<div class="seriesmeta">This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series <a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/Best Of 2020/climb-into-screenplay/" class="series-2591" title="Climb Into Screenplay">Climb Into Screenplay</a></div><div class="seriesbox"><div class="center"> <a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/Best Of 2020/climb-into-screenplay/" class="series-2591" title="Climb Into Screenplay">Climb Into Screenplay</a></div><ul class="serieslist-ul"><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-1/" title="How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-2/" title="How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-3/" title="How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li-current">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)</li></ul></div>The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said, &#8220;A film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.&#8221;
That&#8217;s perfectly fine for the director of Breathless and dozens of other films that openly defy storytelling traditions, but we screenwriters that delve deeply into story need to work within that beginning, middle and end order to take our characters through their paths of growth and change. (Yes, there are protagonists who are designed to not grow or change at all, but even they have to get from where they are in Act One to where they are in Act Three, even if it ends being the same place.)
So, now that you have looked deeply into the economy and purpose of each scene you plan to include in your work, here are a few things to consider when crafting the three acts of your screenplay:
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<h3>The Opening Scene Sequence</h3>
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Blake Snyder put a lot of stock in the opening scene as a microcosm of the story to come, and it’s a really great exercise to see how much we can promise with our opening. Sometimes that promise is explored with narration (American Beauty) or a slam-bang action sequence that puts us on notice (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and, perhaps most impressively, in a scene that uses only visuals to draw us in, making us curious about the world we are about to inhabit and leaving plenty of questions about what it might be. Such is the case with The Conversation. In American Beauty (screenplay by Alan Ball), Lester Burnham’s narrated rundown of his supposedly perfect life prepares us for the irony and sarcasm to come. (Although the opening scene is actually a very quick and equally provocative statement from his daughter, bemoaning her father’s predilections.)
In Raiders Of The Lost Ark (screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan), everything about the homage-to-the-old-serials opening lets us know that there will be more of the same to come. In The Conversation (screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola), we are not sure what to think. We’re going closer and closer into activities in San Francisco’s Union Square, but the context will be slowly unspooled over the course of the story. In each case, a great opening sequence leaves us with an understanding of what we are about to watch and contains everything we need to orient us to the landscape we’ll be visiting for a couple of hours. Strive to find that richness in your own opening images.
<div id="attachment_28347" style="width: 617px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28347" class=" wp-image-28347" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-3-3.jpeg" alt="Creative Screenwriting Magazine" width="607" height="334" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-3-3.jpeg 755w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-3-3-150x82.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-3-3-250x137.jpeg 250w" sizes="(max-width: 607px) 100vw, 607px" />Indy (Harrison Ford) Raiders Of The Lost Ark</div>
Another strong Act One technique is to keep us waiting for information. Hold back. Plant an idea and let us wonder what it means. A simple example would be your protagonist being unable to approach a door in the first five pages, and not until the beginning of Act Two will we discover the backstory of that. (You might even hold off until the very end, depending on how you are defining the character’s arc; for example, if the denouement is tied into a final discovery about that door that is going to let your character finally break through to growth and change. In general, though, don’t explain too much in the first fifteen pages, let us settle in and be curious.
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<h3>The Midpoint Challenge</h3>
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Complete this sentence: “At my midpoint [this happens].” I recently worked with a student who filled in that blank and in so doing we both realized that their midpoint was really their ending! The plot had bottlenecked to such a place that the satisfying, right conclusion had been reached halfway through. As basic as it may seem, check your midpoint as you stack your scenes and make sure your protagonist (or ensemble) have somewhere to go from that point on.
Much like the door from the previous example, the judicious unfurling of your story and characters (and having an ending already on mind while you write), will allow you to find the point at which your protagonist (or a crucial fulcrum in your ensemble) finally gets it. Finally figures out how their tragic flaw is holding them back, finally realizes what they have been doing wrong and who they have to make peace with, along with themselves. If that protagonist is not still pretty ignorant of how they need to change by the midpoint, you’ve got nowhere to go.
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<h3>The Ending</h3>
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This series (indeed, the previous paragraph) has already addressed the idea of making sure to have an ending of your script in mind (even if it is several alternate endings before you decide on one) since it Is true that if you are unclear as to what you are building to, the progression of the acts could be muddled.
The other decision a screenwriter must make is where to leave the reader/viewer when the story ends. This choice is often linked strongly with genre. A mystery? You will probably want to let the audience in on whodunit. Romantic Comedy? Do we need to know if the meet-cute ends in a long-term relationship, or will the main character decide to choose none of the romantic options and head off on their own? A drama? Perhaps just a hint of hope for the protagonist’s future growth and evolution. Horror? Maybe a suggestion that things are only going to get worse. Straight-up comedy? We’re happy to be left on a note of continuing chaos.
<div id="attachment_28348" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28348" class="size-full wp-image-28348" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-4-2.jpeg" alt="Creative Screenwriting Magazine" width="600" height="337" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-4-2.jpeg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-4-2-150x84.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-4-2-250x140.jpeg 250w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari) American Beauty</div>
What we want the audience to feel at the end comes right back to the themes we have chosen to explore and what our worldview is for any given idea. What’s on our mind should be seamlessly integrated into the storytelling, so that anyone encountering the material will tune in to the intent, even if they cannot put it into words. (After all, that was the writer’s job.)
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<h3>The Ever-Evolving Nature of the Screenplay</h3>
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You have finished your first draft, paying attention to all the building blocks mentioned in this series.
Your final task, then, is to remain open to change. There may be no more fluid form of artistic expression in the world than the screenplay, subject as it is to further interpretation by a team of technicians, actors, directors, and money. In the perfect world, your work has led to this next stage, wherein the screenplay will, indeed, be brought to life on locations and soundstages. Each element involved in this leveling-up may well require you to go even deeper into the possibilities that your story contains. The producer’s vision may be in conflict with the director’s and both sensibilities are being thrown your way. An actor drops out and the part needs to be refined on the page to accommodate the replacement.
A location is lost and now the intent of a previously-written scene needs to be re-imagined in a new place. All of these things and more may occur while your script is being brought to the screen. Happily, though, in this case scenario, you are being compensated for your artistic flexibility and sense of play.
Roll with it!
<fieldset><legend>Series Navigation</legend><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-3/" title="&lt;&lt; How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)">&lt;&lt; How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)</a></fieldset>

How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)

<div class="seriesmeta">This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series <a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/Best Of 2020/climb-into-screenplay/" class="series-2591" title="Climb Into Screenplay">Climb Into Screenplay</a></div><div class="seriesbox"><div class="center"> <a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/Best Of 2020/climb-into-screenplay/" class="series-2591" title="Climb Into Screenplay">Climb Into Screenplay</a></div><ul class="serieslist-ul"><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-1/" title="How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-2/" title="How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li-current">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)</li><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-4/" title="How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)</a></li></ul></div>You’ve put your script through its try-everything development stage, getting clear on your characters, locations, themes, and intent. That was fun, wasn’t it? Now it’s time to connect-the-dots and build your story scene-by-scene.  
On the way into this, decide on a few things first:
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<h3>Point-of-View (POV)</h3>
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Perhaps strange to think about, since we associate point-of-view (POV) with a camera position and may even designate a POV shot within our scripts on occasion. Nonetheless, a decision has to be made regarding whose perspective is driving our story. Most of the time its the main character. Sometimes it can be the antagonist or even an omnipotent narrator as discussed below.
In action films like Taken, the stakes and the obstacles are clear and must be solved through the intervention of one easily-identifiable hero. But there are times when decisions must be made about who is truly our audience surrogate. In The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s story, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is the protagonist in the sense that he must break out of prison in order to reclaim his innocence, but the perspective, tone, and mood of the script and its emotional takeaways are given over to Red (Morgan Freeman), who also narrates.
Sometimes, if you are moved to choose a narrator in your story, it may be pointing you toward the POV you ought to be telling the story from, even if your protagonist is going through the driving action. In an ensemble story, the POV is more easily likened to the omniscient narrator of a novel— an all-seeing God of story dropping in on each life within the story and sharing this breadth of perspectives in one feature-length narrative. Nothing like Marvel’s The Avengers to call attention to this, but also ensemble mysteries like Knives Out or romantic comedies like Love, Actually fit this paradigm, as well as countless multi-character television series. 
<div id="attachment_28337" style="width: 642px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28337" class=" wp-image-28337" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-7-1024x576.jpeg" alt="" width="632" height="356" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-7-1024x576.jpeg 1024w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-7-150x84.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-7-250x141.jpeg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-7-768x432.jpeg 768w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-7.jpeg 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 632px) 100vw, 632px" />Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) in Knives Out</div>
But, thinking about these ensemble character TV shows is a great way into a lesson in perspective. Mad Men concerned the fates of at least six “main characters (Don, Peggy, Joan, Betty, Pete, Roger) whose A and B stories intersected in most episodes, not to mention the fates of Don and Betty’s children and the various post-divorce relationships of Don and Betty. Yet, we are always aware that Mad Men is Don Draper’s show. That his character arc, his energy, his issues, and problems are what is driving the tone and story progression of the series.
Veep similarly gets its focus from Selina Meyer’s predicaments, even as the farcical predicaments of everyone else on her (and other people’s) staff unfold. What about Game of Thrones? A true ensemble, or is there a character who is a key fulcrum around which all emotional aspects of the story revolve? (Get going on the chat boards on that one, GOT fans.) When crafting your story, make certain that you make a clear decision about whose (and/or how many) perspectives we are meant to take in.
Confusion in this area leads to lagging pace and unclear story flow. The recent film Shirley provides a good example of this. Adapted from a novel about real-life author Shirley Jackson, it is atmospheric and evocative. However, it also divides its time between a focus on the titular Shirley and two invented young houseguests that act as audience surrogates. With this constant shifting in focus, it’s difficult to tell which of these characters is meant to invite our emotional investment.
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<h3>Writing Style</h3>
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Every writer has their own way of expressing themselves. This section is not about your voice as an author, which is something each of us cultivates and burnishes over time, but rather the stylistic format of what you write. There are any number of produced screenplays available online, and if you examine the ones from the 1990s and even the early 2000s, you will find them quite wordy, with a great quantity of description and often quite a few scripts with plenty of camera direction.
For a good part of Hollywood history, the fact that the written page stood in for a camera was more apparent. Writers felt emboldened to “direct” the reader (and, hence, whatever director might come on board) with as many pertinent details as might be necessary to translate to the screen.
No longer. In the present day, it’s about conveying the basic idea of well-paced visuals with brief, evocative phrasing that still, in their own way, guide the reader to what is being seen. Dan Gilroy&#8217;s screenplay for Nightcrawler or the Beck &amp; Woods vehicle A Quiet Place caused quite a stir in the screenwriting community with their non-conforming formats which perfectly conveyed space and emotion.
<div id="attachment_28339" style="width: 674px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="Creat"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-28339" class=" wp-image-28339" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-2-3.jpeg" alt="Creative Screenwriting Magazine" width="664" height="373" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-2-3.jpeg 780w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-2-3-150x84.jpeg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-2-3-250x140.jpeg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/iu-2-3-768x431.jpeg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 664px) 100vw, 664px" /></a>Lee Abbott (John Krasinski) A Quiet Place</div>
One very quick stylistic fix a writer can make is to remove every “we see” that might appear in the text. One’s screenplay is a blueprint for a film, a visual medium—it’s abundantly clear that everything on the page is about something we will see. Try it—see how authoritative and visual your description feels without the “we see.”
The sentence arguably carries much more potency without it and tells the reader that what is being “seen” simply is. Remove “begins to” and such phrases, too. Nobody on screen is beginning to do anything. They are doing, or not doing. Basically, keep an eye on how little is needed to suggest that we are imagining a movie while reading. 
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<h3>The Value of Outlining</h3>
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As with a screenwriter’s voice, the ways in which writers put their stories together piece by piece varies. Whether it is a wall of index cards, painstakingly writing scene-by-scene without stopping, or working from an outline, the individual nuances of each author’s process are as varied as story ideas themselves. 
Here is an exciting by-product of working on an outline in a particular way: when outlining, discipline yourself to describe each outlined scene in one sentence. (Two at the most.) Outlining brings with it a temptation to over-describe to make sure we are including enough information for context, set-up, and clarity. Forcing oneself to get the description down to a bare minimum, to really nail down what each scene is about and must have serves two great functions.
One: it challenges us to bluntly ask what needs to be conveyed in a scene, and thereby can influence our revision process by showing us what can safely be cut.
Two: by getting down to the barest minimum of what a scene can tell us, a spare outline prepares us for another key aspect of sharing our work: the pitch process. If you know your story back to front in the most efficient bites you can muster through the leanest of outlines, you have in your hands a ready-made template for an incisive, crisp, free-flowing pitch.  
Even if you do not do the actual work of screenwriting from an outline, it’s still a valuable exercise to go back into your finished script and outline it using the criteria above. It may well point to things that can be trimmed or re-approached more efficiently. 
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<h3>The Scenes Themselves</h3>
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So, it’s not only about what must be conveyed in each scene but what scenes must appear in your script. Most everyone can come away from a film and say, “It was twenty minutes too long.” But the work of a screenwriter is to know exactly which twenty minutes didn’t need to be there.
Writers know the adage about getting into scenes late and leaving them early, and it’s been discussed in previous columns from yours truly. It does remain an excellent maxim for us. Does every scene show us something new? Is information repeated? Is a character wasting a lot of time re-stating something that happened two scenes ago in the fear that the audience will have forgotten it? Does every scene have its own beginning, middle, and end as well some kind of conflict?
Granted, the latter question can be a vexing one for screenwriters. Take heart. If we want to write a scene that just depicts our protagonist brushing their teeth as a way of seeing them in an intimate everyday activity, we should not be held back by the fact that there is no identifiable conflict in such a scene. That said, though, we should not be so lazy as to not fully describe that tooth-brushing in such a way that we understand our character even more through the scene (and this, after all, is an underlying goal of every script—to build a character that shows us something more every moment). So, decide on how that person is brushing their teeth. Fast, uncaring? Too hard? Slurpy? Letting it all spill as they brush?
Each of these can be complementary to the established behaviors of the character and shine a light on “the way we do one thing is the way we do everything” aspect of being human. 
It has been said that the field of philosophy grew out of the fact that there are definite answers to the inquiries behind who, what, where and when, but no provable answers for the question of why.
Your scenes have two responsibilities: to tell us the who, what, where, and when of each moment in your script while at the same time letting us know the why of its inclusion in your story. If you were writing a term paper, and simply cited your source quotations without explaining why you included them, you would likely not pass your course. Because that paper would be a compilation of facts without any attendant interpretation by its author. Your screenplay may not be a term paper, but it has to tell us why we&#8217;re watching each and every scene. You are in essence, constructing an argument to invite the audience to respond in a certain way. Otherwise, the audience, who is, after all, your greatest teacher, might be inclined to give you a failing grade.
<fieldset><legend>Series Navigation</legend><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-2/" title="&lt;&lt; How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)">&lt;&lt; How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)</a><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-4/" title="How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4) &gt;&gt;">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4) &gt;&gt;</a></fieldset>

How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)

<div class="seriesmeta">This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series <a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/Best Of 2020/climb-into-screenplay/" class="series-2591" title="Climb Into Screenplay">Climb Into Screenplay</a></div><div class="seriesbox"><div class="center"> <a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/Best Of 2020/climb-into-screenplay/" class="series-2591" title="Climb Into Screenplay">Climb Into Screenplay</a></div><ul class="serieslist-ul"><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-1/" title="How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li-current">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)</li><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-3/" title="How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)</a></li><li class="serieslist-li"><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-4/" title="How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)">How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)</a></li></ul></div>Okay, so you’ve gone through the various permutations of the initial inspiration for your idea and started to get a handle on how it might sustain a full story. You’ve worked out a good, story-driven logline to narrow down the basic progression of your narrative, and you’ve started to do research on any of the professions, locations, or history that will add some authority to the experience of reading your script. 
Now, the grunt work of screenwriting begins. 
However, the great thing about grunt work when it comes to doing the creative work you love is that it isn’t grunt work at all. Well, when you’re doing it right, that is.  
Each screenwriter usually has some way of mapping out the building blocks of their story. Color-coded index cards, juggling scenes around in one’s head, cranking out a draft chronologically…whatever your method, this is the time to keep juggling, move those index cards around and ignore the chronology. With the possible exception of sports, writers and artists are privileged in that they get to play and call it work. It’s important to embrace that privilege and not get locked into anything as you begin what many writers ingloriously refer to as the “vomit draft.” 
Before you think about simply packing pages one through 120 with enough three-act structure to appease the masses, throw the story into as much disarray as you can muster. A question often asked of my students, for example, is, “what if you made a supporting character, or even your antagonist, into the protagonist?” Experiment with that concept for a draft and see what is revealed. You might find more sympathetic aspects to your antagonist than you thought were there; you might even decide to make the swap right then and there. And speaking of swaps, what about gender?
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<h3>A Sense of Place</h3>
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In a previous article for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, I detailed my own resistance to switching the gender of one of my characters after it was suggested in a production meeting. Once I let go of that resistance, I found myself with a very strong spec script that I still use as a writing sample to this day. Got your heart set on a location? Change it, see what it does to the feel and tone of your story. (This dovetails with research. If your script lacks a fully-realized sense of place, that can be a red flag for industry readers, who look for a well-rounded approach to the craft.) 
<img class="alignleft wp-image-27670" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/saint-basil-s-cathedral-753339.jpg" alt="" width="311" height="466" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/saint-basil-s-cathedral-753339.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/saint-basil-s-cathedral-753339-100x150.jpg 100w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/saint-basil-s-cathedral-753339-200x300.jpg 200w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/saint-basil-s-cathedral-753339-150x225.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 311px) 100vw, 311px" />
In the legal field, the process of each side gathering every possible tidbit of information on the case is called “discovery,” and that’s the screenwriter’s job, too. Anything, and that means anything, can be the detail that cracks the case for the prosecution or the defense. It’s important not to resist your discovery process. This is your craft. Honor it. Rigidity is the enemy of discovery. I often encounter writers who do not think they are artists or even craftspeople. Writing scripts is simply a task that might lead to a career. But, it’s difficult to sustain a career if you miss out on maintaining a love of the process. And what is the process of discovery for a screenwriter if not collecting evidence for and against the motivations and actions of each character in the proceedings?
It is important to have an ending in mind. Knowing how your characters and story will resolve is a great guidepost—a sense of where things are going will have a ripple effect on the scene-by-scene construction. However, it’s also a good idea to consider several different endings, and let them, indeed, guide where you will eventually take the reader with your scene work.
 
<h3>Character Mash Up</h3>
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Speaking of guides, your characters are ready and waiting to fulfill that function. Part of that work of discovery is getting to know them as if they are extensions of yourself (which, let’s face it, most of them are—and not just your protagonist, but all the aspects of supporting characters and antagonists that reflect pieces of you). A quick Google search will offer up countless writing prompt exercises designed to help you put your characters in imagined situations and explore how they might behave. The answers to character biography questions, too, when approached with an open mind, can each offer up an idea for a scene. (“Where were you born?” “What was your most terrifying moment as a child?” “Who would you never want to see again?”—write a scene embodying the answer to each of these questions for your protagonist, a key supporting character and the antagonist.) In this way, when you truly kick into a pass at a beginning-middle-and-end story, any decisions facing your characters at the in and out points of every scene can be addressed by having them behave in exactly the way you know they will. 
When children play, there is very little concern for a structured narrative. One thing jumps to another, the craziest notion becomes a building block to continue the action. Film, and the writers who write them, fulfill a freeing function for the world—they make it look easy, like children at play. Your task as a screenwriter is to allow that childlike space to be part of your writer’s toolkit, and then bring in the grown-up knowledge of craft and effectiveness of story beats into the mix. 
Which leads to a big question to ask as you settle into the straight-up telling of your story. 
Notice the question was not “what do you want to say?” The age-old adage attributed to playwright Moss Hart, “if you want to send a message, call Western Union,” still applies, although in the 21st Century the punchline would probably involve an opinion-based blog. 
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<blockquote>What kind of story is it, and how do you want your audience to feel when it is over? </blockquote>
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What a screenplay is “saying” will become apparent through the telling. If there is a message about the meaning of life, or man’s inhumanity to man, or the corruption of the political process contained in your tale, the actions of everybody in it will be reinforcing these ideas simply by their actions.  
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<h3>Give Me a Tone</h3>
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However, tonal considerations arise when you make the decision as to what type of story this “saying” is occurring in. Is it an allegory, told through magical realism or as a fable, or as a political or social satire? Is it a metaphor for a larger issue, in which the characters will embody carefully-selected functions that guide us to that metaphor? Is it a straight-ahead drama, more akin to an Arthur Miller play or Ordinary People? In this, there will be less room for anything but carefully-observed, authentic interactions, less room for metaphor or allegory. 
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<img class=" wp-image-27671 alignright" src="https://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/man-tuning-his-bass-guitar-on-stage-1943412-2.jpg" alt="" width="394" height="395" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/man-tuning-his-bass-guitar-on-stage-1943412-2.jpg 576w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/man-tuning-his-bass-guitar-on-stage-1943412-2-150x151.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/man-tuning-his-bass-guitar-on-stage-1943412-2-250x251.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/man-tuning-his-bass-guitar-on-stage-1943412-2-50x50.jpg 50w" sizes="(max-width: 394px) 100vw, 394px" />What, then, do you want your audience to feel after having experienced the film of your screenplay? Sure, a sense of having gotten a series of adrenaline rushes is a decent enough goal for an action film, but it always helps to aim higher, only because “it’s just an action movie” or “it’s just a silly comedy” can lead to stagnation in terms of taking things up a notch and creating a genre piece that has a layer or two with which an audience can identify—thereby making your simple action movie or dopey comedy into something that resonates and lasts as a perennial audience favorite. (Bridesmaids, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, is filled with bawdy humor, but it’s built on the foundation of an exploration of the volatility of friendships and gives us something to connect to because of it. Die Hard, written by Steven E. de Sousa and Jeb Stuart,  is non-stop action, but it’s also about letting go of our attachments to our narrow view of relationships—its hero saves the day and sees things a little more clearly in the bargain.) If your story is a mystery, is wanting the audience to feel that they have the answer to whodunit enough of an end goal? Can you add another layer of feeling through a character’s inner journey that maybe will up that ante, too?  
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<blockquote>
Your audience must feel and think something
&nbsp;</blockquote>
No matter the genre, you should want your audience to feel something. It’s why they came to the movie, after all. Viewers (and the readers of your script before it gets made) can certainly think something, too, after having taken in your drama, comedy, allegory or metaphor. What do you want them to think? That man is basically good? That man is essentially corruptible? That competitive sports can bring a community together, and help underdogs achieve greatness? That relationships are fraught with compromise?  Any and of all of these are common and recurring ideas in films, and each one provides a signpost for your own story.
Give your audience takeaways intellectually and emotionally. By the time you have jumped into the symbolic writer’s sandbox and done some toddler-style play with your story, bent and twisted it into all sorts of incarnations, gone deeply into your characters’ history and motivations, switched into grown-up craft mode and tackled the bigger picture of what is actually happening from scene-to-scene in your script—you will know what type of story you are telling and what you want your audience to experience through it.
At which point you can take a deep breath, maybe step away from the keyboard for a few days, and realize… there’s more work to do. 
Next: Outlining, Scene Writing, Refining the Telling 
You can read the first installment of this series of articles <a href="https://creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-1/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">HERE</a>.
<fieldset><legend>Series Navigation</legend><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-1/" title="&lt;&lt; How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)">&lt;&lt; How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 1)</a><a href="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/how-to-climb-into-your-screenplay-part-3/" title="How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3) &gt;&gt;">How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3) &gt;&gt;</a></fieldset>

How To Climb Into Your Screenplay (Part 4)

How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 3)

How to Climb into Your Screenplay (Part 2)

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