Procrastination works
It’s a quick post today. Last time I talked about the
importance of finding an ending for a story. It’s incredibly difficult to tell
a story when you don’t know where it ends. Knowing where you want to end up
lets you figure out the steps that will get you there. You don’t have to know
every detail but you should certainly know enough about it to give it a brief
description.
Eureka
In the process of procrastinating this weekend I finally
figured out the end to this story. Harlan will end up in the hospital again.
His wife and son will come to see him. He’ll push them away because they didn’t
come see him the first time he was in the hospital. They leave but he discovers
that Nathan kept his first injury a secret and has basically kidnapped him.
Harlan will decide he needs start fixing things with his family. He’ll escape
the hospital again and put his life at risk just to apologize to his wife and
son.
Dig it
The goal with this ending is to have Harlan put as much or
more effort into his newfound maturity as he put into his immature adventure
with Nathan.
The old fashioned way
A lot of the folks who read the early drafts of the script
for Last Words wanted it to have a sad ending. They thought the happy ending
wasn’t real enough. That it lacked power. I was convinced it needed the happy
ending otherwise it lost something important. Neither perspective is wrong. The
early drafts didn’t need a sad ending and the final version doesn’t need a
happy ending. The ending that the movie needs is the earned ending. The end of
your movie can be heartbreaking or uplifting. It can be depressing or joyous.
It’s the end of your story. It should end the way you want it to end. Either
way you had better earn your ending. If you have a happy ending your character
must go through hell to get it. Earn your ending.
Beats, bears, Battlestar Balactica
Now that I’ve figured out who the story is about, who’s in
that character’s way, and a general idea of what the story will look like it’s
time to start outlining. One of the first documents I produce when I’m
outlining a story is a beat sheet. The beats of a story are just what they
sound like. They are the rhythm of the scenes of the story. I like to go
through and figure out what steps the character has to go through to get from
where they are at the beginning of the story to where they will be at the end
of the story. Each important step of the process is a beat.
A beat is a term that is used to describe a lot of different
things in a script. It can be something an actor makes note of to let them know
they should take a breath between two words. It can be the second by second
breakdown of a scene. It can be a moment-by-moment account of the entire
script. In this case we’re talking about the big beats. The important moments
along the path from start to end.
Even though a beat sheet is a relatively simple document it
can take a lot of time to refine. I write each beat as a bullet point in a
simple sentence. Here’s the fist pass at a beat sheet for Act 1.
- · Harlan at work, imagines a monster made of screws and washers.
- · Harlan on the way home, imagines a giant while waiting in traffic.
- · Harlan at home, argues with his wife and son.
- · Harlan goes to a roleplaying game at Nathan’s house. Has fun with his friends. We meet Nathan and his wife.
- · Nathan invites Harlan to a movie. Harlan refuses.
- · Harlan has a job interview. It goes horribly.
- · Harlan is discouraged and won’t talk to his wife about it.
- · Nathan invites Harlan to something geek-cool. Harlan refuses.
- · Harlan gets fired.
- · Harlan at a roleplaying session with his friends. They try to be supportive but it doesn’t help.
- · Harlan is depressed and searches for a job. No luck.
- · Nathan shows up and talks Harlan into going on a road trip.
These are quick notes about what will happen in Act 1. It’s
easy to move them around if I see that something might work better earlier or
later. They’re also easy to erase and replace since they literally took 3
seconds to write. It gets much harder to get rid of something after you’ve put
a couple hours into writing it.
Moving forward
We’re all about forward momentum here. We’ve got some beats
for Act 1 and what I think is a good solid ending. There's a lot of room for improvement but that can wait until later. It's time to move on to beats for Acts 2 and 3. Remember that writing is about rewriting. Get through the first bad version so you can go back and refine it until it's a good version. You can get stuck in an endless loop of refining the first scene too easily. Keep moving forward.
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