ScripTips 11: Triangles off of Triangles

Movies aren’t books, and books aren’t movies. They each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, their own set of tools, and crafting them calls for related but different skills.

When a book becomes a movie, the plot naturally gets compressed. Characters are cut or combined. The passage of time is often compressed. And what may have been a broader focus of the novel zeroes in on one principle character who is always either present or the subject of any scene in which they are absent. These are all necessary alterations to fit the hundreds of pages of prose into the hundred and twenty or so pages of script.

But what happens if you go the other way? What happens when you have to expand a movie plot into a novel?

I plot all of my novels using the techniques I’m outlining here, and when plotting, I work off that 1:2:1 ratio of beats in a classic three act structure. But when the actual novel is written, I find that ration often ends up close to 1:5:3. But that’s not something to worry about at this stage. At this stage, we’re going to talk about how to build out the plot to enrich that novel.

We’re going to talk about building triangles off of triangles. And to do it, we’re going to keep looking at our gold standard, The Avengers.