The show runner of a drama series I once worked on described what he wanted in the middle of an episode as being a “punch – counterpunch” dynamic between the good guys and the forces opposing them. As I coach writers these days on their projects, I often find myself using this phrase to describe how we want the second act of a movie (or main central section of any story) to feel.

No matter what your genre or medium, what stories tend to have in common is this:

A main character has a big problem to solve and/or goal to achieve, which tends to build and complicate as they actively try to resolve it. It gets worse and continually changes, in ways that entertain the audience and keep them compelled, because they’re emotionally invested in the character and a certain kind of desired outcome for them.

So one of the biggest challenges in any story is the need to keep things changing and developing in the middle, and moving forward in such a way as to keep the audience hooked.

One way to approach it is to think about what initial steps the main character might believably take, and how those might go wrong, or at least only partially right, while also resulting in more difficulties they will have to deal with in future scenes. After all, it’s characters dealing with difficulties that we audience members almost exclusively want to watch, so we’re almost always looking for how to increase those.

Often these problems and complications that result from their actions are going to come about because whoever or whatever opposes them (be it a particular human antagonist or something else), is going to “counterpunch” in response to the main character’s “punch.”

That counterpunch will put the main character in a new situation with fresh problems to deal with. And then the cycle can begin again. They punch, and their opposing forces counterpunch. Or the opposing forces punch, and they counterpunch. Either way, it should feel like a great sporting match, to some extent — in that neither team is able to easily win the day. Instead, both continue to fight, responding to what the other has brought with their own new ideas and actions. This is true in everything from action movies to romantic comedies — where the “problem” of the story is the thing in the way of a relationship.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park, The Book of Mormon, Team America: World Police) have said a key to storytelling they learned at some point was that it’s not, “This happens, then this happens.” Instead, it’s “This happens, therefore this happens” or “This happens, but this happens.” In other words, when a character takes action, it changes the situation in some way and causes more things to happen as a result, often unforeseen things that aren’t helpful to what they’re trying to do. And this often comes from a “counterpunch.”

Robert McKee also talks about this in Story: how most effective scenes involve a character (typically the main character of that story) taking action to try to get something they want in the world, and not getting the result they had hoped for and expected. And it’s the improvising that they have to do, in the face of that, which tends to be most entertaining and intriguing for the audience.

“Point of view” is a big part of this. The audience is meant to take on the subjective perspective of the “main character” of a story, and then stay with them, in virtually every scene, as they continually take action after action in pursuit of their desires, then deal with the consequences, regroup, and continue on. So good scenes generally depict that special person the audience is emotionally aligned with trying to do something, and encountering conflict.

Where writers sometimes go off track is when they depict other characters who aren’t the “main character,” separately from them. (Or write scenes where there is no real conflict or agenda someone is pursuing, but simply a sharing of information or opinions in a low-conflict way.) This generally happens because they don’t realize how important point of view is to earning and maintaining that all-important goal of “audience emotional investment.” That tends to dissipate when we leave the main character, which is why it’s generally better to meet other characters only when they do, and not separately from them.

I can imagine you’re now asking this:

“So there’s only one main character and they have to be in every single scene? That doesn’t seem right!”

Here’s how I see it: there is only one main character in a story, typically, and yes, they should be in pretty much every scene. But there might be multiple stories within one script, each with a different main character, and their stories can interweave. So in every scene we’re following the main character of one of the stories in the way described above.

Virtually every TV episode or pilot works this way, as well as many books and plays. There might be two, three, or even ten or more “stories” in one episode or work. Movies, on the other hand, usually only have one main story and a subsidiary “B Story” with the same main character as the “A Story.”

Whatever the situation in your script, and however many “stories” it has, it’s helpful to remember this one thing: we want each main character’s overall problem in each story (which hopefully is really compelling to the audience for the 7 reasons I talk about in my new book) to be front and center in every scene of their story, always developing, and generally building in difficulty and importance, because of an ongoing sequence of punch – counterpunch actions between them and whoever or whatever is against them.

If you do that, and it’s all believable and entertaining to watch — and the audience has a strong reason to care about this main character and their outcome — you will be on the right track.