In this business of reading submitted screenplays, we see a number of typical mistakes and weaknesses. This blog looks specifically at the readiness of your story idea.
A passionate force urges you to script the telling of your Grandfather’s tale. He means so much to you and his adventures in the wilds seem too good to let fade away. So you begin writing.
It is very easy to get lost in the world of your screenplay. Writing takes you into a sphere where the focus between you and your computer become an impenetrable zone. Within this, you lose track and scope as you journey further, the typed words potentially leading you astray.
Before letting yourself get this far down the path, it is imperative to be sure your story is worth telling in the first place.
All too often, a personal event or nugget of family history is the spark for an idea, whereby a story is attempted before it is fully conceived, structured and shaped.
A common problem is that there isn’t enough of a story there in the first place to grow.
What’s worse is what ensues months into your writing journey. You begin to struggle and get frustrated as the words don’t flow. This is because of the potential lack of story and structure to hang your scenes on.
Worse still, you finish your screenplay and kid yourself that you are satisfied. You might pass it to a friend or screenplay business for appraisal. The lukewarm reception may piss you off, to put it bluntly. This is your story of the family struggle with Granny’s old Oldsmobile and the pains it took them through.
Take this article, for example. It also has to have a reason for being and have a structure to make it work. A beginning, middle and end, but wrapped around an idea worth sharing. No one would want to read about my own personal writing issues and reasons for productivity block. It would not necessarily be actionable advice relevant to others. It’s too personal and not likely conceptual.
As an unproven writer, the money men will want to be sure their investment is worth the gamble on your story. For that to happen, you need a great reason for it to exist and be told. It will need to relate to the masses, and not just Granny and the family.
If your story involves a specific period in time, the budget will increase to cover props, costume and set dressing on an epic scale. So your story of Granny’s old car ends up an expensive proposition. Why would anyone outside the family care about Granny’s old car? If you have a great plot and originality, maybe you can make this work.
Can you ensure you impress the Hollywood gatekeepers?
So what do you do?
Ensure a good story which is tangible and relevant to others. You may need to embrace the idea of a commercial approach to ensure the powers that be see profit potential. Leave the pet projects until you are an established writer or have an independent association willing to sponsor you to exhibit your artistry.
Let’s assume you want to run with a personal idea. There are ways to make this work, but you must look outside your narrow scope on what the story concept is. You need to think of the audience and create something which will stir and engage them. Following the family history idea, look beyond the historical facts.
Adopt artistic license. The story of your Grandmother’s Oldsmobile might mean something to you and your family, but to have traction for an audience you’ll need to use artistic license to deviate from the personal family events to make sure you have the necessary elements to complete a screenplay. More often than not, the missing component is ‘conflict.’ Stories need a sense of jeopardy and opposition to the proceedings to create emotion in the audience and the “What if they don’t make it?” scenario. Then they will care.
Let’s look at an example. “Titanic,” written by James Cameron, is based on the sinking of a formidable ship. If the writer had kept to the facts, the movie would have been really short and kind of boring. The shrill voice of “Iceberg dead ahead” and then the ensuing sinking would only be a little exciting.
To make the story work, James Cameron created some fiction to augment the history. By creating some characters and adding a love story, he achieved the necessary conflict and emotion. He effectively “dressed up” the core story to provide points of interest and a care for the characters in jeopardy.
That would mean having Granny’s Oldsmobile stolen one night off the driveway and creating a sense of loss and activity in searching to get it back. What if the family safety deposit box key is also in the glove compartment? A story turning point could be that Granny’s grandson’s pet snakes are in the trunk, and when the thief gets home and opens up, he gets bit and taken to hospital. You can work out where this might go from here…
The point is that these additive events may never have happened, but with artistic license you create them to help your story along and fit the working structure of acts.
During planning, it is useful to step back from your idea and see it as a whole. Use index cards to chart the story from beginning to end with what you have and you’ll see where you need to make additions. Refer to Michael Hauge’s six stage plot structure, which you can find on his site at storymastery.com
In summary, what you can do to sense check your story idea is to ask yourself these questions:
What is my story about?
Why is it important to tell?
Would people want to sit through this?
What do I need to add to get people to sit through this?
Remember that most personal narratives are un-relatable. The key is to make them relatable by inserting whatever it takes to get the reader/audience to care about your characters, the situation and feel emotion through some aspect of conflict.
Best of luck.
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