All that being said Blake and almost everyone else in the industry confuses structure with formula. Structure is about pacing and a film or any story told since the beginning of time that isn’t properly paced fails miserably. The beats are the structure. Formula, not structure, is where Blake and virtually every other expert on the subject tells us exactly what is suppose to happen at each beat or turn. The overwhelming majority of films that get made adhere to formula. The problem is that anybody who has seen more than a dozen formulaic films knows what’s coming before it happens. It really comes down to what you’re writing and who your writing for. It should be noted that very few of the truly great films made adhere to formula. That is one of the things that makes them great.

You need to learn how to walk before you can run. Look at Picasso. Before he entered his abstract phase where he shocked the world with his talent, he had a more formalist period; a period during which he stuck the rules as laid out by those who came before him. He was learning.

The takeaway is: before you can break the rules, you need to internalize (learn it, love it, live it) what the rules actually are.

And as was said above, Blake Snyder did not invent these Beats, he merely analyzed them, described them and wrote down what they are. The fraternity of screenwriters, in cahoots with with movie audiences over the past 100 years, are the people that invented them.

Even if (especially if) you want to ignore these rules, you still need to know deep down what they are.

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