The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 259 - It All Goes Back to the First 15 Pages

I spent my Presidents' Day, not touring the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument as perhaps others did, but rather going over the second draft of my sci-fi collaboration with my writing partner. Almost a year to the date since we began working together, we now have a very strong workable draft of our script. It didn't come easily or quickly, though. Leading up to today, we went through seven drafts of our outline (and minor revisions along the way) and two major drafts of the script, before arriving at the one we went over today. 

We're poised to send the script to the producer who paired us together. Before we do it, though, there's one more issue we have to tackle in the script. It's not exactly a small matter. In fact, it's what the entire screenplay is built on. I'm talking about the protagonist's character. 

The hero of our story is a senior in college with some heavy baggage in his past. He is incredibly talented and smart, but he's also afraid (for good reason) of his own potential. He's at an amazing academic institution, but he's squandering his potential. In short, he's both the most capable student in his class, and a slacker. 

We've been struggling with our protagonist since we started working together, but today it was most apparent that he can't straddle the line we have him on now. It just doesn't work. And if our protagonist and his motivations don't work, then the rest of the script fails, too. 

In fact, over the course of our one and a half hour conversation, pretty much the only thing we discussed was our protagonist. More specifically, we spoke about our protagonist as we see him in the first 15 pages. Fifteen pages. Because of how we structured the screenplay (a 4 page prologue, inciting incident around page 11, and a big reveal on 15), we only have the first fifteen pages to set up our protagonist. However, with the prologue, we go down to eleven pages. That's not a lot of room to establish a deeply wounded character with incredible potential. 

We spoke at length about him. What does he want? What motivates him? What is he afraid of? Of course, all of this will have to come to a head over the course of the script, as he evolves, grows, and changes by the end of act three. I think we landed in a good place by the end of our conversation, but it just goes to show - if your protagonist isn't clearly written, especially within the first fifteen pages of your script, then good luck getting it to a producer. We're not even going to show the one that we work with our draft until this issue is resolved. It's a no-brainer that she would ask us about the protagonist - or tell us that she doesn't understand his motivations. It's that apparent. No way will we turn in something that's weak at such a fundamental level.

How do you make sure your protagonist is as strongly written as he or she can be?

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 119 - Writing a Character Backstory Helped Me with My Re-Writes

My goal for this weekend was to hit page 60 of my script. Granted, I’m primarily re-writing from page 40 on, so the task didn’t seem that challenging (I started writing around this time last week). However, when I sat down to write Tuesday and essentially got nowhere, I realized that I couldn’t just plow on ahead like I normally do. I was being held back by something, something very important; I had changed the nature of my protagonist fairly dramatically, setting up a very dark past for him, and I was having trouble advancing before fully fleshing that out and reconciling it with the existing pages.

To see that typed now, the problem seems obvious. Of course I couldn’t write 50 new pages with a drastically different protagonist before addressing Act One and the first part of Act Two. What’s the saying? “If you’re having Act Two and Act Three problems, the solution probably lies in Act One.” Sometimes, you just have to re-learn the old lessons through trial and error.

I thought I could achieve what I needed to before doing too much digging into my protagonist’s past. A tweak here and there to Act One – his past catches up to him in Act Two, but remains largely hidden until then – and I would be good to go. But something was still nagging at me, something telling me that what I had was… incomplete. In fact, the first scene that I sat down to write involved a flashback to one of the darkest memories from my protagonist’s past. There was no way I was going to b.s. my way through it, so I did the only thing that I knew would help me move forward – I wrote a character backstory.

Normally, I don’t tend to put too much about my characters down on paper. I did it in the outlining stage of another project I was working on, and I did a tiny bit in a general outline for this one, but I avoided specifics. I thought that the “gist” would suffice. Obviously, it didn’t, because when I was staring at that FLASHBACK transition, I had no idea what to write next. I set aside the script for a night, opened Word, and pumped out a page and a half about my protagonist’s previous life, detailing who he was and what he tries to hide from his life ten years ago. And once that was done, I felt like I’d made the breakthrough I needed. It was the most elegant piece of writing, and it probably won’t all make it into the script, but it was essential to my work. And, now that I’ve done it, I can move forward with him further into the script.