Your Story Has Two Stories Inside It: Complicating Your Plot

About a year and a half ago, I started writing a blog post called “Your Story Has Two Stories Inside It.” In that post, I looked at three popular and acclaimed movies that I chose basically at random from IMDB and examined how in each movie the protagonist’s goal at the beginning of the story is actually achieved fairly early in the film, at which point a complication sends the protagonist on a new mission which they pursue for the rest of the movie.

This is interesting because often when we’re plotting a story, we pick a goal for the hero and then assume they’ll spend three acts pursuing that goal and that they’ll achieve it (or in some cases emphatically fail to achieve it) at the denouement. But that actually isn’t how most successful stories work.

I never finished writing that post.

Flash forward to this week. I’m working on a new feature and I’m head over heels in heart-eyes-emoji love with it but I have this nagging feeling that something is off about the structure. It feels a little… thin. Like, it’s a cool idea, it has a meaningful theme, I love the characters, and I found a powerful resolution to the plot, but there’s some part of me that keeps thinking… is that really it?

That’s the whole movie?

And then this morning, Monica Beletsky (a writer/producer of many beloved TV shows such as Fargo and The Leftovers, and someone you should follow on Twitter because she posts awesome tweet threads like this) posted this tweet thread:

And oh man, it sucks how right she is, because it means that the kick ass Act 3 climax I just wrote? Is probably actually my midpoint. Or even the end of Act 1! Crap.

What’s funny is this is probably the most common feedback I give people when I read their scripts — this awesome ending you just wrote? I hate to tell you this, but it’s your midpoint. It’s your end of Act 1. Sometimes it’s even your inciting incident! (Sorry.)

Let’s think about Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), which is a movie I use a lot as an example because it’s so satisfying and well-structured and it was both commercially successful and critically acclaimed.

(Some spoilers will follow if you somehow still haven’t seen that movie. I will also talk about Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) with some spoilers for the first half of the film. I later reference Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Annihilation (2018) but don’t reveal any big spoilers for either.)

In Guardians, Peter Quill’s initial goal is to sell the stolen Orb (aka the Infinity Stone) for money. He already has this goal when the story starts (after the quick childhood flashback) and he pursues it relentlessly through the first half of the movie.

But that is not the goal he achieves at the end of the movie.

He actually achieves this initial goal (with the help of his new friends) at the midpoint, but it turns out this was the wrong goal for him to pursue because the Infinity Stone is incredibly destructive (he and his friends learn this the hard way when it blows up The Collector’s lab). They learn that Ronan plans to use the Orb to destroy the planet Xandar, so now their goal is to get the Orb back from Ronan and save Xandar.

This becomes their true goal and the one they pursue for the rest of the film.

Imagine if the entire movie had just been about Peter trying to sell the Orb. That’s an interesting enough problem for the first half of the movie, but having that goal turn out to be the wrong goal is a huge complication that makes the story more interesting and creates an opportunity for each of the main characters to grow as they learn from their mistakes.

Alternately, imagine if Peter’s goal the entire movie had been to stop Ronan from blowing up Xandar. A worthy goal and one that could probably string together enough action set pieces to fill two hours, but it would be very one-note. And where’s the growth then for Peter? In this version, he would have already been pursuing a noble goal from page 1.

This isn’t only true for commercial blockbusters like Guardians of the Galaxy. Another movie I analyzed that follows this pattern is Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963). The protagonist’s goal at the beginning of the movie is to assemble enough money to buy majority control of his company to save it from ruin. This could be a whole movie in itself (maybe not a terribly interesting one), but then his son is kidnapped and he must use the money he’s accumulated as ransom instead of using it to buy stock. New goal: get his son back.

But the real twist comes when he finds out that the kidnappers took the wrong boy — it’s not his son they have, it’s his chauffeur’s. So now he has to decide whether to use the money he needs for his company to pay the ransom for a son that isn’t even his. The protagonist’s goal was originally control of his company, but now it’s about something much more primal and forces him to confront and reveal the person he really is.

This is definitely more interesting than 140 minutes of a guy trying to raise funds to take control of his shoe company!

That said, I’m not sure that every movie follows this pattern, even though all the thrillers Monica Beletsky analyzed did. For example, I recently watched Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) in theaters, which I (in perhaps slight exaggeration) called last year’s “best movie of the year.” I’d have to rewatch it to be sure, but I think the goal in that movie is the same from the inciting incident (when they get sucked into the game) as it is at the climax, though there is a major complication introduced at the midpoint which shifts their approach.

Another counter example is Annihilation (2018), which I also just watched in theaters. The goal in that movie is introduced in Act 1 (enter the Shimmer and make it to the lighthouse) and though there are several complications along the way that change our understanding of the problem, that goal remains the same for the entire movie through Act 3.

I’ll have to think more about this to decide if it’s true, but my hypothesis is that movies like Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Annihilation are actually a different kind of story with their own separate structure.

Something those two movies have in common is that they both have an ultra-clear goal from pretty much the start of Act 2 (if not a bit earlier) with a literal map to get there. Like, an actual, literal map! In both cases, if the story is working well, we’re so oriented to the journey that we understand at any given moment exactly where we are on our path to the final goal.

Annihilation goes so far as to have actual title cards delineating each story beat. We get an “Area X” title card at the inciting incident, a title card that says “The Shimmer” at the start of Act 2, and a title card labeled “The Lighthouse” at the start of Act 3.

In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the characters continually refer back to the map of the game world so that we always understand how far we’ve come and how much of the journey is left.

So maybe these movies have a different structure because they’re almost their own separate type of story.

So, like most writing tips, this is less of a Rule and more of a Tool. If your story feels a little thin, like it would be a better episode of a TV show than a full movie people pay $16 to watch in a theater, maybe the answer is taking your Act 3 climax and making it your midpoint, or even the end of Act 1.

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