I was hoping to write a article that followed up on my previous blog that covered the importance of the first ten pages, but what at first seemed like a simple correction rapidly began to unravel. The more the thread was pulled the bigger the hole became until the spine of the script collapsed and I was faced with the prospect of massive re-writes.
We quickly identified the problem with the script being related to not seeing a particular character’s point of view. The original solution was to give her more of a voice, however this just led her to looking at the action and having some kind of emotional response to it. She wasn’t really being active and she had no problem to solve or lessons to learn. We took the story out of the script, writing each beat up and then tried to figure out the story based on what we already had. When that failed to bring about results we started to explore what stories we wanted to tell with the character. We threw up ideas, from the predictable to the bizarre, we looked at her wants, her needs, what we wanted her to learn and what dilemmas we wanted to place before her. Ideas that worked tended to be dull, ideas that were exciting were struck down for not being emotionally driven. Often the stakes at risk were not big enough or emotional enough. For example do we really care if someone loses a job they don’t really like?
We often talk about how our scripts have to be the best that they can be and that ‘good’, is not good enough, but we have been at this for so long that we are rapidly getting to a point where we need to wrap this thing up. We had pretty much spent two weeks trying to figure this story out with all the false leads thrown in front of us until finally yesterday after another day of writing up possibilities on the board I started to think of the quote – “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. Maybe good is good enough. I dismissed it just as quickly as I could no longer ignore the problem we had exposed, it had to be solved and a plaster was not going to cut it. Stuck with not even a hint of the right direction to go in, I suggested we go for a walk. Group breaks are not something we tend to take, mainly because we are never ready at the same time, but standing at a dead end we all agreed.
On the walk we discussed what wasn’t working and why we couldn’t crack this story. We boiled it right down to the most basic story.
Act I – Perfect world
Act II – Shattered world
Act III – Repaired but new world
Understanding that, we tried to elaborate on these ideas and things quickly started falling into place. We got back to the whiteboard and threw up the ideas and started to flesh things out. We ended up using many of ideas the we had discussed over the previous days, but we identified the wants the needs, we knew the moments of choice and stakes for the first time seemed high.
We are still not there. The second act still needs more exploration and elaboration, but we certainly have a beginning, middle and an end.
Of course we will rack our brains for reasons why this took so long. Were we too tied to the story, or the restrictions of the plotlines that follow in future episodes? Were we too close to the characters or the script? Did we talk too much, did we get to complicated, too abstract, did we not take breaks to allow our minds to process information? Were there too many cooks? Who knows. When we nail that story lining will be much, much easier.
Tags: character, process, Script, story, storyline, writing, writing partners
