The Goal Of Your First Draft
Note: This is a chapter from the first draft of Screenwriting is Rewriting. Although it did not make the final cut, I believe in the chapter and want to offer it to you here. I hope you find it helpful.
THE FIRST DRAFT
The Discovery Draft
Find a strong-willed character with a nothing-will-stand-in-my-way determination to reach his or her goal confronting strong opposition, add a strong action line, keep throwing obstacles in his or her path, and you’re well on your way to a gripping screenplay.
William Froug, Screen and Television Writer
While this is primarily a book about rewriting, let’s take a moment to discuss what you should be trying to accomplish with your first draft. For starters, let go of the idea you are going to write a “perfect” draft that will not need any revisions. That is not going to happen. You will need to write numerous drafts to execute your creative vision. Let go of perfection and work on being good. You can achieve good – you can strive for great – you will fail at perfection. Perfection is the enemy of the good.
It is only the amateur who believes their first draft is ready to be shot. The professional writer uses their first draft to find out who and what their movie is about. Professionals use their first draft as a sketch of our movie. Most professional writers do a lot of preparation before they begin to write their first draft. From experience, professional writers know the essential questions to ask, and which elements they must have in place before they begin to write. Few professional writers start on page one and try to figure it out as they go along. It is just a waste of time, and to the professional, time is money. Better to figure it out before the writing begins.
A solid first draft with a strong central character, a central dramatic conflict, a strong opposition character, a specific plot problem, a strong key relationship, and a functioning structure will help you enormously when you being your rewrites. And you will rewrite—multiple times. That is if you are serious about becoming a professional screenwriter. The biggest mistake aspiring writers make in their first draft is emphasizing plot over character. It is way easier to add more plot to a screenplay than it is to add more character. Screenwriting is about asking questions, and first question has to be: “Whose story is this?”
The Discovery Draft
The first draft is the Discovery Draft. The first draft should be written with passion and enthusiasm, and you should take chances and make mistakes. You want to free your subconscious to have some fun. Don’t worry about being perfect or writing the best scene in the history of cinema. It will probably be thrown out or rewritten anyway, so you might as well use it to learn something about your main character or your narrative.
The Discovery Draft is where to find the potential in your story. You want to discover the inner life of your main character. You want to find out who their friends and enemies are. What are their most important relationships? What are they afraid of? What are thy proud of? What are their dreams and hopes? At its most basic, what is your story about? Does a theme emerge? What at the high points and the low points?
By being playful, running with your ideas, and seeing where they take you, you will discover a lot of important and original aspects to your story. If you can let go and not try to hold your writing up to your lofty critic, then you can enjoy the act of discovery. You should plan out your story and use an outline. Do not start on page one and plow forward. Give yourself enough character and story information so that you spend your time writing about a character you know, and not spend your time trying to figure out the basics plot of what happens next.
Emotional Core – The Main Character
The goal of the Discovery Draft is to find the emotional core of your idea. The emotional core begins with your main character. Who is this person and what to they want? What is their internal character crisis and what is their external crisis? What is at stake for this person if they fail in their quest? What will they lose and what will be the dire consequences? Who else will be hurt if they fail? (To learn more about the Internal Character Story, see Screenwriting is Rewriting, page 36-39.)
Every good screenplay must have a strong emotional underpinning. The screenplay must be based on the most critical time in a person’s life. Your main character has stepped in the middle of quick sand and with each step they take they get pulled deeper and deeper into the sand until they are up to their neck. Either they can find a way to solve their crisis or they will be dragged down. The main character must have something or someone personal they will lose if they fail in their quest.
The first draft is where you develop the inner life of the main character. The main character must have relationships with the other characters in the story. Each character in your screenplay needs to have a life. No character should exist as a “feeder character” just to feed lines to the main character. Your main character must be making emotional connections throughout your screenplay.
For the first draft, I want to get my ideas down and let my characters talk. I want them to tell me their stories. I don’t want to put constraints on them to be perfect or brilliant. That’s for later drafts. The Discovery Draft is story and character. What does the main character want and what is stopping them? If I can find that, and if I can find a strong emotional heart beat for my story, then my first draft will be a success. Even before I start my first draft I know there will be a second, third, and fourth. If I’m lucky and a producer or a studio is interested in my script, there will be many more drafts to come.
Character Growth
In the Discovery Draft, your main character needs to be making an emotional and a physical journey. The emotional journey is harder to find but is critical to the success of your screenplay. The events of the story should help your main character grow and change as a person. Your main character must be facing some sort of internal crisis. It can be a crisis of confidence, a story of regret, or a story of conquest. There are any numbers of stories where characters overcome adversity to gain their full potential.
In your first draft you want your main character to have a character arc. They may start as someone who has made a mistake and the story is their attempt to redeem themselves. Your main character should transform by the end of the screenplay. The events and the relationships in your screenplay should have an affect on your main character and influences his change. This is a foundational element in 99.9% of all screenplays and should be your primary goal of your first draft. If you are able to tell your main character’s story, and track their eventual growth and transformation, then you have done excellent work with your first draft, and your rewrite will be that much easier.
Establish One Key Relationship
You should establish many relationships in your first draft, but make sure you establish one key relationship that has the most to lose should the main character fail to achieve his goal. This can be a love story, or a mentor relationship. Which relationship you feel is most important to the main character is up to you, but that supporting character must have a stake in the outcome of the screenplay.
Supporting Characters
Give your main characters someone close to talk to so that they can help tell you their story. I often give the main character a best friend so that the main character can confide in his best friend, or the best friend can make a pointed observation. This is also helpful to tell the reader where the story is heading.
On the whole, I don’t concern myself too much with supporting characters in my first draft. Supporting characters come and go, and the ones that are important will tend to stay around. Once again, I want to be playful and create supporting characters as I go along. I have a few in mind when I begin, but the most important ones tend to surface during the writing. I want to stay playful and let the supporting characters tell me their stories. Do not create stock or cardboard supporting characters. It is much easier to create unique and original supporting characters. The world of the story and your research will give you a lot of interesting supporting characters. I try to find the supporting characters attitudes and their stories as they talk about themselves. In later drafts, I decide which supporting characters I need – which can cut and which ones can combine into a single character.
World of the Story
Let your screenplay in a very specific world. Top Gun is not just set in the Navy; it is set specifically at the Top Gun School in N.A.S. Miramar in San Diego, California. Good Will Hunting takes place in Boston, more specifically South Boston and Harvard University at Cambridge. Location and place play an important role in the development of that idea. In your Discovery Draft explore and exploit the world of the story. Every screenplay benefits from having a unique take on a very specific world. Learn about the world you are writing about and use actual elements from that world to help you find characters and story. World will help with plot elements and complications. World helps with scenes and supporting characters. What is unique about this world and how does this world make the main character’s emotional journey more difficult? Who else is in this world and why are they there?
Establish A Narrative Through Line
The first draft is a good place to develop a solid plot narrative. Find five major plot scenes that complicate your main character’s journey and write them. Beware of letting the plot take over the screenplay. Character emotion is more important in the first draft than plot elements. Plot is important, but a plot without a character at the center of it is empty and vapid.
Setting up the main plot problem is essential in a first draft. Do not start writing until you know clearly what the main character is trying to accomplish and who is trying to stop them from reaching their goal.
Establish the Opposition
“To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Newton’s third law of physics applies in screenwriting. To create conflict and tension, the main character must be struggling against someone or something that is equal to, or stronger, than them. Something or someone must be in opposition to the main character’s journey, and that opposition must continue to get more powerful, and dangerous, the closer the main character gets to their goal. The main character’s struggle can only be as strong as the power of the main opposition force. Darth Vader is more powerful than Luke Skywalker. That is what makes the conflict so interesting. If Skywalker were more powerful than Vader, the outcome would not be in doubt. The audience is curious to see how David will defeat Goliath. Everyone roots for the underdog.
One of the goals of your Discovery Draft is to find the Central Dramatic Conflict of your screenplay. (To more about The Central Dramatic Conflict see Screenwriting is Rewriting, page 132-133.) That conflict can be between the main character and a traditional antagonist such as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, or the conflict can be relationships conflicts between characters as in Little Miss Sunshine. The opposition character does not have to be evil or one-dimensional. In Little Miss Sunshine, the father, Richard, is the antagonist of the story and he supplies a great deal of the conflict and tension, but he isn’t evil. He’s lost slight of what “should” be most important in his life—his family. The story is about how Richard learns to appreciate what he has, and brings his family back together.
The main character wants something and someone, or something, stands in their way of getting it. If the main opposition force is a person, that character must have clear and compelling motivation for their actions. Beware of falling back on stereotypical character types. Always seek originality.
Write To The Ending
I reverse engineer my screenplays. I need to know the ending before I can figure out the beginning. If I know where my screenplay ends, then I know where I need to begin. If I don’t know where I am going, then it is like taking a trip without a destination. You may have fun along the way, but you are going to get lost and you might end up going nowhere. Like any journey, first pick your destination and then plan how to get there. Before you begin putting words on paper, create a road map of your main character’s journey.
Dialogue
Let your main character talk to you and the other characters in the screenplay. They have a lot to say if you are willing to listen. But, do not be too concerned about the quality of the dialogue in your Discovery Draft. Don’t worry too much about subtext, or subtle. Let your characters talk to you and don’t worry about what they say or how they say it. Always write the best dialogue you can, but in your Discover Draft you want to let them tell you their story. And to do that, they have to talk—a lot. Most of the dialogue will change through successive drafts. During the rewriting process, dialogue revisions are best saved for the last pass, The Dialogue Pass. In your first draft, let your characters hit their dialogue on the nose and say what is on their minds. Allow your characters to reveal their inner stories.
A Little Bit of Research Goes a Long Way
One of the first things I do when I begin a project is to do original research on the world I am writing about. I have learned by experience that story, characters, scenes, and plot elements emerge from original research. Also, I want to ensure any story I write has a ring of truth to it. It’s important to experts about the world, as well as to physically visit the world if possible.
I did extensive research before I started writing Top Gun. Although I had my private pilot’s license, I had never flown in a military jet, and did not know much about that world. I spent over a month researching the world of Naval Aviation. Each day of research gave me another story idea or another potential character to develop. The jet ride changed my entire concept about the movie. I was struck by how physical and difficult it was to dog fight. I crawled out of the jet drenched in sweat, my body aching as if I had just played an intense game of ice hockey—which is my sport. I saw the pilots as athletes rather than warriors. That became my metaphor. I used that experience to frame Top Gun as a sports story rather than a military movie.
A word of warning: research is very seductive. It is writing without writing. It is eating the frosting before the cake. Do just enough research so that you have a good idea of the subject, but not too much so that you are overwhelmed by the volume of your research. You want to be able to write about the world with authority. But, do not feel you must capture every little nuisance. Your goal is to express a sliver of the essence. Also, do not be a slave to the research. You are writing a drama and therefore you will need to take dramatic license with the subject matter. In Top Gun, I needed something tangible the pilots could compete for so I created the Top Gun Trophy. There is no such thing as the Top Gun Trophy. In fact, is antithetical to the way pilots train, but it helped focus the plot, and also surprised the audience when the main character did not win the trophy. You are writing a movie—not making a documentary.
Outline
Many aspiring writers complain about outlining. Outlining can be a tedious task but a necessary one. Screenplays should be designed before they are written. You should not start your screenplay without a clear understanding of where the main character is headed, the problems he will encounter along the way, and what lies at the end of that journey. You do not want to find yourself sitting at you computer asking “what happens next?” You do not want to spend days or weeks trying to figure out plot problems and loose your rhythm. By the time you get to the writing stage, you should have your story worked out and spend your time developing character and relationship.
Personally, I do not use the traditional paper outline, but use index cards instead. Outlines tend to be written in a linear fashion starting on scene one, then two and so on.My mind does not work that way. I like to start building a story with my favorite scenes first. Those scenes may start in the middle of the screenplay or the end. Then I begin to fill in around those scenes. Index cards allow me to see the bigger picture and the detail at the same time. (To learn more about using Index Cards, see Screenwriting is Rewriting, page 102-104.)
Keep Writing
Do not stay stuck on a scene. Do not worry if the writing isn’t good enough. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Usually when I reread a scene that I had trouble with, I find it is better than I thought. Yes, it needs work, but there may be an idea I can build upon in a later draft. The fact I could not make a scene work usually means I have a problem in another area of the screenplay. That problem may need to be solved first. Or, maybe I don’t need the scene at all and cutting it would be best. I don’t worry about cutting or trimming, or script length.
The only thing that counts is finding your main character and discovering their story. Everything else can come later. But, if after your first draft you do not know my main character, then you are lost. You can always add plot, but adding character is like adding the foundation after you have build the house. First you lay the foundation, and then you build the house. Character is the foundation of all screenplays.
A quick note about “Writer’s Block.” I don’t believe it in. There are good days, and there are bad days—good years and bad years. You have to write through the down times to find the up times. Again: Perfection is the enemy of the good. Allow yourself to write badly. It will free you. Every one—I mean everyone—writes badly. You just have to write your way out of it. Tell the critic to get lost and keep writing.
Further Thoughts
Be playful and experimental with your Discover Draft. Fly without a net. The gems you find along the way will be worth more than the ideas that do not work out. Make sure you outline your basic story before you begin. Know where your main character is heading. Allow yourself to discover new things along the way, but know your destination.
Take the pressure off yourself to be perfect. Write well and have fun. Outlining is back breaking work, but writing the story is the reward. Give yourself a break and turn off the critic. Try to get your first draft into focus. Use it to find your main character and your story. Let your characters talk to you and tell you who they are. They will surprise you.
A rewrite lies at the end of the road. Instead of dreading it, look forward to using it as an opportunity to make your screenplay better. Rewriting will make you a better screenwriter. Rewriting forces you to ask the right questions before you begin. Rewriting is where you learn the craft of being a screenwriter.
A first draft that discovers the main character’s story, the main character’s arc, the key relationship the central dramatic conflict, the main plot problem, and a rough structure, make your rewrites go much easier. It doesn’t matter how the dialogue reads, or whether all your scenes are marvelous. First discover the important characters, stories and themes of your screenplay, and then you can begin to layer and improve each element though a series of passes.
THE FIRST DRAFT
The Discovery Draft
Find a strong-willed character with a nothing-will-stand-in-my-way determination to reach his or her goal confronting strong opposition, add a strong action line, keep throwing obstacles in his or her path, and you’re well on your way to a gripping screenplay.
William Froug, Screen and Television Writer
While this is primarily a book about rewriting, let’s take a moment to discuss what you should be trying to accomplish with your first draft. For starters, let go of the idea you are going to write a “perfect” draft that will not need any revisions. That is not going to happen. You will need to write numerous drafts to execute your creative vision. Let go of perfection and work on being good. You can achieve good – you can strive for great – you will fail at perfection. Perfection is the enemy of the good.
It is only the amateur who believes their first draft is ready to be shot. The professional writer uses their first draft to find out who and what their movie is about. Professionals use their first draft as a sketch of our movie. Most professional writers do a lot of preparation before they begin to write their first draft. From experience, professional writers know the essential questions to ask, and which elements they must have in place before they begin to write. Few professional writers start on page one and try to figure it out as they go along. It is just a waste of time, and to the professional, time is money. Better to figure it out before the writing begins.
A solid first draft with a strong central character, a central dramatic conflict, a strong opposition character, a specific plot problem, a strong key relationship, and a functioning structure will help you enormously when you being your rewrites. And you will rewrite—multiple times. That is if you are serious about becoming a professional screenwriter. The biggest mistake aspiring writers make in their first draft is emphasizing plot over character. It is way easier to add more plot to a screenplay than it is to add more character. Screenwriting is about asking questions, and first question has to be: “Whose story is this?”
The Discovery Draft
The first draft is the Discovery Draft. The first draft should be written with passion and enthusiasm, and you should take chances and make mistakes. You want to free your subconscious to have some fun. Don’t worry about being perfect or writing the best scene in the history of cinema. It will probably be thrown out or rewritten anyway, so you might as well use it to learn something about your main character or your narrative.
The Discovery Draft is where to find the potential in your story. You want to discover the inner life of your main character. You want to find out who their friends and enemies are. What are their most important relationships? What are they afraid of? What are thy proud of? What are their dreams and hopes? At its most basic, what is your story about? Does a theme emerge? What at the high points and the low points?
By being playful, running with your ideas, and seeing where they take you, you will discover a lot of important and original aspects to your story. If you can let go and not try to hold your writing up to your lofty critic, then you can enjoy the act of discovery. You should plan out your story and use an outline. Do not start on page one and plow forward. Give yourself enough character and story information so that you spend your time writing about a character you know, and not spend your time trying to figure out the basics plot of what happens next.
Emotional Core – The Main Character
The goal of the Discovery Draft is to find the emotional core of your idea. The emotional core begins with your main character. Who is this person and what to they want? What is their internal character crisis and what is their external crisis? What is at stake for this person if they fail in their quest? What will they lose and what will be the dire consequences? Who else will be hurt if they fail? (To learn more about the Internal Character Story, see Screenwriting is Rewriting, page 36-39.)
Every good screenplay must have a strong emotional underpinning. The screenplay must be based on the most critical time in a person’s life. Your main character has stepped in the middle of quick sand and with each step they take they get pulled deeper and deeper into the sand until they are up to their neck. Either they can find a way to solve their crisis or they will be dragged down. The main character must have something or someone personal they will lose if they fail in their quest.
The first draft is where you develop the inner life of the main character. The main character must have relationships with the other characters in the story. Each character in your screenplay needs to have a life. No character should exist as a “feeder character” just to feed lines to the main character. Your main character must be making emotional connections throughout your screenplay.
For the first draft, I want to get my ideas down and let my characters talk. I want them to tell me their stories. I don’t want to put constraints on them to be perfect or brilliant. That’s for later drafts. The Discovery Draft is story and character. What does the main character want and what is stopping them? If I can find that, and if I can find a strong emotional heart beat for my story, then my first draft will be a success. Even before I start my first draft I know there will be a second, third, and fourth. If I’m lucky and a producer or a studio is interested in my script, there will be many more drafts to come.
Character Growth
In the Discovery Draft, your main character needs to be making an emotional and a physical journey. The emotional journey is harder to find but is critical to the success of your screenplay. The events of the story should help your main character grow and change as a person. Your main character must be facing some sort of internal crisis. It can be a crisis of confidence, a story of regret, or a story of conquest. There are any numbers of stories where characters overcome adversity to gain their full potential.
In your first draft you want your main character to have a character arc. They may start as someone who has made a mistake and the story is their attempt to redeem themselves. Your main character should transform by the end of the screenplay. The events and the relationships in your screenplay should have an affect on your main character and influences his change. This is a foundational element in 99.9% of all screenplays and should be your primary goal of your first draft. If you are able to tell your main character’s story, and track their eventual growth and transformation, then you have done excellent work with your first draft, and your rewrite will be that much easier.
Establish One Key Relationship
You should establish many relationships in your first draft, but make sure you establish one key relationship that has the most to lose should the main character fail to achieve his goal. This can be a love story, or a mentor relationship. Which relationship you feel is most important to the main character is up to you, but that supporting character must have a stake in the outcome of the screenplay.
Supporting Characters
Give your main characters someone close to talk to so that they can help tell you their story. I often give the main character a best friend so that the main character can confide in his best friend, or the best friend can make a pointed observation. This is also helpful to tell the reader where the story is heading.
On the whole, I don’t concern myself too much with supporting characters in my first draft. Supporting characters come and go, and the ones that are important will tend to stay around. Once again, I want to be playful and create supporting characters as I go along. I have a few in mind when I begin, but the most important ones tend to surface during the writing. I want to stay playful and let the supporting characters tell me their stories. Do not create stock or cardboard supporting characters. It is much easier to create unique and original supporting characters. The world of the story and your research will give you a lot of interesting supporting characters. I try to find the supporting characters attitudes and their stories as they talk about themselves. In later drafts, I decide which supporting characters I need – which can cut and which ones can combine into a single character.
World of the Story
Let your screenplay in a very specific world. Top Gun is not just set in the Navy; it is set specifically at the Top Gun School in N.A.S. Miramar in San Diego, California. Good Will Hunting takes place in Boston, more specifically South Boston and Harvard University at Cambridge. Location and place play an important role in the development of that idea. In your Discovery Draft explore and exploit the world of the story. Every screenplay benefits from having a unique take on a very specific world. Learn about the world you are writing about and use actual elements from that world to help you find characters and story. World will help with plot elements and complications. World helps with scenes and supporting characters. What is unique about this world and how does this world make the main character’s emotional journey more difficult? Who else is in this world and why are they there?
Establish A Narrative Through Line
The first draft is a good place to develop a solid plot narrative. Find five major plot scenes that complicate your main character’s journey and write them. Beware of letting the plot take over the screenplay. Character emotion is more important in the first draft than plot elements. Plot is important, but a plot without a character at the center of it is empty and vapid.
Setting up the main plot problem is essential in a first draft. Do not start writing until you know clearly what the main character is trying to accomplish and who is trying to stop them from reaching their goal.
Establish the Opposition
“To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Newton’s third law of physics applies in screenwriting. To create conflict and tension, the main character must be struggling against someone or something that is equal to, or stronger, than them. Something or someone must be in opposition to the main character’s journey, and that opposition must continue to get more powerful, and dangerous, the closer the main character gets to their goal. The main character’s struggle can only be as strong as the power of the main opposition force. Darth Vader is more powerful than Luke Skywalker. That is what makes the conflict so interesting. If Skywalker were more powerful than Vader, the outcome would not be in doubt. The audience is curious to see how David will defeat Goliath. Everyone roots for the underdog.
One of the goals of your Discovery Draft is to find the Central Dramatic Conflict of your screenplay. (To more about The Central Dramatic Conflict see Screenwriting is Rewriting, page 132-133.) That conflict can be between the main character and a traditional antagonist such as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, or the conflict can be relationships conflicts between characters as in Little Miss Sunshine. The opposition character does not have to be evil or one-dimensional. In Little Miss Sunshine, the father, Richard, is the antagonist of the story and he supplies a great deal of the conflict and tension, but he isn’t evil. He’s lost slight of what “should” be most important in his life—his family. The story is about how Richard learns to appreciate what he has, and brings his family back together.
The main character wants something and someone, or something, stands in their way of getting it. If the main opposition force is a person, that character must have clear and compelling motivation for their actions. Beware of falling back on stereotypical character types. Always seek originality.
Write To The Ending
I reverse engineer my screenplays. I need to know the ending before I can figure out the beginning. If I know where my screenplay ends, then I know where I need to begin. If I don’t know where I am going, then it is like taking a trip without a destination. You may have fun along the way, but you are going to get lost and you might end up going nowhere. Like any journey, first pick your destination and then plan how to get there. Before you begin putting words on paper, create a road map of your main character’s journey.
Dialogue
Let your main character talk to you and the other characters in the screenplay. They have a lot to say if you are willing to listen. But, do not be too concerned about the quality of the dialogue in your Discovery Draft. Don’t worry too much about subtext, or subtle. Let your characters talk to you and don’t worry about what they say or how they say it. Always write the best dialogue you can, but in your Discover Draft you want to let them tell you their story. And to do that, they have to talk—a lot. Most of the dialogue will change through successive drafts. During the rewriting process, dialogue revisions are best saved for the last pass, The Dialogue Pass. In your first draft, let your characters hit their dialogue on the nose and say what is on their minds. Allow your characters to reveal their inner stories.
A Little Bit of Research Goes a Long Way
One of the first things I do when I begin a project is to do original research on the world I am writing about. I have learned by experience that story, characters, scenes, and plot elements emerge from original research. Also, I want to ensure any story I write has a ring of truth to it. It’s important to experts about the world, as well as to physically visit the world if possible.
I did extensive research before I started writing Top Gun. Although I had my private pilot’s license, I had never flown in a military jet, and did not know much about that world. I spent over a month researching the world of Naval Aviation. Each day of research gave me another story idea or another potential character to develop. The jet ride changed my entire concept about the movie. I was struck by how physical and difficult it was to dog fight. I crawled out of the jet drenched in sweat, my body aching as if I had just played an intense game of ice hockey—which is my sport. I saw the pilots as athletes rather than warriors. That became my metaphor. I used that experience to frame Top Gun as a sports story rather than a military movie.
A word of warning: research is very seductive. It is writing without writing. It is eating the frosting before the cake. Do just enough research so that you have a good idea of the subject, but not too much so that you are overwhelmed by the volume of your research. You want to be able to write about the world with authority. But, do not feel you must capture every little nuisance. Your goal is to express a sliver of the essence. Also, do not be a slave to the research. You are writing a drama and therefore you will need to take dramatic license with the subject matter. In Top Gun, I needed something tangible the pilots could compete for so I created the Top Gun Trophy. There is no such thing as the Top Gun Trophy. In fact, is antithetical to the way pilots train, but it helped focus the plot, and also surprised the audience when the main character did not win the trophy. You are writing a movie—not making a documentary.
Outline
Many aspiring writers complain about outlining. Outlining can be a tedious task but a necessary one. Screenplays should be designed before they are written. You should not start your screenplay without a clear understanding of where the main character is headed, the problems he will encounter along the way, and what lies at the end of that journey. You do not want to find yourself sitting at you computer asking “what happens next?” You do not want to spend days or weeks trying to figure out plot problems and loose your rhythm. By the time you get to the writing stage, you should have your story worked out and spend your time developing character and relationship.
Personally, I do not use the traditional paper outline, but use index cards instead. Outlines tend to be written in a linear fashion starting on scene one, then two and so on.My mind does not work that way. I like to start building a story with my favorite scenes first. Those scenes may start in the middle of the screenplay or the end. Then I begin to fill in around those scenes. Index cards allow me to see the bigger picture and the detail at the same time. (To learn more about using Index Cards, see Screenwriting is Rewriting, page 102-104.)
Keep Writing
Do not stay stuck on a scene. Do not worry if the writing isn’t good enough. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Usually when I reread a scene that I had trouble with, I find it is better than I thought. Yes, it needs work, but there may be an idea I can build upon in a later draft. The fact I could not make a scene work usually means I have a problem in another area of the screenplay. That problem may need to be solved first. Or, maybe I don’t need the scene at all and cutting it would be best. I don’t worry about cutting or trimming, or script length.
The only thing that counts is finding your main character and discovering their story. Everything else can come later. But, if after your first draft you do not know my main character, then you are lost. You can always add plot, but adding character is like adding the foundation after you have build the house. First you lay the foundation, and then you build the house. Character is the foundation of all screenplays.
A quick note about “Writer’s Block.” I don’t believe it in. There are good days, and there are bad days—good years and bad years. You have to write through the down times to find the up times. Again: Perfection is the enemy of the good. Allow yourself to write badly. It will free you. Every one—I mean everyone—writes badly. You just have to write your way out of it. Tell the critic to get lost and keep writing.
Further Thoughts
Be playful and experimental with your Discover Draft. Fly without a net. The gems you find along the way will be worth more than the ideas that do not work out. Make sure you outline your basic story before you begin. Know where your main character is heading. Allow yourself to discover new things along the way, but know your destination.
Take the pressure off yourself to be perfect. Write well and have fun. Outlining is back breaking work, but writing the story is the reward. Give yourself a break and turn off the critic. Try to get your first draft into focus. Use it to find your main character and your story. Let your characters talk to you and tell you who they are. They will surprise you.
A rewrite lies at the end of the road. Instead of dreading it, look forward to using it as an opportunity to make your screenplay better. Rewriting will make you a better screenwriter. Rewriting forces you to ask the right questions before you begin. Rewriting is where you learn the craft of being a screenwriter.
A first draft that discovers the main character’s story, the main character’s arc, the key relationship the central dramatic conflict, the main plot problem, and a rough structure, make your rewrites go much easier. It doesn’t matter how the dialogue reads, or whether all your scenes are marvelous. First discover the important characters, stories and themes of your screenplay, and then you can begin to layer and improve each element though a series of passes.