5

Telling the Dramatic Story

Orson Welles undoubtedly would have agreed that the images of a narrative film, whether visual or aural, should, like the language of a novel or short story, serve to illuminate the tale. Rust Hills, in his excellent book on writing the short story, elaborates on a similar point: “A successful short story will thus necessarily show a more harmonious relationship of part to whole, and part to part, than it is usual to find in a novel. Everything must work with everything else. Everything enhances everything else, inter-relates with everything else, is inseparable from everything else—and all this is done with a necessary and perfect harmony.”¹

What he writes is as true for the short film in relation to the feature film as it is for the short story in relation to the novel. But unlike novels and short stories, which are meant to be read, narrative film and television are forms of drama; if a story is to work as drama, its content needs to be organized in terms of dramatic structure.

The word “drama” derives from the Greek word dran, which means to do or to act. A drama, whether presented on a stage or on a screen, is the story of an action, intended for presentation before an audience. In previous chapters, we have been exploring storytelling in images; in this one, we will discuss storytelling in terms of drama.

Some Basic Definitions

What follow are some of the important and widely used terms that we will be using throughout this book:

Protagonist, meaning main character, is a word that comes from the Greek words for “first” (protos) and “struggler” or “combatant” (agonistes). So the protagonist is the main struggler in the story.

The word antagonist comes from the Greek words for “against” (anti) and, once more, “struggler” or “combatant” (agonistes). The antagonist, whether human, man-made, or a force of nature such as a mountain, desert, or raging storm, is the force or obstacle with which the protagonist must contend. It is the story of that struggle that provides the plot. In some stories, the main characteristics of the antagonist are virtually the direct opposites of those of the protagonist; in others, the antagonist can seem almost a twin or second self of the protagonist. That is not to say that the most engaging antagonist of all can’t be the protagonist’s own nature, his or her own arrogance, fear, or unadmitted needs.

It is also important to note that the stronger the antagonist, the stronger the conflict, and the harder the protagonist must struggle to achieve his or her goal. The decision as to who or what should be the antagonist in a film script is always a crucial one; the designation sometimes shifts from one character to another as a writer goes through revisions.

In any drama, the main conflict is the struggle between protagonist and antagonist—again, whether the antagonist is another character, a man-made disaster, a force of nature, or simply an aspect of the protagonist’s own character. The more there is at stake, the more dramatic—in every sense of the word— the conflict.

Dramatic action, or “movement of spirit,” as Aristotle defines it in the Poetics, is the life force, the heartbeat, of any screenplay.² Psyche, the word he uses for spirit, meant both “mind” and “soul” to the ancient Greeks—the inner energy that fuels human thoughts and feelings, the underlying force that motivates us.

The catalyst is the incident that calls the protagonist’s dramatic action to life. It is sometimes called “the inciting incident,” e.g., the little boy rescuing the magical balloon in The Red Balloon, or the breaking of the rope as the hero is about to be hung in Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.

The climax is generally the moment of greatest intensity for the protagonist and a major turning point in his or her dramatic action. Even in a fairly short script, the climax is often the culmination of a series of lesser crises.

Recognition—according to Aristotle, “a change from ignorance to knowledge”—usually, though not always, closely precedes or follows the climax³; it is the point at which the protagonist realizes where the dramatic action has taken him or her through the course of the events that have made up the story. In some forms of comedy, where the protagonist does not experience any kind of illumination, recognition is often reserved for a character who is an interested onlooker, or for the audience itself.

Scene is a word with many definitions. We will be using it primarily in the sense of an episode that presents the working out of a single dramatic situation. The scene is the basic building block of any narrative screenplay. Every scene in a short script should serve to forward the action.

Adapting A Myth or Fairy Tale: A First Example

One of the interesting things that becomes apparent on reading a number of myths—whatever tribe or culture they come from—is how soon after relating the birth of the cosmos storytellers found it necessary to introduce conflict. And no wonder! Generation after generation, people looked about them and tried to make sense of what they had observed, what they knew from their own experience: that human beings have needs and that these needs bring them into conflict with one another, as well as with the gods.

In the Book of Genesis, we are told in a beautifully worded, carefully detailed listing how God created all things, animate and inanimate, in six days and rested on the seventh. We are told that He formed the first man out of dust, breathed life into him, and planted a marvelous garden for him to live in. Then God gave Adam and Eve a single prohibition: they could eat the fruit of every tree in that garden except one—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Also, most important for any kind of dramatic story, Adam and Eve were left the freedom to choose: eat or don’t eat, obey or disobey— it is up to you. Familiar as we are with our own curiosity, our own desire to get to the bottom of things, as well as our own need to resist authority, we recognize that the seed of conflict has been sown in Paradise. In that seed lies the beginning of a dramatic situation, for Eve (and then Adam as well) wants one thing, while God wants another. The serpent is God’s antagonist in all things; the serpent’s initial approach to Eve serves as catalyst in this story of the Fall.

Two questions often prove major stumbling blocks for film and video students, as well as for filmmakers who have never written a narrative script. What, specifically, do I write about? How, specifically, do I write about it? In screenwriting, general ideas are of little or no use when you sit down at a desk to write, and it is often difficult for those who are not “natural” writers (in the way one may be a “natural” cinematographer or director) to come up with fruitful story ideas. Yet, as anyone experienced in the arts knows, learning a skill is a process, and that process has to start somewhere.

Where?—In the case of a short script, with a simple adaptation.

From the very beginning of the film industry, fiction and drama have proved unending sources of film stories, and it has been our experience in many years of teaching that adapting a myth or fairy tale offers the novice screenwriter an immediate way to learn how to structure a short script.

Stories that began as oral narratives almost always are dramatic in structure and lend themselves easily to visualization. For these reasons, and because such material is both readily available and in the public domain (that is, not under copyright), we will be using examples of such adaptations throughout the rest of this chapter. If you have a short story already in hand that you would like to adapt, the working techniques we describe are much the same.

Structuring A First Adaptation

What follows is an example of the process by which a myth can provide source material for very different narratives, any one of which an audience might enjoy without being familiar with the original story—which is not to say that a viewer’s experience of the film wouldn’t gain in depth and resonance if he or she were familiar with it.

The myth we have chosen to adapt is the Fall of Icarus. Briefly, the story material we are working from is this: Daedalus (which means “cunning artificer”) was both a renowned artist and a brilliant architect and inventor. Jealous because his nephew and favorite pupil Perdix seemed likely to surpass him in every way, he took the boy to the top of the Acropolis and hurled him off. For this he was condemned by the authorities, but he managed to flee to the island of Crete with his young son Icarus.

There the tyrant Minos gave him sanctuary and an almost impossible assignment—to design and oversee the construction of a prison for the Minotaur, a sacred monster with the head of a bull, the body of a man, and an appetite for human flesh. Because the Cretans had to feed the Minotaur youths and maidens chosen to be fed to him, the prison would have to be designed so that the victims could be forced to enter but would not be able to find a way out. Daedalus solved this problem by designing and overseeing the building of the first labyrinth. Instead of rewarding him, however, the tyrant Minos imprisoned both Daedalus and his son in a high tower overlooking the sea. Determined to escape, Daedalus painstakingly fashioned two pairs of wings from feathers dropped by seabirds, binding them together with melted candle wax. When the wings were completed, father and son each strapped on a pair. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high or Apollo, the sun god, would melt the wax of his wings. The boy promised to be careful, and the two set off from the tower over the water. Everything went well until Icarus, intoxicated by the glories of flight, began to climb higher and higher toward the blazing sun. Daedalus cried out to him in warning, but the boy ignored him until at last the wax holding together the feathers of his wings melted, and he plunged headlong into the sea.

Here then is our basic material, culled from a number of versions of the Daedalus/Icarus myth. There is more material than we could possibly use for a short screenplay, but we won’t know which details will be important until we have answered some key questions. These are questions you may find it helpful to ask yourself each time you begin writing (or, for that matter, critiquing) a short screenplay.

Finding A Structure (I): Eight Preliminary Questions

What follows are the answers we came up with for a short project we imagined as an animated film or video of three or four minutes’ length, using the ritual occasion structure: two characters in a closed situation, with the seagull’s appearance as the appearance of the stranger who changes everything. (The approach would be basically the same whether for animation or live action.) To give you an idea of the process, we have included something of the reasoning we employed in responding to each of the questions.

1 Who is the Protagonist?

Before considering this question, it is important to note once more that most short films or tapes work best with a single protagonist; there simply is not enough time for an audience to identify with more than one. The exception is with certain kinds of comedy—slapstick, parody, or satire, for example— where a writer may not want the audience to identify with the main character but to maintain a psychological distance from all the characters. (Think of how one views W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, or the main characters in most cartoons.) Thus, short comedies often have two or even more main characters.

As the project we are considering is a drama, however, we will want to have a single protagonist. What we must ask ourselves right off is, do we want our script be about what happens to Daedalus, or about what happens to Icarus? Either one would be intriguing. Do we want to tell the story of a bold and willful exile, a brilliant inventor, who works out an ingenious way to escape from prison with his son and, in so doing, loses that son? Or do we want to tell the story of a boy in exile, almost as bold and willful as his father, who escapes from prison only to destroy himself by flying too close to the sun?

These are two very different main characters, whose actions would lead to very different plots.

For this project, we have decided to choose Icarus as our protagonist; however, to demonstrate how profoundly different the plot could be were we to choose Daedalus, we will give a synopsis for a longer, live-action project about Daedalus after the story outline about Icarus.

2 What is Icarus’S Situation at the Beginning of the Script?

The shorter the film or video is to be, the more license is given the scriptwriter to plunge right into the middle of things. In this case, because the film is to be so short, it makes sense to open with a scene showing the boy and his father in the tower as if they’d been there for some time. In order to give viewers the opportunity to discover for themselves what kind of youth Icarus is and how he feels about being imprisoned, we need to show details of his daily life in prison. However powerful the images onscreen, viewers won’t be able to identify fully with the boy’s intoxication at flying if they haven’t first observed the soul-destroying nature of his captivity.

So, the answer to Question 2 is that Icarus has been imprisoned for some time, along with his father, in a tower by the sea. Visualizing the scene, we came up with the idea that Daedalus has been supplied with parchment and stylus to pass the time, but that Icarus has been given nothing. Perhaps he’s gathered up gull feathers from the parapets around their chamber and amused himself as best he can with them.

3 Who or What is the Antagonist?

In every version of the myth that we looked at, Icarus was warned by Daedalus not to fly up toward the sun, and in every version he ignored the warning. Because of this, and because we do not want to complicate the story by introducing another character, Daedalus is the logical choice for the antagonist.

4 What Occasion or Event Serves as the Catalyst?

There will be times you would like to skip this question, leaving it until the last, and there will be times you’ll be able to answer it immediately—only to find that the catalyst changes with each draft of the script. Either way, you are engaged in discovering what it is that you want to say, rather than what you think it is you want to say. Still, it is important to realize that a screenplay should not be considered complete until the catalyst is in place.

Calling up our image of Icarus trying to occupy himself with the gull feathers, in the answer to Question 2, and knowing that the climax must take place during his flight, it first seemed to us that the catalyst, or agent for change, in the script must be the moment when Daedalus conceives of escaping on wings made of feathers and wax. The difficulty was that Daedalus was not our protagonist. Therefore the question became this: How could we involve Icarus in this pivotal event?

We turned to Aristotle, who has some very practical advice for dramatists in his Poetics: “In constructing the plot and working it out …the playwright should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.”⁴

Close your eyes with us, then, and imagine a stone chamber at the top of the tower. Imagine Daedalus busy at the only table with his parchment and stylus. Imagine young Icarus, restless and bored, with little to do and nothing to look at but his father, the sea, the sky, the sun, and the gulls that perch on the open parapets. Imagine a pile of the feathers he’s gathered and the ways he invents to play with them—trying to make them float, keeping them up with his breath, pasting them onto his skin with water or spit so that he can spread his arms wide and pretend to be a seagull …

Ask yourself what this particular father would do if he were disturbed while working. Probably he would rebuke his son sharply; only then, because he is by nature a “cunning artificer,” would he realize that there might be a way to construct real wings of feathers and, yes, candle wax.

In answer to Question 4, then, the catalyst will be Daedalus’s realization, at the sight of Icarus imitating a bird in flight, that he might be able to design wings on which he and Icarus could escape.

5 What is the Protagonist’S Dramatic Action?

We arrived at an answer to this question by a roundabout way. Because Daedalus is a doer, not a dreamer, a desire to escape prison with his son would serve him as a strong dramatic action. We could simply have made Icarus’s dramatic action complementary—to escape prison with his father— but it might be more dramatic to follow through on our perception of him as a dreamer, very different from his father. This difference would exacerbate the natural tension between father and adolescent son.

For when we go back to the original material, hunting clues to the father’s character, we are reminded that Daedalus killed his nephew—and favorite pupil!—out of fear that the boy might surpass him as an architect. Such a man would probably be an irascible, competitive parent.

Thus, it makes sense that, in answer to Question 5, Icarus’s dramatic action is to escape his father any way he can.

6 What is the Antagonist’S Dramatic Action?

As discussed above, Daedalus’s dramatic action is to escape prison with his son.

7 How is the Protagonist’S Dramatic Action Resolved?

Icarus escapes his father, but at the cost of his life.

8 Do You Have Any Images or Ideas, However Unformed, as to What the Climax Might Be? the Ending?

Keeping in mind that the climax, by definition, ought to be the most intense moment in the film or video—both for the audience and for the protagonist—we should be searching for a powerful image, or series of images, that will express not just what Icarus is doing at that moment but also what he is feeling.

Sometimes a writer is in possession of such an image early on and needs only to articulate it; sometimes he or she finds ideas by going back to the original material, or by doing further research. Sometimes an image of the climax does not appear until the writer is actually working on an outline, or even the first draft, of a screenplay. As professionals well know, each project can prove quite different in the writing from every other; the imagination works in mysterious ways.

This myth is a tragic one, but it doesn’t at all follow that the script should be unrelentingly grim. On the contrary, if viewers are to identify with a doomed character such as Icarus, it’s essential that they empathize with the passion that drives him to destruction, that they be able to feel compassion for his belief in the possibility of achieving his heart’s desire. In our project, where the climax will be the moment in which Icarus ignores his father’s shouts of warning and continues soaring up toward the sun, we need images that convey the wonders of such flight, the glory of wheeling and swooping and gliding like a seagull. In answer to the first part of Question 7, then, the climax is to be a series of images in which a joyful Icarus swoops, glides, and wheels up and up through the dazzling sunlight.

What about an ending? Because death is the ultimate escape from any situation in life, we can say that Icarus has achieved his dramatic action—to escape his father any way that he can. But at what a cost!

It seemed to us that in order to explore the irony of this, we would need two different sorts of images for the ending—those showing the boy’s terror as he falls, and those showing the indifferent world through which he falls: blazing sun, tranquil sea, cloudless sky, and fields where peasants labor. (This last is suggested by a renowned painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, “The Fall of Icarus.”)

At this point, we imagine the very last image of the film to be that of Icarus plunging into the sea and descending underwater in slow motion past the camera.

Finding A Structure (II)

In long narrative films, there is time to develop plot as well as subplots, but in most short narratives, there is time only for a fairly simple story line, however complete the characters or experimental the approach. In order to care about what happens to the main character, we need to be engaged as early as possible. We need to see that character in the midst of life, however briefly, before the catalyst occurs, introducing or stimulating the main dramatic action.

Basically, developing this action through the character’s struggle with a series of increasingly difficult obstacles constitutes the story line or simple plot of a short film script. And while the concept of a full three-act structure has proven useful to writers of longer films (mainly features), it can be unhelpful—even obstructive—to writers of short films. With some exceptions, it is best to think of the story line for a short as a single flow of incidents. In our experience, the following structure is a simpler, more flexible scaffolding for the short, whether it is original or an adaptation.

Structuring Your Short Screenplay

In a sense, the first and last steps above can be thought of as a simple framing device that shows the protagonist before the main dramatic action gets underway, and again, after that action has been completed. Closure is the writer and director’s last word on the subject, the image or images they wish the audience to come away with.

(More on closure in Chapter 7, Rewriting Your Script.)

Writing A Story Outline

In an interview discussing the architecture of the screenplay, screenwriter William Goldman, author of the film scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and All the President’s Men, says, “I’ve done a lot of thinking myself about what a screenplay is, and I’ve come up with nothing except that it’s carpentry. It’s basically putting down some kind of structure form that they [the actors and director] can then mess around with. And as long as they keep the structure form, whatever I have written is relatively valid; a scene will hold, regardless of the dialogue. It’s the thrust of a scene that’s kept pure.”⁵

One of the most valuable tools we have for structure is the story outline, wherein each step briefly describes a full scene—ideally a scene that furthers the action.

The writing of a story outline often begins with collecting notes or making observations on character, location, events, bits of dialogue, or images that you have about the project. When these notes take on some sort of coherence, you can start asking yourself the questions we’ve listed. Keep in mind, though, that for most people the best way to work on ideas for writing anything is with pen in hand or fingers on keyboard.

In the short script, where dialogue is best kept to a minimum, a detailed story outline can occasionally serve the purposes of a first-draft screenplay. There are students who prefer to answer the questions and move directly to a rough draft. If this second method is your choice, you will probably find that writing a bare-bones outline of this draft can help you spot problems in motivation and structure before going on to the next draft. It is much easier to see such difficulties when the scenes are laid out in sequence on a single sheet of paper.

There are those who find that using index cards, or photocopied cutouts from the draft of the outline, for each step and moving them around helps in finding the sequence that works best. (Most people who have done any film editing at all discover, sooner or later, that casual or even accidental juxtapositions can yield extraordinary results.)

When you arrive at the assignment, keep an open mind and be prepared to experiment with these strategies to find out what works for you. Because our first example of such an outline is intended for a very short animated film or video, and story-boarding is all-important in animation, it will be somewhat more detailed than it would be for most live-action films. Essentially, what we are aiming at is an outline that could almost serve as a first draft of the screenplay.

Story Outline for “Icarus’S Flight”

As often happens, another image presented itself as a possible final one after we had finished the outline:

This last shot may not work in the film, because it leaves us contemplating Daedalus’s suffering rather than that of our protagonist, Icarus. But it is worth thinking about, possibly even shooting, with the final decision left for the editing room.

Reflections and Comments

If you look over the outline, you will see that each step represents a scene that forwards the action, whether the scene is more or less continuous in time or is a single unit taking place at different times.

For instance, the first step essentially sets up the main character’s situation and shows tension between Icarus and his father, even hinting at the struggle that will develop between them. Step 2 is a variation on this and could easily be considered a part of 1. Step 3 shows us Icarus as a dreamer, imagining himself a seagull. Step 4 shows us Icarus carrying the fantasy a degree farther, and Step 5, even farther—to the point where he forgets himself enough to disturb Daedalus as he works.

Then we have the reprimand, the boy’s display of anger at his father, and Daedalus’s realization that he might be able to craft wings for them of feathers and wax. From this point until step 9, each scene moves the two characters toward escape from the tower—and Icarus’s escape from his father.

Looking over the outline, you can see that there is nothing extraneous— everything counts. A writer has more freedom in writing a longer script, but digressions that are pleasurable in a feature are apt to lose the audience in a short film. Still, there are aspects of the story that have not yet been explored. For instance, in writing the actual screenplay, we would want to be sure to develop the suspense latent in Step 7, when the jailer comes into the chamber, as well as the mounting tension in Icarus’s struggle to stay aloft as his father tries desperately to reach him.

A screenplay is a narrative, and one of the tasks of any narrative, whatever the medium, is to engage the curiosity of its audience. How? By the time-honored method of “raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers,” as novelist and critic David Lodge writes in The Art of Fiction. Lodge believes that the questions raised in narrative “are broadly of two kinds, having to do with causality (e.g., whodunit?) and temporality (e.g., what will happen next?), each exhibited in a very pure form by the classic detective story and the adventure story, respectively.”⁶

The particular challenge for writers of short scripts is that there usually isn’t time to establish the protagonist’s character and plight in a leisurely way and also tell the story. There are exceptions to this “rule,” of course— many of them comedies, or experimental films or videos.

All the same, if you are interested in making narrative films, it’s useful to learn the ground rules before you take to the air.

On Character as Habitual Behavior

As we have noted, Aristotle referred to character as habitual action. You are what you ordinarily do—that is, until you do something you don’t ordinarily do, which is what makes for drama. To be believable, the character’s capacity for out-of-the-ordinary behavior needs to have been glimpsed by the audience—even if not recognized for what it is—at some point in the story before it appears full blown. (If your aim is to create cartoon characters in a live-action world, believability of behavior doesn’t matter as much.) For example, in the outline above, Icarus ordinarily obeys his father without question, if sullenly, until the moment in the flight when he realizes that Daedalus is no longer in command, that he can do as he chooses. His out-of-the-ordinary behavior in disregarding Daedalus’s warnings would make sense to us as an audience, because we have witnessed for ourselves earlier signs of rebelliousness. In Cocteau’s sense, the logic of it has been “proven” to us.

It is the “movement of spirit or psyche,” as Aristotle calls dramatic action, that produces a character’s behavior. In any of the dramatic forms, the inner life of a character has to be expressed in what that character does, as well as in the way he or she does it. In a good screenplay, both dialogue and physical action flow from a character’s dramatic action (or want or need).

Another Adaptation, with Daedalus as Hero

Now we shall work from the same source material as before (the myth) but in a very different way, using Daedalus as our main character. We’ll answer the seven questions briefly, as a step toward writing a bare-bones synopsis of the projected script, which is for a live-action, realistic film of 15 to 18 minutes, set during the time of the American Civil War. The synopsis is a useful tool, one required by many teachers as a first step in writing any screen-play—a kind of trial balloon. It is also useful for an initial class discussion of a student’s work. Widely used in the industry, it is often required in applications for foundation grants, and many writers prefer it to a story outline.

Here are the questions and our answers:

He shares a small room at the top of the house with a boy who is awaiting court-martial—and most likely death by firing squad—for having fallen asleep while on sentry duty.

The synopsis that follows is a distillation of this information into a couple of paragraphs.

This story outline and synopsis bear a strong family resemblance to a number of feature films in the escape genre, particularly Robert Bresson’s A Man Escapes and Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (said by Siegel, in fact, to have been heavily influenced by A Man Escapes). However, this story is set apart by its setting, the specific moral dilemma faced by the protagonist during the escape, and the ambivalence of the outcome.

The main challenges in writing the script would be twofold: developing each character fully enough in a short time, and exploring the relationship of Dedalus and the Icarus figure.

Adaptations of Myths and Fairy Tales

Some contemporary adaptations of myths and fairy tales done by students working collaboratively in workshops given by coauthor Pat Cooper include the following:

Adaptations of fairy tales, particularly, tend toward the melodramatic, and that can be a good part of the fun of doing them.

Ninth Assignment: Finding A Myth or Fairy Tale to Adapt

Find yourself at least two good collections of myths or fairy tales, and pick a tale you’d like to work on. After you’ve located it, make at least two photocopies of several versions of the story—one to keep as a clean copy, the other to mark up as you work on your outline. In addition, photocopy any other material that interests you, such as illustrations or observations by the book’s editor. At this point it is better to have too much material rather than too little, as you can’t tell which bits and pieces of information may prove useful in writing your outline.

While collections of myths or fairy tales intended for children can be good sources, depending on the audience you want to reach, they are often heavily expurgated or simplified. Adults, not children, were the original audience for most folktales; for earlier versions, it would make sense to consult more scholarly collections, like LaRousse’s Mythology, an unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or a good encyclopedia such as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Researching and locating the right myth or fairy tale can take a good deal of time, but it is important to choose a story that is personally meaningful, one that you will enjoy working on. It is also important that this assignment not be rushed.

Tenth Assignment: Getting Started

Consider the character in the story who appeals to you, the one with whom you can most readily identify. In writing narrative of any kind—except farce or parody, where one doesn’t necessarily have to identify with the main character or characters—identification is really more important than whether you approve of the character. One often identifies with characters or finds them appealing even if one doesn’t approve of them (Richard III, for example). When you have decided, take that character as your protagonist. Now think about whether you would like the script to take place in the present, at some period in history that particularly interests you, or in the mythical time in which it was originally set. If you can’t decide at the moment, choose the last option, at least for your first rough draft.

For this next part of the assignment, you will need two or three different-colored pens. Mark on one of your photocopies the events, images, and remarks on characters or setting that seem essential to the story you want to tell. Then, using a different color, mark material you think you will probably want. Last of all, in a third color, mark anything that seems problematic but intrigues you.

At this point, it makes sense to look back over the seven questions listed earlier in this chapter, as well as the answers we gave to them. By now, you should be ready to try answering these questions for your own project. Write as clearly and simply as you can, unless you are planning to do a detailed story outline in place of a first-draft script, as discussed earlier; in that case, you can overwrite and revise, as we did with the outline for “Icarus’s Flight.” Either way, the question-and-answer process may take you as much time to complete as the actual writing of your story outline, but it will be time well spent. When you’ve completed the answers, some sort of feedback—from a class session, your teacher, or informed friends—would be helpful before continuing. It is especially important that the dramatic action of your main character be clear and make sense to your audience as well as to you.

Eleventh Assignment: Writing the Story Outline

Now take up pencil and paper, or go to your computer, and write down the steps of your outline, the spine of your story. Revise at least twice before handing it in or showing it to anyone, giving yourself enough time between each revision to develop some sort of detachment about the writing. As for criticism, listen and take note but use only what works for you.