Descripción del desarrollo de la propuesta

It is in this context, this definition of drama as the presentation of a thoughtful and motivated character choosing a course of action, that we should place the questions that every beginning screenwriter has heard flogged about: What does your character want? What is the charac-ter arc? What is at stake? Whose scene is it?

These questions come into focus—and can be addressed and answered in practical fashion—once you think of dramatic action as decision.

Character Completes Plot

Character necessity gives coherence and meaning to plot.

The difference between a B-movie—which may be great fun to watch—and a film that survives the conversation on the way home is character.

Sidney Lumet put it this way (paraphrasing): In melodrama, plot forms character; in drama, character forms plot.

Whatever your idea, whatever the genre; no matter how ingenious the incidents or cinematic the vision—if you do not ground your story in character you will end up with simple spectacle.

Character helps you create and solidify plot.

No matter how wildly inventive your images are, no matter how original the events you concoct, if they are not tethered to your char-acters, if you have not evaluated their consistency to character’s True

North, they will seem false, forced. They will be insufficient. They will not add up to story.

We do not identify with incident. We do not empathize with event.

We consume story through character. That’s our way in.

We do not identify with incident. We do not empathize with event. We consume story through character. That’s our way in.

What’s the difference between a good movie and a bad movie?

It’s simple. In a good movie, you feel a stake in the characters’

choices. This goes beyond empathy, or antipathy, and drills down to the heart of drama.

There are only a few things that make an audience member lean for-ward. There is fear. There is sex. And there is thinking.

And it’s particularly interesting to watch a character make a choice.

The right choice, wrong choice, the choice we fear, the choice we our-selves would make.

In a bad movie, effects may be spectacular, action riveting, and the starlet beautiful, but if I don’t believe the choices they make are important, and genuine, and meaningful, then I will not care.

If there isn’t an individuated personality whose desire we can rec-ognize and understand, if there is no choice with which we can agree or abhor, then all that remains is the titillation of spectacle. Which, one could argue, is the definition of pornography.

CHARACTER-DRIVEN VERSUS PLOT-DRIVEN Okay. I admit. That’s asking a lot of a reader. It’s pretty heady stuff.

You came here to learn how to write a screenplay and here I am hold-ing forth on Aristotle. But, trust me. By the time you finish this book you’ll want to return to the last chapter and you’ll see it anew. And it will help. I know it will.

Let’s take a breath and put it all in more familiar and colloquial terms.

You will often hear films described as either character-driven or plot-driven. I think this is a false dichotomy. All films are character-plot-driven.

All films have plot. These labels tell something, it’s true, about empha-sis. And, for the most part, it’s become something of a commonplace that smaller, independent films are more character-driven, and larger

“tent pole” films are more plot-driven.

But it seems to me that these terms are best seen as describing a spectrum. At the far end of the character-driven end you might find personal dramas or portraits, films like Sideways or Woman Under the Influence. At the far end of the plot-driven you might place most hor-ror films, Kung Fu movies, disaster movies, and plot-heavy thrillers

like Inception. In the former we are drawn into the story by character agency, by how what the character chooses generates story; in the lat-ter characlat-ter is seen primarily in reaction to events beyond their per-sonal control.

What interests me about this distinction is (1) how the vast majority of movies, at least the vast majority of good movies, fall into the mid-dle and (2) how we can turn it to task in the making of new characters and new plots.

From the point of view of the writer confronting a blank page, plot-ting sometimes feels like an exercise in mechanics: how to get the pieces to fit together, how to concoct action and event that rivets and interests and is logically probable and consistent. But if you accept that all but the most extreme spectacle films are also character-driven, you have a tool with which to create and challenge event toward plot. Imagined events, when viewed through character behavior and motivation and ambition, become necessary; not simply interesting, but compelling.

The reader is drawn, via empathy and understanding, into the plot.

It would be easy to make this point about character’s relation to plot in the quieter, more personal movies of the independent film universe.

More interesting is to demonstrate that this idea of character impact-ing and refinimpact-ing plot can be found in relatively plot-heavy popcorn movies. Many of the examples I will use in what follows are taken from such movies. The intent is not to suggest that Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are the kind of films you should be writing; or that they are paradigms of film art. Rather it is to make the point that what makes these movies transcend their plot-driven genre, what has made them memorable and successful, is an astute entwining of plot and charac-ter. Take the Bourne Identity franchise. There you have popular, heav-ily plotted thrillers driven by the main character’s search for identity.

Deftly drawn and consistent characters are what separates successful films from their B-movie siblings.

The concepts examined here are equally applicable to Hollywood blockbusters, independent film, micro-budget, and television.

Realize that this distinction between character-driven and plot-driven is usually applied to completed films, to characters and plots that have already been created and composed. We are concerned with making a plot, not with appreciating one. We are concerned, not with plot, but with plotting:

…that which makes a plot “move forward,” and makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of the narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the prom-ise of progress toward meaning.¹¹

11 Peter Brooks, Reading for Plot, p. xiii

What a great definition of our goal as dramatists: to seduce a reader toward meaning with a combination of intention and design. That’s an idea of plotting one can sink one’s teeth into. But it’s not as quota-ble as Screenplays Are Structure. Reread it. I think you’ll come to like it.

In order to think about character and plot from the point of view of plotting, of making a plot rather than analyzing one, we must turn again to theory to get some terms straight, to lay out a vocabulary.

FABLE AND CONSTRUCT

What do you have when you sit down to write a screenplay? What now? Where to start?

Let’s look at what you bring to that first night of composition.

How do we approach the blank page? Usually with nothing but an ambition or urge to tell a story.

Sometimes you don’t even have that. Sometimes you just have a desire to sit down and do fun things with language. The hope for a story becomes an excuse for feeling the pleasure of composition.

We might not even know what story we hope to tell when we first create that blank document or crack the newly purchased composition book.

Where do we find our stories? History. Personal experience. An old folk tale or an obscure novel. Yesterday’s headlines. A single image. A thematic idea.

No matter the source, all of these—urge to tell, high concept, politi-cal point, personal history, contemporary event—have one thing in common. They are ambitions to story, not story itself.

What’s the joke in Annie Hall?

Right now it’s only a notion. But I think I can get money to turn it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.

At this point you are swimming about in a inchoate morass of pos-sible story ideas and directions.

How do we start typing? How do we move from the unformed notion to a screenplay? First, we need to understand what we mean when we think about story.

Story

Surely, I hear you say, story needs no definition. I know a story. I heard this story. It’s a great story. What’s your story?

But what do we really mean when we use story to refer to a screen-play? Or more specifically, in the context of setting out to write a screenplay?

A friend asks what your screenplay is about. You try and tell them some graspable aspect of the story. But really, if you haven’t finished the screenplay, you’re just flailing about to find the more interesting bits of what you are working on, trying to find a way to link them together in a way that makes sense. But deep down you know this attempt to tell what isn’t finished just won’t do. It isn’t doing justice to your idea, to your ambition.

This kind of precomposition storytelling has been codified in the film industry as The Pitch. You work out the barest outline of a story, using as much glitz and glamour and as many formulaic catchphrases as you can, and you act it out for a studio executive. If you’re good enough at the performance aspect of The Pitch you may walk away with a deal. But you haven’t actually written a story. You have described—just as you did in answer to your friend’s casual question—what you hope to write, what you plan to write. You have described an ambition to a story, not a story. You have described a story before it has been composed.

Now ask the question from the point of view of the writer before he has set pen to paper (finger to keyboard). What is the story, the chaotic field of infinite possibility, the thing that struck the author one evening in the shower, that now swims in his head, keeping him up at night?

That story is amorphous. It is flexible. It changes as the writer imag-ines alternative turns, thinks through character and location, adds event, discards, winnows.

Story, in this sense—as the idea with which we begin, the