Mar 18, 2016

Hard at work on book edits to get a final one polished for publication. The Inkshares team has been a big help, can’t wait for you guys to read. In the meantime: Another writing tip essay.

SCREENWRITING TIP #3: PLOT (2)

Waldo Salt, a great screenwriter (Coming Home, Midnight Cowboy) once explained the three act structure to me as “First act, chase the hero up a tree, second act, shake a stick at him, third act, he figures a way to get down - or not, and it becomes a tragedy.  Meaning that as you build the first act, set up the characters problem(s), make it as bad as you can for them, try to find a twist in the second act and then one again in the third.  Remember that the audience wants plot and character surprises but only ones that make sense, that fit.

The first act defines your main character’s problem, not just the external plot problem (Nick Of Time – father’s daughter is kidnapped) but their internal problem (Nick Of Time – the man’s wife just died and she never thought he was responsible enough to take care of a child and he has similar doubts).

In act two you make the problem even worse for your character, culminating in the character attempting a solution, one that usually fails and probably makes things even more dire.  Maybe they misunderstood the situation or only tried to deal with the surface crisis.

Act three propels the character into actually striving toward a real solution.  For example; someone who is a control freak cedes control and trusts others to help them.

What you do as a writer is create puzzles that you solve.  You constantly get your character in trouble, physical, emotional, psychological, and then find a way to get them out, over and over and over, escalating the jeopardy until the climax.  The thrill for the audience is the same as it has been for centuries of storytelling, from around the campfire to IMAX 3D, how are they gonna get out of that fix?  That is the fun part.

Often the audience is ahead of you and there is nothing you can do about it because of the genre or the trailer.  They know that there is a monster in the closet.  This is not a bad thing as you can play with that knowledge, tease them.  Hitchcock talked about the bomb under  the table.  Two people are sitting having a quiet amiable lunch – BOOM! A bomb goes off.  It surprises the audience.  Cool.  But what if the audience sees the bomb under their table.  The couple sit, talk about what ‘organic’ really means, and we cut to the clock on the bomb ticking away, closer and closer toward detonation, the tension mounts and instead of the audience having three seconds of surprise they can participate in so many minutes of dramatic tension. Works better, right?

Above all your job is to keep the audience entertained in every possible way, through drama, comedy, action, tension, using every trick of the storyteller’s art.