Dispatch From The Quest: Paul Wie
Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.
Today: Paul talks about how “diligence leads to clarity”:
This week we dove deep into the life of our protagonist. Taking all the interviews, notes, questionnaires, scenes, and monologues from our first two months, we distilled this information into an extensive bio and treatment of our main character. Having to fill in every gap in his life, having to define who he is and why he is in a detailed, compelling way was difficult work. But it was vital and inspiring work. Had I been writing this script on my own, I may have been tempted to rush into the page writing — the fun part — the part I’m itching to get to. But having explored my character in such a thorough manner, I think my screenplay will be more complex, more truthful, and more dramatically rich than it would’ve been had I jumped the gun. So thank you Quest for holding me back. Diligence leads to clarity, and I’m grateful for all this prep work. Because without fail, every week, I learn something new about my characters. Every week, I go deeper into my story.
I get it. The instinct to type those magical words FADE IN and leap into writing the story. You may see the Protagonist. You may know the other characters to a certain degree. Key scenes in the setup may have sprung to mind. Act One may lay out so nicely in your mind.
Then there’s Act Two…
The pages come more slowly, don’t they?
35. 38. 40. 41…
Where to next?
Uh…
You try this way. That.
Wait. What if I rethought this character. That subplot.
You go back. Revise.
Another thought. Another revision.
Now you’re back on P. 12 and…
What was I thinking? This isn’t working…
40 pages or so. Caught up in a morass of not knowing where to go.
And yet another story left to die on the vine…
All because you didn’t do the one thing most professional writers do: Break the story in prep.
That’s the negative narrative. Paul offers up the positive one: “Diligence leads to clarity.”
If you are diligent in working out your story in prep, your chances of actually finishing a draft go up exponentially.
I just put the Questers through a challenging week of brainstorming. In our teleconference, we considered the potentially good stuff they had surfaced, but also key questions about their stories.
Those questions will not go away. They have to be answered. It’s easy to say, “I’ll figure those out when I’m writing.”
Then Act Two comes along and… see above.
So yet again, another post dedicated to the importance of breaking your story. Can you do it without any prep work? Sure. Anything is possible. But if you want to develop an approach to the craft that maximizes your chances of generating the number of scripts you need to learn screenwriting and have the tools to be a working screenwriter, take on assignments and pound them out on time and with quality, remember Paul’s words about the value of prep-writing:
“Diligence leads to clarity.”
Next week: More Dispatches from The Quest.
About Paul: Director + Writer. Loves Spielberg, Truffaut, Abrams, Kurosawa, Attack the Block, cinematic stories beautifully told. @paulhwie.