The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 260 - The Weight of a Scene

It all comes down to one scene. The big reveal. The climax. The inciting incident. The heart-wrenching death of the protagonist's love. We've all written, giddy for the scene we know will sell our scripts and win us our Oscars. Anything can happen in a scene, and any scene has the potential to make - or break - a movie. 

Any scene can be a bull to write.

For me, that scene this week has come within the first 15 pages of the script and is charged with no small feat: it has to establish the protagonist, his goals, and his fears. In short, it has to prep him (and therefore, us) for his entire story arc. I know it might seem silly to boil such an important task down to one scene, but the anatomy of the first act of this new script is a little atypical. Many sci-fi scripts start off with a normal world, before the foreign/unknown/extraterrestrial/fictional invades Earth and kicks things into drive. That's no different with the collaboration I'm working on. However, this script also opens with a five-page prologue. The inciting incident still has to happen around page ten and is shortly followed by the aforementioned invasion, which turns normal on its head. In the script, that happens around page 13.

Page thirteen. With the first five pages setting future events up in a way that offer very little introduction of the protagonist. So, I'm down to eight pages to establish my protagonist, his world, his friends, and the current "normal" before all goes awry on page thirteen. It's a Sisyphean feat, especially when you consider that, in this particular scene, his character is being established mainly through dialogue with a confidante. Dialogue, as I'm sure you've experienced, can be a lot of fun or incredibly sticky. You don't want to be too on the nose. My protagonist isn't going to say, "this is my opinion of myself, and these are all the skeletons in my closet that are going to hold me back, which I need to overcome to grow as a person over the coming experience." But, of course, that's exactly what the subtext has to be, and it has to be subtle enough that it sounds natural, but not so esoteric that audiences won't follow it.

The dialogue has to be crisp, revealing, and deep. And right now, I have a three pages scene set up in which I can make it happen. The whole rest of the script will follow from there - and we have it, ready for this scene to be slotted in and the following dialogue tweaked to match - but the script can't go to our producer or representatives until this one scene is reworked. One little scene. What a bear. 

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 177 - How Closely do you have to Adhere to Three-Act Structure?

I nearly finished the first draft of Act Two last night. At this point, the script is 77 pages long. Technically, according to basic structure 101, I am 13 pages short of where I should be. 

If you look at introductory guides to screenwriting, the standard structure is as follows: Act One - 30 pages, Act Two - 60 pages (pages 30-90), Act Three - 30 pages (pages 90-120). Of course, this only follows if you're writing a 120 page script. Though 120 is "standard," the trend I've seen is to cut that down closer to 105. For action and horror, that's about what many writers target; anywhere from 90 to 105 is decent length for those genres. Romantic comedies and dramas can be a bit longer. It has been a long time since I've written a 120 page script, and even longer since I set out to do so.

So how do you readjust? An easy way is simply to do it proportionately. For example, if you know you're going to write roughly a 100 pages script, or are targeting that as a final page count, just reduce everything page-wise, keeping the ratio the same. Acts one and three are 25% of the script; act two is 50%. Therefore, you wind up with 25 page acts one and three and a 50 page act two. By this math, assuming I'm targeting 100 pages, I am two pages over where I should be. In the grand scheme of things, that's not bad, especially for a first draft. In reality, I'm actually aiming for a 95 page script - maybe even 90. So, the other solution to maintaining act structure for a shorter script is one I employ a lot: use the structure, until it begins to use you. 

Structure should be malleable. Yes, there is a definite, agreed upon industry standard format out there. Know it. Even if you don't use it. But that format is more a guideline and an unbreakable set of rules. If your second act is five pages short, so be it. Any reader, producer, or agent worth their salt will be able to tell when something is stretched or gratuitous. And you know what? That will be the first thing to wind up on the cutting room floor. So screw it. You don't need it, and it doesn't need you. 

I also don't follow the structure exactly. I'll aim for the "appropriate" 25 or 30 page first act depending on the final page count, but my third act rarely tops 20 pages these days. It's often closer to 15. I believe that if the first two acts have been successfully written, the ending will come quickly and practically write itself in the process. By the time I'm hitting the climactic final sequences, everything is coming to a head and simply can't sustain much more. There's no room for extra dialogue or exposition or action at that point - it's all been set up, and the proverbial volcano is erupting. No keeping it from overflowing any more.

Granted, I am focusing on action movies now. If you watch some, you'll probably notice that the last 15 or 20 minutes comprise the final showdown. Everything else has been taken care of or lost by then. That's how I like to structure my scripts, too. Dramas and comedies might be slightly different. 

The bottom line: act structure is a great guide, but it's one that is best tailored to the needs of your script.

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 174 - Act One Done

One of my favorite things about this time of year is that I can begin writing outside in my back yard again. Here in NYC, it's still a bit too chilly to spend time immobile outside some of the time, but we're getting close to consistently warm days. When it's actually nice - and not just deceptively so - I take my laptop outside and write in the sun. And yes, that's how I managed to burn my shoulders before May.

I spent most of the past week at the picnic table behind my house, ticking away, tracks from LAST OF THE MOHICANS and BRAVEHEART and GLORY and SUNSHINE seeping from my computer's speakers. The first few days were a little rocky, but I decided to push forward, eventually arriving at a first act that was just over 26 full pages long. I took the weekend off to read the results, and spent the past two days tweaking the pages, coming out with another page. 

Being so close to the material - I know what will come next and what the scenes are supposed to have accomplished (which means that I can easily assume they do that, when they in fact don't) - I know that I need a few sets of outside eyes on it now. Thankfully, that's what the League is for. We have a meeting next week, which I will be out of town for. My target is the June meeting - one full script, coming up!

In the meantime, it's on me to keep rolling with the draft; the worst thing I could do is lose the momentum I've built over the past week and a half. I have 27 and change pages in what I'm hoping will be about a 100 page script. I can't afford to take time off to "celebrate" act one; to do so would be foolhardy. As we say in theater, the show must go on. Only, without me, there's no show.

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 168 - How to Write and Use an Outline

At first, when I was still in school for writing, I openly doubted the importance of outlines. To me, they were suffocating documents that hampered my experience writing a script; I preferred having the story unfold for me as I went along, each day a surprise as to what came next. An outline meant that I would just sit down and bang out the details of a scene that I had already figured out, with little surprise of what was to come. The budding, less-wise writer in me thought that took any sort of art out of writing. 

More recently, as I have improved as a writer, I've come to see the great importance that outlining plays in my technique. Some writers refuse to use them; others outline until there's no room left for changes, and burn through writing the actual script. I, on the other hand, think I've come to learn that there's a comfortable middle ground to work in. I'll outline until I have more than just a loose structure of the film. The document I prepare gives an overall sense of what beats fall where and what happens in them, so it's pretty detailed. However, it's also fluid; that means that when I sit down to produce actual screenplay pages, I don't take the outline as gospel. Case in point: when I wrote my firefighter spec a while ago, I realized before I had even finished the first page that an entire component of the story was missing from the outline. Luckily, the structure I had mapped out was successful enough that it afforded obvious places to include these new characters I was adding, and allowed certain beats to be molded to incorporate them. This flexible outline approach is great - it gets me writing with little hesitation about what the next day will bring, but it also allows me time to problem-solve as I go along.

I've spent the past few weeks talking about various stages of the multiple outlines I'm working on, but I realized I have yet to really delve into what that looks like on the page. For a quick snapshot of what those look like - and, mind you, I have submitted both forms to my manager, so this is what people in the industry have seen - there are two main types of outlines I write. Often, I'll do one of each for each project I'm working on. 

The first type of outline is a pretty straight forward, scene by scene breakdown. It will look something like this:

ACT ONE

-Vietnam, 1972. Mark stands at the edge of a battlefield. He and his buddies are tense. They pass a joint, trying to calm down. Hushed small talk.

-BOOM a mortar round lands not far off. The trees erupt with gunfire.

-In the battle, Mark goes down with a shot to the gut.

-Later, in the field hospital, Mark recovers. A nurse stands nearby. He checks her out.

I tend to conceive of these lines as shots, almost, multiple beats within a sequence. The guys hanging around talking might be a page or two. The mortar round might be a half page. The battle will be a few pages, culminating in Mark's injury. The next scene we see opens in the hospital. Depending on the detail I put into each scene, this type of outline might be 6-10 pages. I'll mark a few tentpole scenes for myself with the following: ACT ONE, PAGE TEN (or INCITING INCIDENT), ACT TWO, MIDPOINT, and ACT THREE. More than anything, those demarcations are to help me with my page count targets. Acto Two should begin between 25 and 30, midpoint will land at 50 or 60 (depending on total count), and Act Three at 75-90. 

The other kind of outline is all prose. This approach will convert the beats into a narrative that reads like a short story. Again, this might be 6-8 pages. My goal with this is to see how the story checks out as a narrative. Sometimes, the beats make sense as bullet point, but reading and writing it the other way makes it easy to see where something's missing or redundant. This approach is also the one my manager tends to favor, and converting the outlines has proven helpful for me. I tend to think out my story in narrative terms a lot, and then convert it to the beat format, so half the work is already done by the time I sit down to work it out as a short story.

Anyway, hope that's helpful. What approach to outlining do you take - if you take one at all?

The Writing Week (Vol. 4) part 162 - Fleshing out the Mystery

My agent, manager, and I settled on my next spec last week. Thankfully, the chosen project is the horror script I talked a bit about last week. It's potentially a very cool project with material that has yet to be explored on film too much (beyond a C-grade horror flick here or there that I don't even know actually exists). I'm glad we landed on this idea, because it's one that I can really flex my muscles on, while trying something new.

At this point, the approach I'm working on for horror/mystery spec is investigative. By that, I meant that my protag will go on a journey to find out what happened to someone in the recent past, and the thrills and chills will come along the way. Over the weekend, I began outlining the script. (Technically, I'd already started, but the earlier strokes were broader, less specific). The thing is, I ran into a wall pretty early on. 

One of the key components in the first act (which will detail the events leading up to the character's disappearance) is a relationship with some people who live in the area. That relationship becomes integral to all that comes later in the script. It also determines a healthy portion of the action in Act One. While I thought that I could work my way around it, particularly because we don't actually see the lost character disappear, I found I was proving myself wrong.

There is a lot that goes unseen in my script, especially by the protagonist. However, as the writer, I cannot proceed without knowing it. Even if I develop enough material for another script, I have to flesh out the mystery. What happened to this person? Where did they go? These questions seem obvious, because they are the very ones that the protagonist is trying to answer throughout the script. However, their answer - to me - must come before any actual pages. There's a saying that the solution to an Act Three problem can be found in Act One, and that's proving extremely true here. The ability to map out a script all rests on the ability to plan through the first act. Right now, I don't have nearly enough to go on. Before I can flesh out the script, I have to understand and map out the mysterious events - even if we never see them in the pages or on the screen.