What KIND of story is it? (A Star is Born: Daisy Jones & the Six, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Babylon)

We’re working with Act II: Part 1, so it’s time to do another post on STORY PATTERNS - which you really start to see at work in this second quarter of a book or script. The KIND of story, or STORY PATTERN, is different from genre or subgenre.

There are hundreds of story patterns in books, movies, TV and plays - and when you start consciously spotting them, it can seriously up your story structure game.

Here are just a very, very few examples,

• The Big Lie

• MacGuffin

• Road Trip

• Fish Out of Water

• Wolf in the Fold

• Dark Academia (includes Campus Mystery)

• Three Tasks

• Three Brothers, Three Sisters or Three Siblings

• Sociopolitical commentary

• Buddy story

• Lude Comedy

• Trapped in the Family Business

• Cinderella

• Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show

• Eat the Rich

• The Long Con

• Unreliable Narrator

There’s a much longer list of these patterns, with examples and discussion, in Stealing Hollywood and Writing Love: “What KIND of Story is It?”

And in these previous posts:

• What KIND of Story is it?

  and especially:

• Working with Story Structure Patterns

I’ll be honest - this might feel like advanced work to some of you, and if it’s confusing, don’t worry about it right now! As they say in 12-Step programs, “Take what you like and leave the rest.”

But in many ways, Story Patterns can be the most useful thing you ever learn about story structure. If the idea of Story Patterns clicks with you, it can really be a huge and helpful shortcut to a much stronger and very likely more commercial book or script.

So if you’re interested, I suggest you read through the lists of examples in those above chapters and posts, then take your own MASTER LIST of top ten movies and try identifying the story patterns working in each (remember, there will almost always be more than one).

Then identify the story pattern/s you are writing in your own book or script.

I’m happy to help you work this out if you leave a question or a list in the Comments -

Once you’ve identified your own Story Pattern - it’s always astonishingly useful to watch three or four movies of this story type in a row, to understand how the pattern can help you organize your own story. and what elements the audience or reader expects and loves from this kind of story.

So you can make sure to be hitting those elements in your own story, and even give us the new or deeper take that will make your story a classic. Right?

Here are a few books and TV series from my recent reading/viewing, with the primary story patterns I see working in them:

• Daisy Jones and the Six (book and series) - A Star is Born

• Succession - Three Siblings and King Lear (these are two of the oldest and most effective story patterns of all!). Also has elements of Trapped in the Family Business

• The Bear - Trapped in the Family Business and Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Show! (restaurant version)

• The White Lotus, Season 2 - The Long Con (this extremely clever series has multiple concurrent Long Cons)

• Dear Evan Hansen (book and series) - The Big Lie/Mistaken Identity (a classic romance/ romantic comedy pattern)

• Desert Star (by Michael Connelly) - Wolf in the Fold / Fox in the Henhouse a very common crime/thriller/action/sci-fi story pattern)

  

Let’s take a deeper look, this time with some examples of a classic story pattern: A Star is Born.

There are many classic Hollywood examples of the “Star is Born” story, including all four of the movies with that title (1937, 1954, 1976, 2018), What Price Hollywood, and Funny Girl.  The hit TV show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is an extraordinarily good, and successful, example of this story type. Last year’s film Babylon used this story pattern, although it had a lot of story patterns mashed into it—overall not very successfully, but with some incredible setpieces!

And Daisy Jones and the Six, the book and new Netflix TV adaptation, is the latest iteration.

I’d also throw in Almost Famous, not quite in the pattern - but it’s a charming example of the show business story that hits a lot of my personal pleasure points! And Daisy Jones for sure pulled a LOT from that film.

I have to admit that I am drawn to this story pattern because of the thematic deal with the devil aspect of it. A Star is Born never ends happily, does it? At least it never has until recently! But usually the heroine is forced into a choice between fame and love. And the implication of the story line, historically, has ALWAYS been that the heroine achieves fame only by sacrificing love. Even worse, the story often says, implicitly, that the love of her life has to die in order for her to achieve fame! (Or maybe what it’s saying is that even if he loves her, a man would rather die than be eclipsed by a female star…)

But that’s an incredibly regressive theme, isn't it? And it doesn’t have to be.

Daisy Jones also forces a choice between stardom and “real life” (including marriage/kids), and it depends a lot on tired Madonna/whore cliches. But I admire the book and series for grappling with real issues of addiction and creativity—even though it only gives us a highly sanitized version of addiction. It’s a much more positive version of A Star is Born: the main characters overcome those issues and both separately choose sobriety and sanity over the temptations of the star life. (But I do have kind of an issue with the convenient death that allows them their happily ever after in the end.)

I’m holding out hope that Mrs. Maisel will be the most modern about this theme and end with an unequivocal happy ever after. The last season is streaming now, so we’ll see!

So let’s say you have an idea for a story that fits in the Star is Born pattern. How can you use movie examples to deliver powerhouse scenes of your own?

1. First, brainstorm a Master List of Star is Born stories. (Or, obviously, whatever story pattern you’re working with!)

2. Now choose three or four of these Star is Born stories from your list and watch them in a row, looking for common elements.

By the end of that fun exercise, even if you do nothing but watch them you should be bursting with inspiration!

3. But of course you’ll get much more out of your viewing if you are deliberately looking for the essential elements of all genres that we are constantly talking about here:

• Elements of Act I

• Elements of Act II: Part 1

• Elements of Act II: Part 2

• Elements of Act III.

4. It is really useful to print out and use a story grid as you watch each movie and note these elements on it as you see them:

5. But also, beyond seeing the universal essential story elements, you’ll see scenes that are specific to this particular story pattern - and that are expected by your reader or audience.

For example: you can’t help but notice that there is a crucial scene early on in each one of these Star is Born movies/shows that you could call the “Star Power” scene: a musical or acting tour de force that makes us understand that the heroine was born to do exactly this.

(This scene is a great example of the PROMISE OF THE GENRE that we were talking about recently).

It’s unique in that the heroine doesn’t just express her DESIRE for fame (the classic musical I WANT song) - the scene specifically has to blow us away with the force of her talent in this climactic SETPIECE. (it’s a demonstration of superpowers.)

Funny Girl is a great example of making the Heroine's Desire concrete and visual.

Watch on Youtube.

Musicals so often do this brilliantly, in song, staging and visuals. Early in the story, Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice is fired from the chorus line of a vaudeville show because she's a terrible dancer, and, well, not exactly cover girl material. She tries to convince the producer to rehire her in a comic song ("I'm the Greatest Star") but gets thrown out of the theater anyway. Out in the alley, she makes a decision and storms back inside to try again, still singing - only to find the theater empty. Then alone, out on stage, she has that moment that I'm sure every actor and singer and dancer in the history of the world has had - that moment of being alone on an empty stage with the entire vast history and awesome power of the theater around you. She is speechless, silenced— and then finishes the song with a power and passion we haven't seen in her yet. We see, unequivocally, that she is a star.

And that turn gets her hired back. 

I love that Star Power scene, and the whole first half of the movie - I think it's a much more entertaining and thoughtful take on the Star is Born story than the actual A Star is Born Streisand starred in in 1976. (Unfortunately Funny Girl falls short in the last half).

Other movies on that list have equally classic “Star Power” scenes:

The 2018 A Star is Born nails the Star Power scene for damn sure with Lady Gaga’s stellar turn of “La Vie En Rose” in the drag club.

Watch on Youtube.

Mrs. Maisel’s first drunken foray into standup comedy is a fantastic, non-musical variation on the scene. Yeah, that upper East Side housewife has the goods!

Watch on Youtube.

And of course in George Cukor’s 1954 A Star is Born, the iconic Judy Garland rendition of “The Man That Got Away” is not just a famous scene, but one of the best-known scenes in film history. A dazzling tour de force by Garland that also STATES THE THEME and FORESHADOWS the entire movie.

I’m not really recommending Babylon as a movie, unless you’re a Hollywood history nerd. Even then it’s exasperating, meandering and overlong. But it has an early Star Power scene that shows Margot Robbie filming her first ever movie scene amidst the Wild West-level chaos of an early movie shoot, and it’s a stunner. (The film overall goes straight downhill after that.)

Watch on Youtube.

(The truck sequence intercut with the film set scene is a great period parody of LA traffic!)

So pop quiz: if you watched or read Daisy Jones & The Six, what would you say is the Star Power scene? Is there more than one?

So if you’re writing a Star is Born story, now that you know your reader or audience will be expecting a phenomenal Star Power scene in your story, you have these incredible scenes to look at for inspiration.

And here’s the point I really, really want you to get:

You can use this technique for any story question or problem you have in your own book or script!

It works like a charm:

Screen three movies in the genre you’re writing and let the scenes those filmmakers came up with inspire you to create your own classic scenes.

So - what KIND of story are you writing? And do you have other examples of the kinds of stories I've listed above, or other kinds of stories to add to the list?

If there’s a story pattern you’d like me to go deeper into, please let me know in the Comments:

- Alex

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• Stealing Hollywood ebook, $4.99, also available as print workbook

• Writing Love ebook, $2.99

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