CS Daily Archive > Son of a Pitch > 05/20/04

Breaking the Story Without Breaking the Story

By David Michael Wharton

Outlines, beat sheets, treatments… there are plenty of different ways to break down the story before you start writing. Which one is right for you, and for your project?

There's still some debate about just how much you need to know about your story before you charge heedless into the breach. Some say you need to know only certain road signs along the path: beginning, end, and a few key developments along the way. Others insist on a more thorough game plan, with full outlines or treatments synopsizing the action from start to finish. Which is it? Well, from the writers I've talked to, there really isn't any correct answer. In fact, the most common response I've received is, "Oh, I've tried everything at one point or another."

First, a little vocabulary lesson, since this is a beginner's column, and not everybody is as schooled on the lingo as others. A beat sheet is a short breakdown of the important moments in a script -- the beats. Moving up from a beat sheet, we have an outline. This is a more detailed animal, breaking down every scene of the script, point by point. Finally, we have the treatment, which is a detailed breakdown of the story in prose form, sort of a cross between a short story and a synopsis. Treatments can be anywhere from several pages to upwards of forty. (There's also the scriptment, which is what James Cameron called his thick treatment for Spider-Man.) Then there's the old standby, 3 x 5 cards, with each card denoting a scene. The cards allow you to see the overall flow of the story (some even color code them), and notice any potential pacing problems. Any or all may be used in the prewriting process of plotting out the story.

In plotting out my screenplay, Imagine That, I've dabbled with all of them except 3 x 5 cards (though I may try that at some point), and I've found each of them useful. It was only after I worked through both a beat sheet and an outline for Imagine That that I finally wrote an 11-page treatment. This worked great for me, because it allowed me to flex my old reliable prose muscles when it came to fleshing out the story and characters, but building upon the structural skeleton that I'd built in the earlier stages.

I think beginning screenwriters need to be more detailed in their prewriting than experienced ones, and this seems to be supported by the writers I've interviewed. In the early stages, as we learn the form, these tools help keep us on target and give us a sort of situational awareness, but once you've been doing it for a while, the process becomes natural, almost subliminal.

Let's hear from Robert Nelson Jacobs (The Shipping News, Werewolf by Night): "Some people are obsessive about an outline, where they have to know every beat of the story. That's something that has changed for me over the years. I used to be very meticulous and wanted to answer every question before I began writing. As I've become more experienced, I'm learning to trust myself more. I still have to know beginning, middle, end; I have to know the major beats of the story; for each character, I have to know, in the most general sense, what that character's journey is going to be. I have to know where they're going to start and where they'll end up, and in what ways they'll be changed. But I don't necessarily have to know what's going to happen in every scene. Of course, you're always sort of checking against your outline. There are certain things in your original conception of the story that you want to remain true to: certain themes or big ideas. You want to always check against them and ask, 'Is this the story I want to be telling?' At the same time, you want to give yourself the freedom to discover different paths, or different ways of getting to that goal. And occasionally, you discover that that original goal isn't right, and that you've come up with something better."

That seems to be the key, and one that we sometimes forget. I know that when I first began learning screenplays, I sure as hell didn't want to take the time to write outlines or beat sheets or anything else. By God, I had a kickass story in my head, and I wanted to get it on paper! So I charged ahead for 15 pages or so, started questioning where I was headed, started habitually rewriting said 15 pages, and finally ended up snapping holding up a Starbucks during a 40-hour police standoff.

I may have made up that last part.

Identity's Michael Cooney still has troubles with this (with prewriting, not with holding up Starbucks). "It's so tricky talking about a third act, about what my character will be doing and how he'll be saving the day, if I don't know every other step he's taken. In life, we are the conclusion of everything we've done before. It's so tricky to say who actually will be walking through the door in the final scene, if I don't know how he reacted during the bank heist scene. Something like Unique (Cooney's current project, from Dean Motter's graphic novel), where before I begin writing, the studio wants to know what I'm going to write -- that seems like a time travel question to me. Part of my brain asks, 'Well, how do I know what I'm going to write before I write it?'"

It's about knowing where you're starting from and where you're headed, with a few guideposts along the way. Early in our writing careers, most of us are going to need more guideposts than those that have been doing this for years. That's to be expected. Don't look at these things as obstacles between you and the script. Look at them as tools to help keep you on track. I was coming into the game with the wrong mindset, probably because I was spoiled by writing short stories. Nobody outlines a friggin' short story, and if they do, they're probably also the type of person who would organize their DVD collection, not alphabetically, but thematically. (And yes, that is a jibe at the expense of one of my good friends…hello there, Mr. Adams!) The point being, I wanted to dive right in and let my muse do the work. But 120 pages is a lot more daunting than 20, and you really have to have some idea where you're going.

Keep in mind, it's not as if the outline is inviolate divine doctrine. Once you start writing, you may feel that the story needs to veer away from the outline -- in fact, it's almost certain that this will happen. Once the story starts popping and takes on a life of its own, it will want to go where it needs to go, and that's fine; the outline's just there to remind you of what you wanted to accomplish when you started, what story you wanted to tell, so if you divert from that course, you can make sure it's for a good reason, and that you're not just wandering blindly into the desert.

And on that note, I leave you one last point of view. In addition to having written Riverworld for the Sci Fi Channel, Stuart Hazeldine has one of the most interesting unproduced resumés in Hollywood (a Blade Runner sequel spec, which first brought him notice, and a high-fantasy version of Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death, written with Alex Proyas). He told me his own process for breaking down the story:

"I've found a formula that works for me, whether it's a treatment or a screenplay or what-have-you. I call it 'Bones, Muscles, and Skin.' The bones of the script are literally just going through and writing all the slug lines. That normally takes about two hours, but you can only do that once you have some sort of treatment, even if it's illegible and in a foreign language. You have to know roughly what the structure is. The slug lines are the bones. What I call the muscles is going through the slug lines and writing every possible thing that could be said or done: action, description, or dialogue. Just writing in no particular order: you write down bits of dialogue, you write down anything that could potentially go into that scene. Once you've done that -- and that's a big process -- you go through and actually write the scenes. I find that as I struggle with that middle phase, I naturally give more order to it. I start to move scenes around or say, 'That works better with this.' So when you finally get to the last phase, skin, which is making everything pretty and writing it properly, there's a lot less work for you to do."

Bones, muscles, skin. Food for thought, children.

Now, go write (or pre-write, as the case may be).

The big R word: research, and how it's not primarily about facts and figures. Or at least, it shouldn't be.

David Michael Wharton is a freelance writer and journalist from Texas, and is assistant editor of CS Daily. When not slaving away in the editorial salt mines, he somehow finds the time to write his column Son of a Pitch, as well as occasional movie and DVD reviews. He is, of course, working on a screenplay.

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