Better Story Structure Through Musicals and Kung Fu Movies

Kung fu movies and musicals are essentially the same thing. Once you understand this, you’ll better understand how to properly structure your stories and connect your characters more deeply with your audience.

Trust me: The more we dig, the more sense it’s going to make.

Whether you’re watching The Sound of Music or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: a group of people come together, and as they interact, their emotions grow—until they boil over.

At which point, there is singing or there is fighting.

That emotional peak is like the crest of a wave.

Your pulse rises. Your senses are engaged.

Like all waves, it must recede, and the story dips down into the trough. That cooling off period is like a pressure release valve. The characters need it, but so do you.

Because there’s another wave coming.

That’s what waves do—they rise and fall, much like a story should. And in a really good story, those crests and troughs are going to get bigger as you go along, building to a climax: a soul-stirring song or a fight to determine someone’s fate.

Good fights and good songs are cool, sure, but they’re not there because they’re cool. They advance the story. They make you a promise. Most of all, they make the characters more accessible and draw you closer to them. On a technical level, these genres are great for establishing their authority. But on an emotional level, putting characters in a place of emotional or physical vulnerability makes it easier to identify with them—and to root for them.

It’s in recognizing these things that you can become a better storyteller.

World-Building

In the 1999 film The Matrix, humans have been enslaved by machines and stuck into a virtual reality designed to keep them docile. A group of rebels led by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) recruit Neo (Keanu Reeves), who they believe is the chosen one meant to free them.

Neo’s training begins, via virtual downloads, because the war will be fought on a digital landscape; in the realm of the mind rather than the physical body. After 10 hours of this training, Neo proclaims, “I know kung fu.”

Morpheus responds: “Show me.”

And they’re whisked into a virtual program, which Morpheus explains was designed to teach the rebel fighters that they’re only limited by their minds—some rules of physics can be bent, while others can be broken.

Then they fight!

Neo is bursting with excitement at his newfound prowess. Morpheus defends himself in a confident, almost detached manner. Neo grows frustrated, unable to land a single punch.

Morpheus chides him. “You’re faster than this. Don’t think you are. Know you are.”

Neo takes a breath. He drops into a place of stillness. They engage again. This time, Neo is faster, more focused, and the fight ends as he nearly strikes Morpheus, his fist hovering a fraction of an inch from his mentor’s face.

What did we learn here?

The whole sequence lasts a little under five minutes, but we got some great world-building on the rules of the virtual world—dictated and simultaneously expressed through combat. We got a sense of both characters. We watched them emotionally develop, as Neo comes into his confidence, and Morpheus recognizes Neo’s aptitude. We got to cheer for Neo as he took another step toward the ultimate goal of saving humanity (something we all have a vested interest in, even in a fictional setting).

It’s the zenith of that old writing adage: “Show, don’t tell.” Neo telling Morpheus he knows kung fu is meaningless. He had to show him—and us.

Plus, we got a really cool sequence designed by the legendary fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, because what’s the point if we’re not having fun?

After that, we take a breath. More world-building. More character stuff.

Until the next action sequence comes, which is slightly bigger, each acting as a plateau that drives the narrative to the next foundational level.

Character

West Side Story. A spin on Romeo & Juliet, set in the 1950s and featuring two rival New York City gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, both grappling for turf on the Upper West Side. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll refer to Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version (there are clips of this song and the aforementioned fight scene on YouTube, if you want to follow along).

Ansel Elgort plays Tony, a Jet on parole, trying to live a more virtuous life. He meets and falls in love with María (Rachel Zegler), who is engaged to a Shark.

Things are not destined to end well.

Pretty early into the story we get “Jet Song,” which introduces us to, you guessed it, the Jets. The number starts with the gang discussing Tony: members are worried that Tony is out, but their leader Riff (Mike Faist) insists Tony is still one of them—through the power of song.

Riff learns about the Jets: their culture, their values, their hierarchy. It’s clear they consider themselves a family, and Tony leaving is a threat to their strength and identity. When we see the familial bond these characters have, we can better understand why they fight so hard for each other. We can all identify with the power of family—whether it’s the kind we’re born with, or in this case, the chosen kind.

And they don’t just tell us they’re a powerful unit by means of the lyrics—they show us through choreographed action. The gang dances in tandem through the streets, wandering into traffic as cars screech to a halt. People see them and recoil or run in fear.

The entire performance lasts less than three minutes, but in that brief time we got world-building, a musical dissertation on the stakes, and an introduction to one of the movie’s major factions. It established the gang’s bond, their tough-guy bona fides (as tough as a group of theater kids can be), and their technical proficiency as singers.

Structure

These are great scenes, but I doubt anyone would rank them as the best in their respective films. A good storytelling wave isn’t a horizontal line. It climbs, reaching its height at the climax.

Do you put the biggest and the best fight at the beginning of The Matrix? Nope! It comes at the end. Neo versus nigh-invincible computer programs in the form of black-suited agents.

“Jet Song” is a fine piece of singing, but it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of María singing over Tony’s dead body (that’s not a spoiler, the first production was in 1957, and anyway, I already said the story was a spin on Romeo & Juliet).

It’s important to think about this prioritization of impact when structuring your own narratives.

If you break it down, Spielberg’s West Side Story has 22 numbers, each one offering a crest, with a trough of character development and scene-setting and breath-catching in between. The Matrix has approximately seven major action set pieces (that’s if you consider set pieces within the last act as separate [the helicopter rescue, the subway fight], which, I do).

More than that, every song and every action sequence has to be relevant and transformational to the story.

Cool, but functional.

Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story, said that anyone can write a “bad song,” but even worse is writing a “wrong song,” one that doesn’t have any purpose or meaning.

And dancing is a little like fighting, right? Moulin Rouge! The Musical choreographer Sonya Tayeh said she watches shows “without music and [edits] accordingly, making sure every breath, every inch of movement is driving the story.”

You ever see a plot diagram? You can find one pretty easily online. It looks like a mountain, with the beginning, then a straight slope up, consisting of rising action, until you get to the peak—the climax. The slope down is the falling action, until you get to the end.

To my mind, the lines in the classic plot diagram are far too straight.

I believe a good storytelling line has little crests and troughs in them throughout—which tend to be much more apparent in genre stories, because of the expectations they set through the promises they make to the viewer: that some form of peril is imminent.

Pacing

Pacing is so important, and it’s everywhere. If you take a quick turn to Broadway, you realize how technical the format is. The ebb and flow of action and information is built into the foundational structure of many shows, so much so there are terms for them.

Most musicals have a big Opening Number, clearly establishing the world, the characters, and the show you’re about to see. In “Alexander Hamilton,” the first track in Hamilton, the whole cast comes out to tell you about the life of the play’s subject, and Aaron Burr literally tells you he’s going to shoot the guy (again, not a spoiler, because, history).

There’s the I Want song, where the protagonist literally tells us … what they want. In “The Wizard and I,” which Elphaba belts early in Wicked, she dreams about meeting the Wizard (of Oz) so she can find the love and acceptance and beauty she’s always craved.

And then there’s the 11 O’Clock Number, which comes toward the end of the show, and is meant to be a showstopper—a reward for an audience that stayed up late, but also, the culmination of the emotional journey. See: “Memory,” from Cats. I’m not entirely sure what the show is about, but it’s a really dope song.

I’m not saying all stories need to sound the same or follow the exact same format.

But I am saying that some things work because they work.

Head and Heart

We covered world-building, character, and structure. Just as important is the way these stories make a promise by creating a heightened sense of reality, and through this, establishing authority.

This is something Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk talks about. That once you establish authority, “the reader will trust you, believe you, and you can do anything with the plot.”

There are two ways to do this, he says. The “heart” method, through honesty and frankness, and the “head” method, by demonstrating knowledge or proficiency.

Both kung fu movies and musicals are excellent for establishing a high level of technical prowess. It’s easy for us to trust people who are good at things and then to accept the reality their skill sets create, where everyone is a martial arts master or a Broadway-caliber singer.

And there’s an amplified emotional intensity in both of these genres that is captivating and undeniable. The characters are drawn closer—into hitting or kissing range—and we learn more about their true selves in these high-stakes scenarios.

What they want, who they love, what they’ll fight for, and who they’ll die for.

It’s this emotional or physical peril that gives us the opportunity to cheer for them.

Whether it’s Elphaba’s singing “The Wizard and I” or Neo battling for the fate of humanity, these are the moments that truly highlight the stakes, when our allegiance to these characters becomes strongest.

The Bigger Picture

We don’t need to explicitly focus on kung fu movies or musicals to understand the point here.

In fact, I don’t want you to.

I start with those because it’s a little bit funny and will get you to pay attention, but it underscores something really important: You should be reading and watching stories outside your chosen format so you can better see the invisible strands of storytelling common across all genres.

Pull the camera back a little and instead of kung fu, just think about action movies in general. Look at Mad Max: Fury Road. For as propulsive as it is, there is a sense of rising and falling action that gives the juggernaut a heartbeat. There are still moments in which director George Miller allows the audience to catch their breath, but only for a moment—and even that intentionally shortened space amplifies the feeling of perpetual motion.

Crests and troughs. They’re everywhere.

You’ve got dancing in Saturday Night Fever.

You’ve got gunfights in John Wick.

You’ve got boxing in Rocky and football in Friday Night Lights.

I could go on. But I don’t think I need to. Because at this point, I bet you can see it.

Moving forward, those crests and troughs—what they accomplish, what they offer you as a creator—ought to stand out just a little bit more, and you should be better equipped to utilize them in your own stories.

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