Day 4

Goals. Stakes. Urgency.

Those are the three elements that script reader, Carson Reeves, highlights as the foundations of a good screenplay. His blog has provided me constant source of screenwriting advice since I stumbled across it in 2009. In fact, it was probably the reason I started taking screenwriting seriously. I cannot recommend it enough. It is a must-read for any aspiring screenwriter.

Goal - "The character goal is the heart of your story. A character must be going after something or else that character is doing nothing."

Stakes - "Once you have a character goal, you can establish your stakes. You do this by asking two very simple questions: "What does my character gain if he achieves his goal?" And "What does my character lose if he fails to achieve his goal?" The bigger the gains and losses, the higher the stakes."

Urgency - "One of the biggest problems I see in amateur screenplays is glacial pacing. The writers don't understand how to infuse urgency into their story. The most common way to do this is via a ticking time bomb, that point of no return by when your character needs to achieve his goal. You can throw ticking time bombs all over your screenplay so that the pace is always quick."

Here's a link to Carson's post about GSU.

Another quick tip: kill your babies.

"If something isn't working, if you have a story that you've built and it’s blocked and you can’t figure it out, take your favourite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It’s brutal, but sometimes inevitable. That thing may find its way back in, but cutting it is usually an enormously freeing exercise." Joss Whedon

Yesterday, I removed three scenes and two characters. It was difficult, but it worked.

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