Chapter | four

Inciting Incident: Away We Go

There's a reason movies (usually) don't open with the main character being born. One, birth is bloody and horrifying and they'd have to slap an R rating on every film, and two, movies aren't supposed to be about the protagonist's entire life. They're about the most important, transformative, and screenplay-worthy event that happens in that person's life.

The inciting incident isn't necessarily the start of your script, but it's definitely the start of your story. It's the event that pushes your protagonist inexorably toward their destiny. If we think of a screenplay as one long answer to a question about your protagonist (i.e., “How far would she go for love?” or “What does she believe in so much that she'd be willing to die for it?”), then the inciting incident is that question.

If newbie writers know one thing, it's that protagonists have to be sad.

Because protagonists have to be flawed, right? Well, having a shitty life is a flaw. And of course, characters must have horrible things happen to them so they can be pushed into action, that is, the story. That's what all the screenwriting books say – to pile crap and misfortune on your main character, thus making their inevitable triumph all the sweeter. So of course the protagonist must spend all of Act 1 moping and complaining about this misfortune so that we can see how much it's affecting her.

Yeah, no. Please don't do this, newbie writers. There is a better way.

I'll grant you that a good protagonist needs personal, emotional problems to overcome, and generally, the bigger the problem (subjective to the protagonist herself), the higher the stakes and the stronger the drama. But sorrow – or worse, boredom – is a very difficult choice of “starting position” for your protagonist.

This is because audiences enjoy watching (and readers enjoy reading about) active characters. For one thing, action is infinitely more cinematic than inaction – you can't film thoughts, remember? Another factor is that we tend to identify more with people who help themselves and less with people who mope and complain about their problems … no matter who those people are or the nature of their problems. Seriously, would you rather watch a film about a Nobel laureate orphan-rescuer who does nothing but lie in bed all day struggling with depression, or an amoral, asshole mercenary who spends every waking second hunting for the man who killed her father?

This is why characters like Wolverine, James Bond, and Indiana Jones work. We don't have time to stop and think about what horrible people they are because they never stop to mope – they're constantly moving, constantly acting. (Okay, sometimes Wolverine goes to Japan to mope, but he doesn't do it very often.)

At its most basic, a story is a series of things happening – specifically, things happening to, around, and because of your protagonist. Hopefully, more of the “because of.” That's why moping is backstory. It literally has no place in the main story of your screenplay. Your script begins with some immense, catalytic force in the protagonist's life being set into motion (the inciting incident), and by page 25 or 30, that event will have metastasized into a course of action that your protagonist has no choice but to follow (the “no turning back” point or Act 1 out).

If they're still moping after the inciting incident, they're just avoiding the inevitable forward momentum of events. They're holding up the plot. Do that too much and it becomes annoying for the audience. Reluctant protagonists who resist the call to action are interesting to a point, but if they're still moping beyond the end of Act 1, something has gone terribly wrong.

Better yet, give your protagonist a positive motivation that propels her forward through the plot (an active want or desire). Keep the moping where it belongs: in your backstory notes.

Hold onto your hats and your sanity, folks, because we're about to take a trip to Extended Metaphor Land. Here goes:

Writing is like cooking.

No, wait, hear me out. Learning to write screenplays is like learning to cook. At first, you have no freaking idea what you're doing. The kitchen is an alien place full of things that can burn you or remove your fingers. But you've eaten a lot of food before – a lot – so you figure, what the hell. Maybe you could take a shot at this. Hey, you might be a natural. In a few years’ time, it could be you up there on the silver screen, challenging the Iron Chef to a grand slam sashimi battle.

So you start small. You read a recipe book or two (i.e., a screenplay), and it doesn't sound all that hard. You cook a few simple meals, like scrambled eggs or toasted sandwiches (short film scripts, student scripts, etc.). Maybe you make them for yourself, but you're more likely to inflict them on a loved one. They're polite and encouraging, of course, but they kind of have to be.

After a bit more practice, you feel like you're ready for the big one: hosting a dinner party (writing a real goddamn screenplay). You plan for weeks. You do the research and you buy the right kitchen tools. You decide on the courses, change your mind, decide again, then fret over the decision.

Finally, the big night comes. You spend all day in the kitchen wrestling with sticky pastry, sharp blades, and hot liquids. And finally, after all that effort, you serve up a nice little four-course meal for your friends. And they like it. They chew politely and make those appreciative groaning noises that people do. Everybody loves the dessert, and everybody goes home happy.

But do you know why they enjoyed the meal and made polite noises at you? Because they're your friends, and they care about your feelings. Ask yourself honestly: if an international food critic had walked off the street and into your dinner party, would she have raved about your cooking … or spat it into a napkin?

If you're being honest with yourself, it didn't turn out as well as you'd hoped. The balance of sweet and savory wasn't quite right. You forgot to add a few ingredients. The pasta was gluey, and the meringue melted into an unidentifiable lump. Sure, it all tasted good. But it wasn't quite right. It wasn't perfect.

Aaand we're back from Extended Metaphor Land. I hope the journey wasn't too painful.

Obviously, the dinner party is your first ever spec screenplay. It's probably a feature, and it's probably either: (a) full of angst, (b) unfilmable, or (c) both of the above. But here's the thing: that's okay. There will be other dinner parties/screenplays. You will cook again, and next time you'll remember what you did wrong, and you will fix it. You still have the opportunity to one day become a pro chef – but nobody ever became a pro chef without making a ton of average food.

And that's what your first draft is: a wonderful place to make mistakes. Write in the wrong font, have three protagonists, fill it with licensed music, make it a Victorian period drama set on Mars – when it comes to your first draft and mistakes, the sky's the limit. It won't match the perfect idea that you had in your head, just like the food at your dinner party won't look as good as it does in the glossy recipe book photos. But that's absolutely fine, as long as you learn from your mistakes.

What you should not do under any circumstances is expect to go directly from your first dinner party to head chef at a Michelin three-star restaurant. That's obviously a terrible idea. So why do new writers insist on sending out their first screenplay to managers, agents, or even competitions? Your first screenplay is simply not going to be of the caliber required for those people. And that's not your fault. Nobody's first screenplay is.

So treat it like the exciting learning experience that it is. Enjoy writing it, enjoy showing it to your friends … then put it away and start the next one.

By the way, that doesn't mean you shouldn't rewrite your first script at least a few times. Never, ever show someone a first draft of anything – not even your friends and loved ones. To go back to the food metaphor: you wouldn't serve up a recipe you've never cooked before at your dinner party. That way lies disaster and exploding ovens. You'd give the recipe a trial run first, so you can see what needs to be improved or changed. In the same way, you should never email anybody a first draft. I don't care if they're your identical twin who shares 90 percent of all thoughts and emotions with you – it's still bad, lazy practice.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, in this metaphor, script readers aren't food critics. They're the king's royal tasters, checking every bite for deadly poison.

Where the hell are we? It sounds like an easy question, but sometimes it's really not.

A sense of place is one of the most important things a screenplay can possess. Scripts that have it feel real and grounded – every scene forms itself complete in the reader's mind. On the other hand, scripts that don't have it feel like nothing more than talking heads and words on a page. Like talent, you knows it when you sees it.

So how do you create a sense of place? I can tell you how not to do it: by globbing down enormous chunks of descriptive text all over your lovely screenplay. By describing the protagonist's face, eyes, clothes, shoes, hat, cat, bedroom, workplace, wallpaper, make of computer, make of phone, make of car, makeup, the lighting in the room, the wind blowing in the trees, the wind tousling the protagonist's hair, the color and cut of said hair, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

If you find yourself writing like this, for god's sake put the screenwriting software down and go write a boring short story. Get it all out of your system. Then come back and write like a screenwriter: with the bare minimum of descriptive prose.

You see, descriptive prose is incredibly hard to write interestingly – just ask any struggling novelist. (Remember what Elmore Leonard said: “Never open a book with weather, because nobody buys a book to read about the freaking weather.” At least I think that's what he said. I may have added that last bit.) And it's doubly hard for you because you're stuck with the firmly ingrained “rules” of screenplay style: third-person active voice, minimal adjectives, don't describe anything we can't see on the screen, and so on.

So you need to create a sense of place, but straight-up descriptive prose sucks and is boring. That means your job is to do the impossible: evoke place without actually describing the place. Sounds like some kind of lame Zen koan, right?

Here's how you do it (hint: it's also the solution to nearly every other screenwriting problem) – use character. Write your characters so that they feel like residents of a place, not actors who wandered onto a set. Have them using, moving, interacting, and reacting within the space of your setting. You know how talking heads are boring? The solution is to have one, two, or all of the characters in a scene doing something else while the scene takes place.

The classic example is Aaron Sorkin's “walk-and-talks” from The West Wing – as his characters nattered to each other about policy options, they'd be walking through the halls and rooms of the show's setting, while behind and around them all sorts of miniature dramas played out. From the walk-and-talks and the incidental dialog of the main characters, you got the sense that there were other people, other lives, happening in that world – all because the writer knew his setting inside-out and was able to evoke a sense of place.

So how do you get to know your setting like that? There's only one way I know, and that's to sit down and do the hard work of really, truly thinking it through. If you're working on your first or second screenplay, and if you've taken my advice, you'll have picked an idea with a fairly simple, contemporary setting. But just because it's set on present-day planet Earth doesn't mean you can slack off in your setting-evoking duties. In fact, the smaller your setting, the more detailed and evocative you have to be. If most of your film takes place in one room (e.g., Panic Room, Cube, or Buried), you better damn well know what objects are in that room and where they are in relation to each other. Whether it's a kitchen or a bedroom or an underground nuclear bunker, you need to know everything there is to know about that space.

This rule scales up. Take the typical small-town horror movie setting. It's likely that most of the action is going to take place in this one small location. So what do you actually know about this town? What's the population? Do they have a sheriff's department? A fire department? Do children go to school right here, or two towns over? What's the primary industry of this town? Why do people live here and not somewhere else?

(That last question is especially pertinent for small-town horror films. If it's a ski town, chances are good that Act 3 is going to take place on a mountain. If it's a coal-mining town, expect dark and spooky tunnels. But ski towns and coal towns are very different places, with very different residents, local businesses, and attitudes. So your first two acts will be hugely affected by your choice of finale: yet another reason to know how it's going to end before you begin writing.)

But let's say you didn't pick a relatively normal, contemporary setting. Let's say you've chosen to set your script inside the digital brain of a rogue artificial intelligence, or 10,000 years ago on the lost continent of Lemuria. Congratulations – I have good and bad news.

Here's the bad news: you've just alienated a large portion of script readers, agents, managers, and execs. Not everybody likes “genre” – that is, weird and wacky – settings. It's nothing personal, it's just that self-contained thrillers and low-budget comedies are a lot more enticing because … well, because they're low-budget. In the current economic climate, Hollywood's not big on risk. And then there's the sad fact that some people are just turned off by swords and spaceships.

But here's the good news: you've got originality on your side, and Hollywood is drawn to original ideas like teenage girls are drawn to moody, nonthreatening vampires. A brilliantly original setting will get you noticed. It could sell for a bundle and make your reputation around town, even if it never gets made (see huge spec sales like Galahad, The Brigands of Rattleborge, or Killing on Carnival Row). Even if it gets made and tanks harder than the Battle of Kursk, it could make your reputation as a writer of big worlds and big ideas (see Alex Proyas and David Goyer after Dark City, Brad Bird after The Iron Giant, or Terry Gilliam's entire career).

It stands to reason that in order to play in a big, brilliant setting like that, you need to understand that setting. But that doesn't necessarily mean wasting months of your life on useless world-building, like a Dungeons & Dragons player mapping out every single hex on the map of his homemade fictional kingdom. All you really need to know are the parts of the world that your characters will come into contact with. That's it. The rest you can fake.

Think about Doctor Who. Each episode starts with the TARDIS crashing into some alien planet, or underground volcano base, or gigantic spacefaring creature, or what have you. Very quickly, the script shades in the background of this new world so that we get a sense of where we are, what the people are like, the local customs, and so on, and we go from there. The script gets on about its business and the crazy background setting stays in, well, the background.

Or think about Avatar – we don't see Earth, or space stations, or other colonies, or even parts of the planet Pandora outside of the Na’vi's jungle home. And we don't need to. Many other things in the script – from incidental dialog to backstory to the technology used by the characters – indicates that those other elements of the setting exist. They're just not pertinent to the story being told. So the story feels huge and detailed without losing its focus and going off on an unnecessary tangent.

Here's another tip for creating good “genre” settings: don't play double jeopardy. What does that mean? It means your setting is allowed to have one huge difference from our reality and audiences will accept it. But when your world has two or more deviations from the norm, disbelief gets harder and harder to suspend.

What the hell am I talking about? Try this pitching exercise: in the future, everybody has telepathic powers. Okay, here's another one: imagine a world where ghosts exist, and we can talk to them. And now the last one: imagine a future world in which everybody talks to ghosts telepathically.

See how you reflexively rolled your eyes at the last one? That's because it's an example of double jeopardy – two outlandish setting elements combined. For whatever reason, it's easier for audiences to accept ghosts or telepathy than to embrace the idea of a world in which the protagonist always knows what Princess Di's ghost is thinking.

For some reason, supernatural films are the worst offenders of double jeopardy. Audiences went to see Underworld for Kate Beckinsale in leather pants, not for the ridiculous vampires-and-werewolves setting. The Spierig brothers have made a career out of this – Undead was about a zombie outbreak … which was caused by aliens. Daybreakers was about … well, let's just say I don't recommend you watch Daybreakers. And those are only the mildly successful ones – there are plenty of other double jeopardy supernatural films that failed abysmally.

Newbie writers always go for the gold with their first script, and they often end up with a muddled mess of setting that would most likely cost three hundred bajillion dollars to faithfully film. This is very embarrassing to admit, but the first spec script I ever wrote involved both aliens and superheroes. It was unmitigated garbage, but that's okay – so is everybody's first script. In time, I learned to tone it down, pick one weird setting element, and focus on the important details and incidental quirks that really make a place come to life in the reader's mind. That's how you give your script a sense of place.

Here's the “special snowflake” exception to everything I just said in the last tip: when the setting is intimately tied to, and evocative of, the protagonist, then you're allowed to go nuts on the descriptive text. Go ahead, describe the crap out of that location. Bust out all your fiction-writing skills. Take all your best adjectives down from the top shelf and throw ‘em into the mix.

The example in the tip is that of the protagonist's bedroom, probably the most intimate and revealing space for any character. Let's consider the possibilities there. Bed sheets tangled or immaculately made? TV in the room or a huge stack of books? Light streaming in the open window or blocked out by tightly drawn shades? Every one of these choices reveals something new about the character, something that would have taken line after line of dialog to convey.

This technique is easier, more economical, and more effective than just handing us backstory. That's because backstory is boring when it's handed to you. If your protagonist sits down with her brother and reminisces about the traumatic childhood event – a botched home invasion, let's say – that led to them both becoming police officers, that's boring. The audience will feel like that scene existed only to catch them up to speed on something that will turn out to be important later.

But if you hint at that traumatic event through setting – photos on the mantle, half a dozen locks on the door, reinforced windows, a big old German shepherd for a pet, and so on – then the audience will feel like geniuses when their instincts and hunches later turn out to be correct. Trust me, the audience likes feeling like geniuses. And sometimes it's your job to make them feel that way.

This sort of description usually appears in the first act, and for good reason – it's a great shorthand for setting up characters and foreshadowing plot. But there are times when you'll want to pull out the lashings of description later in the script. For example, consider the moment in Act 3 when your protagonist stumbles upon the serial killer's lair. The way you describe that scene is obviously going to have a huge effect on how much the audience gets creeped out by (or perhaps empathizes with?) the killer.

Description: most of the time, you'll want to keep it in your pants. But very occasionally, you get to cut loose – namely, when it serves the character or fills in for dialog.

But here's the caveat (there's always a caveat, isn't there?): always remember the “one page per minute” rule, that is, a single page of screenplay should equal roughly a minute of screen time. Okay, so it's not a hard-and-fast rule, but readers know it, executives understand it, and assistant directors/script editors use it to break down scripts for production. It's part of the industry. By all means, break it when the situation calls for more description – just keep that little guideline in the back of your mind when you do.

Screenwriting Tip #35:

There should be dialog on Page One (or, failing that, explosions). If your Page One is mostly setup and description, skip it and start the script on Page Two instead.

Screenwriting Tip #37:

If something pisses you off, write about it. Passion is interesting.