John Yull's Profile

Step 2: Imagine that you are your main character. You are going to write in the first person as that character, and describe from their point of view a different ending than the one you'd planned for Act 3. Remember not to worry about the execution, but have fun imagining another outcome. The first line should read, "I had no idea that..."



If you were writing as Frank In The Line Of Fire, you might write something like this, " I had no idea that I would ever get another chance to catch Leary. I was the same loser I had always been. As I headed for the taxi, the sick taste of failure in my mouth, the young smartass agent rattled off the number for the field office I was being sent to. Then it hit, me - I suddenly knew how to find Leary! It was the old feeling of sureness I hadn't felt since I blew things with Kennedy, and I had no reason to believe in myself, but I had nothing left to lose..."



What you've done here is to allow the character to "tell" you how they made the recognition so that your ending can have a strong reversal! It can almost feel like Magic!

. If not, go one step further and ask yourself what is the most unlikely ending? Sometimes that will provoke a new insight. Otherwise, consider that the ending you have is just right, and commit to the best execution possible.



Let's assume you found a new ending. You can now go back and reverse engineer how to make it happen. We do that by revisiting the events of the preceding two acts and finding where the assumptions have been made. In the Line Of Fire, Frank is shown to lack confidence in his own judgment, so by giving him a moment of recognition when he has a gut feeling that the anagram is the key, his confidence is restored. In The Usual Suspects, it's "Verbal/Soze's" supreme confidence that both carries him through and then gives him away at then end.



To summarize: By moving from optimism or pessimism and applying Aristotle's simple principles of reversal and recognition, it's possible to come up with a great new ending for your screenplay.

Part. 3: The last step is to pretend that you are the hero or heroine of your story, and that the story of your screenplay is over. It is now several years later, and you have moved forward in your life and are looking back.



Again using North By Northwest as a model, writing as Roger, your story might read: "After I survived the climb down Mount Rushmore, and got the girl, I thought back to how this all happened: I was in a bar, and these 2 men mistook me for this spy, and I was taken to this fancy house in the suburbs. I was made to drink liquor and put in a speeding car, but managed not to crash.When I found out who the owner of the house was, I went to the UN to confront him, but before I could he was killed and I was framed. I escaped and found myself on a train to Chicago. The cops were about to catch me but I was befriended by Eve, a beautiful woman who hid me in her compartment..."



Set a timer for 15 minutes and write without stopping, completing the phrase: "After I survived..."



You get the idea. They say: "Hindsight is 20/20," so why not make practical use of it and imagine your story beyond the end.This act of imagination frees you to make more interesting plot connections you would otherwise have been unable to make. These connections enable you to create more unusual and effective scenes and will tighten your screenplay as a whole.

Read it Aloud! A wise man once told me that in life there are always two choices: when you come to a fork in the road, you can take the right way or the long way.



The technique of reading aloud won't help you skip steps, but it will give you control over your work by helping you find a new perspective fast. Changing your point of view will give you instant objectivity, thus you will be able to see the overall structure of your script with ease. Once you get the structure right, then you can work in improving the dialog and action. Reading aloud will help you here as well, but begin with correcting the structure first.

The key here is to allow yourself to mentally "see" the whole picture before you decide which "snapshot" to
present to your audience. But how can we do this and not end with a fifty page first act?



The answer is to write a first person narration of the events of the first act as if you were the hero, heroine or villain. Understanding
the way a character thinks and feels about the situation you have placed them in can cut your writing time in half. By
allowing your characters to think and feel in their own voice is the fast track to successfully compressing exposition
so that you can get into your story more quickly

To Dramatize or Summarize? That is the question



We often need a single organizing principle to act as a compass as we navigate through our own work and pinpoint what needs rewriting. Finding the right question to ask, one that allows you to evaluate each part of your screenplay, is the key.

An effective way to begin is to imagine that every scene has a moment before it began and a moment after and each one of these is a separate scene, and so each of your scenes becomes part of a larger whole, called a sequence. If you look at each scene as a sequence, it will give you the overview you need for correct assessment. Now ask yourself if you have dramatized the moments where there is the most conflict? Did you stay in the scene with the characters until they resolved it, or cut away to a new scene just as the previous one got juicy?



I often read drafts which include a two-page scene of the characters dining at a restaurant. When the waitperson finally leaves, the writer summarizes the conflict of the scene in a line or two. What the writer should have done was start the scene after the waitperson left, and stayed with the characters until the conflict was resolved.



Question: But how do I make the right decision as to what to rewrite or cut?




Answer: By identifying the conflict in the scene, and determining what each character wants. For example, in The Godfather, Michael wants to murder the Turk, who wants to make a drug deal. As they eat dinner in a restaurant, each seemingly mundane event (sitting down, ordering, being served) is loaded, because it all leads up to the climax.




Why do we so often dilute the tension or suspense that writing real conflict generates? Simple - we're trained to avoid conflict in real life, so we naturally try to minimize the conflicts in our scripts. However, we must overcome this, because our job as writers is to look for conflict and to amplify it. Audiences don't want to see films that are like everyday life; but rather, larger than life. Using the questions will help you do that.

"It doesn't matter. Socrates said there were two reasons things don't get written: one, because they're never started-your problem-and second, because they don't get finished. Not your problem, since you have nothing to finish."



"Okay, so where do I start?"



She laughed. "That is the big question, isn't it? Where did you begin the book?"




"Oh, I just wrote, 'Once upon a time,'" I said sarcastically, and then stopped in mid-lip curl. She had put her finger squarely on the problem.



When telling the story as a fiction writer, I hadn't been worried. I'd begun each character's story at a moment of crisis, a natural choice that I had somehow forgotten to make when I turned to the screenplay form.



I went home and began my zero draft with vigor because I had reconnected to my natural storytelling self that was confident and knew where to start. The zero draft I wrote was a mixture of different things: there were third-person past-tense sections and scenes I felt sure about written in screenplay form. Other parts I summarized with sentences like "fight scene goes here-the hero wins, but the partner dies." My zero draft came in at 139 pages, and had a beginning, middle, and an end.



By the time I was done with the script, I'd kept about 60 percent-a lot considering I had expected to throw out the whole stinking mess, lock, stock, and barrel. It wasn't terrific, but I had achieved the most important thing-I had written a first draft.



Since then I have used this technique combined with The Horowitz SystemT often. It was how I came up with a personal mantra that I use myself and which I also teach my students: "Don't get it right, get it written."



So, if you get stuck, using the Zero Draft technique will get you back on track fast. Just pick a place, anyplace, to start and keep writing until the end.

Later I asked myself, why does such a simple idea have such a helpful effect?



The connection to a deeper self brings us to the present moment and helps us find relief. This is the state of mind
called the "flow" state.




"People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action
awareness merging."

Look at your current script and ask yourself if your character has an awareness of something larger than him or her.
Here are some easy ways to figure this out: Does your main character pray or go to church when stressed?
Meditate or do yoga? Curse God? Mention a fear of going to hell in their dialogue?



If the answer is yes, how are you dramatizing this? And if not, how could add an arc that
begins at one end of the spectrum and ends with the other?

Ask yourself: is there a plot event that forces the character to reexamine or confront his or her belief system?



The "miracle" in Pulp Fiction is an example of how a plot event creates subplot and breadth of story. In the
film, both Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel Jackson) witness the "miracle", by the end of the film, one changes
as a result and the other doesn't. One reforms his life and the other doesn't. Vincent refuses to see that the event is
a sign, a call to adventure to change their lives. Jules realizes it and stops killing people, because he realizes he's
a part of something larger than himself.



Finding a deeper level of awareness, understanding that everyone and every character has a "god speck,"
within themselves, a phrase that, Adrienne Weiss, director of Love Ludlow, used in a wonderful short film
called Mother's Day, can improve both our writing and make life itself more bearable.

Finding the answer to this question of what could drive your main character to murder
can be the one question you need to answer to make your screenplay "pop."



The best part is that identifying the homicidal moment for your characters can work well
whether you're writing a drama or a comedy. In the drama, The Godfather II,
Vito Corleone, as a young man becomes capable of murder in order to save his family when the
local Mafiosi takes away his job. Before that event he is shown as a gentle man. In the
comedy, Little Miss Sunshine, Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear) becomes so angry with his
agent, Larry Sugarman (Gordon Thompson), that he wants to kill him, but instead does
some crazy things to get his daughter to the Beauty Pageant. If he hadn't become so
enraged, we would not have been able to believe that he would really steal his father's
body from the hospital.



Imagining a situation where your main character would commit murder can lead you to a
better, more original story.

An effective way to improve or create a scene is to add secrets that each character hides from the other. Secrets are both things that our characters don't want other people to know, and things that they hide from themselves. You may already know what those secrets are but aren't using them, or perhaps you will have to create them at some point. Remember, everyone has something they think they need to hide.



Let's use When Harry Met Sally as an example. In the beginning of the film, Harry and Sally are driving from Chicago to New York, and they stop at a diner. In the diner, Sally's secret is that she has slept with Sheldon and broke up with him over the days-of-the-week underwear. Harry's secret is that he's attracted to Sally. When Harry claims that Sally has never had great sex, it gets her to reveal her own secret and creates the conflict in the scene. It is, of course, Harry's secret attraction to Sally that drove him to raise the subject of sex in the first place.



Sometimes characters even keep secrets from themselves. When Sally breaks up with Joe, she pretends that she's fine about it. The secret that she keeps from herself is that she's actually very upset about it. She pretends everything is okay until Joe gets engaged to someone else. Then she breaks down and innocently calls Harry to come and comfort her. Her sudden vulnerability is what gets her into trouble with Harry. Meanwhile, Harry's secret from himself is that he's in love with her. When she rejects him, he has to face the fact that he wants to marry her.



You can see how tapping into the secrets your characters keep from themselves and others can improve both your scene work and plot. Secrets raise the stakes and instantly add subtext.
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