In moving between writing novels, children’s books, and movie scripts, there is something important I’ve learned over the years:

Story is story.

That is, the way a story is structured doesn’t really change. If you’re not sure about what I mean when I talk about story structure, I talked a little more about it here.

But in a nutshell, the main character will go through a big change from being one way to being another (usually something like being scared becomes being brave, or being worried about not having a lot of friends to seeing the value of having just a few really valuable ones). Think about Harry Potter changing, or Katniss Everdeen, or Moana, and so on.

One of the easiest ways I have found to see story structure in action is, in fact, to see it.

Watch more movies.

That’s it.

Watching movies works well because you can get through it (usually) in one sitting. Reading books together is obviously super important; it’s just that it may take weeks or months to get through a big one. Breaking down the important parts of a movie’s story is just easier to do because of the tighter 90-minute package.

And parents, if you can get familiar with spotting two of the big elements in story-telling, the inciting incident and the character arc, you can suddenly turn a family movie night into an extra boost for your kid’s writing dreams:

Get your young writer to try and pick out that moment when the main character’s world changes (hint: it’s pretty much always around the 10 to15-minute mark of the movie).

Then get them to talk about how the main character changed from the beginning to the end.

That kind of practice—thinking about how to make a story while doing something fun—will bake itself into their brains and (hopefully) show up when they are trying to build their own stories.

Watch more movies.

And if you need some help, I will put a cheat sheet in the next post which will give a little list of some popular movies and their key structural parts.

Happy writing, young writer.