Vertical versus Horizontal storytelling
the pleasures and pitfalls of two storytelling modes
A script isn’t a standardized test. It also isn’t — despite rumors to the contrary — a blueprint for a movie or a TV show. A script is a persuasive document designed to circulate within a limited, exclusive social group. A document that bears just one implied message: “take a chance on me.”
Through your script, you are trying to persuade human beings within an exclusive social group — that is, “Hollywood” — to become your agent or manager, or to hire you for their writing staff, or to hire you to adapt some intellectual property, or to attach themselves as an actor or director or producer, or to finance your project.
(In fact, my belief is that it’s only in the brief period of time just before production begins that your script is actually a blueprint.)
But your script is only persuasive as a document within this exclusive social group to the extent that it reads as a potentially exciting movie or TV show. Which isn’t the same thing as actually doing the things that’ll result in an exciting movie or TV show.
On first read, a script is like a first date. It’s putting a first good first foot forward. It’s all about being seductive and intriguing and being something to daydream about.
And here, I think it’s worthwhile to consider what kind of storytelling mode you’re offering your industry reader.
One concept that I find percolating when I write my own scripts — and especially when I read the scripts of others — is this: vertical versus horizontal storytelling.
What do I mean by “vertical storytelling”? Probably this: the scenes and incidents seem to stack atop each other as you read from page to page.
Then what is “horizontal storytelling”? Something like this: the scenes and incidents seem to sprawl out wider as you read from page to page.
I’m more of a vertical storyteller. I like to write scripts that are hopefully page-turners. I prefer working within a genre mode, usually with the promise of violence hovering in the air. That is, when I write a western, I’m not writing trying to write an anti-western, deconstructing tropes and avoiding typical western scenes like gunfights and showdowns.
When I write a western, I’m trying to write a great fucking western. I usually embrace the traditional iconography and tropes, though I try to re-imagine them for a contemporary audience. I don’t want to avoid gunfights and showdowns, I want to write great new versions of them. Traditional genre pleasures in a new guise, perhaps. That is, I’m much more likely to aim for a Tombstone or Django Unchained than a McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Meek’s Cutoff or Heaven’s Gate.
In a finely-crafted vertical script, the scenes are like a chain of chemical reactions. The Die Hard script is an example. It’s tight, dynamic, gripping. Even the brief introductory scene is a mini-masterclass: John McClane is anxious about the plane landing (he’s a regular dude, not a superhero). We see his service weapon (he’s a cop). He pulls a big teddy bear from the overhead compartment (he’s got a family and it’s Christmas time). And of course, the dude sitting next to him extols the virtues of walking around barefoot on a carpet, which will lead to McClane being shoeless when the terrorists hit.
All of these beats within this 90 second scene are like little jenga blocks that future scenes will pile onto. Knowing what kind of storytelling was called for, screenwriters Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza winnowed this scene to its bare essentials. They aren’t exploring the scene for its dramatic or thematic potential here. Nor are they deconstructing genre assumptions. Nor are they trying to capture the moment-by-moment experience of air travel circa 1988. They are establishing a slightly unorthodox protagonist — John McClane isn’t an Arnold/Sly superhuman, but rather a blue collar everyman with a family — and getting on with his story.
Compare this with the opening of another movie I love, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. As in Die Hard, we’re introduced to our protagonist as he’s in essence traveling his way into the story. But the approach couldn’t be more different:
Even from the opening shots, you know that this is a different kind of storytelling. The focus isn’t on establishing the ingredients of the plot. The focus is on replicating what the experience of traveling cross-country by train in the 1800s must’ve been like.
We take in stray details simply because they are part of the experience. (We cut to the kerosene lamp above Depp not because it’s going to play into an action beat later, but simply because it’s always there.) We move in and out of Johnny Depp’s consciousness. We get a sense of elongated time, even boredom.
The beats don’t pile atop each other in Dead Man in the same way. They are spread out, giving us the sensation of experiencing a mode of travel in a distant time. You could rearrange Depp’s perceptions in a different order and they’d still make sense. The sensations sprawl out, giving a 360 degree sense of what travel was like back then, and what Depp’s meek character is like, and how he’s possibly in over his head in this environment.
Each scene doesn’t lead to the next because of cause-and-effect. It’s not a chain reaction. It’s an artistic rendering of one character’s experience of actual everyday life. It takes ninety seconds for Bruce Willis to arrive where his story is taking place. Nine minutes in and Depp is still on his way to his story’s location.
If I was to grossly generalize, I’d say vertical storytelling prioritizes the mechanics of the plot. That is, the details and moments within any given scene are important only to the extent that they connect to both prior scenes and to future scenes to create an unbroken chain of cause-and-effect.
In contrast, horizontal storytelling prioritizes the sensory and emotional textures of a scene. That is, details and moments aren’t important primarily in terms of their plot or story function — they are important in and of themselves.
The passengers in Dead Man shooting at buffalo out the train window doesn’t play into the larger plot of the story. (In a vertical script, Depp would later perhaps be riding a horse with a buffalo herd only to come under gunfire by a different passing train.) The behavior of the passengers is significant in and of itself as part of the experiental world of the film.
I think of vertical and horizontal storytelling not as a hard either/or, though. It’s more like poles along a spectrum, maybe. But I think it’s useful to know where your own intentions and ambitions land on that spectrum.
Jim Jarmusic is one of my favorite directors. Like, tippy tippy top. But as a writer, I would never write an opening like Dead Man’s opening. I just don’t think I have the patience. If Jarmusch’s script — which is actually kind of Rudolph Wurlitzer’s script, but that’s a different matter — was my script, I wouldn’t be able to resist bringing some verticality into it.
I’d probably do something like this: Johnny Depp would still be riding in the train. He would still be dozing in and out of consciousness. But Crispin Glover’s character (above) would also be on the train with him the whole time. The first glimpse, Glover is at the far end of the train car, among the details of Depp’s POV. Then Depp dozes off. Awakes again. All the passengers are different, but Glover is still on the car, only seated a little closer now. Doze off. Awake. Passengers once again are different. But now Glover is even closer. Doze off. Awake. Glover is right across from Depp and begins talking.
Now, I’m not saying that’s better than what Jarmusch (via Wurlitzer) wrote. I’m just saying, that’s more my sensibility.
I think most writers have one of two inner selves that they need to be careful not to let take over their script.
Some writers need to resist having their inner hack take over a script. What does an inner hack do? An inner hack just checks off boxes to keep the plot moving, resorting to over-familiar dialogue and tactics to do so.
Other writers have to fight off their inner poet. And what does an inner poet do? An inner poet over-indulges in private whims and details and meanders around and about to their own delight, ultimately losing the story’s thread and momentum.
Two different paths leading to the same place: reader boredom.
If you’re more inclined to vertical storytelling, you probably have to beware your inner hack.
If you’re more inclined to horizontal storytelling, you probably have to beware your inner poet.
Perhaps it’s ironic that — even though I used to be a poet — I always have to be vigilant about not giving over to my inner hack. I get quickly impatient with Tree of Life type of poeticisms and rarely (if ever) attempt them in my own work. What I have to watch is that I don’t just do a rudimentary speed run through my favorite genre-specific tropes and scenes.
For vertical storytelling:
Just one main POV or dilemma. A vertical story isn’t usually an ensemble piece — not unless it’s about a single disaster or contained situation. There’s usually a strong, clear lead protagonist. And even when we cut away from the protagonist, usually every scene is going to directly effect that protagonist in some way. Die Hard being a strong example.
A single spine unifies the drama. In a vertical story, there’s an inciting incident and it comes early. Everything before the inciting incident is setting the tables for it. Everything after the inciting incident is a direct consequence of it. For this reason, most genre stories — thriller, horror, romantic comedy, western, crime — tend to be vertical stories unless they’re some kind of arthouse deconstruction of — or poetic meditation upon — the genre.
The scenes pile atop each other. That is, from scene one, each dramatic or comedic dilemma leads directly to the next one. There’s a chain reaction of cause and effect at work. Scenes and storylines don’t occur separately from one another, but in reaction to each other. After one scene is over, the next scene either occurs because of what just happened, or it complicates what just happened. Even when a scene appears to be an outlier to this logic, it’ll later be revealed to have been pivotal to the main plot. It’s like a Buster Keaton routine writ large.
For horizontal storytelling:
There can be multiple POVs and/or dilemmas. You can still do a single POV in a horizontal story, but it’ll probably end up having more of a slice-of-life flavor (think of Wim Wenders or Jim Jarmusch films, or Agnes Varda’s Cleo From 5 to 7). But one of the strengths of a horizontal storytelling approach is its potential for scope. That is, divorced from telling a single plot, it can expand itself to ensemble storytelling. Robert Altman’s Nashville is a masterpiece of this. Altman’s film is a snapshot of a single time and place told through 24 characters, allowing him to explore a variety of themes, mostly the state of the American spirit. Some characters are connected to each other, but Altman and his screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury move between characters and storylines largely by whim. That is, he’ll intercut between two different conversations not because he wants to show two competing sides of some plot development, as in a Hitchcock thriller. Instead, he’ll intercut between two different conversations simply because he finds it to be interesting in and of itself.
A web unifies the drama. In a vertical script, a single spine unifies the story: a heist, or a romantic relationship, or an alien invasion. In a horizontal script, unity will usually arrive via some kind of web. This can be geographic and/or social, as in Nashville, Magnolia, or Lone Star. Or it can be a stylistic or thematic web, as in a Malick or Godard or PTA film where the inner incidents don’t necessarily connect on a scene-by-scene basis plot-wise — I think you could easily rearrange the chronology of many scenes in say The Master, Tree of Life, or Pierrot le Fou — but the stylistic voice is so strong that the films achieve a kind of unity anyway.
Scenes connect via association, juxtaposition, and/or vibes. That is, you can’t pinpoint a single causal reason why one scene necessarily follows the next like you can in say Die Hard or Sleepless in Seattle. There’s a different connective logic at work. Perhaps the storyteller moves between scenes because they’re trying to expand his or her canvas. Perhaps he or she is trying to connect or juxtapose two scenes because of their emotional or thematic content. Whatever the reason, scenes aren’t connected to each other via direct, plot-related cause-and-effect. Scenes can lead to other scenes just because, without connecting to the larger plot.
My second favorite movie of all-time is Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. It’s a horizontal vibes western. When the studio released Peckinpah’s film (after taking it from him), they cut out one of my favorite scenes (above).
In it, Pat Garrett is lounging by the side of the river. A homemade barge with a family comes ambling down the current, with the father taking shots at bottles his son is tossing into the river. Pat decides to join in on the game and the two men nearly get into a shootout.
The scene has no consequence on the plot, which is why the studio cut it. But later versions thankfully reinstate the scene. It captures something about the soul of the film that mere vertical storytelling could never accomplish in the same way.
If vertical storytelling is about dramatizing cause and effect, horizontal storytelling will often submerge and hide cause and effect. Why are we seeing this family on the barge? Why does the father shoot at Pat, then decide to lower his gun? Does this influence Pat’s mindset about having to kill his friend Billy the Kid? A vertical script would dramatize these questions and answer them for us. A horizontal script is content to keep them mysterious.
You could argue that my vertical storytelling versus horizontal storytelling rubric isn’t anything other than a matter of identifying where storytellers place their emphases.
A vertical storyteller emphasizes and prioritizes the details and incidents that lead to the development of the main plot. They do this by stacking scenes atop each other via cause-and-effect in service of a main story, whether that’s Unforgiven or When Harry Met Sally or Dunkirk.
A horizontal storyteller emphasizes and prioritizes details and incidents as details and incidents, largely because of their innate emotional or thematic or sensory qualities. The storyteller strings these details and incidents together to tell a story that can’t be reduced to a single plotline, whether that’s Licorice Pizza or Dazed and Confused or Nomadland.
The main reason why I think it’s useful to delineate differences between vertical and horizontal storytelling modes is this: they can help each other.
When vertical storytelling goes wrong, it does nothing but push the plot along. It turns into mere hackery, checking box after box of a story you’ve seen before. What a script like that often needs is a reinvigoration of the details and characters themselves.
If you revised a character in a vertical genre story so he or she would have to be interesting enough to carry a slice-of-life horizontal story, maybe then you’d have something. If you revised the telling details and incidents that propel your genre plot forward so that they would be interesting even if disconnected from the main plot, maybe then you’d have something.
Steven Spielberg is one of my gods. One of the reasons is that he tells vertical genre stories but populates them with characters who could carry a slice-of-life drama. You could tell a nice little slice-of-life drama about Brody from Jaws trying to fit in on Amity Island as an outsider to an insular community without ever bringing a terrifying shark into the picture. You could tell a moving drama about the families in E.T. or Close Encounters without ever bringing aliens into the picture.
Likewise, when horizontal storytelling goes wrong, it does nothing but indulge in interesting-to-the-storyteller details and incidents. What a script like that often needs is some kind of vertical story running the background. Horizontal scenes don’t necessarily foreground the key plot details and developments, but those developments can run behind or alongside the emphasized elements. That is, some of these seemingly whimsical details and observations could turn out to have some actual story consequence. It’s the difference being presented with a string of incidents (“eh”) and being told a story (“yay”).
Perhaps my patron saint of this type of submerged storytelling is Yasujirō Ozu, the Japanese master who is an enormous influence of horizontal filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, and Claire Denis.
Although I write nothing like his films — which range from the serene domestic tragedy of Tokyo Story to the fart-loving domestic comedy of Good Morning (above) — I study him closely. He often focuses on small, slice-of-life moments and details in his scene-work. But his pictures feel bigger than the sum of these scenes. This is because he often still has big plot developments occur — marriages, deaths, betrayals — but he lets them occur off-screen. We get the horizontal tip, perhaps, of a larger vertical iceberg.
In my own scripts right now I’m very focused on this interplay between vertical and horizontal modes. Another model for me is the famous Mike Yanagita scene in Fargo, where Marge — in the midst of investigating a trio of roadside murders — visits an old classmate who tells a heartrending story about his wife’s death. It’s a scene that is also uncomfortably funny. Afterwards, Marge hears that Mike’s story is a total fucking lie.
For many people, this Mike Yanagita scene is the height of narrative absurdity. Suddenly, Marge’s investigation grinds to a halt so she can have an uncomfortable conversation with a classmate, only to later find out later that this conversation was a total fiction. When he was pitching the Fargo tv series, Noah Hawley noted:
“What we have to figure out is what is our Mike Yanagita,” who is the guy from high school who calls Marge out of the blue and turns out to be nuts, and you’re like, “Why is this in the movie?” But it’s in the movie, in my opinion, because it’s one of those details where you’re like, “Well, they wouldn’t put it in the movie unless it really happened. It has nothing to do with anything.”
For Hawley, this scene is pure horizontal storytelling. It’s there simply to help the Coen brothers double-down on the “true crime” conceit of the film by virtue of the scene being completely, whimsically unrelated to the main spine of the story. This scene makes the movie feel more like real life because real life likewise doesn’t unfold in a linear, cause-and-effect fashion.
That is, real life isn’t vertical. It’s horizontal. Something happens, then something else happens, then something else happens. And you can’t pinpoint a reason why it had to unfold just like it did.
But other Fargo viewers — myself included — would argue that the Mike Yanagita scene does serve a clear plot function. After Marge finds out that the meek, pathetic Mike Yanagita is completely capable of lying to Marge’s face, she decides to revisit the meek, pathetic Jerry Lundergaard and question him again. And when he flees from her questioning, it breaks open the case for her.
It’s a vertical scene disguised as a horizontal scene.
And for me, that’s fantastic storytelling. To present a scene that in and of itself is so compelling, so strange, so captivating that it totally obscures that scene’s plot function, even to a professional screenwriter of Noah Hawley’s caliber.
You could argue that the entirety of Fargo functions like this. It’s a compelling, pulpy, old-fashioned B-movie crime plot. But it’s also told as a sequence of compelling character sketches of each of its main players. It’s neither vertical nor horizontal storytelling but the perfected modulation of both modes.
So what is my intended takeaway here? Probably this.
If you buy into this vertical versus horizontal storytelling rubric I’m offering, you should probably decide which tendency you wish to pursue. Are you more of a plot-driven cause-and-effect vertical storyteller? Or are you more of a horizontal storyteller offering pleasures less beholden to plot mechanics?
Whichever you choose, you should probably also recognize that there’s an implicit contract you’re making with your reader, dependent on the modality you choose. If you’re more vertical, you probably shouldn’t open your script with a ten page slice-of-life scene. Likewise, if you’re more horizontal, you probably shouldn’t open with a Die Hard-esque get-in/get-out scene establishing the bare plot essentials.
But whichever mode you tend towards, when your script goes astray, you may also want to recognize that the other modality may offer the way out of your current dilemma.
This might be my favorite (i.e., most helpful long term) of your posts yet. I think I've already come to the conclusion that the majority of the films I love the most are those where vertical and horizontal storytelling intersect. Offhand, I'm thinking of A River Runs Through It, Amelie, House of Flying Daggers, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Sideways... Interestingly, I could watch all of those films with the sound off, and they would still be entertaining because of those tone poem (horizontal) moments. No one wants to watch Die Hard without audio.
I like how you explain arthouse films as examples of horizontal storytelling. Nice.