I’ve gotten to read many amateur scripts over the years. Some by giving feedback on the Screenwriters Network for other members. Others as the leader of a writers workshop, or as a contest judge. I want to write about one thing that trips up a lot of new screenwriters – the difference between an idea and a story.
Some Definitions
An idea is the cool whatsit that gets your attention. It could be an interesting monster, or a captivating world, or a strange premise. Usually, whatever gets you excited about writing your script is your core idea.
And that’s great. You want to be motivated and passionate about telling your story. But the important part of that sentence is telling your story. Too often amateurs forget to actually deliver on that part.
A story is a series of events, generally with characters and cause and effect. But it’s also an experience, a ride that the audience is going on. Whether it’s thrills or frights or emotional catharsis, your story should have an impact on the audience.
Too often what I see is a writer in love with an idea who spends all their pages setting up this cool situation or giving the backstory on that interesting villain. But just because it’s interesting to you doesn’t mean the audience wants to spend all their time getting a lesson from you on the world of your script. They still want to go on a journey, with characters, that causes some kind of emotional response.
An Example
Let’s look at one of my favorite movies, Jurassic Park. It has a killer idea: what if we cloned dinosaurs, and made an amusement park? If you were the first person to come up with that conceit for a story you’d be pumped.
But notice how Jurassic Park builds a story around that idea. We spend time with Dr. Grant, a paleontologist who has doubts about having kids. We see our human villains, Nedry and Dodson, setting their devious plans in motion. We meet the admin team and discover the uncertainty and doubt roiling under the surface of this venture.
In short, the movie takes the time to tell a story – to get us invested in characters with objectives and flaws and see how they spark off each other. It knows it’s got this cool idea in its pocket, but also that the idea alone isn’t enough.
And once they do deploy the dinosaurs, it’s in a series of thrilling set pieces and sequences. Because we know the characters and their goals and stakes, we’re invested in the outcome of each dinosaur interaction. The encounters themselves build and change, as well – they don’t just run into a T-Rex, get eaten, and that’s that.
The Set-piece
Consider the first T-Rex attack. It starts with the goat missing and the cup shaking. Then the wires go. Gennaro flees the car. The kids try to figure out what’s going on. Grant and Malcolm try to see what’s going on from the other car. All this is building anticipation.
Then the T-Rex emerges, attracted by the kids’ lights and attacks the car. First Grant and then Malcolm attempt to distract the T-Rex – in the second case inadvertently drawing it to Gennaro. Grant uses the distraction to rescue Ellie but they have to freeze under the T-Rex’s gaze. It inadvertently forces them over the side of the reservoir, which they then have to climb down while avoiding the falling car. Finally they reach solid ground, away from the T-Rex, but now what?
If you go back through this series of events and break it down, you can see how cause and effect causes things to escalate. Each time it escalates, the threat grows greater. But it also changes, evolves into a new spin on the situation that requires a new response that will cause a new change and so on.
Telling a story is about characters and investing in their objectives, but it’s also about crafting the ride the audience is going to go on. If you want us to be thrilled, then thrill us. Be mindful about the audience experience and don’t get focused on telling the audience how cool your idea is. The goal is to make the audience experience how cool your idea is.
The Alternative
If Jurassic Park had been written like the amateur scripts I read, it would have gone something like this:
We start with a brief introduction to Dr. Grant, who’s a paleontologist. That’s all we learn about him. Some other characters also arrive at this island. We then spend two-thirds of the movie going around the park, checking out the cool sights, and having explained to us in detail what it’s like to run a dinosaur park.
Once the dinosaurs break free they quickly dispatch the cast, one-by-one, in brief scenes with no tension or surprise. Person encounters dinosaur, they get eaten. Repeat. We blaze through our characters until finally Grant escapes, while acknowledging that those dinosaurs were pretty cool.
End of movie. Roll credits.
See how boring that is?
The Basics
In the end, it comes back to the basics. Specifically, show don’t tell. You might have the coolest idea in the world in your story, but if you spend your whole time telling us how cool it is, or even worse explaining other stuff so you can eventually and briefly get around to telling us about your cool idea, your script will fail. We want a story, which you can deliver by showing us how cool your idea. Let us experience it for ourselves, and then when we get to the end we’ll grab the next person we see and say “I have to tell you about this story with dinosaurs in an amusement park.” Let us be the one telling how cool it is, because you’ve already done the hard work of showing.