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This blog covers points 4-7 of the common mistakes Dr. Stan Williams sees when fixing scripts.
#4
Inconsistent roller coaster.
That's one way of saying it. The other way is what is challenging in screenplays is called the slow middle. You know, you have act one that sets things up.
You have Act two that resolves everything. And then two, which is really equal in length to Act one, plus Act three together. That's where the protagonist is testing and learning and going through the special world and trying to learn those skills that they need to learn to resolve the problem that's presented in Act One but is solved in Act three.
Well, the problem is that when you're going through Act two, because it's so long, I mean, it's twice as long as Act one, and it's twice as long as Act three is that you tend to slow down. You tend to try to maybe there is too much exposition, but it becomes slow and muddled. Okay. So there's a whole way there's a very good way that I explain in the book and on my blog and in my online story craft training about how you avoid that slow middle. https://stanwilliams.com/storycrafttraining/
And it's by creating a roller coaster with pinch points. And there's turning points. People oftentimes think of a movie as having at least two turning points, one at the end of Act one and the other one at the end of Act two. And that turned the protagonist a totally different direction. To help resolve the problem.
But actually these are all turning points in a good film.
There's the inciting incident.
There's the Act one climax.
There's pinch point A,
there's the moment of grace.
There's pinch point B,
there's Act two, climax,
there's the final incident.
And then there is, in fact, the final conclusion of the climax of the story.
Those are all turning points. There's eight turning points, and if you position those things about every 12 and a half percent through the movie and you change the direction that the protagonist is going, or you change the emotional response to the audience's feeling, from hopeful to depressed and to exciting to dull, to action, to dialog, those things create a roller coaster effect emotionally and physically.
You know, it's like the boy with the the clover or the the flower, the pedal of a flower. And he says she loves me, she loves me not loves me. Well, that's a good romantic comedy. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl, Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl. All right. A roller coaster And you've got to position those turning point elements.
But every 12 and a half percent or 12 pages or so in your 100 page script.
On Stan's Blog you can see how he breaks down a script with those roller coaster points.
Sometimes filmmakers do this kind of subconsciously, you know, it's not like they've plotted out on paper. I mean, eventually they do, but it's almost like a script is handed out to someone and they say, Well, what do you think about the script and the star or the producer say, Well, I don't know.
It seems a little slow here. And they go back and forth, back and forth with all these revisions, and eventually they end up with something that has a natural feeling to it, a natural law, a natural rhythm or the rollercoaster. And so they don't always plot it out, but they get there for they get there. They get there eventually.
#5
Natural Law Action
Another way to explain natural law action is to simply say that every effect has a cause. It's the cause and effect of you. If if a character does something, there has to be a natural consequence to that action. Yes. If a character makes a decision and takes that action, there has to be a natural law effect to that.
And oftentimes you'll have people write a scene where the character will do something and there is no effect. You know, they'll do something evil and there is no consequence. There's no judgment. That takes the audience out of the story unless you're showing it to gangsters, in which case they want that to happen. That's right. But then you're in a different diegesis.
One of the ways going back to the show and tell thing, one of my criticisms of a lot of faith films is that there's this there's this idea. There's ideology that Christian filmmakers have that to solve the problem. You have to have a scene where the protagonist who's having a problem goes in and sits with a pastor and gets counseled or sits in a church and listens to a sermon.
And in the sermon or in the counseling words from the counselor to the pastor as a solution to his problem. And he goes out and implements that and everything's fine. Well, that that's not natural law. That's not the way we learn. Now, a pastor may be able to explain something to you in a sermon as to why things work in natural law.
But the way natural law really works is that it works like this. If you go rob a store, that's the action. The consequence you get, you get arrested and go to prison, and it's in prison that you get saved. It's not in the pastor's office. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Once after the fall. Yeah. It's there's there's got to be a natural cause and effect that the audience recognizes.
You have to remember that movies are visual.
They're not verbal mediums. A stage play oftentimes has to be verbal because you can't show things, but there's no reason why you can't show things in a movie. So you have to show it that, tell it, and the showing has to be consistent with natural law. Okay. So that's number four.
Natural law action. The cause and effect have to make logical sense, and there has to be an effect to a cause.
#6
Stream of consciousness as opposed to a constructed plot.
This is where, in fact, I'm working with one writer right now out in L.A., And she she's very creative. She's just very visual. But she tends to write a stream of consciousness of what's happening and without plotting it out. She's essentially a panzer. She's we call writer's panzers or plots plotters. And a panzer is someone that will just the imagination of wild and fertile, and they'll start writing, but it won't have any.
There may be some logical gaps and we don't understand it. And it's not constructed to flow like a rollercoaster effect, cause and effect. And so what happens? You end up with the stream of consciousness and you have to, as a critic like I do, I'll have to read herself. What does she really thinking here? What's really going on?
And oftentimes, a lot of writers, I probably 50% of the writers I work with, they will write something down that doesn't make any sense. And and if you talk to them, you'll say, well, that makes sense. I understand why you wrote that now, but guess what? You didn't tell me that in the script. Yeah, it was in their brain, but it wasn't on the paper.
And so when I'm reading it, I can't read their mind. I'm trying to figure it out. And so they're kind of. It's almost like writing down all the effects, but never writing down the causes.
That's the importance of putting your self in the audience shoes. You have to.
And that's why it's so important to have anybody read it out loud with, you know, sit down. Like when I write stuff. My wife. She'll always read my stuff or I'll sit down and read it to her. And, and she said, Wait a minute. What? Why did that happen? And I'll say and I'll explain it eventually. She said, Well, you didn't say that.
And so that takes people out of the story. You lose the track. Sometimes you have to be explicit about what's going on. That's why when you see someone walking out of the house and, you know, they've got and the idea is that they've got to drive across town to to a meeting or to some event, you have to see them get in the car and at least drive for 10 seconds.
Right. And then you can see the car pull up into the front of the new building. You can leave gaps for the audience to fill in, but the gaps can't be too big. You can't see them. You can't see them walk out of your living room, or they're sitting in their living room like Archie Bunker and Archie Bunker.
Because when he walks over to the kitchen and the next thing, you see them in the lodge. Well, wait, what? Why did he go there? What happened? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a gap that I mean, if you've established it as a motif that works like before, but you can't do it initially. You have to fill in the gaps.
#7
A lack of value based motivation.
This goes at the heart of the moral premise, which I'm not really going to talk about right now. We're going to talk about that later. But every action, every character that acts on something is they've done that action based on a value.
So I'll say to a roomful of people listening to me talk, I said, You came here today and sat down because of a value that you've figured that hopefully I was going to say something that would help you be a better writer. That's a value. You value your craft. You value learning. And so you make the decision and you take the action to get your car, pay your money, whatever it takes, and get into that class so that you can learn.
You can get that degree. You can get that certification. You can't have characters doing things without also making it clear, often implicitly, why they're doing it. What is the motivation inside their brain? We do nothing without first having a value in our mind and making a decision that we're going to do something. So you have to have that value.
Now, I think I'm going to talk about this later on, but let me try to reinforce this right here, because this is really important. Yeah. When you're looking at a character, you have to look at them as a real live person. And that real life person does three things consciously. They have a value that they they're conscious of.
Well, that may be their subconscious about it, but if you ask them, well, is drinking water during the day important? Well, I've never thought about it, but you do it. I notice you keep taking sips of that water bottle. Well, yeah, I guess that is important to me, but I never thought I'd just do it unconsciously. Okay, But it's a value.
You hydrate yourself. Okay. Okay. Next thing that they do voluntarily is they actually pick up the bottle and drink the water. That's the action.
So there's the value I need to hydrate. That's their value. That they they voluntarily hold voluntarily.
And then there's the decision. The value is in your mind. The decision is in your mind.
And then the third thing is outside. That's external, and that's the action. You take the action. So those three things we do.
The fourth thing in the cycle, and this continues as a cycle throughout our life, is the consequence, the natural consequence of taking that action.
Now, let's say that we have to make this clear. The two things are in the brain. I have a value and I make a decision.
The next two things are outside in our body.
We take the action and there's a physical consequence.
So let's say the value is I don't like water. I'm not going to drink it.
Okay? And so the action you take is it's a negative action. You refuse to drink when someone offers it to you. And well, that's actually the action. The the decision is that I'm going to refuse it. And the action is that I, I don't take it. I really don't drink the water. The consequence is that you may faint from dehydration.
You have no control over that. So characters have control over the value. The decision and the action, but they have no control over the natural law consequence. So always make sure that your characters have a value that they're using. Whether it's a good value or a bad value. Value doesn't mean it's good. It can be. In my book, The Moral Premise, we talk about virtues or values or good values and.
Vices are the bad values, and they both have physical consequences.
The consequence seems like a really fun place to keep the story interesting. Or maybe I don't know if that could be a pinch or something like that, but, because sometimes things happen in life, like our consequences are different than what we expected.
Right. Yeah. No, no, definitely. And in fact, in a movie, as opposed to let me do it this way, in a novel, you're going to read the character's inner monologue where they are articulate, learning their values and they're debating the decision, and then they take the action. But in a movie and you often don't understand the character's values.
Or the struggle they through with the decision, although they may have a shadow character or a sidekick where that decision is debated, you know, the dilemma, the moral dilemmas debated, and then the action is taken. But typically in a movie, it's mostly the action that's taken. And the consequence to that action, that's almost what a movie is almost all a movie is.
That is. And that's what's so you. So writers have to understand that it's this and this is why thrillers and chase scenes and adventures are the more popular genres, because they're not we're not thinking, we're not talking. You know, there's the movies that Linklater filmmaker Art Linklater's son, famous filmmaker, he did all those talkies, you know, okay. Like, like before sunrise, before sunset and after midnight and all that.
And it's just two people talking. Ethan Hawke and Julia Delphia, I think walking through Paris or someplace talking and they're philosophical. Well, those are okay for people that like words, but those are those are not the most popular movies and they're harder to sell,
You're depending a lot on that On the actor at that point, I would think.
yeah. yeah. And Julie Delphia and Ethan Hawke are two interesting people to talk to. I mean, you know, listen, listen. Talking to each other, especially as they're walking through Paris, you know, because there's landscapes behind them. Right. And so interesting about those movies and this is Linklater and and the scripts are written by Linklater and Delfi and Hawke.
They collaborate on the script. And what's so interesting about it, it looks like they're just ad libbing off an outline. But in fact, they're tightly scripted and they memorized everything. At least that's what I'm told.
On our next podcast. Will. We'll tackle a few more.
mark your calendars.
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