“Have a plan”

The Bitter Script Reader recently did something with his readers called “Project Wilson Phillips,” a collaborative writing challenge. TBSR posted something this week, a lesson learned from the process:

As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, interesting problems result when you set out on your story without a clear plan. Before long, narrative threads are lost, character arcs loose cohesion, and the plot falls apart. Old characters are forgotten, or drastically changed mid-stream to fit the developing story, while new characters might be introduced to explain plot holes.

With Project Wilson Phillips, we had three groups all start with the same ten pages, the same main characters — and yet three COMPLETELY different stories of varying quality emerged. There were high points in each of them, and also there seemed to be details that got lost along the way in each of them. Without any direction, a lot of writers got stuck making the characters explain the story, just so there was some sense of everything fitting together. And if you go in each of the script, you’ll find some small dropped threads that went nowhere. In a script with a plan, those all would have been pruned out.

And that’s the danger of working without a plan. It’s a little like tracing a maze with a pencil. Every now and then you’ll take a wrong turn which leads to a dead end. You can back up and find your way out and to the right path, but that little detour is still going to be there, so that anyone who follows your path will see that run up to the wrong turn.

If you preplan, those mistakes don’t exist.

 — — 

When you’re working on a “real” script, it’s essential that you know the themes and the story trajectory from the start. Let’s take Back to the Future for example. If I wrote ten or fifteen pages that only got as far as putting Marty in the time machine and sending him back to the fifties, any writer that takes up after me could have taken that story in any direction. Maybe he’d get involved in the civil rights movement, or perhaps he decides to buy vintage comics and baseball cards that he knows he can sell for big bucks when he gets back. Maybe he uses his knowledge of the future to come up with inventions.

But let’s say I give you those fifteen pages and also the logline: “A teenager travels back in time to encounter his parents as teenagers and after inadvertently messing up their first meeting, must get them to fall in love before he ceases to exist.” Suddenly there’s a much stronger spine to the story than just the novelty of sending an 80s teen back to the fifties, no?

Better still, what if I told you how the theme would be that a person’s past — even small incidents in it — can have a profound role in shaping the adult he becomes. Then the subsequent writers might get that as Marty changes his parent’s past, he affects who they grow up to be.

And I bet if I gave the groups those fifteen pages and those two pieces of information, the resulting scripts might have been a lot more cohesive, focused and similar to each other. There still probably would be the issue of the plot being made up as it went along, but there would be a stronger direction here than before.

So keep that in mind when working on your own screenplays. The best writers work from plans.

I call it prep-writing. And there’s perhaps nothing more important when writing a spec script than this part of the process. Brainstorming, character development, research, plotting, outlining — tiresome work, but critical to finding your story.

I know there are writers who prefer to type FADE IN and search for their story that way, a journey of discovery. As I say, there’s no right way to write a script. And if that approach has proved successful for you, then godspeed, my friend!

But if you’re a FADE IN first person and you have not achieved the results you want in your scripts, you owe it to yourself to try prep-writing at least one time. I don’t mean a few days or even a week kicking around your story idea. I’m talking real work: 

* Immerse yourself in the universe of your story, burrowing beneath its surface to find its distinctive feel and tone. 

* If this world is unfamiliar territory to you, then research. That way you not only gain a greater understanding of the place, you also find anecdotes and bits of business you can use in your plot. 

* Dig into your Protagonist character and ask key question: What do you want? What do you need? Who is keeping you from your goal? Consider each character that emerges into being and ask what their core narrative function is, and what their connection is to the Protagonist.

* Give yourself ample time to brainstorm, letting your mind free associate everything and anything, putting it all down into a master list. You may only end up using 5% of what your imagination conjures up, but it’s likely that 5% will be pure gold. 

* Work and rework the plot. And don’t be so quick to get from Point A to Point B. Part of the adventure in a story are complications, roadblocks, and reversals, the twists and turns that push the Protagonist to their limit, and make the journey all that much more dramatic and meaningful.

* Outline. Create a version of your story that lays out from beginning to end, along with a clear sense of what happens in its emotional plot.

In other words, like TBSR said, come up with a plan before you start the page-writing part of the process. You will save yourself heartache and stress, approach writing the script with much more confidence than you would otherwise, make the chances much better that you will actually finish the script, and finally this: you will be approaching the craft the same way most professional writers do, cracking the story before typing FADE IN.

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