The Three Stages of Screenwriting

Acknowledgements

Many people helped me with this book. First and foremost I must acknowledge those who read early drafts and gave me feedback: Cindy Davis, Paul Guay, Ken Aguado, Pavan Ojha, Bill Gladstone, Lisa Kors, Robert Watson, and Kat Smith. Their advice greatly improved this book. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to all of the teachers, mentors, producers, agents, managers, and fellow screenwriters who taught me how to write. In particular, I want to single out teachers Frank Daniel and David Howard. I also am eternally grateful for Emily Dephoure, Aghi Koh, Eric Kim, and Stokely Chaffin, each of whom gave me a critical break on my path to a screenwriting career. Finally, thank you to my Mom and Dad who always encouraged me to pursue my dreams.

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Introduction

Why another book on screenwriting?

Fair question. There are a lot of them out there. Let me tell you why I went to the trouble of writing this and maybe that will help explain why I think the world needs another screenwriting book.

I became a screenwriter because of Star Wars and Time magazine. After I saw Star Wars as a kid, I became obsessed with it, reading everything I could about the movie. At that time, there wasn’t much information available about how movies were made. No DVD commentaries, movie magazines, or movie websites for a kid to seek out. But my dad’s Time magazine had an article about Star Wars, so I read it. And that’s where I learned about a guy named George Lucas who was a director. Sounds like a fun job, I thought. That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up.

Not such an easy thing when you go to high school in Juneau, Alaska and don’t know anybody in the film business. I went to the University of Southern California film school because I learned that’s where George Lucas went… and my guidance counselor didn’t even know you could major in film.

I started out focusing mostly on cinematography, and when I graduated I worked small jobs as a production assistant, gaffer, or grip. On the side, I was working on screenplays. I discovered I had more of a passion for the writing part of making movies than anything else. So I went back to grad school, majoring in screenwriting. And over time I discovered writing was the thing people were most willing to pay me to do.

I learned story structure (of the three-act variety) in grad school back at USC. I’ve also read dozens of books on the subject, most of which added to or altered my approach in some ways. More importantly, I’ve written over twenty-five screenplays, some of which were bad, some of which were good, some of which got me an agent or writing work, and in one case (so far) got made into a big hit movie – Sweet Home Alabama. I’ve also written a children’s play that’s been performed thousands of times (Sleepover at the Stable), a video game (Nightmare Cove), and an animated television pilot (The MOFF Shoppe). Each experience helped me hone my approach to screenwriting.

Then, I got hired to teach a screenwriting class at Art Center College of Design. I naturally built my syllabus around what I was initially taught. But I quickly realized some of that stuff I never actually used. Plus, I wanted to include the many other things that I had learned since. So I adjusted the class to reflect my real world experience. I also asked other professional screenwriters what they thought about various techniques and adjusted my teaching process further.

Since then I have had the experience of helping hundreds of students hone their own screenplays. I’ve seen the mistakes they commonly make and I continued adjusting my teaching approach to head off those mistakes. I’ve also become a better writer myself in the process.

I was looking for a book to use as a textbook for my class. I found some very good screenwriting books, but nothing that was both comprehensive and deep on all the subjects I covered. Many gave a useful account of structure; far fewer dealt with crafting a powerful scene. Almost none covered techniques for rewriting. And there was a lot of misinformation about character development out there.

So I wrote this book to provide a complete guide to the craft of writing a screenplay the way the professionals do it. I will cover each part of the process in-depth; giving you the theories, techniques, and tools I have found to be the most practical in my own writing career.

And I will endeavor to always keep the focus on creating a screenplay that can actually be turned into a movie. Because that’s the goal, isn’t it.

How to Use This Book

The screenwriting process consists of three distinct stages that require different mindsets. As you’ve undoubtedly figured out from my title, I’ve divided the book by those three stages.

The first stage is story development. This is where you figure out what your story is, who the characters are, and what happens. It requires both creativity and an understanding of narrative structure.

The second stage is writing the first draft. This is where you take the solid skeleton you built in the first stage and flesh it out with action, dialogue, spectacle and all the things we love in movies.

The third stage is rewriting. This takes the longest. Your first draft will not be perfect. Likely it will be a raging disaster. That’s okay – that’s what first drafts are for. It is in the rewriting stage that you take that raw material and shape it into something brilliant.

I will discuss the techniques used in each of the stages, including the theory behind them. I think it’s important that you don’t just memorize rules or a list of plot points, but that you understand why we’ve come to codify these techniques the way we have. Every story is different, and if you really understand technique, you will know how to apply it to your unique story in a way that brings out your vision and voice, rather than conforming your ideas to someone else’s form.

I will always come at the theory from the point of view of how it’s useful to you as a screenwriter. This is a how-to book. Most chapters will contain Practical Application sections that will guide you in applying the technique to your story.

Looking at examples from existing films is extremely useful for showing how these techniques work, of course. I will draw most examples from a handful of films so that you can easily watch any you haven’t seen (or re-watch any you haven’t seen in a while). I chose the films to represent different genres, styles, forms and time periods, and because they are all extremely well written. I stuck to well known films so they should be easy to find. The films I’ll be referring to the most are:

Some Like It Hot, 1959 (story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond)

The Godfather, 1972 (screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola based on the novel by Mario Puzo)

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982 (written by Melissa Mathison)

The Matrix, 1999 (written by Andy & Lana Wachowski)

Little Miss Sunshine, 2006 (written by Michael Arndt)

Gravity, 2013 (written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón)

Of course the downside of working from a small pool of films is not every concept and technique I cover will be well represented among them, so from time to time I’ll bring in other examples. But I will always try to use well-known films.

A Note to eBook Readers

Screenplays are formatted in a very specific way with different elements like dialogue and action set at specific margins. I have attempted to replicate the look of a screenplay in my examples. However, the settings and format of your device will affect this layout. If the examples become jumbled, choosing a smaller font size may improve the look. To see how a properly formatted screenplay looks, see the images in the Appendix.

The Life of the Screenwriter

About a year after graduating from film school I won a screenwriting contest sponsored by the Scriptwriters Network. One of the prizes was a mug with a quote from Carl Sautter (after whom the contest was named). The quote is:

Be happy…there are enough miserable people in this business. We don’t need any more!

Unfortunately it’s true. There are way too many unhappy screenwriters. Part of that is the lack of respect screenwriters sometimes get in the business. Anybody who’s been doing this professionally for more than a few months can undoubtedly relate several stories of incredibly rude treatment at the hands of producers or executives.

It’s important to remember that we’re part of a business – a business with hundreds of millions of dollars at risk on unpredictable products whose quality is subjective – a business which compensates us insanely well when something we do is successful… and often even when it’s not. Stress and tension run high in the halls of the studios.

And writers have enormous power in this business. Nothing happens without us. Nobody else – not producer, not director, not movie star, not studio president – can do anything until a writer writes a script. A good, marketable script is gold.

It’s also important to remember that filmmaking is collaborative. This can be difficult, because writing is solitary. Even writers who work in teams still have to face that blank page essentially alone. It’s easy to forget that we’re part of a team of artists working together to make a movie.

Artistically, we have the best and worst of the collaboration because of our role as the first on and first off in the filmmaking process.

On the one hand we get to create something that is completely ours – the screenplay. It reflects exactly how we see the final film. Yes, we may be influenced by underlying material, previous drafts, and the directions of producers and others. But we take those things and shape something that is uniquely our vision of the film that the team is trying to make. Nobody else has that opportunity – not even the director.

On the other hand, we then give our unique, personal vision to a whole cadre of people who are charged with turning our words-on-paper into a film. The results of the process by necessity will be different from our vision. We have no control as to how well or even if our ideas are executed. Not to mention the common situation where other writers rewrite our words!

If we are to be happy, we must embrace this process. We must celebrate the opportunity to put our best vision forward, then let go of that vision when we hand it to other talented people. If the results are disappointing, then we must remember that we are in a collaborative medium where success and failure are shared. A screenplay is meant to be turned into a film. The best unproduced screenplay is just a pile of paper as far as the world at large and the history of film is concerned.

And guess what? Sometimes different is better. Sometimes we benefit from the tremendous work of all those talented people. Sometimes the movie is actually greater than the script. That is a wonderful experience as long as you let yourself recognize it when it happens. If only it were always so….

If you’re going to be a writer in the film business, my advice is to embrace your role and be happy!

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STAGE ONE:

DEVELOPING THE STORY

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there’s no way you can have writer’s block.

– R.L. Stine

Chapter 1

The Basics of Narrative

Before you can truly understand structure, character, dialogue, action, and all the other things that make up a writer’s arsenal, you have to understand what a story is at its most basic level. Without this understanding, all writing techniques become simply rules to follow, a paint-by-numbers approach to screenwriting. This can result in competent but uninspired and lifeless screenplays. My goal with this book is to explain why the rules are there so you can break them with confidence, if that is what best serves your screenplay.

So let me begin by posing a question: What is a story?

A story, by definition, requires three things:

1) A character. The character need not be human, but he or she must behave in recognizably human fashion. Mickey Mouse is not a human, but he behaves like one. If you don’t have a character, you may be writing a travel guide, op-ed essay, or a scientific treatise, but you are not writing a story.

2) A dilemma. The character must have a problem to solve. If you tell me about someone whose life is great and has no problems, well that’s nice, but it’s not a story. I get it. He’s happy. After two minutes, it’s boring. Whatever it is about humans that causes us to be interested in made-up tales seems to have to do with the need to explore how people solve problems.

3) A resolution. If the dilemma isn’t resolved, the story doesn’t feel complete. That doesn’t mean the ending has to be happy, or that all the loose ends need to be tied up. But we listen to/watch/read a story to find out what happens. So it’s not a story unless we indeed find out what happens.

If you have those three things you have a story – even a thirty-second commercial has them if it’s a narrative: A young man (character) is not getting good gas mileage (dilemma) so he tries a different type of gasoline and his mileage improves (resolution).

But simply having a character, dilemma and resolution doesn’t necessarily make the story dramatic. If you have a guy whose dilemma is that he’s hungry and he goes into the kitchen to make a sandwich, you have a story… but not a very dramatic one.

There are two things that affect how dramatic your story is: obstacles and stakes. The more that’s at stake for the character and the greater the obstacles standing in the way of successfully resolving the dilemma, the more dramatic your story becomes. Of course dramatic isn’t the same as good, but we’ll get to that.

Obstacles

The story about the hungry guy in his apartment is pretty boring. But if the same guy with the same dilemma is stranded on an island with only one fruit tree and a tiger is sleeping below it, then I’m interested. That’s because you’ve given him obstacles.

Which isn’t to suggest the obstacles have to be physical. You could make a compelling story about a hungry guy in his apartment whose obstacle is he’s on a diet.

Generally, the more challenging the obstacles, the more dramatic the story. You could make a great story out of someone tying their shoe if the obstacles to his success were significant and believable, and if there were enough at stake. Which brings me to…

Stakes

What is at stake for the character? What happens if he succeeds or fails? If the character doesn’t really care about the outcome of his dilemma, why should I? The more the character has at stake, the more significant and interesting the story.

Now, a lot of people who only partly understand narrative make a common mistake (and a few of those people work as development executives in Hollywood). They suggest a writer raise the stakes by increasing the size of what’s at stake. Rather than trying to get one million dollars, the character should be trying to get 100 million dollars. But that’s the wrong approach.

Imagine a story where a terrorist has planted a bomb in a diner and our character must get across town in time to keep it from going off. Why don’t you raise the stakes, our clueless development executive says, make it a football stadium instead of a diner. Objectively that would seem to raise the stakes – more lives are in jeopardy. But it’s still a character trying to save the lives of a bunch of people. The number is not all that important to how much we care.

What would raise the stakes more effectively is if the character’s wife and child were having lunch in the diner. Stopping a bomb from killing his family is much more dramatic than stopping a bomb from killing a group of strangers in a football stadium, because the key to raising the dramatic stakes is to increase how much the character cares about the outcome of the situation. Don’t confuse objective stakes with dramatic stakes.

There should be both positive and negative stakes for your character. In other words, the character has the chance to achieve something good, but also the possibility of suffering something bad, depending on the outcome of the dilemma. I phrase this as hope and fear. What is the audience hoping will happen? What do they fear might happen?

Sometimes I’ll see a story where there are only positive stakes. The character wants to win the race or get the pretty girl to go out with him. The reasons are fairly obvious. But what happens if they fail? If failure simply means they move on to the next race or the next girl then there really isn’t that much at stake, is there?

It’s important to create a significant penalty for failure in your story. Paint the picture for the audience – if this doesn’t work out for the character, what will their life be like? It should be a pretty bleak future.

Sometimes that’s easy. In Gravity, if Ryan fails to get back to Earth, she’ll die. But not every premise has such clear-cut dangers built in.

In Little Miss Sunshine, Richard, the father, wants his daughter, Olive, to win the beauty pageant because she dreams of being a beauty queen. Great, those are high positive stakes: if Olive can win the pageant, she will achieve her dream.

But what if Olive doesn’t win? If she is simply disappointed and then moves on to the next pageant, then the movie wouldn’t feel urgent or important. So the movie establishes upfront that Richard believes there are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. Before they leave on the road trip to the pageant, he makes Olive tell him that she believes she can win. Later, Olive confesses she’s worried that her father won’t love her if she doesn’t win. In other words, what’s at stake is the relationship between a father and a daughter. That’s quite a lot at risk if Olive fails!

If you find your story lacks negative stakes, it’s usually best to look at your characters. If Richard didn’t have his philosophy about winners and losers, if he just supported his daughter regardless of the outcome, there wouldn’t be much drama in the story.

Related to negative stakes is the need to trap your character in the story. If the character can just walk away when things get tough, then the story doesn’t seem all that important. In Little Miss Sunshine, the whole family is making sacrifices for Olive to compete in this pageant. Once they get on the road, she will either succeed or fail.

Internal and External Stories

Good stories really consist of two interlocking journeys: the internal and external.

The external journey is the physical action the character takes attempting to resolve their dilemma. This is realized through the plot of the movie.

The internal journey is how the character is changed or affected by the story emotionally and psychologically. This is often referred to as character arc.

Some films may emphasize one more than the other, but most good stories have both. Because film is a visual medium, the external story is often the most obvious. But a good movie should also contain an internal story. After all, if the events aren’t going to affect the character, how important could they be?

In the best stories these two journeys interact: the external events causing the internal character to change, and that change causing the character to take new action to influence the external events.

These concepts underlie much of the theory in this book. I’ll be returning to them and expanding on them throughout.

Practical Application: The Basics of Your Story

Do you have an idea for a story already? Answer these questions about it:

-Who is your main character?

-What is their dilemma?

-How will their dilemma be resolved (positively or negatively)?

-What are the biggest obstacles they face?

-What is at stake if they succeed? What is at stake if they fail?

-If you can’t answer all these questions yet, don’t worry. Your idea just needs some more development. Continue on to Chapter 2!

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Chapter 2

Choosing an Idea

What you bring to screenwriting are your ideas – your imagination and your perspective on the world based on your experiences. That’s what makes this an art as well as a craft, and that’s what will give you a chance to be unique and therefore valuable to the art and the business of filmmaking.

Nobody can teach you how to have interesting things to say. However, there is a lot to be learned about how to evaluate and develop your ideas to ensure that they are workable as a feature film, and that you realize the best of their potential.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

It’s a question asked frequently of writers. The truth is, it’s not actually that hard to come up with ideas. I see movie ideas everywhere because I’m looking for them. If my job were to design transportation systems, I would probably get ideas for transportation systems all the time. But I don’t because I’m not thinking about that. Of course, that doesn’t mean all of my ideas are great – most aren’t, in fact. But that’s okay. We’ll get to that in a bit.

If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for stories, try carrying around a notebook. You probably have more ideas than you realize, you just don’t remember them. Whenever you read or hear something interesting, meet an interesting person, or hear an unusual bit of dialogue, jot it down in the notebook. Soon you will train yourself to be on the lookout for great ideas for stories, characters, scenes and dialogue.

There’s an old saying – write what you know. But that doesn’t mean you have to develop stories based on your own life. Write what you know actually means you should write characters with identifiable human emotions, emotions that you yourself have felt. That’s true regardless of whether your character lives a life much like yours, whether they live in the distant past in a far-away country, or whether they live in a fantastical, imaginary world. Think of your notebook as a springboard to imagination.

What you should really be asking yourself is: what are you interested in? Find stories you’re passionate about.

The real world, whether current events, personal experiences, or historical tales, can be a good source of story ideas. But reality often does not present itself in a neat narrative. That’s where your craft comes in. More on developing true stories in a bit.

You could also choose to rely on fictional source material – a story that someone else wrote that you will convert into movie form. Whether you can legally adapt an existing story depends on copyright law. Some stories, like The Bible, Hamlet, or Robin Hood are in the public domain, meaning anyone can use them. But be careful… though Robin Hood is in the public domain, elements added to that mythology by recent storytellers may not be. For example, the book Frankenstein is in the public domain, but the character of Ygor was added in a later movie adaptation. You could write a script based on Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, but if you use the character of Ygor, you could be sued. If you wish to write something based on existing characters or stories, you will need to do some research and possibly consult an attorney.

You could also acquire the rights to some underlying source material,