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Nora Ephron in Telling True Stories: I have also learned things through screenwriting that would have been good to know when I worked as a journalist. As a young journalist I thought that stories were simply WHAT HAPPENED. As a screenwriter I realized that we CREATE stories by imposing narrative on the events that happen around us.

Structure is the key to narrative. These are the crucial questions any storyteller must answer: Where does it begin? Where does the beginning start to end and the middle begin? Where does the middle start to end and the end begin? In film school you learn these three questions as the classic three-act structure.