One Way to Handle Story Sequences: Song Titles

Last night, I was working through my take on the story structure for the script Man Up and it occurred to me I could tag each sequence thematically by using song titles. Here’s the breakdown I posted:

Love is a Battlefield (1–12): Intro Nancy and establish her dysfunctional romantic life.

I Want to Hold Your Hand (12–20): Nancy intersects with Jessica, the whole book thing, and the meet cute with Jack.

Liar, Liar (20–34): Nancy learns to adapt as ‘Jessica’ and is almost ready to confess the truth, but doesn’t.

It Ain’t Me Babe (34–53): Bowling is a blast and the couple is flirting big time, but when Sean enters the scene, the truth comes out.

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (53–66): They head back to the Mexican bar and Nancy has a down moment in the bathroom alone, only to emerge to see Jack’s ex-wife with her new beau.

Gimme Shelter (66–83): Nancy takes on the role of Jack’s fiery lover giving Jack cover with his ex.

One is the Loneliest Number (83–91): Jack bumps into Jessica and goes off with her leaving Nancy alone and crying at her parents party, and Jack unable to keep his mind off Nancy.

Help! (91–98): Jack heads off to find Nancy getting help from Sean, who fools him by dropping off Jack at a teen party while Sean heads to Nancy’s parents house posing as Jack.

I Want You (99–108): Jack finally makes it to the party and confesses his feelings for Nancy and she him.

If a sequence is, in fact, a mini-story, with its own Beginning-Middle-End, then it figures it might very well have its own theme as well or variation on the story’s central theme. So…

Takeaway: Use song titles to help focus your story prep process. Or in rewrites, if you need help focusing what you’re trying to accomplish with our sequences, zero in on each one’s theme and tag it with a song title.

By the way, when I did that with Man Up, I used a combination of my memory and the Rolling Stone Top 500 songs of all time list which you can find here.

Thoughts?

For a musical interlude here are a few songs from the above list which track the trajectory of Nancy and Jack’s story in Man Up.