative at all, you’ll normally find they discuss them merely as ingredients that can be added as optional extras to the three act linear structure. Not so.
The key to understanding how to work with parallel narrative is a) that each family is a structure in its own right, with specific rules and patterns, and b) content dictates which structure you use. 
Everything depends what story you want to tell.  It’s entirely valid to tell the story of a group, not just an individual. It’s clear that flashback films from Citizen Kane to Blue Jasmine are fascinating and benefit greatly from actually depicting on screen stories from the past, not just talking about the past in the present (as you would need to do were you to use the conventional one hero, one time frame model).  Similarly we enjoy fractured multiple storyline films like Pulp Fiction and 21 Grams that make their point through several stories, not just one.
Here is a quick summary of the six main types of parallel narrative, each of which has several sub categories, along with a quick look at how you structure them and what problems you’ll face as you begin to structure them yourself.  The names may sound clumsy but I have deliberately invented them so that they actually describe the shape of the structure, thereby being a reminder of what the structure actually is and does.

Different families of parallel narrative
1.    Tandem Narrative. Films in this form have equally-weighted stories on the same theme running simultaneously (e.g. City of Hope, Caramel, Lantana, Traffic – practically everything of Altman’s)
2.    Multiple protagonist films (e.g. American Beauty, Little Miss Sunshine, Saving Private Ryan, Galaxy Quest, Tea with Mussolini, Ordinary People, The Full Monty, All About my Mother etc.). Multiple protagonist films work by being either missions, reunions or physical or emotional sieges (you may have to invent and insert one of these)
3.    Double Journeys These are films like The Departed, Brokeback Mountain, Finding Nemo, and The Lives of Others, in which there are two equally important protagonists who are journeying either towards, apart or in parallel with each other physically, emotionally or both.
4.     Flashback. There are six subcategories of flashback some very simple, others very complex each serving a different story purpose. Sometimes films will have several kinds. I explain many flashback films across all categories, including Blue Jasmine, Usual Suspects, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane, The Life of David Gale, Shine, Remains of the Day, Slumdog Millionaire, Great Gatsby, Shine, Remains of the Day, Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi, Benjamin Button, Catch-22 etc.
5.    Consecutive Stories (I used to call this family 'Sequential Narrative') This means equally-weighted, self-contained stories following one after the other joined together in some way at the end (e.g. Pulp Fiction, The Circle, The Butterfly Effect, Run Lola Run, Amores Perros, City of God ). These films split into a number of categories with different structural rules.
6.    Fractured Tandem. This is the form of films like 21 Grams, Babel, Three Burials of Melchiades Estrada, The Hours and Crash. It’s like tandem but fractured.  It consists of equally-weighted stories, often in different time frames, fractured and truncated and put together again, usually dealing with catastrophic encounters.

Problems: Pace, Connection, Meaning and Closure
Audiences are brutal if your parallel narrative film is confusing or anticlimactic and you don’t give them a clear reason for watching a parallel narrative structure. Once you start using multiple storylines and fracturing you will be faced with major problems about how to jump stories without losing pace and coherence.  You also need to answer the obvious audience question: ‘why these particular stories, what’s your point?’   In practice it requires you to provide pace, connection, meaning and closure – the latter being, if you like ‘a moral’, even if your ‘moral’ is that there are no answers.  You also have the practical problem of squeezing many stories into 100-120 minutes, not just one main action line and one relationship subplot, so you need to condense and use truncation.

The structural patterns in all parallel narrative achieve pace, connection, meaning and closure by the following methods, which we’ll look at in detail over two days: 
1.    Jumping storylines in specific ways and at specific points (don’t do this and it will cause confusion, loss of pace and anti-climax.
2.    Incorporating a whole range of ingredients that provide the vital connection between stories, including specific types of plot. 
3.    Keeping the stories differentiated to avoid confusion
4.    Truncating storylines and inferring time jumps in a range of ways
  The bottom line is that this stuff is not easy. However it works to patterns that you can use as templates. You do, though, need to be clear on what the templates are, which form suits which content and particularly, what can go wrong.

How editors can use my theories
As editors, you will often be asked to insert flashbacks or consider fracturing. There are ways to make this work well and ways to fall flat on your face, and in some cases you will simply not have the right footage to create a successful model with no way of getting it.  But often you will. Often the difference between success and failure depends on jumping stories at the right point.
 As for non scripted forms, I’m a writer, not an editor, but I would say that there is no reason why, if you have the right footage,  you couldn’t turn the material into a Pulp Fiction style structure, or a flashback structure using the guidelines I’ll show you. I also think you might be interested in my suggestions for using nonlinearity to hold together and insert jeopardy into predictable films and genres. For example, in my seminar I explain how and why in my view, Syriana could have been edited in such a way as to remove a lot of its problems.
As I say, nobody can claim this stuff is easy, but, excitingly,  it is definitely doable. Frankly I don’t think any of us will have a career in ten years time unless we can handle it with some degree of confidence because it is everywhere in film and TV.  Of course, you can do this intuitively, but it’s risky and time consuming. I’d suggest that you check out my ideas and make up your own mind.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this taste of what I do. I’d love to see you at the seminar.  I would love your specialized feedback too, since I’m only a writer, not an editor.  Thanks again for the space to talk to you. The nice photo of Australian editors above comes from the ASE website.

Linda Aronson www.lindaaronson.com
New Structures in Screenwriting.  Sydney 22-23 Feb, Melbourne 1-2 March
Information and Enrolments

I recently wrote the post below entitled Ten Ways the Conventional  Hollywood three act one hero Chronological Structure will let you down.  A filmmaker responded: ‘It worked for William Shakespeare’.  Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I feel this is inaccurate, and since those of who write drama need to take old Bill very seriously indeed, I responded in detail, explaining that Shakespeare used multiple storylines, not just one  and even flashback (in Henry V), his structure being similar to what we see in films like Nashville and Traffic and in many TV series and serials (which I suspect inherited their structure from the stage). I thought you might be interested. And by the way, always  feel free to correct or challenge my ideas. Convince me and I'll change 'em. Here's the post

With respect I believe this to be inaccurate, but I'm happy to be corrected. Shakespeare's plays are all, famously, in five acts, but even if we leave that formality of structure aside, Shakespeare's plays to the best of my knowledge, all have multiple plotlines, not just one hero on a single journey, although each of those multiple storylines is usually, I think,  a three act structure.

Shakespeare's plays utilise a very similar multiple storyline structure to the one used in films like 'Traffic' or 'Nashville' (a structure that I have I have termed 'tandem narrative' meaning 'stories running together') which is a structure involving a number of equally important stories on the same theme. In this, you have multiple storylines linked by: theme; often (but not always) geography; and characters that appear in several different storylines.

A lot of TV drama is structured like this, too, with multiple separate plotlines, hence the irritation of experienced TV writers when they're told linear one hero structure is the only way..
Shakespeare's comedies, like all Elizabethan/Jacobean comedies, famously have three plot lines, not just one, featuring three separate couples with stories on the same theme. Having three couples in a comedy was actually a convention of English comedy writing at the time, there being also a dance featuring all six together at the end of the play.

'Henry V' famously features what I've termed a bookend flashback structure (where a character in the present appears and talks about the past - or is reminded by it - and we flash back ('this wooden 0") . When we're in the past in Henry V, there are several storylines there. The tragedies have several plotlines on the same theme (eg King Lear has the Gloucester/Edgar/Edmund storyline on the same theme as that of Lear, namely 'ungrateful/grateful child' but note that Lear himself appears in it only at the start ).

Also, while it is currently fashionable to assert that all great drama is based on the Aristotelian notion of unities of time and place and single plotline, Shakespeare was famous for not fitting this model. There was a huge debate about this in the eighteenth century, in which Racine I believe and the French neoclassicists rejected Shakespeare as a bad playwright) However, Dr Johnson wrote a famous piece arguing that Shakespeare transcended Aristotle's formulae. So the 'Aristotelian structure is the only one' argument was put to bed two centuries ago. And, of course, French neoclassic drama famously atrophied and died out because it was so rule bound). But that's a whole other issue.

Happy to be corrected if Shakespeare did write any plays that featured solely one hero in one chronological three storyline.

For more information on my theories go first to Practical Writing Advice on my website then read my book The 21st Century Screenplay.  And there are also videos of me, some free, one, a two hour lecture, for purThis nonlinear multiple storyline stuff isn't easy, but it's doable. (and that witty pic of Shakespeare is from the very clever Slatebreakers site)

If you’ve ever wondered why so many experienced film and TV writers have serious doubts about scriptwriting theory it’s because it works on the assumption that all stories are about one dynamic proactive hero on a single chronological journey when they clearly aren’t -and professional writers have personal experience of this. As just one evening’s TV viewing will show you, many films and much TV drama involve multiple protagonists, time jumps, flashbacks, fracturing, multiple storylines and non-linearity.  Here are ten types of film that the conventional model - useful as it is for certain types of story,  doesn’t help you with.
:

1. Films and TV like Rain Man, The Elephant Man and The Shawshank Redemption – in which a normal, but often passive reactive protagonist is troubled by and learns from a much more interesting charismatic dynamic wild card outsider (a ‘mentor antagonist’).
2. Films and TV like The Full Monty or Calendar Girls or Little Miss Sunshine that are about a group of heroes (not just one) all on the same quest or involved in the same siege or having a reunion.  
3. Films and TV like Traffic or Nashville about a group of people all with separate but interconnected stories on the same theme.
4. Films and TV like Brokeback Mountain or The Queen that feature two characters, each a different versions of the same type, each having their own separate story as well as a story in which they appear together.
5. Films and TV like Blue Jasmine or The Story of Pi that need flashbacks jumping back and forth between the past and the present
6. Films and TV like Twelve Monkeys or The End of the Affair that involve a ‘woodshed incident’ in which an incremental flashback gradually reveals and explains a traumatic event
7. Films and TV where we see different perspectives on the same event like Rashomon
8. Films and TV where we see different outcomes from the same event like Atonement
9. Films and TV like Pulp Fiction or The Joy Luck Club or City of God that show a series of separate stories consecutively and often in fractured form, linking them at the end.
10. Films and TV like 21 Grams or The Hours where one event triggers a number of stories, that are fractured and told in a nonlinear way

If you are interested in writing in these forms (and frankly, I don't think you'll have a career in a few years' time if you don't have some idea how to do them, particularly in TV, because they are now so prevalent) I  provide practical guidelines for these forms (and more) as well as in the conventional one-hero model in my book The 21st Century Screenplay.

UPCOMING SEMINARS
(in conjuction with the National Film and TV School of Australia AFTRS )

Sydney: 22-23 February 2014.
Melbourne: 1-2 March 2014
Two-day seminar New Structures for Film and TV (including material  originally created for BBC TV Writers' Festival on how to use nonlinear structures in short and long form TV series)

This seminar on how to construct a wide range of nonlinear and multiple storyline films that don't fit the conventional model is the only one of its kind in the world. It has proved extremely popular internationally particularly with experienced writers, but is suitable for writers of all experience levels, also screen editors, directors and script development executives.
PLease note: numbers are limited.  Full details and bookings via AFTRS

November’s Advanced Screenwriting Newsletter
Hi everyone. This is an extract from my advanced screenwriting newsletter.  You can read the whole article in the November issue , which you can access by going to the subscription form on this page and clicking 'Previous Campaigns'.  If you'd like what you see you can then subscribe to the newsletter by completing the sign-up form.  You'll then join our group of people who are interested in how to plan, write and edit film and TV scripts that don't fit the conventional one-hero-on-a-single three act journey.  You'll also get special subscribers' access to discounts on my webinars, consultancies, videos etc. etc . 

What is Double Narrative Flashback?
First of all, let's just confirm what double narrative flashback actually is.  It’s the kind of flashback structure you see in films like The Great Gatsby, Blue Jasmine, The Usual Suspects, Citizen Kane or Slumdog Millionaire and many more.  I gave it that name to describe its structure.  That way, the name remains a constant reminder of what we have to do to create the structure.The name says exactly what the structure is (hence what you have to do): two narrative lines plus flashback.

You have two storylines, one  in the past (a big one) and one in the present (usually much smaller, sometimes very small indeed) and the action of the film jumps between the two, with the two storylines joining again either three quarters of the way through the film or at its end.

It’s the most difficult kind of flashback, requiring a different kind of mindset and operating to all kinds of rules that just don’t apply in conventional linear narrative.  Hence, it’s no surprise that it often causes trouble, even to the most experienced of writers.

The story in the present is what causes most problems

 Over the years I’ve noticed that it’s the story in the present that causes writers the most problems.

The three main problems are:
1.    The story material isn’t suited to double narrative flashback
2.    There is insufficient or no mystery in the story in the present
3.    The film is opening on the wrong scene in the present for the flashbacks to work

 I think the reason writers have problems with the story in the present is that they aren’t really interested in it.  I can really sympathize.  When you’re writing a double narrative flashback story, what you’re in love with - your reason for writing - is the story in the past. So you don’t really care about the story in the present.  It feels like a necessary evil. You want to rush through it in order to get back to the past.   

However, if you want your story in the past to work properly, the evidence suggests that you must pay a great deal of attention to the story in the present, because if it’s not properly constructed it will drag the script down, even kill it.  Unless your story idea has actually presented itself to you with a strong story in the present, you will need to make a conscious effort to create and fall in love with a story in the present (even if it’s very short indeed).   You won’t regret it. You can do wonderful things with the story in the present and end up with two magnificent stories – look at Blue Jasmine

Problem 1
The story in the present is redundant (in other words, do you need flashback at all?)

 I spend a lot of time suggesting to people with problem double narrative flashback films that their film doesn’t need double narrative flashback at all. Remember, if you use double narrative flashback you have to create a compelling unfolding MYSTERY in the present that you keep returning to, a story that really involves the audience, or they’ll get bored. You have to keep servicing that story, taking its protagonist forward, creating a plotline.  It’s hard enough to create one good story, let alone two that you have to interweave. So think seriously whether you need it. If you don’t need it, the story in the present can become a millstone around your neck,

Possible Fix 1
Is Preview Flashback the answer?

Perhaps you do need a flashback, but it’s another sort of flashback, preview flashback, which I discussed in last month’s newsletter.  Preview flashback is when the film opens on an event a long way into the story (usually the second act turning point) which provides a hook, then jumps back to the start of the story and continues uninterrupted through to its end, repeating the scene we saw at the opening.  It’s really a simple loop, with a scene or segment from the body of film acting as a kind of tantalizing preview.  It turns your film into a detective story of sorts because we want to know what that opening sequence is all about.

There are all kinds of good narrative reasons for using preview flashback.  It can work wonders when properly used. So, if you feel you need flashback, maybe you are feeling a need for preview flashback, not double narrative flashback at all.  The big advantage is that you don’t have to keep returning to the present to service a story that you don’t actually need.

Possible Fix 2
Is your film inherently a straightforward, linear chronological story?

I can explain this better by giving you an example of a film that I think has a redundant story in the present.The film is Paying it Forward. It opens with the story in the present. A young man is upset because his car has been stolen or broken down. A complete stranger gives him the use of his own car. The young man asks the stranger why he is being so generous. The stranger explains that he is repaying a good turn that was done to him by a complete stranger, and this is ‘paying it forward’. Our young man sets out to find the person who

(Continued in the November newsletter. You can read the rest of this article and preview the newsletter to see whether you'd like to sign up by going to the newsletter subscription form on this page. On it you'll see a 'Previous Campaigns' link. Click on that, then, if you think the newsletter is something you'd enjoy, you can subscribe. Just note that as an anti-spam protection for you, you'll be asked to confirm your subscription.)
Best wishes
Linda

Hi Everyone
This is part of the October issue of my new newsletter, which I've entitled Linda Aronson's Craft Skills Newsletter and to which you can subscribe (in the column on the right).  So why the newsletter?  Whereas the blog focuses on all types of script, the newsletter puts a strong focus on how to write and fix  scripts that don't fit the conventional one hero, three act, linear chronological structure.  These types of scripts - scripts that use flashback, multiple protagonists etc - are everywhere out there (The Great Gatsby and Blue Jasmine for example) but people rarely talk about them,  I don't think any writer, new or experienced, can afford not to examine these forms. We all need to get our heads around them.  In this issue I focused particularly on one kind of  flashback structure, one that I've given the name of 'Preview Flashback'.   If you'd like to see the full newsletter and subscribe to future newsletters (which means you'll get more articles along with discounts, the chance to be involved in webinars etc, just join in the form on this page to your right).

Flashbacks are not all the same ...
One of the major problems that people have in creating flashbacks is that flashbacks are generally regarded as being all the same. They're not. Some are actually structures in themselves, some aren't. Flashback is complicated, but doable. I’ve isolated seven kinds of flashback, all of which have a different effect, and luckily they all work to patterns (if you need an introduction to these seven kinds or a reminder,  check out  a quick summary of flashbacks that I've written for you here on my website.  There's a great deal more in my book The 21st Century Screenplay and elsewhere in the blog)

Preview Flashback
This month I'm talking about the type of flashback structure that I've named  'Preview Flashback'. Preview flashback is a pretty simple  kind of flashback, and the name is there to remind you of the mechanics of the form, since, as we writers all know, in the enthusiasm of the story it's easy to get distracted from the technical task at hand. Preview flashback presents the audience with a preview of a scene or sequence from later in the film as a hook. It then flashes back to the start of the story, telling it uninterrupted from start to finish, repeating the preview scene on the way. Goodfellas, for example, uses preview flashback.

You can see that preview flashback is fundamentally different from the kind of complex flashback structure in films like The Usual Suspects or Slumdog Millionaire or Citizen Kane. These films have many flashbacks and two storylines, one in the past and other in the present with the action jumping between the two. In contrast, preview flashback has only one storyline and one flashback. While preview flashback is of itself a simple structure, wrongly done it can be very damaging to your film. This is what the following article is all about.
 
Preview Flashbacks must pay off
After I'd given a talk on nonlinear script structure at the BBC TV Drama Writers' Festival, I got into correspondence with UK film and TV writer Phill Barron about what I'd call Preview Flashback. Phill is a very experienced writer indeed. In his letter, after discussing flashback very thoughtfully, he added a comment which, while it's interesting, I need to challenge. I need to challenge it because Phil is clearly picking an effect that a certain kind of flashback can provide in certain situations - and he's right in that  - but I think he's wrongly attributing the cause of the effect, what it fixes and how you can get it. Since he is a man who knows his structural onions, I feel I need to flag a warning.  Where I disagree with Phill is that he claims that  films which open with what I'd call a preview flashback, do so simply to establish the genre, the only proviso being that the genre scene has to be very different from the initial scene.
 
Personally I think serious attention has to be given to any flashback or flashforward that opens the film, particularly in terms of its content. The wrong content can wreck your film. I think, in short, that flashbacks/flashforwards must  pay off, so I'm using Phill's comments as the starting place for a wider discussion on preview flashback

Phill's Comments on Preview flashback and genre
Phill says this about preview flashback:

It seems to me a lot of films adopt that structure [preview flashback] primarily because they otherwise wouldn’t open with a genre scene. Comedies start with a joke, musicals start with a song, action films start with action ... but sometimes the stories need to start in a different place. If it’s an action film, for example, then the easiest way to get round this is to pinch 3/4 of an action sequence from later on and stick at the beginning.
To my mind, that buys you about 20 – 30 mins of scenes which aren’t action (or whatever the genre is) because you’ve shown the audience it’s coming and hopefully whetted their appetite enough to sit through the essential, often non-genre, character scenes. Although I only think this works if the scene you flashback to is completely opposite from the initial scene and you can’t see how the protagonist goes from A to B. If it’s too similar or you can easily imagine the journey, then it doesn’t work.
Opening with a genre scene and flashing back is frequently done because otherwise the first act of the script is non genre and therefore not what the audience has paid to see.If the following scene is too similar in tone or it’s too obvious how the character will get from there to the opening scene, then it just feels like a gimmick instead of a natural story structure.

I agree that some stories need to start in a different place. I also agree that you pinch ¾ of a scene from later on (although I don't think it  always has to be only 3/4). I think, too, that preview flashback does indeed establish genre and indeed, that's something I hadn't thought of, so, many thanks to Phill for pointing it out to me. But, with respect, in suggesting that preview flashback is all about establishing genre, I think Phill is picking a side effect rather than the cause. My view is that successful preview flashback turns your film into a detective story - and because of that, the opening preview always has to be a vital plot clue that will later pay off. In short, in preview flashback plot content is king.

I should say that I strongly suspect that Phill, out of his extensive experience, would intuitively pick a vital scene as the preview flashback. It's the sort of thing that seems blindingly obvious to experienced writers, who tend to forget it's taken them many years and many scripts to get that degree of mastery in storytelling. However, intuition can fail even the very  best of us at times, so let's see if we can establish some sort of guidelines in this area for new writers, experienced writers and everyone in between.

To summarise, we have two questions:

1.    can we use an opening flashback that's interesting but not really relevant to the story?

2.    Isn't the preview just a genre scene inserted to give energy to a film in which 20-30 minutes at the start is not in genre?


What I intend to show here is my view that if the character or action depicted in a preview flashback doesn't give us a vital plot clue, the preview flashback can damage your  film in a variety of ways.

However, before I do that, I want to discuss this suggestion that preview flashback can take the curse off 20-30 minutes of unfunny comedy or off action films without action.The reason I'm going into it is because it's working on a false but very common assumption about flashbacks, one that is perhaps the greatest trap. This is, that flashback is a quick and easy fix for parts of your film that lack suspense. Flashback does indeed insert suspense. It  can indeed be a great fix. But it's not easy and it can work only in certain situations and under specific conditions.

Flashback is not a cure-all

You can't just  insert an exciting or interesting flashback into a film that's flagging or boring and hey presto it's fixed. Yes, you will get instant energy, but when the flashback is over you have to return to the boring bit and things will be worse - because the audience will then realise just how boring the boring bit is. You will factor in a whacking great anticlimax. If you insert a number of these into a boring or meandering story the audience may actually forget where they are in the present. Alternatively, your flashback may rivet your audience's attention but send them  into completely the wrong direction, believing your story to be about something it's not.

So let me be pedantic here. Are there actually successful linear comedies out there are that are not funny for 20-30 minutes, for their entire first act, but work well because they have a funny preview flashback inserted at the start? Ditto action films with action preview flashbacks, ditto musicals with preview flashbacks of great songs? Wouldn't that dead 20-30 minutes kill the films? Wouldn't that material be cut?

And what is happening on screen in these 'character scenes' if they are 'non-genre'? How can a scene not be in genre? Are we positing some kind of all-purpose 'character scene'?  Genre is a matter of plot, style and theme. Surely, character interaction in a comedy is always dealt with in a comedic and/or whimsical way while character interaction in an action film is always dealt with in a way appropriate to the action genre. As for 'character scenes' in a musical being separate from genre, these scenes are often exactly where the characters have their torch songs.

I think the word 'genre' is not accurate in this instance and is actively distracting. I'll be very precise here and say that what I think Phill is picking here is not to do with genre.  What he's describing (and he's quite right) is that  films which necessarily have a slow setup to their plot - a set up that is apparently irrelevant or wandering -  can indeed be invigorated with a flashback. But I'd say it must be a flashback with right plot content.

A successful preview flashback

Goodfellas features a brilliantly successful preview flashback. The film is about a decent young man who gradually becomes a depraved and amoral gangster. Chronologically told, the story shows how the decent young boy gets involved with the gansters and, for a long time, how his life as a gangster is all great fun. However, at the midpoint there is a horrific scene in which the protagonist and other gangsters calmly and cold-bloodedly execute and bury a man. That scene marks the young man's descent into evil. The film is no longer a good fun gangster romp. It shows his terrible decline, from which there is no return.

Having opened with this crucial execution scene, the film then flashes back to the start of the man's story when he joins the gangsters, with a line of dialogue that is or close to : 'I always wanted to be a gangster'. The effect is chilling. It's quite brilliant. Without that preview flashback the film would have come over as a gangster romp that suddenly changed its mind and became a moral tale. As it is, we know the nice young boy is on his way to moral destruction.

Goodfellas illustrates what a good preview flashback should do. It enhances the film by giving a vital and very specific plot clue that will pay off later. Let's look further into this. 

Flashbacks are clues that need to pay off Whether you like it or not, a flashback at the start of a film instantly turns your film into a detective story. The audience views a flashback at the start of a film as a plot clue that has to pay off later in the film. If you draw an audience’s attention to something at the start of the story they have a right to expect it to pay off, and their expectations are increased because many films do exactly that. In fact, we could say that in many films, the opening flashback actually gives us the topic of the film, what the film is 'about'.

You can’t just insert any old scene that you feel is interesting or indicates genre. If you do you risk either a) factoring in an anti-climax (and the irritated response: ‘what was all that about?') or else b) sending your audience, which automatically believes your opening flashback to be a clue, wildly off course as they wait in vain for its characters and events to pay off. 

It’s like me saying: ‘Listen to what happened to me this morning…!’ then making a point of showing you a piece of jewellery. You of course focus on the jewellery, assuming it to be relevant to the story. But then I go on to tell a story that has nothing to do with the piece of jewellery at all. At which point you are liable to feel very frustrated, to feel that I have wasted your time and emotional engagement.

If you say to your audience: ‘Look at this!’ they will naturally assume it’s of itself important. And they will be particularly irritated if you mislead them at the start of your film because audiences assume that every moment at a film's beginning is a clue. You have maximum audience attention and goodwill. You mess with that at your peril.

 

Trap a) ‘What was that all about?’ You can see this problem very clearly in The Well.  I've written about this film before (The 21st Century Screenplay p.262). It opens with an accident on a country road. Two women accidentally run down a man in their car, killing him. The core of the story is the fascinating idea that the women hide the body in a disused well and drop down stones to cover it only to suspect, to their horror, that the man is not dead and that he has escaped and is coming back to kill them.

Good story! 

However, the way the film is structured, it opens with a flashforward to the accident (which is indeed striking) but then goes into flashback to explain how the two women got together. This has nothing at all to do with the well story which is  'the hea't  of the film (that is, what defines it and makes it original).  Predictably, when we finally see the accident again, returning to the body-down-the-well story, there is a classic ‘what was all that about?’ moment as the audience ponders the irrelevance of the flashback. That  flashback has done nothing but force the film to start again. Compare this with the recent telemovie An Accidental Soldier, which successfully uses a preview flashback based on a 1st act turning point (see the structural review later in this newsletter).

My guess is that the accident scene was inserted at the start precisely to do what Phill suggests - to indicate the genre because the opening part of the story (how the two women met) is slow. The accident does indeed insert excitement and tension and suggest a thrilling film.  But surely the answer here is to junk the boring irrelevant 'how they met' section, not to try to pump it up with a  flashback. You can't do that.  A redundant bit of back story is a redundant bit of back story - made all the more dreary because it stands in stark contrast to the exciting road accident.  

As I've said, the flashback needs to provide a clue to the outcome of the story. If all it does is provide a bit of dreary irrelevant backstory, or mask a dreary bit of characterisation, forget it.The issue here, actually, is understanding what story you are trying to tell. Significantly, the film was an adaptation of a story. Fiction can get away with a very slow meandering set up.  Film very often can't.  

The film Beat, about the Beat Poets, is another example of this. It opens in a riveting way - a man has a gun to another's head!  Exciting?  Yes. Setting up genre?  Yes.  But that scene goes nowhere. It just depicts a moment of random risk-taking among the beat poets. As in The Well, once it's over the film has to start all over again.


Trap b) Sending the audience in the wrong direction This is the second way your preview flashback section can damage your film. The Jammed, a very fine film about human traffickers, provides us with a powerful flashforward 'genre scene' to overcome a slow start.  Again, the flashback doesn't pay off, but in this instance it sends the audience in the wrong direction, away from the central characters and the main plot. It sets up emotional engagement with the wrong character. Like my jewellery story, the film starts out telling us one story then switches to another.  

The film opens with a blonde Caucasian girl desperately running to a phone box and making a call for help. We naturally assume that this girl is the central character and that this scene is crucial to the film. We emotionally connect with her in her terrible distress and panic.  However, we then cut to a different story, with a slow set-up. An Australian woman is at an airport and meets a woman from China who has come to Australia to hunt for her missing daughter. 

The Australian starts to help the Chinese mother, and we gradually discover that the missing daughter is with the traffickers. The film's story is all about the Chinese girl and how the Australian woman and the mother hunt for her. The blonde girl, far from being the person we assumed the film was all about, is merely another girl who has been trafficked. 

Personally (and perhaps others didn’t feel this, but one can only speak for oneself), I found myself waiting for the blonde girl to return. I wasn't really focussing on the mother, her new friend and the Chinese girl. I was waiting to see how the blonde girl - with whom I’d emotionally engaged - was going to fit into the picture and become the heart of the story. But she didn’t. Hence, instead of emotionally engaging with the desperate mother and her daughter, I finally engaged only intellectually, doing so only after the anticlimax of finally realizing who the film was about. That visceral panic in me that the escaping blonde had created evaporated. It was wasted.

I'd argue that the preview flashback adversely affected a fine film. However, note that, just like the flashback in The Well, this flashback  ticked all of the boxes for our two writers. The opening flashback in The Jammed  certainly inserted energy into the film. It was certainly interesting.  It  certainly told us what genre the film was in.

How you could get a powerful opening here

The opening would have been much more useful to the film if the girl in the flashback had been the Chinese girl. In that instance we would have had one of the oldest and most powerful tricks in the dramatist's book: dramatic irony, the ticking clock. 

Dramatic irony is when we, the audience, know something very important that the characters don’t and we are desperate for the characters to find it out. It’s the classic ‘Look out behind you!’ trick.  If the girl rushing for the phone had been the Chinese girl we would identify instantly not only with the girl but, when her mother appeared, with her  anxiety and with the hunt. We’d know that the story of the film was a girl taken for trafficking and her mother’s search. We’d be worrying about the right girl – the one who grabbed us emotionally through her desperate phone call – and we would be willing her mother to find her.

As it is, we don’t know until  later what story we’re in and we don’t properly emotionally engage.  Leastways, I didn’t, much as I admired the film.

Flashback, come to think of it, is often all about dramatic irony (that's interesting actually. Anybody got any ideas on that?  Tell me and I'll put it in next month's issue )

Three Dollars
Three Dollars is another film that  ticks our two writers' boxes but sends us in the wrong direction because its opening flashback has content that doesn't pay off, sending the audience in the wrong direction. An opening flashback tells us the protagonist's life was regularly changed by a girl called Amanda. We wait for Amanda. She turns up only at the end (see The 21st Century Screenplay, p.260).
  

Bottom line: flashbacks aren't a momentary decoration or effect Only the simplest of flashback types can be used as a momentary decoration or effect that you can slip into a three act structure depending if you fancy it or if you want to establish genre. For example, the kind of flashbacks that I’ve named ‘flashback as illustration’ do this. Flashback as illustration is when, say, a detective in a crime movie asks suspects where they were on the night of the crime and each time we flash back to see that. There, the flashbacks are really just bits of dramatized backstory and yes, they are optional and essentially merely a matter of style, since, if you liked, you could transmit that backstory information simply by dialogue.

But most types of flashback have a major impact on structure. Indeed, some of the more complex forms (as in Slumdog Millionaire and The Usual Suspects etc.) are actually structures in themselves, in which we are in effect cutting between two chronologically-progressing films. Each of these is in a different time frame, and each is carefully structured in three acts, with particular attention to where the jumps between time frames occur. 

To summarise, if you intend:

•    to jump back and forth between past and present as in, say, The Usual Suspects or Slumdog Millionaire,
  or
•    to insert a big lump of crucial backstory at the start (as in Babette’s Feast – using what I’ve termed ‘Babette’s Flashback’),
  or
•    to use what I’ve named 'Bookend Flashbacks' (when you split  one scene or sequence from the present to bookend a story in the past),
  or, finally
•     to use a preview flashback,

you are turning your film into a detective story, a mystery.  It needs to be solved.


Which scene to choose as the first flashback I started this discussion by talking about Goodfellas. Goodfellas starts at its midpoint because that it is the moment at which the protagonist crosses the line morally. If you were writing a film that had the same kind of moral message as Goodfellas, the midpoint would be a good place to start. 
However, in my experience, most flashbacks that occur at the start of a film commence at the first or second part of the second act turning point (the first part being the protagonist’s worst possible moment and the second part being the decision to fight back) and then jump back to the disturbance, to where it all started. In some types of flashback they start on climax then jump back to the disturbance. I have written extensively on this in The 21st Century Screenplay.
 

Goodfellas was an exception.  Another exception is the recent and fine telemovie An Accidental Soldier. This opens on its first act turning point (the protagonist, a World War I deserter, running desperately through a village in France and finding a woman who takes him in). It then flashes back to the start of the story, showing why and how he decided to desert. When the film returns to its opening moment (the man running away, deserting) we start pursuing the main story, the man’s relationship with the woman. 

So why does a preview flashback from first act turning point work in An Accidental Soldier but not in The Well? In An Accidental Soldier, both the opening sequence (the preview) and the material to which we jump back are crucial to the plot.

Preview Flashbacks that pay off in unusual ways
There are three interesting instances in which successful films  seem to do exactly what I recommend at the start of this article you avoid. In fact, they are all following the basic rule whereby the content of flashbacks or flashforwards is crucial plot material. The first is when the preview flashback is a kind of red herring, playing with your expectations so it actually uses anti-climax, but in a very successful way. The second is when a necessarily slow, exposition-heavy story is fixed by judicial use of the right flashback or flashforward. The third is when character who is not the protagonist can successfully appear in an opening flashback.

a)  playing with your expectations  You find this often in the form I’ve termed ‘fractured tandem’, that is, the form in which we use equally important stories running in tandem but chopped up (21 Grams, Babel, The Hours etc.).  A good example of the red herring effect appears in The Hours. Here, the film opens with a scene of a suicide. We assume this is a preview flashback, giving us a suicide that will happen later in the film. We  expect a suicide and yes, we get it - but the person who commits suicide is not the one we expect. Thus the opening suicide scene is a red herring.

Fractured tandem often works on dread of death, and can make us feel a relief when the death we've been dreading doesn't happen. Paradoxically, the climax is an anticlimax.

b) Flashback and flashforward as a fix for a slow setup and problem films

Fractured tandem is also a great way to insert suspense into:

• didactic hence predictable films
• films that change genre
• film that have necessarily long set ups.

Careful fracturing (that is, flashforwards and flashbacks) can turn these films into detective stories, with the fractured structure actually creating the necessary suspenseful build to closure that isn't there in the chronological form. But in all cases, the slow content is not redundant. It's simply not immediately relevant. If you want to use fractured tandem, please check out The 21st Century Screenplay (or your head will explode - although it might also explode if you read the book). Seriously though, fractured tandem is very complicated. Proceed with care.

 
c)  Mentor Antagonists I argued earlier that  a preview flashback which features a character who is not the key character, particularly the protagonist, is dangerous. An apparent exception might be when a Mentor Antagonist character appears in the preview flashback, 'apparent' because the mentor antagonist is actually central to the plot and is usually the reason for the story. The story is all about this person.

So what is a mentor antagonist?  A mentor antagonist is a special kind of antagonist that I've noticed appears in films with very specific story material. They are films with stories in which a passive reactive protagonist is taken on an adventure of the soul by an enigmatic charismatic and proactive outsider with a wisdom born of pain. The enigmatic outsider does not change, or changes very little, indeed, what marks them is their fixity of purpose. The person who changes is the protagonist. I've named this  enigmatic outsider the mentor antagonist.  

And yes, I know the idea of a reactive passive protagonist is deemed heresy and some would have your right hand chopped off for even thinking it, but it’s another instance where conventional narrative theory is too rigid.

Typical mentor antagonists are Raymond in Rain Man, Merrick in The Elephant Man and Andy (the Tim Robbins character) in The Shawshank Redemption. These characters are more interesting than the protagonist and need, for the sake of the story, to be seen from the outside, as antagonists, from the point of view of the much more normal protagonist whom they teach. Why?  Because it's important for the story that we are not inside them, understanding what they're thinking. They must remain unpredictable. On the most basic level, if you could see what Andy in The Shawshank Redemption does in his cell you wouldn't have a film. It's also because the essence of the Shawshank Redemptiom story is that it's Red's story. It's about Red, Red, a normal person, the protagonist, is changed because of Andy. Changing the protagonist is what mentor antagonists do.  I've written a lot about mentor antagonist films in The 21st Century Screenplay.

The thing to note here is that the mentor antagonist is crucial to the protagonist's story. Indeed, they  are the  protagonist's story.

My recollection is that The Shawshank Redemption does actually open with a flashback to the murders for which that Andy was wrongly jailed, and to his trial (yes?  I don't have a copy of the movie with me). But you could also imagine a film which opened with a scene in which the mentor antagonist was shown behaving in a typical way - but then that scene didn't appear again in the film.  It could be a stand-alone scene, a kind of teaser prologue. 

By the way, since people often get confused about mentor antagonists, just remember that mentor antagonists do not appear in every story. They only appear in stories in which a normal person, often a child or young person, is changed by an enigmatic outsider with a wisdom born of pain. In these films the mentor antagonist is more interesting that the protagonist (this is more heresy on my part, but again, it's true).  You can often pick mentor antagonist film because their titles refer to the mentor antagonist. Frequently, the title is actually the mentor antagonist's name or nickname. For example, some more mentor antagonist films are King Kong, Sophie's Choice, Jean de Florette, Julia - you get the idea .

Thanks for reading. See you next time! Well, if anyone is still reading and isn't off in a corner in a foetal position having brain fever, many thanks for reading on. Feel free to challenge this. That's how we progress.  And don't forget to send me your ideas for webinars.  If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, just do so in the column on the right. 

With very best wishes to you all.

Linda

Coming up in the November 2013 Issue …
We'll be talking about flashback again, this time focusing on  what can go wrong in  Double Narrative flashback  (the films that jump between a story in the present and a story in the past like Blue Jasmine, The Usual Suspects, Citizen Kane, Slumdog Millionaire, etc) Some of the things you’ll find in the November issue are: 
'Double Narrative Flashback*: Where (and Why) Writers Crash and Burn ·
The structure of Broken:  Is it unique? · 
Blue Jasmine and flashbacks
Keep those questions coming and thanks for all the nice comments you're sending. Remember, if you'd like to suggest a topic or ask a question, fire away.

Phill Barron's Blog
This blog The Jobbing Scriptwriter: One Man's Crusade not to Give Useful Advice is very funny. Read it..!

I just added a comment to Lucy Hay's Bang to Write blog on the issue of how to succeed as a writer so I thought I'd also post it here.  See Lucy's post and the comments When you get a job, even it's the most menial, put in 100%. Knock their socks off. The person in the drama department making the tea today will be head of drama in 5 years. That person will want their own stable of new, committed (and cheap) writers. The number of new writers I've heard trash the jobs they've landed - eg soap. Hello? Speaking as an experienced writer when you hear a new writer speaking like that it's hard not to make a mental note that this person might be hard to work with because their hearts are not in the job. You're thinking 'What if they're asked to do a major rewrite, will there be a tantrum? Are they seriously concentrating on this script?' etc So when a pal asks if you know any up and comings they might employ you have to qualify any recommendation you might give with the proviso that this person might not be as committed as others. Go figure

I'm delighted to say that for the first time, in response to many requests and in conjunction with Chris Jones of the London Screenwriters' Festival, the full two-hour  film of my lecture at the London Screenwriters' Festival in 2011 is now available to purchase. And if you subscribe to my new Craft Skills Newsletter (which can do in the right hand column on this page) for a limited time you will be able to get a 20% discount.  Below is the cover blurb. 
In 2010, leading screenwriting guru Linda Aronson gave a talk at the London Screenwriters’ Festival that caused a sensation because it exploded the conventional Hollywood approach to screenwriting. The audience of scriptwriters was so anxious to hear more that they kept Linda talking for almost five hours after the lecture was finished.

What galvanized the writers were Linda Aronson’s step by step guidelines for planning and writing screenplays like 'Pulp Fiction' or 'The Usual Suspects' that use components like flashbacks, time jumps, multiple protagonists and nonlinear storylines – all elements frowned upon or actively banned by other screenwriting gurus.

In 2011 Linda Aronson came back to the London Screenwriters’ Festival and gave an expanded form of the lecture to hundreds of writers, explaining how to construct eighteen storytelling structures apart from the conventional linear, chronological one-hero model.

That historical, game-changing lecture was filmed by the London Screenwriters' Festival. For the first time it is now made publicly available by Linda Aronson in conjunction with the London Screenwriters' Festival in a special licence permitting you to view and keep on to download and own on three different digital devices.  Watch a trailer.

I’m fascinated by that comment you often hear when people discuss non-linearity, to wit:  ‘every film has a beginning middle and end – but not necessarily in that order’. And it’s always said dismissively, as if it ends the debate.

I find it interesting for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s totally inaccurate.  Nonlinearity in all of the nonlinear structures is (as far as I can see) always arranged so that the end always occurs at the very end of the film, or else, if there are multiple stories, that the film ends on the end of one very powerful story, thereby getting its strong ending from that story’s ending, piggybacking,  if you like, on that story’s pull to closure ( as happens in Pulp Fiction for example). 

There is always a striking or thought-provoking resolution, indeed, nonlinear forms very often clearly show what I call a ‘Rosebud’ twist ( a term referencing Citizen Kane), where only in the final moments is the crucial answer given and this answer turns what seemed to be the message and point of the film on its head.  In fact, it’s this pleasing tying-up of threads in an unexpected way that gives nonlinear films much of their pleasure.

But let’s move on. What practical help is this little dictum offering?  Well, none. To the contrary, not only has it pointed you towards disaster by suggesting that you don’t have to have the end of the story at the end but it begs a dozen questions. Let’s look at it.  ‘Every film has a beginning, middle and end but not in that order’. Surely one has to say: ‘ That sounds really useful, but can you please elaborate?  Your comment implies that you have come to this conclusion after studying these forms in some detail (otherwise how could you make such a sweeping and apparently authoritative statement?), hence, can you please list these different orders, with examples? Please also explain by what rules, if any, one should choose to use any individual order?  Is there any particular form of story content to which each is best suited?  And please may I have some technical details here.  How precisely am I to jump between the three components?  Your argument is premised on there being three distinct parts to the story that one reorders. How do you define those parts? I need to know so that I know precisely where to start the reordering. How do we define the end of the beginning and the start of the middle and the end of the middle and the start of the end?

I’m not being smart here. These questions are the ones you really have to ask about the practical mechanics of non-linear.  Where you jump stories is vital.  Films crash and burn if you jump at the wrong places.  Personally, I’ve spent years studying how and when and why nonlinear stories jump at the points that they do, and what effect each sort of jump creates for the audience and what sort of material suits what sort of structure.  I had no choice about this because the jumps to and fro between stories make or break the nonlinear film and you need to choose the right structure to tell your story or it won't work. I’d say, for example, that many nonlinear forms open on the second act turning point of one of their stories then jump to its disturbance.

My only request is for precision and seriousness. Bottom line. Let’s have a proper debate about nonlinear.