Film Crit Hulk's Seven Questions of Narrative Drama

A short excerpt from Film Crit Hulk’s 2013 article on Man of Steele. In this article Film Crit Hulk explains what he calls ‘The Big Seven’. Seven questions that will strike to the heart of a narrative, that will help you understand the story and ultimately can be a great way to improve it: 

     

And so the one thing that hulk has discovered in this job, is that the best way of communicating and getting at the heart of problems is by asking the right questions. 

For example, start with ‘The Big Seven’:

What does this character want?

What does this character need?

How do those wants and needs conflict with each other within the character?

How do they conflict with the outside world?

How do they conflict with other characters?

How does the character change through those conflicts and how does the resolution affect them?

What impact does that change have on everyone else?

Those are the seven basic questions of narrative drama and they are the ones that Hulk always starts with any time that Hulk reads a script. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not as if they are the be-all-end-all of story cohesion, but they really do a great job of immediately identifying the most basic problems of any narrative. And that's because those questions are the ones that that most illuminate 1) character motivation and 2) character-centric conflict... Which, ya know, happen to be the basis of good storytelling. And so, these seven questions are such a great place to start for any story diagnostician.

And you would be surprised by how many mainstream movies fail to answer those questions whatsoever.

... Okay, maybe that doesn't surprise you at all.