The Story Crystal is a three-dimensional, spiraling, energetic molecule of plot, character and theme that articulates through Sixteen Storytelling Vertebrae to form the Structural Spine of your screenplays. Each Storytelling Vertebra has a necessary and essential function that interdependently generates a wave of meaning and inspiration for you to write more compelling and innovative screenplays.

The Story Crystal is based on four interweaving Dramatic Models that I've developed with my friend and colleague Keith Cunningham over the last twenty years. These models, or lenses into film stories, were each inspired by our work as screenwriters, as well as by meetings with remarkable people.

Keith and I met in Chicago in 1980. We began a dialogue about storytelling that has continued to the present day. We were both studying with mythologists Joseph Campbell and Jean Houston and wanted to find a deeper, more soulful way of writing screenplays. This came when we realized that what Campbell and Houston were saying about the Hero's Journey was a brilliant metaphor for the creative process. That is, when we sit down to write a screenplay, and face the uncertainty of the blank page or computer screen, we are about to embark on a parallel emotional and psychological journey along with our characters. This is same essential journey that the audience will experience when they enter the movie theater and the lights go down.

Keith and I realized that screenwriting formulas are based on observing the common elements of scripts that have successfully been produced. It was time to find a way to integrate our creative, intuitive impulses with the essential, analytical considerations about film structure.

I asked "Midnight Cowboy" screenwriter Waldo Salt how he finds the through-line in his screenplays -- which also included "Serpico" and "Coming Home" -- and he said that in every screenplay that he's written, the main character's mode is in opposition to what he or she needs to learn. Waldo Salt's insight -- that there is a fundamental dramatic tension between how a character tries to achieve their goals and what they need learn to grow and mature -- became the next step on the long and winding road to developing the Story Crystal. Here was a lens into writing screenplays that helps us stay on track through the unity of plot, character and theme. Keith and I called this the Need versus Mode Model.

Filmmaker John Sayles ("Brother from Another Planet," "Lone Star") told me that he sometimes puts all of his characters' names down on one page and sees how they're related to each other. If a character wasn't emotionally connected to two other characters, his role in the story might only be functional and better served by another "more connected" character. John's notion triggered the idea of our second model, the Story Molecule. The Story Molecule expands the Need Versus Mode Model to view the relationship between plot, character, and theme as a revolving molecule of sub-stories: the inner world or need; the emotional network or constellation of relationships; and the outer story or plot.

But how does a network of characters, driven by inner need and outer desires, move through time and space? Chap Freeman, the head of Columbia College's Screenwriting Program, created a model to view this movement based on what Aristotle had to say about Greek comedies and tragedies. Chap placed these observations on an energy curve that charted the relationship between time (the horizontal) and dramatic intensity (the vertical), and called it, "Aristotle's Plot Curve." Aristotle observed that the audience would stay in their seats for about two hours and every so often needed a reason not to leave. Chap outlined these movements of deeper engagement for the audience as the establishing, the catalyst, the crisis, the catastrophe, and the climax. Aristotle's Plot Curve is our third lens into viewing film story development.

Using these three film models as a basis, we created a composite model, which we called the Film Story Model. The Film Story Model explored how the character's Need Versus Mode tensions and the three sub-stories in the Story Molecule move through Aristotle's Plot Curve of rising and falling action.

The Film Story Model was the prototype for the Story Crystal. As our teacher Jean Houston expounded on how stories are "in our bodies, our bones, and in our DNA," Keith and I delved further into the morphology of film stories. Just as humans share the same morphology of respiratory systems, circulatory systems, and nervous systems, stories share a similar morphology and yet are as unique as every person.

Ultimately, we found that film stories can be viewed through a three-dimensional Story Crystal, a cumulative series of Sixteen Storytelling Vertebrae that form the through-line or Structural Spine of the story. These vertebra, Keith says, have a necessary order through which they articulate the structure of the screenplay. Like words in a sentence, the Storytelling Vertebrae provide the grammar for a vibrant, dynamic language of screenwriting, the Story Crystal.