A Screenwriter's Journey #6: Chekov's Bullet

So, this morning I woke up early and got to 30 pages. But what does 30 pages mean at this point?

Included in the page counts before now were notes. Up until 15 pages or so, I had done no explicit writing, it was all just brainstorming and notes and random thoughts and reminders that certain things had to be written.

The first step in turning that into a screenplay is structure. But since I don't have all the ideas and necessary plot points yet, it's a very loose structure. I took each of the notes I had and did my best to put them all in chronological order according to when they appear on screen. Some things I couldn't know where to put them yet, so I had to guess at some. Some of those guesses were immediately wrong. So I put them in "order" knowing that any of those things could (and many definitely would) change. So it's a bit of a guessing game combined with an eye towards film structure.

A word about structure. This is a fuzzy word in screenwriting. Often people confuse it with formula, meaning you're copying an exact page-by-page placement of plot elements and a set of required plot elements. Some screenwriting advice suggests going this direction, but that advice largely comes from people who don't sell a lot of scripts or get a lot of movies made. All of these advice books have good advice in them, but all of them should be a guideline and any time you follow them exactly, you decrease the likeliness that someone will buy the script. They are starting points only.

Structure in a more deliberate sense means how the story is told. The basic rule of this is the simple three-act-structure (beginning, middle, end), but that's so vague as to almost be meaningless. So structure for me comes down to two basic things: 1. Plot (what happens in the story) and 2. Character arcs (how do the characters affect that plot and how are they affected by it. And both of these things borrow very heavily from a stand-up comedy concept, the set-up. For anything to have an effect in a movie, it has to be set up. Things that come out of nowhere take the audience out of the movie and make it less interesting. The "deus ex machina" (machine of the gods) that dominated classical theater has long since been discarded as a primary storytelling element and when it happens in film, people usually hate it.

In theater there's a concept called "Chekov's gun." This is the idea that if you see a gun in act 1 of a play, it had better go off in act 3. I came up with a corollary that I call "Chekov's bullet." It someone's going to get shot in the third act, you have to show the means in the first act. In both of these cases, the gun can be literal, but usually it isn't. This is just talking about anything that has an impact on the story. If you set something up early that seems like it has to payoff later, you have to pay it off. And if something important happens later on, you have to set it up early or it isn't satisfying and doesn't complete the plot loop.

So the first part in structure is to figure out what you want the viewer to feel at the end of the movie. And then you have to figure out how to get them there. It's not a hard concept and genre conventions pretty much do a lot of the work for you. If you want people to be scared, put them in a haunted house. If you want someone to fall in love with a character, you have to show reasons why they should be loved.

In previous posts, I talked about a lot of the feelings I'm going for in this movie, so a lot of that work is done. So, I start laying those things out in order. And, I start making notes of how to set each thing up. So if I want to show that the lesbian character has a crush on the SGA president, I have to both set that up in the early part and it has to have some kind of payoff later on. The fact that she's a lesbian has to either be important to the story or important to the character. Otherwise, it's just biography. Too many movies have made lesbian characters only characterization being about their sexuality, which isn't fair in a story that isn't a explicitly lesbian tale. This isn't, so it is important to her character, but doesn't define her. That means I have to come up with other things about her (she's shy, she has body image issues, etc.) and then I have to set those things up early and give them a reason to be part of the story. If she's shy, then she will have to attempt to overcome that shyness later or fail and be punished. If she has body image issues, she has to face those down or be harmed by them in the story. In good film structure, everything exists for a reason and is connected to something else in the story. Screen time is precious real estate.

Okay, so that's the start of the structure and I'll go into that more next time. Structure and character are the things that give you all your scenes, dialogue and whatever else you are going to write. In a novel you can just start writing and come back to the plot and other things at a leisurely pace, but not in a film. Your beginning has to naturally find it's way to your ending and this is almost impossible to do well without outlining your structure in advance, or at least early in the process. I've got most of that done, which is why I'm at 30 pages.