Here‘s a first little thought about the intricacies and effectiveness of storytelling structure.
One of the most basic storytelling advices I suppose everybody heard a lot of times is that a good story needs beginning middle and end. But even this simple truth is a lot less basic than it seems at first glance.
What if we begin a story by showing the end, then continue with the chronological beginning of the story and show how it all came to the final moment we put first.
In that case, we have a story with two beginnings, the opening scene and the chronological beginning of events. There is only one ending if the first and last scene are basically the same. But there are two endings as well if the story finishes before showing the first scene again.
An almost classical stylistic device is to show what could be an ending in the beginning, then let the story run up to this point, and continue the first scene into a final conclusion. It creates tension and can be used as a build-up for an exciting twist at the end.
This works for a 5 second Tik Tok ad, and it works for a 3-hour costume-heavy period drama. Period!
Now what about the middle? Can we begin or end with the middle? Of course we can, but it’s not quite that easy. More than 99% of viewers will instinctively perceive the beginning of a story also as the chronological beginning of events unless the story explicitly states something that hints at a different point in time like “3 months ago”, “20 years later”, “after the war”, “when I was a kid”…
Flipping beginning and end isn’t too hard to get for us because we are used to understand opposites. Hot and cold, black and white, cats and dogs…
But beginning or ending with the middle part of story is difficult because there is no opposite to that, and we have two loose ends “bothering” us.
Once a story began with the middle, there’s not much time for clarifying that it actually is the middle before the audience gets confused to the point of stopping to read, watch, listen…
Next, a storyteller must decide whether to continue the story by showing the beginning or the end because it’s hard to show them both at the same time.
Even if you clearly tell your audience what’s what by having huge letters on screen or let a character/narrator just say it out loud, you still put a cognitive load on the audience, so beginning with the middle is not very well suited for super short form content like ads, trailers or sizzles.
Ending with the middle? Oh boy, I’d have to think about that more. On a gut level, I wouldn’t recommend it.
But all that is not all. It’s never all, no matter how all it is, I think. Um… the final-for-now point I want to make is that different story structures also serve different genres, audiences and desired outcomes.
Like for example:
Do you wish your clip would make Asian teenagers buy something or make them not buy something?
Do you wish your novel to become a standard birthday gift for educated white guys facing a midlife crisis? (Maybe that’s the one of the few things allowing you to end with the middle.)
Do you wish your movie to be so intense, it lingers on in the mind rather than being watched again soon?
Whatever it is, not only content shapes the outcome of your projects but also thought through storytelling structure plays a part in this and there's a lot of fun research and experiments lying ahead.
:-)
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I've done that, @Till. Showed the end scene/another scene as the opening scene, then told the story, leading to the end scene/other scene that I showed at the start. I actually did it so much, I stopped doing it.
I haven't thought about starting with the middle. Thanks for the idea. I think it'd be harder to start with the middle, but it's an opportunity to mislead the reader/audience (like in a Mystery story) or set up a twist.
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Check out Harold Pinter's play, and or film version of "Betrayal", which begins at the end and ends at the beginning
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I think I do this without realcizing i am doing it and I always get skewed when I ask for ntoes!!
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How about my script titled DIVORCE AMONGST US?
About time huh
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DIVORCE AMONGST US is serious!
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Every movie cannot be Comedy!
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Your job as a screenwriter is to entertain (not to preach, command, dictate...) Leading the audience astray a little bit here & there can certainly be entertaining at times and has its value but tying your story into knots for lack of a good provocative hobby leads toward a dead end. What we call a failure.
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Memento (2000) is a story about someone with retrograde amnesia. It is presented in reverse order. to give viewers the feeling of the world as the MC experiences it. I had to see it twice to get past the discomfort of the situation.
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This is a great breakdown of structure. I really appreciate how you explained the difference between flipping beginning/end vs. starting in the middle.
I’ve actually experimented with reverse storytelling in my book The Table of Regrets, where the narrative unfolds backward. Instead of building toward an ending, the reader is gradually uncovering why the ending happened.
One thing I noticed is exactly what you mentioned about cognitive load. I think that readers needed clear emotional anchors to stay grounded, even if the timeline was reversed. Without that, it can get disorienting quickly.
Some of my readers said the reverse structure made the story feel more reflective and haunting, because they were constantly reevaluating what they thought they knew.
I’m curious. Do you think reverse storytelling works better for certain genres like psychological or suspense versus others?
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Feel free to organize your story in whatever order you wish. As long as it can be understood and delivered at its highest potential is all that matters!
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D A Stenard ir seems to have worked out for, though. :-)
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Kimberly Cummings Hey Kimberly,
thank you for asking.
I think that reverse storytelling for example works well with who-done-it stories like detective and crime. It's not super fresh in that case and almost the name of the game because most of the time the crime is committed and the detective has to piece it all together going backwards.
But, what's exciting here is that the investigation also goes forward until the suspect has been pinned down.
So flipping this around by ending with the crime and beginn with an investigation where the audience does not immediately know what crime it's for could be a nice idea.
Psychological genres are great too because there some disorders and/or mental states where the feeling of time is distorted. Déjà vu is a classic but there are also veritable disorders like chronophobia or dyschronometria. While those will surely be suffering experience, they can certainly be used for haunting movies.
Could talk for ages about that... :-)
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Hey Till,
I really appreciate your perspective especially what you said about reverse storytelling working well when the audience is uncovering something they don’t fully understand at the beginning.
I actually have a completed story titled The Table of Regrets that’s written entirely in reverse. Instead of focusing on a traditional crime, it centers on a character’s life and the unraveling of their choices, where each step backward reveals deeper emotional and spiritual consequences.
What you mentioned about psychological elements and distorted perception really resonated with me, because the structure naturally creates that feeling, like the audience is piecing together truth while the character’s reality becomes clearer in reverse.
I’d love your thoughts on whether positioning it more as a psychological unraveling versus a traditional reverse narrative would make it stronger for screen adaptation.
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I like the good middle and end. It helps me better than the traditional three act format. Frankly if I don' t have a good opening and don't know how my story ends, I don't have a story.