By Larry Brooks

(If you’re a skimmer, you should know up front that there’s a payoff waiting for you at the end of this post… in the form of a handful of really enlightening movie trailers that can teach you two of the most important things there is to know about storytelling.)

The best way to really learn something from a lecture or a blog or a craft book – to really cement your understanding of it – is to go out and see it in play (within a novel, or in a movie) in the real world of storytelling.

Of course, some writers hear or read something they are told will serve them and dive right into executing it within a draft. Which is a bit like doing surgery the evening after sitting in on a med school lecture, without having witnessed that surgery firsthand.

But this point of craft is too important to not approach with the precision of a surgeon. In fact, your writing road will be long, steep and bumpy – your patient just might die on your table – until you get this one critical point of storytelling firmly implanted within your story sensibilities.

(A reminder… four movie trailers await at the end of this post that will show you this principle in play.)

One of the most important aspects of storytelling, from a structural perspective, is the execution of what many of us call The First Plot (sometimes known as the “call to action”), which is the turning point following the setup of a story (consuming the first 60 to 80 pages in a novel, or about 20 to 28 minutes in a movie) and the actual dramatic spine of the narrative. The First Plot Point launches that dramatic spine by inserting something into the story that changes everything.

Think of these narrative blocks as quartiles. The first quartile is the setup. The second quartile is the hero’s response.

Response to what, you might ask? To the critical narrative moment that divides those two quartiles: the First Plot Point.

The moment where the real drama and quest – the narrative core of the story – actually and fully begins in earnest. How the hero reacts to, attacks and ultimately resolves the problem or quest launched by that FPP moment will become the story from that point forward.

Remember: It isn’t a story until something goes wrong.

And when it does, the hero must respond (because bad things will happen if she/he doesn’t)… with some combination of fleeing, fighting, navigating the unknown, finding help, seeking information or simply surviving what at first seems like unbeatable odds and imminent danger.

The First Plot Point delivers that moment. And when properly handled, does so at the optimal point (within a prescribed range) in the narrative.

So how do we go out there and find this?

How do you see it for yourself? Study it? Prove it to be valid? Or if you’re a non-believer, try to prove it to be a false creed?

Watch a movie trailer, that’s how. Because…

Every movie preview is built around the FPP moment.

Don’t go to the movies much, you say? Good news for you: Youtube is stocked with tens of thousands of movie previews. If you own a smart TV (or Apple TV or Roku), the main menu will have an entire channel devoted to nothing but previews, with literally thousands available. Thousands of opportunities – little two-minute storytelling clinics – that will show you this principle in action.

Two of the four movie trailers shown below are adapted from bestselling novels, which means the very same plot point you are looking for exists within the novel that created it.

It’s important to note, though, that the placement of the first plot point moment within a trailer (where something goes very wrong) doesn’t align with where it belongs within a novel or script. While it may, in fact, appear virtually anywhere within the two minutes of a movie trailer, the optimal placement within a novel or a script remains in a range between the 20th and 25th percentile.

In fact, if the concept itself is the draw (rather than the premise/plot), then up to two-thirds of the trailer might focus there, before it cracks wide open with a First Plot Point that shatters the calm

One other thing to notice.  

In addition to the First Plot Point, you will also sense the nature of the setup narrative (the first quartile of the actual story… novel or script) that precedes it. Remember, no matter how much or how little of it you notice in the trailer, the setup is everything that happens before everything goes wrong (thus comprising the entire first quartile of a novel), even when some of it contributes to that pivot.

The first quartile setup is where the concept of your story, as a narrative framework, is shown to the audience.

Okay, let’s watch some movie trailers and find those FPPs.

Jack Reacher, from a novel by Lee Child

Who doesn’t like the Reacher series, right? Well, more than a few didn’t approve of Tom Cruise being cast as Reacher in the first film… but he’s back, and this preview doesn’t disappoint.

The First Plot Point is shown at the 28-second mark (out of a total running time of 1:56). Everything prior to that moment is setup narrative, in this case (because this is a character-centric story) introducing the hero and the conceptual essence of him that invests us in him before he is thrust into harm’s way.  (You may have to put up with a few seconds of promotion first…  hang in there, hit the Skip button when presented.)

That initial scene with the handcuffs? Total prologue. Other than showing us Reacher himself (thus rendering it a setup strategy), it has nothing at all do to with the plot – the premise – of the story to follow.

The Help, from the novel by Kathryn Stockett

You’ve probably seen the movie and/or read the novel. But notice how the trailer sets up the strong themes before it reveals the First Plot Point (always the mission of the first quartile of a story), which is where Skeeter (one of three hero/protagonists) is launched on her dramatic quest, which is to write her book.

Once she heads down that path, serious drama awaits everyone.

Everything prior to the 1:28 mark is part of the setup of the story (borrowing, in this case, from several places within the story’s structure), before showing us the FPP that launches them all into a quest that is as emotionally resonant as it is dramatic. That moment, by the way, happens at the 24th percentile in both the novel and the film itself… right where it should be according to the principles of story structure.

Two Versions of Tomorrowland – a movie starring George Clooney

All Hollywood movies, and their trailers, are trying to sell you an idea. Sometimes that idea is almost entirely rooted in the concept, rather than the dramatic proposition (premise) of the story. In the first of these two trailers for Tomorrowland (based on an original sci-fi script inspired by an actual Disney place, rather than a novel), the only thing there is the concept. The story itself – the drama, and the FPP that launches it, is completely missing from this version.

Check it out, then watch the full trailer (that does include the drama and the FPP) that follows… and notice the difference. That’s where the learning awaits you.

Now, in this next version, notice the something does go wrong (which wasn’t included in the previous version), shown at the 1:30 mark (the First Plot Point) of the movie).  The trailer is 2:23 in total length, so even here, it is the concept – not the drama – that is the main draw.

Too many new authors, who are enthralled with their own concepts, write a novel that resembles the first of these two versions. Which, as a fully-rendered story, doesn’t/won’t-ever work… because there is no dramatic spine/proposition (a plot) to it.

But the second version… that could have been a novel. And in that novel the FPP would not have appeared at the 60th percentile mark, as it does in the preview… it would appear in the 20th to 25th percentile mark, where the principles of structure tell us it works best.

Writers who mess with these principles do so at their own peril.

Just as writers who deny them, but nonetheless nail it in a story (and there are many) do so by virtue of their own story sensibilities, which tells them the exact same thing as does the principle they claim to deny.

 

Literally thousands of these little two-to-three minute writing clinics are at your fingertips. And nearly every one has something to teach you – by showing you – about two of the most critical elements of a story that works: an appealing, conceptually-driven setup quartile, leading to a story-changing First Plot Point that fully launches the dramatic spine of the story itself.

Get this right – get this principle firmly implanted in your writing head – and you will have achieved a sort of First Plot Point in your career. Only this one – your writing dream suddenly accelerated – will be wondrous, however dramatic it might feel.