Listen for the music - Structure
So how many demons have you dug up since my last blog? If you haven’t read it yet, it’s time to catch up. As a writer you can’t avoid the demons. Getting under the surface of your characters is essential. For that you need to first get under the surface of your own personality. There’s nothing comfortable about being a good writer. Yet no matter how fascinating our characters, how nuanced, how complex, or how delicious our dialogue, without a clear thread to sew our screenplay together, we are nowhere. A screenplay is like a musical score. It has cadence and rhythm, dissonance and harmony. It must flow like a river, silken smooth at times, at others crashing against boulders, or, winding round bends. In previous blogs I focused on Character and spent some time talking about Dialogue. Today the idea of demons, leads me to skeletons. But now I’m skipping a piece, your story Idea, which I will get to in the next blog, so that I can talk about skeletons, and by skeletons I mean the bones, the bones of your story. Your Step or Story Outline. Not to be confused with your Story Summary.
A few weeks ago I went through the back-breaking, mind bending pleasure of moving. What a job that is! And it got me thinking about how everything mirrors everything else. You decide to or need to move. So what do you do? What steps do you take?
Well after I got the idea that I must move, I had to narrow it down by asking myself what exactly was I looking for? What were the basics...the must haves of the new place:
Two bedrooms. Trees and grass, and water to gaze out at. No stairs and no one above me.
The furniture, my CHARACTERS - not everything, only the furniture I was taking, and a few new pieces.
How will what I take, relate, or fit, DIALOGUE - within the new space.
Prime importance…stay within my means...(a feature film is about 120 minutes).
When I was clear about the basics - my skeleton - it became easier, and fortunately I found what I wanted.
There are many teachers and books that deal with Structure very early on in the process. Personally I don’t see how that can work. You need first to have a clear IDEA of what your story is about, enough in a general sense. You need your key characters and have a pretty good idea of how they relate. The challenge now is, how does your story unfold so as to keep the audience involved, sustain their interest? Remember you know your story but the audience does not. Separating the two is invariably tricky for beginning screenwriters. You need a carefully crafted progression of events, isolating and threading together the turning points in your story, to form a through line from beginning to end.
Like all good music, or even a good joke; you are setting up your story by introducing you characters and a situation. Then you are building, you are building the curiosity of the audience pulling them deeper and deeper. Finally, rewarding them with a carefully timed, satisfying, pay off. Your outline does not have to be chronological, you can go backwards and forwards, even deliberately mislead. There can be dissonance, and confusion too, but all deliberately designed to invite the audience to keep following you, eager to know ‘what happens next,’ ‘‘what happens next.’
A screenplay, like a symphony, is written to move the listener through a sequence of patterns which build in intensity and direction, and concludes with a harmonic, melodic and rhythmic resolution. If you prefer you can think in terms of a good meal carefully prepared and served, and as a reward, a delicious dessert at the end. A Step Outline is the engine of the story. At the service of the writer the Outline is a tool by which to focus how your story unfolds to its best advantage. And that applies equally to a light comedy or a suspense thriller, or any other genre. Your turning points are the moments that move the story forward. That tell the audience something is changing at this particular point. Turning Points are like gears in a car, going forwards or backwards or around, but always keeping the car, your story, moving towards a destination. They aren’t explanations but specifically moments where you feel the engine shifting.
OK - so, you Set Up your story, you Build your story, and you Pay Off your story.
Here’s a capsule example, a spin off from an earlier idea:
SET UP
1. Daniel listens to a voicemail from his unaffectionate daughter, giving a poor explanation of why she didn’t invite him to her 40th birthday party.
2. Daniel goes to the movies to distract himself from feeling slighted and alone.
3. On the ticket line a little girl comes up to him and gives him a flower.
BUILD
1. Daniel goes to the cemetery and lays a bunch of flowers on his late wife’s grave.
2.. A man who he recognizes from having seen in his neighborhood walks up to him.
3. They talk and find that the man’s son was killed in a car accident and is buried in a nearby plot.
4. Daniel in turn tells the man he has a daughter but she is very detached and admits he feels stupid considering the man’s situation.
5. The man wishes him well and leaves.
PAY OFF
1. Daniel goes back to the movie house curious to see if the little girl is there.
2. The little girl is, this time she is standing on the ticket line with her mother.
3. Daniel turns to tell the mother how surprised he was when the other day her little girl gave him a flower.
4. The mother laughs and says that her daughter has devised a mission that when she sees someone looking sad she gives them a flower.
5. The three say hello in the lobby after the movie. The woman suggests they have a coffee together one day.
6. We see Daniel and the mother at a coffee shop. Daniel is all smiles now, energized and engaged. The woman is laughing. And the world turns.
A little story to give you an idea of what I mean.
You have about two hours to tell your story so you must find a structure that continuously propels the story forward. Just like a good joke you can’t ramble, you can stretch but you must always keep the tension. The process of writing a screenplay is rooted in logic, emotional and physical logic. Each turning point must plant the seed to another turning point. This is not to be confused with Continuity. She leaves for Budapest is a Turning Point. They go out for a walk is Continuity. She trips and falls, breaks her leg and is rushed to the hospital, is a Turning Point. You have to tell your story in as interesting a way. Keep the audience guessing. If your story line is so straightforward that each turn is predictable you will simply lose the viewer. So use your imagination. Be a magician.
In my experience, most people who want to be screenwriters focus on the dialogue and the rest is a loose catch-all of ideas that sag and dip with no core, no shape, no structure. Dialogue is fun, it’s meaty, it makes the writer feel alive. But crafting a good screenplay calls for much more than writing on impulse or feeling good.
I leave you with a tip that works for me: read your work out loud to yourself. You must hear and feel the flow.
Listen for the music…
and oh…happy Halloween!
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See you next time!