CS Daily Archive > Son of a Pitch > 03/24/04

What screenwriting is -- and isn't?

by David Michael Wharton

Wherein your intrepid columnist discusses the five basic ingredients for a successful screenplay, and overstays his welcome in the vicinity of an omelet metaphor.

Let's say that, rather than pursuing screenwriting, you decided that you wanted to cook the world's best omelet. Maybe you've never cooked in your life, but you know a good omelet when you taste one, and you have some idea of what goes into one. But this doesn't mean you're prepared to don a floppy hat and cook the World's Best Omelet. To make a good omelet, you have to know what to do with those ingredients, how they function together, and in what proportions. Similarly, you have to know what makes a screenplay good before you can make a good screenplay. It seems to me that there are five overarching characteristics -- five Pillars of Screenwriting, if you're feeling snooty -- that are common to successful screenplays: Conflict, Movement, Economy, Structure, and Vision. Until we understand these basic ingredients, no matter how much hard work we put into our writing, more often than not we'll end up with nothing but a pile of broken eggs.

First, there's Conflict. Everybody knows the old chestnut that drama is conflict; it's the truth proclaimed in a million undergraduate writing courses. If you sat through any of those classes, you can probably run down the conflict list without even thinking about it: man versus himself, man versus man, man versus nature, man versus establishment, and man versus giant, acid-spewing robots. Even though the importance of conflict might seem self-evident, you can wind up in bad shape real fast if you don't give it some thought before you dive into the writing. What is your protagonist's conflict? What does he want, and what is standing in his way? What's the primary conflict in Casablanca ? Rick's internal struggle as he has to chose between self-interest and selflessness? There are other struggles as well -- nearly as many conflicts as there are characters -- but Rick's is the driving force for the story, the spine that holds all the subplots up. Casablanca could easily have been told from Lazlo's point of view, and that would have made a great story . . . but it wouldn't have been Casablanca. The screenwriters understood that finding your story's primary conflicts helps keep you on the straight and narrow path of good storytelling.

Once you've found your story's Conflict, you'll have a running start on understanding Movement. The one flows from the other: once you know your protagonist's Conflict -- what he wants, what he has to accomplish or overcome -- the question becomes, what's he going to do about it? Screenplays generally run between 90 and around 120 pages long, with each page roughly equating to one minute of screen time. That may seem like plenty of breathing room before you start, but think about all those times that you've seen a project -- a story, a report, even an email -- run out of room long before you ran out of things to say. We writers have a nasty tendency to digress, and screenplays are like sharks: if they don't keep moving, they die. If you're going off on a side path, make sure you have a good reason. One hundred twenty pages also doesn't allow for a protagonist who is reactive rather than active. Protagonists should actively work to achieve their goals, and an active character doesn't have time to digress. Think of Bruce Willis' John McClane from Die Hard. Once the action gets going, he has several clearly defined conflicts -- find out and stop the terrorists' plans, rescue his wife, stay alive -- that propel him forward. In his now-canonical text Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting , Syd Field stresses that screenplays are constantly on the move from opening scene to ending. One way to keep your script moving is to know, at least roughly, how your story ends before you begin. Knowing where the story winds up can give your writing an inertia that keeps pulling you forward even when you want to go off on a tangent.

Economy goes hand-in-hand with Movement. Knowing we only have 120 pages, give or take, every scene needs to serve a purpose -- preferably more than one. That's the elusive goal: to craft scenes that are rich and multi-layered. The perfect scene would feature crackling dialogue that reveals character, propels the plot, and rings with verisimilitude, all while foreshadowing later events, symbolizing theme via imagery, and offering clues to the movie's questions.

Any scene that accomplishes even two of these is already ahead of the game. M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense is great at this. Think of the scene where Bruce Willis' Malcolm Crowe meets his wife for dinner. Initially, it comes off as a character scene, speaking volumes about the state of Crowe's relationship with his wife through his words and her actions. Later, once Shyamalan pulls the big reveal, suddenly that scene is completely different -- it drops more hints about the truth that's hiding in plain sight. But here's the thing: even once that scene gets flipped on its head, it still works just as well as a character scene. Since Malcolm doesn't know he's dead, the insight his dialogue provides is still entirely valid. The Nepal sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark is another good example: it furthers the plot by providing Indy with the headpiece for the Staff of Ra; introduces a new character (Marion) and gives us an instant sense of her personality (she's the type of woman who can win a Nepalese drinking contest and still be up for a brawl); and sketches the back story between Marion and Indy. And it does all of that in only a few minutes of screen time, with a thrilling action sequence thrown in for good measure. That's Economy.

Next, there's Structure. Even if you don't know exactly what it is, you've probably heard about "three-act structure." We'll dissect this in more detail in later weeks, but basically it's one of the more common way to structure a screenplay, by dividing the story into three acts: setup, confrontation, and resolution. The structure gets more intricate the deeper you go, with various smaller elements and units of division designed to serve as checkpoints on your way from FADE IN to FADE OUT. Not every screenplay is organized into three-act structure, but every successful screenplay has some sort of structure supporting it. In the words of writer-director Ed Solomon (Levity), "You have to be honest with yourself and decide what your script needs. Some scripts require a three-act structure, some need a four-act structure, some need a five-act structure. Some I don't even think you can divide into acts; you have to divide them into instances or movements, sections."

Writing a screenplay without considering structure is like building a skyscraper without putting up a framework first -- you might, by sheer luck, pile the materials in such a way that it all stays upright . . . but I sure as hell wouldn't want to spend time inside the thing. Maybe your story lends itself to a more open structure, or to more than three acts. Maybe your story needs the crazy-quilt chronology of Pulp Fiction or the progressing-as-it-regresses structure of Memento. Structure should be designed to help you as a writer, not hinder you, but as a beginning screenwriter there's a lot to be said for understanding three-act structure. Like the old saying goes, you gotta know the rules before you can break them. Get a feel for basic structure; then you can write your seventeen-act, reverse-chronology opus about the Amsterdam hooker and the Brazilian investment banker.

Last but not least is Vision. The meaning here is twofold: first, that film is a primarily visual medium; and second, that it's a collaborative medium, and the final product will reflect the vision of many people. The first isn't too tricky; it's just a matter of seeing your story through the potential audience's eyes. That three-minute sequence where your protagonist weeps while berating himself via voiceover may be the most powerful stuff you've ever written, but three minutes is a long time to watch somebody cry on a bed.

The collaborative part of Vision is a bitter pill for a lot of writers to swallow. If you haven't done any creative writing aside from screenplays, there may well be less of a learning curve than those of us who started out writing prose. With novels and short stories, you're the sole creative source, so any details or insights you don't provide quite simply won't be there. The screenplay process is more akin to the creative process used in comics -- where the writer puts together a script and then passes it onto the other members of the creative team -- than that in novels.

If you embrace that collaborative element, it can be exciting. A skilled actor can often communicate more with the corner of his mouth than we could in a whole page of dialogue. The placement of the camera, the way each scene is lit, the set decorations . . . on a good day, everything works in tandem to bring your story to the screen. Will it be exactly as you pictured it in your head? Probably not. But that's usually not the disaster some writers fear. (And sometimes -- with the talents of hundreds of cast and crew members adding audio and visual layers to the story you created -- it just might be better.)

Conflict, Movement, Economy, Structure, and Vision. These are the ingredients that I've found in every script I've dissected. Understanding them, and how they work together, won't automatically guarantee you a stellar screenplay -- if there's a magic formula for screenwriting success, I've yet to find it, and my own little system is no exception -- but once you have a feel for the ingredients, your writing may just start looking more like an omelet, and less like a mess of broken eggs.

Next week: We'll talk about figuring out what assets you can bring to the table as you build a writing career . . . whether you live in Los Angeles or not.

David Michael Wharton is a regular contributor to Creative Screenwriting magazine. When not watching DVDs or otherwise procrastinating when he should be working on his screenplay [Ed.: or his column], he has been known to write for the likes of UGO Screenwriter's Voice and Comic Book Resources. You can email him, especially if you're deposed African royalty looking to secretly transfer millions of dollars into an American bank account.

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