When Alfred Hitchcock roamed the sets of his movies, he could be seen with a small book called Plotto. With this book of prompts, storytellers can connect 15 characters types (listed in Column A) to 62 conflict situations (Column B) and 15 consequences (Column C). In a sense, Plotto is a guide for mix-and-matching the elements of a story.
Published in 1928 by William Wallace Cook—who used it to write an endless series of pulp novels—Plotto was responsible for the greatest stream of thrillers, this side of John Grisham. A former lawyer named Erle Stanley Gardner used Plotto to create a series of pulp novels featuring Perry Mason. Those novels sold 170 million copies and inspired the classic radio, film, and TV productions.
Enter Eric R. Williams, a screen/virtual reality writer who also teaches storytelling at Ohio University. His book The Screenwriter’s Taxonomy goes far beyond Plotto. In this fascinating guide to genre, Williams lays out 260 different elements of stories, arranged on a hierarchy that looks like this:
- Super-Genres: These 11 basic categories (Action, Crime, Fantasy, Horror, Life, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sports, Thriller, War, Western) establish the basic expectations for stories.
- Macro-Genres: These 50 story contexts show different “worlds of the story” (from Addiction to Workplace), each with its own distinct settings, values, and patterns of behavior.
- Micro-Genres: These 199 details help to give further definition to the 50 Macro-Genres (e.g., a Legal Macro-Genre could have a Micro-Genre of Courtroom, Investigation, Tales of the System, or Underdog/Whistleblower).
All this might remind you of the old barb about academic analysis—that it’s an endless process of figuring out “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” In other words, it may seem like nothing more than mind-numbing insider-speak. Occam’s Razor, it ain’t.
But wait. This typology offers a brilliant way to understand stories and how they work. It’s a great way to brainstorm stories and to create a great plot.
Williams suggests using his story-generation machine in three stages:
- Start by looking at the 50 Macro-Genres. What kind of world do you want to explore? The world of Addiction? A Gangster story? A Love story? Maybe a Procedural? How about a Romantic Comedy?
- Now look at the kinds of stories you can tell within your Macro-Genre—in other words, look at the Micro-Genres. If you want to tell a Love story, figure out what kind. You have five basic choices: Disguise (think Roxanne), Nonconventional (Her), Obsession (Fatal Attraction), Traditional (Emma), and Unrequited (Remains of the Day).
- Now, decide what Super-Genre you want to use. Theoretically, once you have picked your Macro-Micro combination, you could tell 11 different kinds of stories. If you wanted to tell a tale of Unrequited Love, for example, it could fall under the Super-Genre of Action, Crime, Fantasy, Thriller, and seven other Super-Genres.
If this still feels overwhelming, that’s OK. Life is complicated, right? Williams estimates that his system could produce as many as 187,816,200 permutations of story types. But never mind.
My advice is to get the book, download a handy cheat sheet, and let your imagination roam over these three levels of story categories. Whatever you do, don’t rush.
This is not simple. But the more you work with it, the more you understand the internal mechanisms of stories. Lucky for me, I had an opportunity to talk with Eric R. Williams about his approach to genre. Here’s a transcript of our talk, edited for brevity and clarity.
We might think about genre in business terms. A corporate brand is essentially a promise. The brand says to the buyer of Corn Flakes or iPhones or UnderArmour: This is what you can expect if you enter this world.
Or look at it as a niche. It’s a way of zooming down to the most elemental or unique aspects of whatever we’re talking about. So a smartphones are a niche of the telecommunications business, along with flip phones, land lines, and even Zoom.
When you’re writing a film, just like when you’re creating a product, you are trying to meet the promises that you’ve made to your audience. With The Screenwriters Taxonomy, I wanted to help writers specify different elements that they’re going to be working on creatively. I realized that genre is just so broadly used that it’s lost its meaning. As storytellers, genre (as a concept) has to be useful.
In essence, I believe, genre is about character, atmosphere, and key expectations of the story. So if I’m doing a War movie, it’s going to be the us versus them, right? It’s going to be soldiers against those conspiring against the soldiers—other soldiers or people in a foreign land or political opponents.
So, what’s atmosphere? Well, where is the war going to take place? Here are some options: probably a contrast between foreign lands and back home, right? We’ll probably see some sort of combination of battlegrounds, training grounds, and the spaces in between. Atmosphere also includes props and costumes (so, in War, we’ll see uniforms and weapons and war machines and symbols of peace and patriotism).
We also know what’s going to happen in a war movie, right? We know the basic tenets and themes of stories of War. Sacrifice and survival, patriotism and camaraderie, and the effects or war on society and the individual. That sort of stuff, right? That what we expect in a war movie? Not all of it—not all at once, but some of it.
And we know these key tentpole scenes: Battles and injuries and captives and freedom. Decisions of life and death. Questions of rank and leadership. Themes of Us versus Them. We know thematically a handful of areas that we might explore in a war movie. We pretend that each war movie is unique. But they’re not. Not really.
Looking at your 11 Super-Genres, that’s one of them. Suppose we want to do a War story that’s a Comedy, like M*A*S*H. So we have a war with different ways people are fighting each other. The ongoing fight between the North Koreans and South Koreans is an obvious level. Another level is the dumb bureaucrats and martinets against ordinary people who are just trying to survive. So we have a comedy that falls in the Super-Genre of War. And then we look at the 50 Macro-Genres.
The War Super-Genre typically has multiple characters. Maybe a big band of brothers going off and fighting. But what else are we exploring besides war? You might have someone who, in a B plot, has left his family behind. So now we have a Family story as a Macro-Genre. And we can take that further by exploring the Micro-Genre of the Family story: is this a story that tests the family bond? Or is this a story about a family dealing with loss? Or has war created a feud within the family?
Or let’s take this war Super-Genre in a completely different direction with a Macro-Genre of Time Travel. We could have a war movie with all the typical trappings you’d expect, but then what would happen if one of the soldiers discovered a time-travel mechanism? All of a sudden, in the second act, it becomes a War story with a character who can travel forwards and backwards in time. Now you’ve paired your Super-Genre of War with a Macro-Genre of Time Travel. In essence, that’s what Kurt Vonnegut did with Slaughterhouse Five—except that the character Billy Pilgrim didn’t have a time machine, he was just unmoored in the time-space continuum.
You could also have Addiction—a character who is addicted to X, Y, and Z. During the course of the battles, he overcomes that addiction—or he becomes addicted. You can weave those thematic or personal stories (the Macro-Genre) into that larger Super-Genre in a variety of ways. So there’s 50 Macro-Genres, probably more. You can put any one of those 50 Macro-Genres into any of the 11 Super-Genres.
So one or more of the 50 Macro-Genres can be combined with any of the 11 Super-Genres. What’s the sweet spot for the number of Macro-Genres that might go with a Super-Genres like War or Romance or Life or whatever? Is it three or …
Off the top of my head, I’d shoot for two or three. Obviously, when you start telling stories with more characters, you might to pull more Macro-Genres. It’s also important to note that any of the 11 Super-Genres can act as a Macro-Genres. For instance, the 2021 film Cherry takes Crime as a Super-Genre, then mixes it with War and Addiction and Love Story as its three Macro-Genres to create a really amazing and complex character study.
It depends on the clarity of the expression. If by having four or five or more Macro-Genres, the story flies off in too many different directions, that could confuse the audience. The ultimate test is to have a core that holds everything together.
That’s exactly right. And I would add that, just because there’s some sort of storytelling element, that doesn’t mean it’s a Macro-Genre. Just because one of our soldiers wants to get home to his sweetheart, that doesn’t make it a Love story. Just because somebody is addicted to heroin, that doesn’t mean that it’s an Addiction story. For a Macro-Genre to emerge, you actually have to explore the character, locations, and story expectations of that Micro-Genre.
Do the Super-Genres have to have their own mini arcs? You hear people talk a lot about the B story. That B story is a complete mini-story unto itself, but it’s subordinate to the main story. Is that the ultimate test of whether you should think of it as a Macro-Genre—whether it helps contribute to the main story or theme?
That’s a great way to put it. The Macro-Genre really needs to be a B story (or even a C story).
If we think of genre as a promise, the B story and C story have to help fulfill that promise—not just for the genre, but also for the setup, right?
In the opening scene of The Godfather, it’s about family, it’s about loyalty, it’s about control. But to me, the main moment is Michael telling Kay, “This is my family, but it’s not me. I’m getting out.” So the big question is: Can a guy like this escape the vortex of a crime family? Everything gets back to that issue: How total is the experience of a crime family?
To me, this is the central difference between Super-Genre and Macro-Genre. Coppola is telling a Crime story (the Super-Genre) which also has elements of a Love story between Kay and Michael (the Macro-Genre). However, it would be possible for someone to take the exact same characters and situations and change the film into a Romance between Kay and Michael, right? That would change how those scenes are told.
If this was a Romance, it might start with Michael and Kay driving into the wedding. Little do we know about this guy who’s in love with his new girlfriend and is bringing her to meet the family. Well, the family is actually—nudge nudge, wink wink—a crime family. That changes everything. Now we have a Romance (Super-Genre) combined with a Gangster story (Macro-Genre). One way to think of Super-Genre is to ask: “How are they advertising this film?”
When I’m walking into a movie theater, looking at all of those movie posters, am I going to see Godfather: The Romance? If that’s the Super-Genre, then I want to see Kay and Michael deciding whether their marriage is going to work out, because that’s going to be our central set of expectations since it’s a Romance and not a Crime movie, right? But of course, as Coppola and Puzo imagined it, Kay and Michael’s love story becomes a secondary element in the Crime Super-Genre.
A movie involving the mafia doesn’t necessarily have to do with organized crime. Analyze This, for example, is not really about organized crime.
No, that’s a Day in the Life story, with Gangster elements. Day in the Life is the Super-Genre and Gangster is the Macro-Genre. It’s similar to the TV series The Sopranos. The brilliant thing that David Chase did with that series it that he chose a different Super-Genre. He made it a Day in the Life story as his Super-Genre, and then used Family and Gangster as Macro-Genres. See how that changes the focus of the piece?
Genre also forces you to be particular, specific. We all have an innate human urge for storytelling. But we also have a huge human tendency toward summarizing and generalizing. A niche forces us to stay specific.
A lot of it has to do with the medium. Film and television are hyper-specific, right? We get into these details because we can actually see it on the screen so we have to be specific. In that opening scene of The Godfather we see a room with specific actors doing specific things in a specific environment. The detail exists for us to point at and agree to: Brando petting a cat and discussing murder. Mario Puzo’s novel has a certain amount of detail, but you can still allow your mind to wander. For instance, Puzo can write, “the men talked about justice for Bonasera’s daughter” and the idea doesn’t need details the way that a filmed scene needs details.
One of one of the problems with biopics is that they try to do too much rather than getting specific. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, for example, covers a huge sweep of time. Might it have been better to focus on one element of the story, like Malcolm’s break with Elijah Muhammad or his trip to Africa or his time in jail? Then you could have a tight theme, a strong story arc, with the details that really get it.
Yeah, I would buy that. Spike Lee tried to cover a lot of ground in three and a half hours. The story of Malcom X might have been better served by exploring a smaller section of his life in more detail. But keep in mind, the movie came out in the early 1990s and that was the biggest canvas Spike Lee had to paint that story. Now you could take that same story and stream it as a 12-part series and add a lot more specificity and detail.
In his interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock said something to the effect of, “I have this funny idea of creating a movie not out of characters or situations, but out of scenes. And then I try to think about what would happen in the scenes.”
That all goes back to genre, because those are the audience’s expectations when they buy a ticket. You can subvert some of those expectations. You could have a gangster movie that takes place in space. But you have to set that expectation up for your audience so that they know that, okay, the theme and the characters are all going to still be a gangster movie, but people are going to be wearing funky futuristic costumes because the story takes place in outer space. Dark City, Dredd, Elysium, and maybe even Tenet would be good examples of Gangster movies that subvert our expectations by placing the story in outer space.
Similarly, if your audience is expecting to see a Western, they don’t expect the story to be in New York City. That just goes to say that if you’re trying to tell a Western and it’s surrounded by skyscrapers, you’re probably starting in a hole.
It could be a fish-out-of-water story. But that’s but that’s a different story. That’s a different niche or a different genre as well.
I’m all in favor of subverting expectations. If we’re going to tell a Western, we could start it in New York and make it out of fish-out-of-water story. But they better get out west by the second act or your audience is going to be wondering why the film was billed as a Western. Remember Back to the Future III. It becomes a Western as soon as Michael J. Fox gets catapulted into the past. It doesn’t start there, but we knew, going in, that’s where they’re going.
If you’re a hierarchical thinker, you probably start with the Super-Genres and then work down. But maybe if there’s a kind of Macro-Genre situation that you really love, you can start there.
I would almost always start with the Macro-Genre. People think in Macro and Micro terms. They’re specific. And their stories bubble up.
We have been talking about Gangster stories, so let’s continue along that line. You might be drawn to telling a Gangster story—be it from the anti-hero’s POV or the lawman’s POV—but that’s just a starting point. Next, ask whether it’s a Western or Sci-Fi or Fantasy or whatever. I mean, it’s possible to have a Gangster Western (3:10 to Yuma) or a Gangster Sci-Fi (The Dark Knight) or even a Gangster Fantasy film (The Forbidden Kingdom).
A story is only as good as its details. That requires research. You might think you know a subject. A young writer might know a lot about high school theater. But those aren’t the details that are going to tell the story. They have to somehow still do research to get the details for other aspects of the story.
Right. They also have to understand the details of the characters that populate those stories. If you’re doing a story about a high school musical, you might have a drama teacher who is going through a divorce and he’s torn because the topic of the play is about children while he’s in a custody battle in court in his real life.
As a writer, you might know everything in the world about high school musicals, but what do you know about divorce and custody battles? To tell this part of the story in your musical though, you’re going to have to write scenes about what that person is going through. And that’s the research you need.
You can’t create that high school drama teacher unless you know something about relationships and the awkward stuff that goes on between divorcing couples and how their friends and families react to each other. There’s a million things that you need to know, besides the world of theater.
Typically, I find that my Macro- and Micro-Genres help me to identify what to research. I might have enough of a general idea about the tropes of my Super-Genre to start imagining my screenplay. But when I dig into the details of the Macro- and Micro-Genres, then I need more specificity to create those characters and the nuance that makes them unique and interesting.
Let’s talk about beats. Robert McKee, in his Story Seminar, does a complete showing of Casablanca. He analyzes the bazaar scene, where Ilsa goes out and looks at fabrics and Rick comes out and tries to atone for his bad behavior the night before. Every moment of dialogue moves that scene forward—and not just the scene, but the whole story. (See this discussion.)
But it’s not just whether it moves the story forward. Sometimes we want a thematic beat that helps us understand the context, the values of the people in the story. Even if it doesn’t change the story, a moment can be valuable for revealing something about the character.
There’s a scene in Black Mass, about the Boston mobster White Bulger. There’s is a scene where he convinces one of his henchmen, Stephen Flemmi, to strangle his girlfriend to death in the trunk of a car. There’s really no other reason for this scene other than to create a distaste for Whitey Bulger.
You see, there’s also this idea of primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are what the character is thinking. Secondary emotions are what the audience is thinking. In that example, Whitey Bulger is smiling. He’s happy. He’s like, ha ha.
So the primary emotion is Bulger’s twisted glee. Then there are those beats that hit a switch in the audience’s heart or mind. In this case, hopefully, the audience is horrified by Bulger. That’s the secondary emotion. Secondary emotions are super important because they’re not very many of them. But when they when they hit, they carry this weight. So they don’t necessarily move the story forward. But thematically, and contextually, they play a crucial role in the story.