Chapter | two

No Idea: Concept Is King

“What's it about?”

You're going to hear that question a lot. You'll hear it from agents, managers, producers, other writers, and even just your friends and family. You'll also hear it from yourself – first muttered in quiet contemplation, later shouted through a haze of confusion and tears as you struggle through the long, dark night of Act 2.

You must have a good answer for all of those people. And the path to that answer begins with the most important step: choosing the right concept.

I know exactly how you feel. All you want right now, more than anything else in the world, is to write a screenplay.

Well, that's not quite right. All you want is to have written a screenplay – to have it sitting there, your name emblazoned on the cover, all polished and sharp and ready to go.

Actually, even that's not right. You want to have written the perfect screenplay. A great idea executed to perfection. The kind of thing that people talk about, that agents want to read, and that production companies want to buy.

The problem is that you want it too much. As with dating, desperation ain't sexy, and it won't help your chances. Wanting it too much will cause you to rush, to cut corners, and to work too fast. You'll get the first thing you wanted (a finished screenplay), but it won't be the perfect script you envisioned. To get as close as possible to your perfect script, you have to go all the way back to the very first screenplay decision you ever made.

You have to go back to the original idea.

Choosing the right idea is like buying a house. You have to spend weeks, or more likely months, doing your research and due diligence. You must be skittish and wary, always asking questions – does the roof leak? Are we right underneath an international flight path? Is this story actually sustainable for a hundred pages? Does my protagonist truly fit the concept?

You need to find answers to the questions the real estate agents won't talk about, such as whether the house next door is a notorious drug drop, or whether the walls are, in fact, filled with snakes. This is the kind of stuff you normally wouldn't find out until a month after you move in. In screenplay terms, I call this the Seventy-five Percent Curse. That's when you get 75 percent of the way into your first draft and realize that you hate your protagonist, you don't know what the theme is, and you have no idea how the story ends. Sometimes this is just writer's doubt – all part of the horrible beast we call the “creative process” – but sometimes it happens because there was always something fundamentally wrong with your concept. Like a genetic disease, it's been lurking there the whole time, waiting for its moment to strike you down and invalidate months of work.

So how do you know you've chosen the right idea?

The exciting answer is that you just know it when you see it. It's the idea that, when you tell it to friends, they say “I'd pay to watch that.” It's the idea that you can't stop thinking about, dreaming about, singing about in the shower. It's the idea that you love so much you could see yourself working on it for a year or more, if that's what it takes to get it perfect. But we don't all get those ideas, and if we do, they might come only once or twice in a career.

So here's the boring answer: the right idea is the one that's easiest to outline. If you can approximate the beginning, middle, and end of the story without too much puzzling, brain-straining work, then you have a winner on your hands, because if you can already see the structure, it follows that you already understand your protagonist. If you know where she's going to be at the end of the story, then you must know how she changes. Structure is character. (More on this later.)

Always remember: screenplays are about people. Not settings, fight scenes, love stories, explosions, or jokes – people. And chances are very good that you're writing a traditional western screenplay, which means that the story is about one person (the protagonist) and how that person changes, usually for the better. Ergo, your idea must be one that allows the protagonist to change.

This sounds so simple and obvious, but you'd be amazed how often writers do it in reverse. They come up with a cool setting or a neat set-piece and try to tack a protagonist on later. That way lies ruin. If you're trying to choose from among five different screenplay ideas, always choose the one where the protagonist's arc is clear to you – where you can imagine how she transforms from a flawed person into a better person over the course of the story. That's your winning idea. I don't care how flashy or unique your other ideas are – if you don't understand the protagonists and can't see their arcs, then those ideas will be dead on arrival.

If you're lucky enough to come up with an idea that truly matters to you, that moves others and features a strong narrative arc for the protagonist … well, what the hell are you waiting for? Time to go to work.

Some writers will tell you they don't have a logline. Their screenplay is “too complex” or “too character-driven,” or they just didn't bother to think of one before they started writing. These writers are either idiots or geniuses – and somehow I don't think there are that many geniuses running around.

You need a logline. After the concept and possibly the title, it's the first thing you should come up with for your screenplay. The logline is the first bit of real writing you will do for a project – it marks the point where you start translating the wonders and marvels in your head into mundane words on a page. The logline is where you stop dreaming and start working.

What's a logline, you ask? It's two sentences that sum up the entire essence of your story, from protagonist to setting to plot. Here's one I prepared earlier:

Dorothy, a naïve farm girl from Kansas, is carried away by a tornado to the mystical land of Oz. With the help of her new friends, she must defeat the Wicked Witch of the West and find her way back home.

Those two sentences describe the protagonist, her motivations and goal, her allies, the inciting incident, the stakes, the setting, and the antagonist. You could probably cram in more, but keeping the two sentences short and readable helps with clarity and impact. Of course, two sentences is an arbitrary limitation, but like so many good arbitrary limitations (the sonnet, the tweet, etc.), it encourages ruthless creativity. It forces you to think about what really matters – what's the core of the story and what's just decoration?

Notice what's not in the example: anything about Dorothy's backstory, her life in Kansas before Oz, or the framing narrative of the whole thing being a dream. Anything about the Wizard, Toto, the Munchkins, or other incidental characters she meets along the way. Any mention of plot devices or MacGuffins, like the fact that the Wicked Witch is angry because Dorothy accidentally killed her sister, or the ruby slippers being the key to getting Dorothy home.

You don't need that stuff in a logline, because you wouldn't open with that stuff if you were explaining the concept to someone. You know it'll be there in your outline and screenplay, but for now your job is to focus on the heart of the story.

From the logline, I tend to expand into a complete short pitch. I'll write it out as if I'm trying to sell the story to someone, starting with an explanatory paragraph (“The Wizard of Oz is a coming-of-age adventure story set in a fantastical world called Oz,” and so on). Then I'll write a quick summary of what happens in Acts 1, 2, and 3. I might follow this up with a short section on characters, or at the very least the protagonist and antagonist – who they are, what they want, where they're coming from.

Finally, I'll cap it off with what might boringly be called a “mission statement” paragraph, but that I prefer to think of as “Why This Is Cool.” It's literally an explanation of what I think is cool about the story, why I love it, and why it deserves to be a screenplay. This could be about how unique and interesting the protagonist is, how the concept has never been done before, or just a description of the visuals or a spectacular set-piece that I can see happening in the script.

Eventually, the whole thing will probably take up only one or two pages. The point of this exercise is to sell yourself on the concept – to set out, carefully and rationally, the details of the screenplay you're about to write. By doing this, you will think of new directions you hadn't considered before, you will find problems that weren't immediately obvious, and you will be better equipped to decide if this is the project you want to devote the next few months of your life to.

If you hadn't written a logline and a pitch document, you'd never have discovered those things. And the next time someone asks you what your script's about, you'll have a killer logline to give them in response.

A good film isn't about setting, set-pieces, issues, or themes. It's about people.

Human beings like watching other human beings. It's a primate thing. We also enjoy imagining what fictional people are thinking and feeling – and in the very best cases, not just imagining but experiencing their emotions as our own. We want to feel brave, scared, heroic, confident, triumphant, in love. Basically, we want to inhabit somebody else's life for a little while.

There are movies that are more about plot and setting than character. Avatar's biggest asset is its luscious wonderland of floating islands and alien animals. But still, our emotional connection to that film comes from imagining what it would be like to live there like Jake Sully, to integrate with the alien land and people like he does. Films with Jason Bourne and James Bond are heavy on plotting and light on characterization, but still we imagine: what would it be like to be that tough, that cunning, that cool? We put ourselves in the characters’ shoes because, well, that's what humans do. To us, everything is filtered through the lens of other people. In a way, film and television are the ultimate vicarious experience.

That's why it's so important that your script be about people, not the events that happen to them. If you want audiences to admire your setting, write a character who admires it. If you want readers to be moved by a plot twist, make sure it moves your protagonist first.

Your protagonist is the engine of your script, the key part that drives everything else. The protagonist's goals and motivations must be clear at the outset or your script isn't going to make sense. At every point in the script, the reader should be able to look at a scene and understand exactly what the protagonist stands to gain or lose from that scene.

So if that's what you want to present to the reader, why not make that your writing method, too? Approach your outline from the perspective of “How is this scene going to affect the protagonist?” Instead of putting plot first – “Okay, so first there's a bank robbery, then a car chase, then a conversation, then a shoot-out in the warehouse, then …” – put your protagonist first. Work out what she's trying to do in every scene, and you'll find that the plot grows organically from her decisions.

As Elbert Hubbard said (yes, I had to look him up, and no, I hadn't heard of him either), “Life is just one damn thing after another.” That's basically all plot is. Without the protagonist, plot has no context. Remember this when you outline, and try to look at everything in your script from the perspective of what it means to your protagonist.

It's important to make the distinction here between your first screenplay and your first spec. Your first screenplay can be written in crayon on the wall of an Arby's restroom and nobody will care. That's just you, alone, playing with the form. Hey, you've never done this before – it's fun! You're discovering what it feels like to type dialog after character names, learning what a logline looks like, and testing the capabilities of your new screenwriting software/restroom wall.

You don't even need to finish that first screenplay. It doesn't even have to make sense. There are no rules at all, save one: you can never, under any circumstances, show that script to anyone else … unless you want them to think that you're a subliterate ape-person. It's a practice run and nothing more.

So that's your first screenplay. No big deal. But your first spec? Now we're talking.

Your first spec is business time. When you finish this script, you will want to show it to other human beings. You're aiming to write something that might actually sell (hence the word “spec”). With that in mind, you need to get a few things straight before you start typing. Obviously, you need to set aside time in which to write it. Certainly you should come up with an interesting protagonist, and maybe a catchy title. And yes, you do need to write an outline. But before you do all of that, you have to choose a killer concept.

I don't quite know why newbie writers always choose ambitious, extravagant, nigh impossible concepts for their first spec, but I have a theory. If you want to be a screenwriter, you're probably a film and/or television geek, right? And we film and TV geeks, we like stuff that normal people don't. We pride ourselves on being the first to discover a new indie film or cable show, and we love recommending them to our friends and family.

So chances are, your favorite film or show is pretty damn weird. Maybe it's Brazil, or Inception, or Twin Peaks, or Carnivale? How about Pulp Fiction, Requiem for a Dream, The Prisoner, or Donnie Darko? All of those are weird, rule-breaking, and wildly ambitious, and that's why we love them.

But they're not good choices for your first spec. Much as you may want to emulate your idols, a time-lost emotional parable is a horrible choice for your first serious screenplay. That sort of script is based on breaking the rules, and the fact is that you and the rules have only just met. You've barely had time to get acquainted with screenplay structure, so you'll have to buy it a few more drinks before it hops into bed with you and starts getting down with the weird stuff. Here's what to avoid:

Nonlinear narrative: Yeah, I've seen Memento, Rashomon, and Pulp Fiction. Unless you have something to add to what those films accomplished, I'd avoid making nonlinearity the entire focus of your script. Don't get me wrong – it's an excellent seasoning when used in moderation. A dash of “open at the end then flash back to the start” can spice up most dishes. Just don't dump the entire shaker on top of your first spec.

Multiple protagonists: Yikes. This one is hard. I can count on one hand the number of recent films that actually accomplish this. But then, it's my opinion that most films that people think of as having multiple protagonists really have only one, plus a strong focus on the antagonist or supporting characters. It's just not a popular format, and to embark on this course for your first spec is to invite confusion, heartache, and a major case of Second Act Blues. Even if you're writing a romantic comedy (or, for the truly old-school, a romance), I'd still recommend focusing on one protagonist at this stage in your writing journey.

Aliens: I don't mean in a horror movie. If they're just there to be mouths-on-legs and devour the extras, I say go for it. The problem comes when new writers decide to develop an entire ecology, language, technology, and home world for their wondrous new species. The key problem here is that people tend to relate to, well, people. The emotions and thought processes of an alien race can often come across as a mildly interesting thought experiment – something much more intellectual than cinematic. Save it for when you're co-writing Avatar 3 with James Cameron.

Time travel: It's a wonderful plot device, but the potential to massively confuse has always slightly outweighed its value as a storytelling tool. That's why it works best in comedy (Back to the Future, Groundhog Day), where the inevitable questions can be waved away or glossed over with an attitude of “it's just for fun.” It's a tough tightrope to walk, and coupled with the fact that your structure is virtually guaranteed to be all over the place, this is one to avoid for a first spec.

Of course, if your brilliant billion-dollar concept relies on one of these tropes, then who am I to stop you from writing it as your first spec? All I'm saying is you know those carnival games with the fluffy toy prizes? Nobody ever wins the big giant bear on their first throw. They rig it so you can't win the big giant bear on your first throw. Start small, win some other prizes, and get your throwing arm in. When you're ready, the big giant bear will still be there, waiting for you.

Screenwriting Tip #16:

Don't pick a title that is impossible to Google, or has already been used for seven other movies dating back to the 1930s. (IMDb.com is your friend!)

Screenwriting Tip #18:

You have 100 pages in which to tell any story in the world. Don't waste them by aping a story that's already been told a hundred times. Give the world something new.

Screenwriting Tip #20:

Your concept is not a state secret. You don't need to be paranoid about someone stealing it – Hollywood doesn't work that way.