The thing is, I never used to outline my movies before I wrote them. I
just sat down with a pad and a pen and jumped right into it. To be fair,
it was a liberating experience. A "stream of consciousness" as they call
it in literary circles. What pops into your mind, suddenly appears on the
paper. The flow takes you away with it.. but beware, before you know it
you are ten pages into your feature script and you have no idea of where
you are going or indeed, where you came from.
Like I said, I never used to think this was a problem, until I was faced with
the dreaded experience of having to rewrite absolutely everything I
wrote another one hundred and fifty times. And this wasn't for development
execs or producers. It was for myself. I was and still am my own worst and
best critic. I know when something I have written works and when it doesn't.
Being a director too, I have always thought visually and approached
each screenwriting project as if I was going to put it on the big screen
myself without anybody's help. This may be unrealistic, but it enabled me
to view my work from a different perspective. An objective one. I learnt
the basics of pace and cutting out of a scene early and into one as late as
possible. I now look at all of my stories as pictures. I see them as
paintings rather than words. And I see the entire scene-to-scene progression of my
screenplays as maneuverable blueprints rather than an adhesive concoction of prose
and dialogue stuck together and to the page.
Confused? I'll try to explain further…
When you write a film script either straight onto a pad or punch it directly into
your computer, the worst
thing you can do is imagine that these words are chiselled in stone. That the
scenes in the order you have created them are rigid and will remain where you
put them for all eternity. You have to see the script as a reflection of your
original idea that can now be moulded and shaped into the story it was always meant to be.
The problem is, when you don't plan out your screenplay first, this is much
harder to do. That's why I started outlining scripts before writing them. Well,
that's actually a lie. I started outlining them because producers and development
execs wanted to see the ideas for my pitches and I couldn't just hand them a bunch of
scribbled notes. These outlines then developed into longer treatments and before I
knew it I was already in the habit of "step-outlining" first and writing screenplays
second. It was a bizarre, subconscious transition, but I'm extremely glad that it happened.
Since planning out my screen stories step by step (or from major event to
major event) I have been able to focus my cinematic ideas and nail down the real
central structure of my screenplays and their principle character arcs before
committing myself to the script itself.
It does take a little commitment, especially if you are eager to start writing
dialogue and getting to know the characters populating your new world up close and
personal, but if you try to curb your enthusiasm for just a few days and hammer out
the central event driven plot beforehand you will most certainly save yourself a whole
load of time and screenwriting headaches in the end.
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