For those of you not familiar with these posts, this is taken from my blog/newsletter on Facebook – “Secrets of Screenwriting Group.” Please search for this group on FB and join. You’ll get a post every week-end about some aspect of screenwriting.
Hello, Everyone. We are now immersed in the art of the rewrite.
We have discussed how you want to attack the major elements of your script rather than get distracted by rather minor issues like rewriting dialogue and re-arranging scenes when you first lay out your attack.
You may have covered some of these issues when you attended your first screenwriting course or enrolled in a screenwriting workshop or screenwriting class. But this will only deepen that understanding.
So, let’s assume you have explored developing and deepening the emotional throughline of your film. What is it really about? Why will audiences connect with this story? Who is my protagonist and is their character arc clear? Are the emotional stakes high enough and does the emotional gold we are digging here (what professors like to call theme) — is it vibrant and does it ring like a bell in practically every scene?
We have discussed these issues earlier so if any of you have missed these earlier posts please let me know and I will email you those earlier conversations.
So what are the secondary issues that must be addressed before we launch into a rewrite?
Well, let’s talk about structure for a bit. Outside of the development of characters and the emotional depth of our story, structure is absolutely essential.
Why is that? We are telling a story in 95-120 pages. A screenplay is difficult to write because we don’t have room to go off into tangents or write scenes or characters that aren’t essential to the story. You admire a great movie because it looks so simple. That simplicity took the screenwriter many months or even years to achieve.
Michael Arndt who wrote “Little Miss Sunshine” only took days to get down the first draft but then spent the next year doing rewrites to achieve the simplicity he ended up achieving.
It’s easy to be complex, it’s extremely hard to be simple. The greatest movies both creatively and commercially are deceptively simple – E.T., Jaws, Star Wars, Midnight Cowboy, etc are all very simple stories and yet are able to achieve a depth of character and theme.
Therefore, our structure must be clean and simple.
Therefore in doing your first rewrite, we need to know your structure works. If you have a faulty structure, it’s very much like building a house where the layout of the design is faulty. If the structure isn’t sound you can keep putting up a roof but it will inevitably collapse because the conception of the basic groundwork is not sound. It’s the same with your structure. If you don’t have a sound beginning, middle and end it doesn’t matter how great your dialogue is or how wonderful some of your scenes are – the screenplay will simply not work.
So what are the basics of good structure – Do you have a grabber in the beginning of your film which literally grabs the audience by the collar and sucks them into the story? In many films (not all, so pay attention to this) there is an inciting incident which gets the story going. For example, in Bridesmaids (which we discussed at great length) the inciting incident occurs when our heroine is picked by her best friend to be her maid of honor and that gets the story going. An inciting incident usually occurs around page 12-15. And not all movies have them so don’t think you absolutely have to have an inciting incident.
Do you have a solid plot point? A plot point is an action or event that comes out of the blue and turns the story around in a new direction. For example in Bridesmaids, our heroine discovers that another bridesmaid is attempting to dethrone her from her perch, and the story revolves around their competition.
The plot point is what the movie is about. It is not set up – we don’t want to know that this story twist is coming because then it is not a surprise. Audiences love plot points. They love to be surprised. The plot point should occur no later than page 30-32. If you set up the plot point correctly, it will delight an audience and Act 2 will naturally lay out organically as the conflict and stakes of the film are now clear.
There are more crucial elements to structure which you need to have – or if you don’t have them – you have a compelling reason why they are absent or you’ve put a spin on them.
This is classic structure I’m talking about. In some movies there will be major revisions to this prototype – like for example – (500) Days of Summer – which broke many of these rules. And there’s nothing at all wrong with breaking rules, we just have to be confident that we’re breaking the rules for a good reason, and what we’re doing absolutely works – because the rules are there for a purpose – they’ve been laid down from Aristotle to Shakespeare to William Goldman.
But let’s know the rules before we break them. And let’s have a damn good reason why we’re playing with classic structure.
We’ll continue on with this little mini lecture as we consider the groundwork of our movie and consider if we need to make changes to our story structure when we do our first rewrite.
Until then – KEEP WRITING!
