The below is a guest essay by Jennine Lanouette, Founder and Chief Content

Creator at Screentakes Digital Publishing, who is currently in the midst of a

Kickstarter campaign for a line of media rich screenplay analysis ebooks.
Lanouette has taught screenwriting and lectured on story structure and script
analysis for over 20 years, and much of her wisdom can be found at her
site. The new ebooks use text, video and interactive graphics to provide a
new dimension to screenplay study. For more details, and to donate to the
campign, visit its Kickstarter page. — SM
It often seems to me that the independent film community is not entirely
comfortable talking about screenwriting. Or perhaps more specifically story
structure. This is not surprising considering a Hollywood Screenwriting Advice
Industry has grown up over the past 20 years pushing a mono-minded model
of story structure that a creative innovator could find stifling.

The truth is that the Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, Syd Field Paradigm, or
whatever is the structure template du jour, are all just variations on what any
decent Screenwriting Fundamentals class would teach about our historically
derived model of drama, generically referred to as Three-Act Structure. But
the Screenwriting Industrial Complex does not deliver it to us as simply a
beginning point that a creative person can noodle around with and push in
new directions. Rather, the screenwriting advice givers drive home the
message: “Stray from this model at your (commercial) peril!”