It is Swap Ideas Day! It’s a day for brainstorming with a friend.
Try this exercise: give your logline away and see what comes back.
You hand another writer your logline and nothing else. They write your first ten script pages, or your first chapter. You write theirs. A week later you trade back and read what somebody else did with your story.
Bam! A brand new angle on a story you have been living inside for months.
A notes session tells you what somebody thought of your execution. A swap shows you what your premise looks like another way. Great for jumpstarting your story when you’re stuck.
The Ten Page Swap
1. Trade loglines and nothing else. One sentence each. No pitch, no context, no “so the thing you need to understand is—.” If your partner has to ask a question before they start, your logline is not finished.
2. Follow the boundaries. One week. Ten script pages or one chapter. The constraint forces you to decide a take on the story.
3. Write it your way, not their way. You are not trying to guess what your partner would have done. You are writing the version you would write. The different approach is the point of the exercise.
4. Read all the way through before saying one word. No reactions, no reading over a shoulder, no commentary at the halfway mark. Finish first.
5. No defending. Your version is on the table. Their version is on the table. Neither one is a criticism of the other. You are exploring each other’s premises.
6. Compare with three questions.
• What did they do that I would never have done?
• What did we both do without discussing it?
• What did they find that is better than what I found?
7. Nobody owns anything. This is an exercise, nobody is co-writing anything. For clarity put the rules in an email.
What You Will Find Out
Your defaults. Where you start, how you start, who you start with.
How your premise lands. Anything you both did without discussing is the logline talking.
Where the story wants to start. Two writers, one premise, two different opening pages.
Try It!
Pick one writer and send them your logline today. One sentence, no explanation, plus the seven rules above.
Happy Swap Ideas Day! Go trade something. Go discover something. And let me know how it goes.
P.S. Did you run the swap and now you are staring at two openings with no idea which way to go? Bring both versions to a story coaching session and we will work out which one your story wants. Book a session here.
Check it Out!
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Cristina Yang says to Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy.
People forget that she’s talking about paperwork. Cristina has scheduled a medical procedure. The clinic won’t confirm the appointment without an emergency contact, and she put down Meredith. That’s the origin of the phrase.
It has since been annexed by romantic couples, but it was coined to describe a friendship. Somebody looked at a form asking who should we call if everything goes wrong and wrote down her best friend’s name.
That’s the whole genre in one sentence.
A couple of weeks ago, we broke male friendship stories into buckets — buddy action, bromance, and the drama that sits underneath both. Women’s friendship stories don’t sort that way. They’re organized around something else.
The Engine: Identity and Belonging
Friendships are a central part of women’s culture, and the stories reflect that. They can carry all kinds of situations, dilemmas, and stakes: comedy, grief, ambition, betrayal, and the very specific horror of watching your person get a new person.
But underneath the wildly different plots, the emotional question is the same two-parter: Who am I when I’m with her? And who am I if I lose her?
That’s the engine. Everything else is the vehicle you bolt it into. A road trip, a wedding, an assassination. If those two questions aren’t running underneath, you don’t have a friendship story.
Interrupted vs. Outgrown
In male friendship stories, the friendship gets interrupted. In female friendship stories, the friendship gets outgrown.
In Lethal Weapon, Riggs and Murtaugh get pulled apart by a plot — a villain, a mission, an external force applying pressure from outside. Something happens to them.
Female friendship stories rarely work that way. Instead, they come apart because one of them got something the other didn’t. Their lives are moving at different speeds. A fiancé. A promotion. A baby.
Insecure built four seasons this way. Issa and Molly’s friendship survives boy problems, bad decisions, and terrible advice. What finally breaks it is that their roles reverse. Issa finally has professional momentum; Molly finally has a functional relationship. Neither one knows how to be the friend of a person who is not struggling in the way she used to.
What does one of them have that the other doesn’t? If the answer is nothing, your friendship has no engine.
The Shapes These Stories Come In
With that engine in mind, here are some classic configurations.
What’s the asymmetry, and what does it cost?
The fear of your best friend replacing you — Bridesmaids (2011). The gold standard for platonic jealousy. Annie isn’t losing a friend, she’s losing her person, and the movie treats that with all the devastation of a breakup.
Women breaking out of their shell — Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021). Two Midwestern culotte enthusiasts leave their town for the first time and discover themselves. The friendship is what makes the leap survivable. Neither woman would have gone alone. In these stories one of them is braver than the other
Standing up to the mean girls — Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion (1997). The friendship survives the reunion, the lie, the fight, and the invention of Post-its. The asymmetry here is who cares more about being accepted.
The friendship that outlasts every romance — Sex and the City, was ostensibly about four women looking for love. But actually it was about the four women’s friendship. The romances came and went. The brunch was forever.
Here are three more buckets.
The Friendship Weepie
Last time we talked about the male friendship drama, where the friendship is the whole story and nobody’s joking. Women’s stories have the same category.
Beaches (1988), Steel Magnolias (1989), Now and Then (1995). Decades of friendship compressed into two hours, usually structured around a death, and engineered with clinical precision to wreck you.
What makes these work structurally is they span a long time. Not a weekend, a lifetime. When you follow two women across thirty years, the asymmetry does itself. One marries and one doesn’t. One leaves town and one stays. One gets sick.
The trade-off is that you’re trading intensity for scope. A weekend story can put every beat under a microscope. A lifetime story has to select ruthlessly using five or six scenes that stand in for decades. Each one has to carry an enormous amount of weight.
If you’re writing in this mode, the question to keep asking is: what is the smallest possible scene that could show they’ve changed?
Coming of Age
If the weepie is a lifetime, the coming-of-age story does the opposite. It clamps down on one summer, one season, one narrow window before everything changes.
Mystic Pizza (1988) takes three young women working at a pizza parlor in a Connecticut fishing town during the last summer before they scatter. One is Yale-bound, one wants to marry up and out, one wants to stay put. Three directions, one summer.
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) makes the structure literal. Four friends, four separate summers, one pair of jeans mailed between them. The garment is a device for keeping a friendship on the page while the friends are geographically apart. The pants are a clever solution that you can steal in a hundred non-denim variations.
Notice that the engine hasn’t changed. It’s just accelerated. In the weepie, the divergence takes thirty years. In the coming-of-age story, it takes twelve weeks.
Friendship Goes Wrong: She Wants Your Life
Female friendship stories have an obsession-and-possession subgenre with no male equivalent It’s the same engine, overheating.
Who am I when I’m with her? What if I’d rather be her than know her?
Single White Female (1992) is the one everyone knows. A roommate moves in and slowly takes over her friend’s life, starting with the haircut. It’s so embedded in the vernacular that the title became a verb — people describe a woman copying them as Single White Female-ing them.
All About Eve (1950) is the ancestor of the entire subgenre. Eve Harrington presents herself as actress Margo Channing’s most devoted fan, becomes her assistant, then her understudy, then her replacement. Eve is a terrifying master manipulator.
Poison Ivy (1992) shifts the target. Sylvie invites Ivy into the family mansion, and Ivy doesn’t leave. What follows is a takeover — Ivy charms Sylvie’s dying mother, wins over the dog, and seduces Sylvie’s father. She isn’t after Sylvie’s friendship. She’s after Sylvie’s family.
The friendship has to be real. If your obsessive character is simply running a con from page one, you don’t have a friendship story. The affection was real, and losing it is a real loss, even when the person was destroying you. If you can get that into your version, you’ve got something better than a thriller.
The Vehicle Is Negotiable. The Engine Isn’t.
Look at the range of stories. Comedy, tragedy, thriller. They’re all running the same two questions. Who am I when I’m with her? And who am I if I lose her?You can put two women anywhere — a spaceship, a bottling plant, a Madrid apartment — as long as the engine is bolted in underneath.
If the friendship in your work in progress feels inert, don’t reach for a bigger plot. Ask what one of them has that the other doesn’t. Ask when she got it. Ask what it costs them both to keep choosing each other anyway.
And then find your version of the emergency contact form — the small, unglamorous, paperwork-shaped moment where one of them writes down the other’s name.
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
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If this blog adds a little spark to your writing week, would you consider buying me a coffee? Your support helps me keep creating practical, joyful resources for writers.
Buy my bookHow to Turn Your Screenplay into a Novel! Turn your scripts into books and start earning money today!
Last week we made the case that best friend love is a story engine. It comes with three ingredients, an arc, and hands you a bond that doubles as your plot.
Best friend stories are not one thing. A story about two women who have known each other since high school (Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) is doing something structurally different from a story about two strangers who get handcuffed together in act one (The Defiant Ones.) Both are best friend love but need different tools.
If you write an old friends story with new friends techniques and you’ll spend forty pages introducing people who are supposed to already know each other. Write a new friends story with old friends techniques and you’ll have two strangers finishing each other’s sentences by page ten.
This week we’re breaking down the difference between old and new friendships and how to write them.
New Friends: Strangers Who Become Everything
Some best friend stories begin with two people who have never met. Project Hail Mary is an extreme version because they’re not from the same solar system. Sometimes they start as antagonists. In Midnight Run, a bounty hunter and his prisoner spend a cross country trip loathing each other into loyalty. Other times they know each other but aren’t friends yet. To win his girlfriend’s brother’s approval, a wannabe cop must survive a 24-hour ride along designed to humiliate him in Ride Along.
How to Build a New Friendship
The challenge is the same in all of them. You have to make an audience believe in a bond that didn’t exist when the story started, so the ending hits hard. If you’re building a friendship from zero, you have two power tools.
1. Establish trust through shared action. Put them in a situation where one of them has to trust the other. The risk is big, and the payoff is bigger. Somebody has the other’s back when it costs them. The big one is one of the duo saves the other’s life.
In Project Hail Mary when the ship starts spinning out of control, Grace is knocked unconscious. Rocky, who cannot survive in human atmosphere, breaks out of his protective capsule to save him, nearly dying himself. It’s one of the most powerful scenes in the movie. It is a deposit into an emotional bank account that the ending is going to cash.
2. Use intense experiences. Shared intense experiences quickly build a deep, believable relationship between two people who have nothing else in common. This is why so many friendships form in foxholes, hospitals, and terrible jobs. If your two characters don’t like each other, put them in a horrible situation.
Inside Jokes
Once they’ve bonded, show it with inside jokes and their own lingo. In Project Hail Mary, as Rocky and Grace learn to communicate, this happens naturally. It’s one of the most charming parts of their friendship.
“Fist my bump.” Grace teaches Rocky the fist bump through the wall. Rocky mangles the word order. Grace corrects him, Rocky insists it’s the same, and Grace loses that argument permanently. By the end it’s their gesture at every major beat, error and all.
"Question?” — Rocky’s translated speech marks a question by sticking the word on the end. He occasionally does the same with “statement” at the end of a declarative, though inconsistently, and seemingly for emphasis. Grace picks the habit up and starts using it himself.
“Friend” as a title. Rocky puts it in front of the name rather than using it as a noun, and Grace starts doing it back. Their goodbye is built entirely on that construction.
Notice that the lingo is never one-directional. Grace doesn’t teach Rocky English and Rocky doesn’t teach Grace Eridian — they meet in a dialect that only the two of them speak, complete with a permanent grammatical error.
Here’s how to build running jokes and lingo:
Name it. Something happens (a mistake, something silly, a genuinely stupid moment) and one of them names it.
Repeat it. It comes back somewhere ordinary, and now it’s shorthand.
Pay it off. It returns at an emotional peak, where it means something completely different then it did the first time.
Old Friends: The McDonald’s Pickle Principle
Your characters have been friends for twenty years and your reader met them four minutes ago. How do you make us feel two decades of history without a flashback montage and eight paragraphs of backstory?
You show us with things like inside jokes, a shared look, or a fifteen year running argument.
Ride or Die uses McDonald’s pickles to show history and affection. After the first shootout, the two friends sit in the car eating McDonald’s and swap their pickles without a word. One tiny food preference that one friend knows about the other, deployed at exactly the right moment, and suddenly you believe in twenty years of shared history you never saw.
You don’t need the montage. You need the pickles.
Old friends refer to the past in their own kind of shorthand. In Broadcast News, Aaron says to Jane “Ok, I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time.” She knows exactly what he’s talking about. In Sahara, Dirk suggests they need to pull a Panama, and Al comes back appalled. A Panama? A Panama? Later Dirk shuts the idea down himself with “No Panama!” The audience never finds out what a Panama is. No flashback or explanation needed.
Friendship Tests
Sometimes the characters start as longtime friends and the story tests them (21 Jump Street, Shaun of the Dead.) The friendship gets strained, cracks, and comes out stronger.
The tests can be:
An outsider arrives and one friend chooses them — a girlfriend, a new crowd, a promotion.
A secret surfaces and one of them turns out not to be who the other thought.
They grow at different speeds, which is the quietest and cruelest one, because nobody did anything wrong.
The most juicy stories make the friendship glue the wedge. Whatever bonds these two is be the thing that tears them apart. 21 Jump Street builds Schmidt and Jenko’s friendship is built on complementary deficiency — one has the brains, one has the social ease, and together they’re a whole person. They go undercover in high school the hierarchy flips, and they must adjust to this new dynamic.
Whether the friends in your story are new friends or old friends, there are all kinds of emotional dilemmas to mine to make a great story!
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Two of the biggest things streaming on Prime Video right now are love stories. Neither one has a kiss in it. Best friends are one of our life's central relationships. Stories showcasing best friendships are automatically emotional and high stakes.
Project Hail Mary (2026) is about a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone eleven light-years from Earth, has to save the sun, and ends up doing it with a rock-shaped alien spider he nicknames Rocky. They become the best friends either of them has ever had.
Ride or Die (2026) is about Debbie, a London political wife who writes her husband’s speeches and hosts a book club, and who discovers that Judith, her best friend of decades, is an international assassin.
One story builds a friendship from absolute scratch. The other detonates a twenty-year friendship in episode one and spends eight episodes putting it back together.
(Spoilers ahead! If you haven't seen Project Hail Mary or Ride or Die, watch the movie and a couple of episodes before you read the rest of the article. You'll have a great time!)
Let's break down the different ways to use best friendships.
What Is Best Friend Love?
Blake Snyder, in Save the Cat!, calls best friend stories Buddy Love. Snyder says a best friends story needs three things:
1. An incomplete hero. Somebody who is missing something — physical, ethical, or spiritual. There is a hole in this person. They cannot fill it alone, and, crucially, they usually don’t know that yet. They think they’re fine. They are not fine.
2. A counterpart. The other one. The person who has the thing your hero is missing, or who makes the completion happen just by existing in the same room. Not a mirror. A missing puzzle piece.
3. A complication. Something that gets in the way. A misunderstanding. A clash of ethics. A war. A secret. A society that disapproves. An Albanian crime syndicate. Whatever keeps these two from simply hugging it out in act one.
In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace didn't volunteer for the one way mission. That’s his hole: he doesn’t believe he’s the kind of person who shows up. Rocky has total, uncomplicated certainty. The complication is physical. They cannot breathe the same air. They cannot touch. They are separated by a wall for the entire relationship.
In Ride or Die. Debbie is a woman who has poured every ounce of her formidable competence into a husband who can’t tie his own shoes. She’s missing a life of her own. Judith is the counterpart — a woman who has never known love outside this one friendship, and who has an entire skill set Debbie has never dreamed of. The complication is the twenty-year lie.
Three ingredients. Two wildly different stories.
The Odd Couple Engine
Most buddy stories run on the odd couple dynamic. Two people whose personalities or professions grind against each other like mismatched gears, and that grinding fuels your plot.
Neat freak and slob (The Odd Couple). Cop and con man (Midnight Run). Assassin and antique enthusiast. (Ride or Die)
The odd couple isn’t a comedy trick, though it can be funny. It’s a story engine. Every time these two have to solve a problem, they will want to solve it differently. You don’t have to import conflict from outside. It’s already sitting in your car with you, complaining about the radio station.
The mistake writers make is casting the odd couple and then never letting them be odd. If your mismatched pair agrees on everything after page twenty, you’ve unplugged your own engine.
Philia: The Love That Faces Outward
The Greeks had a word for friendship love, philia. The classic way to describe it is that romantic love is face-to-face, while friendship love is shoulder-to-shoulder.
Lovers look at each other. Friends look at the same thing.
Friendships are built on a shared mission or a common enemy. They’re forged pointing in the same direction. The thing that bonds your characters is also your plot.
Grace and Rocky are staring at the same impossible problem. The friendship is the byproduct of the mission, and the mission is what makes the friendship believable.
Best friends stories are built on this idea of brotherhood. From Band of Brothers to The Avengers to Lethal Weapon, best friends share a mission, a cause, and a threat.
Give your friends something to look at. A goal, danger, an enemy. Point them at it and let the bond happen sideways.
Friendship Is the Love You Choose
You don’t pick your family. You sort of stumble into romance. But friends? Friends are chosen. Every single day, on purpose, with no legal paperwork requiring it.That’s the beating heart of every great friendship story.
Why did these two people choose each other?
What do they add to each other’s lives? What does love and support look like in this specific relationship? What keeps them choosing, on the days when it would be easier not to?
Best Friend Intimacy
In best friend stories, two people start out with their defenses fully deployed, and the story is about dropping them. The destination is friends who are more emotionally honest and closer at the end.
Best friend stories have a moment of sacrifice when one or both friends sacrifice for the other. In Project Hail Mary, Grace and Rocky both risk their own lives to save the others at different points in the story. In Ride or Die, Judith kills her partner to prevent the assassin from killing Debbie. Later, Debbie turns herself into Interpol so that Judith can get away.
These sacrifices reveal vulnerability and also strengthen their bond.
Both of Them Have to Change.
If only one of your characters is transformed by the friendship, you haven’t written a friendship. You’ve written a life coach.
They should learn from each other’s skills and perspectives, and both come out different people. Grace learns courage from Rocky. Rocky learns joy from Grace. Debbie learns she is a badass. Judith learns she is capable of being loved.
Two arcs. Two transformations. One relationship.
Give the friendship its own arc.
The bond itself should change, grow, get tested and come back different. The friendship is a character. Put it through the wringer.
Test it with secrets. Test it with conflict. Let it break. Then let them choose it again.
The story should mean something different to each of them. Same events, two different internal journeys. In Ride or Die, Debbie, running across Europe discovers she is a badass. For Judith, it’s about whether she gets to keep the only real thing in her life. Same road trip. Completely different stakes.
As you can see, best friend stories are rich with emotion and stakes. How can you incorporate a best friendship into one of your current projects? Or can you come up with a story where best friends are at the center?
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
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If this blog adds a little spark to your writing week, would you consider buying me a coffee? Your support helps me keep creating practical, joyful resources for writers.
Buy my bookHow to Turn Your Screenplay into a Novel! Turn your scripts into books and start earning money today!
How I use Claude to whip a manuscript into shape before a human sees it
Think of a developmental edit as the big-picture, is-this-working pass. It is the first step when you’re getting feedback. Does the story hold together? Does the pacing hum? Are the characters fully formed? Fix this layer first, and every other edit gets easier.
You can get a developmental edit before you hand your project to a human being. Beyond a spellcheck and a grammar pass. A structural read that tells you where your story sags, what your title promises that your story never delivers, and exactly where a reader is going to trip and fall out of the book or script.
To get the best result from any AI you must use a paid version. You get what you pay for, and the free versions of the AI tools are bare bones.
Ask AI to write your prompt. Give it as much information as you can. It doesn't have to be organized. Think of it as a stream of consciousness: what you're worried about and what you need help with. You will get thorough prompt that gives you amazing results.
Prompt with paragraphs, not single sentences. The more pointed and specific your prompt is, the better the output will be. Give your AI a job – “You are a developmental editor.” And context for your project like the audience.
End every prompt with: "Do you have any questions before you start?" to see what you may have left out.
Iterate until you're satisfied. If you don't like the result, refine your prompt, give the AI more information, and ask again.
How I Prompted Claude for a Real Developmental Edit
The magic is in the prompt. Here's the actual exchange:
Me: Help me write a prompt for you to get the best developmental edit from you of the book Sell Your Book to Hollywood. I'm looking for flow to be improved, to make sure everything makes sense, and suggestions of anything I may have missed.
Claude handed back this prompt.
You are a developmental editor with deep experience in both nonfiction how-to books and the entertainment industry. I'm attaching my complete manuscript, Sell Your Book to Hollywood: How to Pitch Your Book, Find the Right Producer, and Navigate the Deal. It teaches novelists — especially indie authors with no Hollywood connections — how to pitch their books for film and TV adaptation, from crafting a pitch through negotiating the option deal and visiting the set. Read the entire manuscript before giving any feedback. Then give me a developmental edit memo in Word focused on three things:
Flow. Evaluate the order of the chapters and sections. Does the reader's journey build logically from skill to skill? Flag any place where the sequence feels out of order, where a chapter interrupts momentum, or where material should be moved, merged, or split. Check that each chapter's opening connects to what came before.
Sense. Read as if you're my target reader: an author who knows nothing about Hollywood. Flag every place where I use a term before defining it, assume knowledge the reader doesn't have yet, contradict something I said earlier, or leave a step vague enough that the reader wouldn't know what to actually do next.
Gaps. Tell me what's missing. What questions will readers have that I never answer? What topics does a book with this title promise that I haven't covered? Where do I need an example, a template, or a story where I currently only have instruction? Also flag the reverse — anything redundant or covered twice.
Format your feedback as a memo: start with your overall assessment in a few paragraphs, then go chapter by chapter, and end with your top ten highest-impact recommendations ranked by importance. For every issue, tell me where it is (chapter and section name), why it's a problem for the reader, and your suggested fix. Be candid — I'd rather hear a hard truth now than a bad review later. Do not line edit, rewrite my prose, or comment on grammar and typos. Do not change my voice — conversational, warm, encouraging, direct. This pass is structure and content only.
Two tips for best results: run it on the full manuscript in a fresh conversation (so nothing else competes for attention), and if the memo surfaces something big, ask follow-ups like “show me exactly how you'd restructure the middle section” before making changes. Want me to run this edit now on the current draft?
Note: Claude gave itself a job with a specific background and the book a specific audience and purpose. He also told me the best way to use the prompt.
Claude read the manuscript and handed back a detailed ten page story notes memo with an overall assessment and specific suggestions section by section. The notes were sharp. They pinpointed things I'd missed and spots that weren't as clear as I thought. A lot of the feedback came down to reordering the book, so I fired off a follow-up:
Me: Please give me a new list of the order of the sections of the book that you suggested in the developmental edit memo. Give it to me as a Word document. Do you have any questions before you start?
Claude: Should the new order be a clean list, or annotated with what changed (moved, new, renamed, merged)?
Me: Clean list only.
My AI Buddy Doesn't Replace Humans
You might be thinking: Lindsey, why on earth are you telling us to use a tool that could replace you?
Because it doesn't. Humans remain at the center my workflow. I use Claude to get my manuscript into the best possible shape before I get feedback from my team.
Pre-AI, I would do as many as ten edits on my own. Using Claude as my AI developmental editor saves me some of those rounds. I get AI notes first, so that when I do bring in my human team, I'm not paying them to catch the obvious stuff I could have fixed myself. It saves me time, money, and more than a few red-faced moments.
I still have a writing coach. I still use human beta readers who are industry experts or my target audience. I still have a human editor and proofreader. I've combed through my manuscripts more times than I can count, on my own and with AI proofreading tools, and mistakes still slip through. AI can flag a sagging middle. It cannot replace human insight, human emotion, and the lived-in detail that both fiction and nonfiction need to breathe.
Want to try this on your own project? Here are two ready-to-go prompts, one for a novel, one for a screenplay. Copy them, swap in your details, and go.
For a Novel
The trick to getting real developmental feedback is briefing your AI editor the way you would talk to a professional one.
To show you what I mean, let's look at what the prompt below does.
It tells Claude what your kind of book is supposed to do.
gives Claude a job (“you're acting as my developmental editor”)
names the genre
comp titles
It draws a hard line between developmental work and line editing, which keeps the notes at the structural level.
It demands a specific deliverable in a Word document: a prioritized diagnosis, chapter-level notes, a concrete punch list
This way you get something you can revise from. Copy it, swap in your own details, and attach your manuscript.
Concrete template
You're acting as my developmental editor. I've attached the full manuscript of my contemporary spy thriller, The Nairobi Handshake. Comps are Mick Herron and Lauren Wilkinson. Read it as a whole before responding. I want a manuscript-level developmental assessment, not line edits or copyedits — don't touch my prose.
Focus on the big structural questions: Plot & logic: Does the central operation hold up? Flag any place where the tradecraft, timeline, or cause-and-effect breaks down or asks too much of the reader's suspension of disbelief.
Structure & pacing: Where does tension sag, and where does it spike too early? Map the escalation and tell me if the midpoint and climax land where they should.
Stakes: Are the personal and geopolitical stakes clear, escalating, and intertwined — or is one carrying the other? Character: Is my protagonist's arc earned? Is the antagonist a real counterweight or a plot device? Are motivations consistent?
POV & structure: Does the POV strategy serve the suspense, or does it leak tension by showing too much too soon?
Theme: What is this book actually about beneath the plot, and is that coming through?
Deliver it as a Word document in three parts: (1) a short overall diagnosis — the two or three things most worth fixing, in priority order; (2) section-by-section notes tied to specific chapters; (3) a punch list of concrete revision suggestions. Be direct and specific — I'd rather hear the hard notes than be flattered. Where something isn't working, tell me why and point to the moment on the page.
Reusable Template
You're acting as my developmental editor. I've attached the full manuscript of my [genre] novel, [Title] [audience/category], comps are [Author A] and [Author B].
Read it as a whole before responding. I want a manuscript-level developmental assessment, not line edits — don't rewrite my prose. Focus on the big structural questions: plot logic, structure and pacing, stakes, character arcs and motivation, POV strategy, and theme.
Deliver it as a Word document in three parts: (1) an overall diagnosis naming the two or three highest-priority fixes; (2) section-by-section notes tied to specific chapters; (3) a punch list of concrete revision suggestions. Be direct — tell me why something isn't working and point to the moment on the page.
For a Screenplay
The prompt below includes: • Genre • Comps • Talks in the currency of screenwriting, page numbers and act breaks, so every note points to a scene. • Draws a line between story notes and dialogue polish, which keeps the feedback where it belongs. Copy it, drop in your details, attach your script, and let your superpower go to work.
Concrete example
You're acting as my Hollywood development executive. I've attached the full screenplay of my thriller feature, Cold Harbor. Comps are Wind River and Blue Ruin. Read the whole script before responding. I want development notes at the story level — not a line-by-line polish. Don't rewrite my dialogue or description.
Focus on the big structural questions: Concept & hook: Is the premise doing enough work? Is the central dramatic question clear by page 10, and is it strong enough to carry a feature?
Structure: Map my act breaks. Does the inciting incident, first-act turn, midpoint, and second act break land where they should page-wise? Flag any act that sags or resolves too early.
Pacing & tension: Where does the suspense slacken? Where am I releasing tension too soon or explaining away the mystery? Point to specific pages.
Stakes & ticking clock: Are the stakes concrete, personal, and escalating? Is there enough time pressure driving the back half?
Protagonist & antagonist: Is my lead active or reactive? Does the antagonist apply real, rising pressure, or fade in the middle? Are the character arcs earned by the climax?
Plausibility & logic: Flag plot holes or coincidences.
Visual storytelling: Am I telling the story in images and action, or leaning on dialogue to carry information a camera should? Call out on-the-nose or expository lines.
Theme: What is this really about underneath the plot, and is it landing?
Deliver it in a Word document in three parts: (1) an overall assessment — the two or three highest-priority fixes, in order; (2) a page-range breakdown tied to specific scenes and act beats; (3) a punch list of concrete revision moves. Be direct and specific — I'd rather have the hard notes than be flattered. Where something isn't working, tell me why and point to the page.
Reusable template
You're acting as my Hollywood development executive. I've attached the full screenplay of my [genre] feature, [Title] [subgenre/type], comps are [Film A] and [Film B]. Read the whole script before responding. I want development notes at the story level — not a line polish. Don't rewrite anything.
Focus on the big structural questions: concept and hook, act structure and beat placement, pacing and tension, stakes and time pressure, protagonist activity and antagonist pressure, character arcs, plausibility and logic, visual storytelling vs. on-the-nose dialogue, and theme.
Deliver it in a Word document in three parts: (1) an overall assessment naming the two or three highest-priority fixes; (2) a page-range breakdown tied to specific scenes and act beats; (3) a punch list of concrete revision moves. Be direct — tell me why something isn't working and point to the page.
I hope these hints help you improve your story. When you're ready for human help, please reach out to me. I'd love to read what you've been creating and help you get it to the next level!
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In 1979, a script reader named Syd Field wrote the first, and for a long time the only book about screenplay structure called Screenplay.
He called his approach the Paradigm. Screenwriters built careers on it. Studio executives focused on it. Novelists quietly stole it. And nearly fifty years later it still works because it isn't a formula. It's a map of how story works.
The Big Picture: Three Acts, One Container
Field says every story had three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end that he split into the three acts. This seems obvious to us now, but was a completely new perspective when he started teaching.
Act One — the Setup (roughly the first 25%)
Act Two — the Confrontation (the big middle, about 50%)
Act Three — the Resolution (the final 25%)
Think of it as a container. In a 120-page screenplay, Act One runs about 30 pages, Act Two about 60, Act Three about 30. Writing a novel instead? Swap pages for percentages and the math still sings quarter, half, quarter.
But acts alone don't make a story move. What makes it move are the hinges between them. Field called them Plot Points (often called act breaks). Strong act breaks are the key to good story telling.
Plot Point One and Act One Structure
Field's first Plot Point lands around the 25% mark, and it's the single most important hinge in your story. He defined it as an incident or event that “hooks into the action and spins it around into another direction.”
But here's where writers get tangled: they assume that hinge is the same thing as the inciting incident. In Field's Paradigm, it isn't.
He gives Act One three distinct action beats:
1. The inciting incident starts the engine—the event that first sets things in motion.
2. The key incident is what pulls your protagonist personally into the story, the thing the story is really about.
3. Plot Point I is the turn at the very end of Act One that spins everything into Act Two. Three different jobs, three different beats.
Field uses Chinatown (1974, Academy Award for Best Screenplay) as his example. If you haven't seen Chinatown, it's a gripping film noir and considered a classic. You might want to watch it before reading the rest of the article because there are spoilers ahead.
In Chinatown, the fake Mrs. Mulwray hires detective Jake Gittes to tail her husband. That's the inciting incident, getting the story rolling. Then the real Evelyn Mulwray shows up threatening to sue, yanking Gittes into the actual mystery, the key incident. And when Hollis Mulwray turns up drowned, that's Plot Point I, the hard spin into Act Two.
Before Plot Point 1 (Act One Break), your protagonist has choices. After it, they have a problem—one big enough to fill the rest of the story. Dorothy lands in Oz. Katniss volunteers. Frodo leaves the Shire. Miss the beat and readers feel the story is still getting started fifty pages in.
The Midpoint Keeps the Long Middle Hopping
Field described Act Two as the place writers get lost. The current lingo is the messy middle. In the Paradigm, he gives us the Midpoint. It splits Act Two into two halves, giving each one a direction. (You may remember, I call this a four-act structure because the midpoint so clearly divides Act Two into Act Two A and Act Two B.)
The Midpoint recontextualizes everything. Sometimes a false victory, sometimes a crushing defeat, sometimes a twist that flips the meaning of every scene before it. Either way, your protagonist stops reacting and starts acting—they quit running from the problem and start confronting it.
In Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon gets yanked into the Death Star at almost the exact center of the film, and a smuggling run becomes a rescue mission. Luke stops drifting and chooses the fight.
The Pinches: Act Two Pressure Points
A stake in the center still isn't enough to keep Act Two moving, so Field added two more pressure points he called the Pinches. A pinch is a moment that squeezes the story back onto its central conflict—a reminder of what's really at stake and who's really standing in your hero's way.
Pinch 1 lands around page 45, in the first half of Act Two, keeping the story driving toward the Midpoint.
Pinch 2 lands around page 75, in the second half, keeping the pressure on as you head for the Act Two break.
Translating to a manuscript, that's roughly the 40% and 60% marks—two spots to check whenever your middle starts to wander.
Chinatown lands both beautifully. Pinch 1 comes when Gittes goes snooping around the reservoir at night and one of Noah Cross's thugs slits his nostril with a knife—"You're a very nosy fellow, kitty cat." It's a bloody reminder, right in the first half of Act Two, that powerful people want him to back off. Pinch 2 arrives in the second half, when Gittes sits down to lunch with Noah Cross himself and Cross warns him, "You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't." No knife this time—just the quiet menace of the real antagonist, tightening the screws as the story drives toward the Plot Point 2 (Act Two break.)
Same job both times: whenever the middle threatens to wander, a pinch yanks it back to the point.
Plot Point 2: The Second Turn
Around page 85–90—roughly the three-quarter mark of your story—Field's second Plot Point (Second Act break) hits. And here's the elegant part: he defines it with the exact same words he used for the first. Plot Point 2 is an incident that “hooks into the action and spins it around into another direction”—this time, into Act Three.
Its whole job is momentum. It locks the story onto its climax and launches the resolution. The dramatic question you raised back at the Act One break is about to be answered, and this turn is what fires the final stretch.
Back to Chinatown: near the end of Act Two, Gittes finally forces the truth out of Evelyn—Katherine is both her daughter and her sister. That revelation reframes the entire case and drives him toward the doomed final confrontation in Chinatown itself. A turn, spinning the story hard into its ending.
Unlike other structures we've discussed, for Field Plot Point 2 is about direction, not mood. It doesn't have to be your hero's lowest moment. It can be a discovery, a decision, a reversal—anything that grabs the action and spins it toward the climax.
Act Three: The Resolution
Now you sprint. Act Three is the shortest act for a reason—the questions are set, the stakes are beating, and your audience is on the edge of their seat. Your job here is simple: pay off every promise you made and answer the dramatic question you asked back at the Act One break. Not just how the plot ends. What the story meant.
The Paradigm for Novels
Field wrote about screenwriting, but the Paradigm was never really about cameras. It's about human attention—how we lean in, sag, and lean back in. Whether you measure in pages, chapters, or percentages, the hinges are identical. Setup. Turn. Center. Turn. Payoff.
Learn to feel those hinges and you'll never again stare at a saggy manuscript wondering what's wrong. You'll know exactly which bone is out of place.
That's the gift of the Paradigm. It doesn't tell you what to write. It shows you where the weight goes.
Ever wonder what it’s like to work with me? Watch me evaluate pitches on The Dialogue Doctor podcast!
Want more content like this? Click here to subscribe to my newsletter.
If this blog adds a little spark to your writing week, would you consider buying me a coffee? Your support helps me keep creating practical, joyful resources for writers.
Buy my bookHow to Turn Your Screenplay into a Novel! Turn your scripts into books and start earning money today!
