The change of heart took place as Field sat down and read the script, and discovered that the movie actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that it is actually three stories about one story — in other words that the movie could be squeezed into his system. This line of reasoning is symptomatic of the way some structure-evangelists regard a movie as good to the extent that it conforms to their own system.

Studying structure and reading screenwriting how-to books is something every aspiring screenwriter should do. But adhering to one theory alone, and to actually value films based on how they fit into that theory is backwards. When innovative movies introduce new ways of structuring, you don’t try and squeeze them into existing theories; you change the theories. Theory is secondary, always.

Field’s article.

Pulp Fiction screenplay.

While the simplicity of the featureless Write/DarkRoom can be appealing, I found that I soon missed basic text editing features. Scrivener, though, looks promising, as does StoryMill, another Mac-only writing tool. They both seem to offer more of a project oriented approach, making it possible to associate notes and research material to blocks of text and to work in outline and timeline modes. Unfortunately, as I don’t own a Mac, I haven’t been able to test any of these tools, but lately I’ve been so fed up with Word that they alone are starting to look like reason enough to buy one.