Chapter | three

Rebel without a Plan: Outlining Is the Best Present You Can Give Your Future Self

Nobody ever achieved anything by running off ill-equipped and half-cocked. (Well, nobody except Columbus, but screw that guy. He was basically the Chauncey Gardiner of explorers.)

It's all very romantic (not to mention Romantic) to imagine the noble writer embarking on a creative struggle against the blank page armed with nothing but her wits, emotions, raw talent, and the radiant favor of the Muses. This idea of writing-as-grail-quest is, of course, nothing but fantastical nonsense… but that doesn't mean that nonwriters don't believe it. That dim glow of respect that our ancestors held for bards, poets, and storytellers has never quite worn off.

Look, don't tell the nonwriters this, but the truth is way less glamorous. The truth is that we sit down at a computer and we think until our thoughts get tangled and our foreheads bleed. We plot and plan and outline, testing to see what works and what doesn't. We're not Muse-driven vessels – we're scientists searching for a working theory through trial and error. And the more rigorously we test and plan, the closer we can get to that perfect unifying theory that is a killer screenplay.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

– Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

First: how cool is that guy's name? That's exactly the sort of weird and wonderful name you should be giving your characters. Second, our friend Helmuth is absolutely right about no plan surviving contact with the enemy. But do note Helmuth's implication that you should actually have a plan in the first place.

That plan is your outline. Know what an outline is? An outline is the difference between a professional writer and a hopeless amateur.

Yeah, that's right. I'm that guy. I'm that strict, writing-is-a-science jerk who wants to quash your creative energy by channeling it into a boring, bone-dry template instead of a beautiful, free-flowing script. I'm the outline jerk. And I'm going to save you from months of unnecessary pain and heartache.

Your script is not an improv play, a jazz saxophone performance, or a stream-of-consciousness poetry jam. Your script is more like a space shuttle launch. No word should be out of place, no character arc less than fully realized. Every single thing in your script has to go exactly right, and for that you need a plan. Luckily, you're probably writing this thing on spec, which means you have a large amount of time in which to make sure your plan is completely foolproof.

I know what you're thinking: “But my favorite writer doesn't outline! He uses the first draft to ‘discover his characters’ and ‘find out what the story is really about’!” Here's the thing: your favorite writer may not know it, but he's lying to you.

Take David Milch, creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue. David Milch claims he doesn't outline – he simply dives in and decides what happens as he writes. But this is highly misleading for two reasons:

•   David Milch is most likely a freaking genius who works on a different plane from you and me.

•   David Milch has internalized story structure over the course of thousands upon thousands of hours of screenwriting, to the point where the “outline” emerges fully formed and glittering in his mind like Athena from the brow of Zeus.

The man's been doing this for decades – he hears the music in his head now. We don't, and we won't… not until we spend a few thousand hours writing detailed outlines followed by space-shuttle-quality screenplays.

So why do you need an outline? Let me count the ways:

You need an outline to tell you what happens and when.

This might seem obvious, but believe me, I've seen plenty of screenplays in which the authors clearly had no idea where their own stories were going. And if you ask me, it's all the fault of that pesky Act 2.

Beginnings are easy. Any idiot can write a beginning. You simply set the heroine up with a goal, a villain, and a portfolio of interesting character flaws and turn her loose on the world you've created. The story drives itself forward… right up until, oh, page 30 or so.

Endings are pretty easy, too. The heroine defeats the monster/gets the boy/cleans up the Louisiana coastline while learning and changing and growing into a better person and so on. All the minor characters get something cool to do, and all the characters we hate get what they deserve.

So what happens in the middle? Ah. There's that pesky Act 2.

Act 2 is vast – sometimes up to fifty pages long – and very poorly signposted. If you follow the traditional method of screenplay structure, there are only two big signposts along the way: the midpoint and the Dark Point. Trouble is, the midpoint is separated from the start of Act 2 by a staggering twenty pages, and the dark point is separated from the midpoint by an even bigger gulf of twenty-five pages. If you start writing into Act 2 without an outline, you're walking out onto a tightrope without a safety net. So write the damn outline, already.

You need an outline to find out what your story's about.

Writing a script without a theme, an ending, and a goal for the protagonist is like attempting to fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping your arms really fast. So how do you acquire these things?

Well, you could just let your characters chat to each other for twenty pages until a story emerges. There's a chance this approach will work. There's a much, much bigger chance that it won't, and you'll be left with pages upon pages of aimless, meaningless drivel.

“But wait!” you cry. “My story is about love and heroism in the face of overwhelming evil, or whatever. I have a protagonist, a setting and some totally sweet action sequences that'll make for nice trailer moments. Why can't I just go from there?” Because, as every good screenwriter knows, structure is character and character is story. If you don't know the structure – if you don't know what drives your heroine at the Act 1 turning point, what turns her around at the midpoint, and what tears her down at the dark point – then you don't know jack about your protagonist or your story.

You need an outline so you can deviate from it.

And here we have the – Wait, what? Doesn't this contradict everything I just said?

Not really. There is no rule that says you can't change your outline on the fly. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you'll have to at some point. There are some things you simply cannot account for at the outlining stage – this part might not make sense without a bridging scene; this scene has more emotional impact if it's moved back a few pages; and so on.

So – to return to Helmuth's military metaphor for a moment – you may have to alter your battle plans on the fly. But at least you'll know the strengths and weaknesses of your troops. You'll know where to redirect them when the time comes to change the plan. That's what a good outline is for.

“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” remember? You're allowed to deviate from your outline if it's clear that things aren't going according to plan. There are three basic ways to do so, and they all have their benefits and pitfalls.

Just remember: don't panic. We'll get through this, soldier.

The stop-everything method. So you've found a problem with the outline. This scene clearly isn't going to work as written. This character obviously needs a bigger arc over the next few scenes, which is going to affect what happens in Act 3.

Well, drop everything. Stop the presses. Pull this freaking car over to the side of the road. You can't possibly write another word until you go back to your original outline and fix it by changing that scene or adding that character in where he's needed. Then you can examine the structural integrity of the new outline and make sure everything's holding together. Once that's done, then you can go back to writing, secure in the knowledge that your safety net is hanging where it's supposed to.

The pros of this method are that you'll be damn sure of fixing every single problem the second it occurs. You'll be thorough and rigorous. Good for you. The cons are that you'll be stopping and starting more often than a Pinto on a steep incline, and there's a chance that could kill your momentum and suck your creative juices dry.

The back-and-forth method. Hmm. Well, this bit isn't working. So what if you write it like this? Let's give that a go – maybe change the character's motivation back in Act 1, alter that dialog here…hey, that seems to work. Guess you can always change the outline to reflect what you just wrote in the script.

The back-and-forth writer tends to change things on the fly, but also keeps one eye on how those changes affect the rest of the script. Every dozen or so pages, or whenever she goes too far off the reservation, she'll go back to the outline and rewrite it to match the changes she's been making in the script.

If you're this kind of the writer, the pros of this approach are that your writing flow will rarely be interrupted. If you think of a better scene than the one you've got in the outline, you can go ahead and change it to that. The cons are that if you're not careful about keeping track of changes, your outline will resemble a patchwork quilt of differing versions. You could very easily end up with characters talking about events that never happened, or a character's name changing from scene to scene as if by magic. The fix-it-later method. Full steam ahead, no time to stop, fix it later, pass the caffeine please. You are going off the outline and you just don't care. All that matters is finishing that first draft.

A character's name, job, and style of speaking might be completely different in Act 3 from what it was back in Act 1. The plot might reflect foreshadowing that doesn't actually exist, but you're totally planning to go back and put it in later. The protagonist's arc might not make a whole lot of sense, but hey, that's what rewrites are for.

The pros of this method are that you'll finish that first draft way quicker than usual. The cons are that your fresh new draft may wind up resembling a dog's breakfast. You'll have written something, but it might not be something good, and you'll probably have your work cut out for you when it comes time for rewrites.

Those are the three methods for deviating from your outline, on a sliding scale from careful to crazy. You know what kind of writer you are, so you probably have some idea which method will work best for you. Respect the outline but follow your instincts, and you'll have a draft you can be proud of.

As we learned back in Tip #11, the best concepts are the ones that already suggest their own ending. If you're writing a biopic, no problem – the protagonist dies at the end. Easy. For the rest of us, we have to figure out the ending before we can have a hope of writing the beginning.

Everything stems from Act 1. Everything. It's where all your characters are introduced and all the dramatic questions of your story are raised. If screenwriting is about how characters go through drama and come out the other end changed (and 99.9 percent of screenplays fit this description), then you need to know where your characters are going before you give them their marching orders.

It also gives you a target to aim for. If you know that a certain character is going to let down their defenses and apologize to the protagonist in Act 3, you'll want to make her struggles with the protagonist in Act 2 as brutal, personal, and emotional as you possibly can. If you know that a character is going to end up sacrificing her life in Act 3, you can start foreshadowing that event as early as you want.

Ever heard of thematic bookending? It's when the last scenes of a script mirror the first scene in order to demonstrate how much the protagonist has changed. You know the kind of thing – if the first scene of a romantic comedy is the protagonist waking up in bed alone and unloved, the last scene is her waking up next to the person of her dreams. It's incredibly effective and a satisfying way to write an ending. So how the hell can you pull this off if you write the beginning without having any idea how it's going to end?

You can't. In fact, you'll probably find you have to go back and change the first scene…and then the second, and then the third, and so forth until you find you've torn down most of the first act. Don't be that writer. Be the smart writer instead – the one who plans. If you know the ending first, you can build a strong, stable Act 1 that serves as a foundation for your entire script.

Ever finished watching a movie and realized you have no idea what any of the characters’ names were? Or maybe you've been writing a script and found yourself mixing up the names of the protagonist and her best friend – every time you go to type one, you type the other.

Look, names are hard. Just ask the creators of therapistfinder.com (spoiler: it's for finding therapists, not rapists). But if you get them wrong, your characters aren't going to feel entirely right. It may sound odd, but you're about to spend months of your life living in close proximity to these fictional people, so you want to make sure they're as richly realized as you can make them.

Don't just steal your friends’ names or trawl through those time-wasting “baby name” websites. Actually take the time to research the perfect names for your story. If it's a period piece, study literature and historical documents from the time and note down any great names that you come across. For a sci-fi or fantasy setting, exotic names work best if they're grounded in some kind of reality. For example, you might decide that your made-up culture has a language that sounds somewhat like Korean – you'd then select some Korean names and alter them in interesting ways to come up with a set of coherent names for your characters. (Cordwainer Smith, a writer of far-future science fiction, named most of his characters by slightly altering the words for numbers in Mandarin, Hindi, and Russian.)

Contemporary names are a little trickier. The best thing to do is keep a notepad with a list of cool and interesting names. But if you don't already have one of these, a good cheater's technique is to look at your bookshelf – you're a writer, so I know you have one – and pick out interesting author names. Along the same lines, searching IMDb.com for lesser-known actor's names can sometimes yield quality results.

Remember, the best character names are:

Memorable but not bizarre. A name with six syllables and three apostrophes might make a character stand out, but nobody is going to remember it. Readers tend to blank on difficult or very long names, so try to stick to weird-but-short: Neo, Cyrus, Gaston, Scarlet, Ash, Deckard, Ferris, and the like.

Cute but not too cute. Bad writers are forever giving their characters cute pun names that somehow relate to the character's personality or to the theme of the film. They think the audience doesn't notice, but we do. Oh, we do. On-the-nose names like “Eric Draven” from The Crow (because he's “Eric da Raven” – get it?) or “Parker Selfridge” (because he's a mean, selfridge guy) are a huge gamble – if the readers don't appreciate the joke, they're going to be constantly distracted by the character's silly name instead of getting immersed in the read. See also: Trinity, Martin Blank, Castor Pollux, and – shudder – General Grievous.

Age-appropriate. You don't see a whole lot of eighty year-old women called Amber or Chloe. Why? Because those names weren't popular eighty years ago. You can actually go online and look up what baby names were most popular the year your character was born. This is a subtle but incredibly effective way of making sure your names feel right for the characters they're attached to.

Meaningful to you. I know I said not to steal your friend's names. But sometimes there's just nothing for it – a character you've created is so closely modeled on somebody you know in real life that you can't help but think of them as having the same name. The character and the name already carry emotional meaning for you, so you should try to nurture that connection. “Ricky” becomes “Nicky” without too much trouble, just as “Alicia” can be transformed into “Alyssa.” Just remember to change the name, for god's sake – it's not worth losing a friend over some unflattering description or dialog.

Screenwriting Tip #26:

It pays to do some kind of research into mental illnesses before you decide to give your main character one.

Screenwriting Tip #28:

TV scripts might be shorter, but TV characters need to have even bigger problems than those in a feature film – huge, deep problems that can't be entirely solved in two hours.