Replace the word unusual with an antonym.

Can I have Branliest for the Correct Answer?
Very often things like flashbacks, flash forwards, non-linear narratives, multiple plots and ensemble casts are regarded as optional gimmicks stuck into the conventional three act structure. They're not. Each of the six types I've isolated and their subcategories provides a different take on the same story material. Suddenly, one idea for a film can give you a multitude of story choices. What do I mean?

More than six ways to turn your idea into a film. Let's imagine that you've read a newspaper article about soldiers contracting a respiratory disease from handling a certain kind of weaponry. You want to write a film about it. Conventional wisdom says create one storyline with one protagonist (a soldier who gets the disease) and follow that protagonist through a three act linear journey. There's no question that you could make a fine film out of that. But there are several other ways to make a story out of the idea, and several different messages that you could transmit - by using one of the parallel narrative forms.

Would you like to create a script about a group of soldiers from the same unit who contract the disease together during one incident, with their relationships disintegrating or improving as they get sicker, dealing with the group dynamic and unfinished emotional business? That would be a shared team 'adventure', which is a kind of group story, so you would be using what I call Multiple Protagonist form (the form seen in films like Saving Private Ryan or The Full Monty or Little Miss Sunshine, where a group goes on a quest together and we follow the group's adventure, the adventure of each soldier, and the emotional interaction of each soldier with the others). 

Alternatively, would you prefer your soldiers not to know each other, instead, to be in different units, or even different parts of the world, with the action following each soldier into a separate story that shows a different version of the same theme, with all of the stories running in parallel in the same time frame and making a socio-political comment about war and cannon fodder? If so, you need what I call tandem narrative, the form of films like Nashville or Traffic. 

Alternatively, if you want to tell a series of stories (each about a different soldier) consecutively, one after the other, linking the stories by plot or theme (or both) at the end, you'll need what, in my book Screenwriting Updated I called 'Sequential Narrative', but now, to avoid confusion with an approach to conventional three act structure script of the same name, I term Consecutive Stories form, either in its fractured state (as in Pulp Fiction or Atonement), or in linear form (as in The Circle).

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3 years ago