It’s the Thanksgiving weekend which means I will be gone for the next four days! OR WILL I? Cough cough. Is someone sending a newsletter out on Thanksgiving? Cough cough. Maybe. #Keepaneyeout.
As we all know, Thanksgiving is a time where we willingly endure a nightmarish travel experience to reconnect with our families, to watch the Cowboys and the Lions while we drink cheap beer, and to participate in a meal that’s never as good as advertised. I mean, seriously, does anyone on the planet really like pumpkin pie? I’m talking even one person?? Can I have the phone number for whoever invented pumpkin pie please so I can give him a proper scolding?
Now, if you’re anything like me, you see the holidays as a sneaky secret time to get some writing done. After all the hugs and hellos and chuckles and uncomfortable political discourse, I burrow into a tiny room that nobody knows about and I start writing. You see, one of the underrated aspects about Thanksgiving is that it’s a highly emotional time. It’s not just the family stuff. It’s the travel. It’s the end of the year. It’s the reminder of previous holidays. Of old friends, old relationships. You don’t want to let all that juicy emotion go to waste. Highly emotional times tend to generate great material.
Which is why I thought I’d remind you that every screenplay requires two things in order to work. Without these two things, a script will die on the vine. They are the oxygen to your script’s lungs. What are they?
1) Give your characters non-stop things to do.
2) Have those things matter.
There is no good script in the history of screenwriting that doesn’t do these things. So let’s look at what they mean.
One of the most common mistakes writers make is they start off strong, with an aggressive first act, then as they make their way into the second act, they can’t think of stuff for their characters to do. They know the characters have to do something. But it isn’t clear what. So they write a bunch of “filler” scenes with characters sitting around talking or going places they don’t need to go. Eventually, they can’t even think of filler scenes anymore and they give up.
The way to avoid this is to make sure your character has a strong goal pushing him forward. This is true for big movies. This is true for small movies. But it’s far more common for the small movies to fail at this. That’s because with big movies, big goals are baked into the concept. Whether it’s the Avengers going after Thanos or The Rock and Ryan Reynolds trying to steal Cleopatra’s bejeweled eggs in Red Notice. The logline itself seems to tell you what the character’s going to be doing for the next two hours.
But what if you’re writing a character piece about a guy whose wife just divorced him and he doesn’t know what to do with his life? In these cases, the goal isn’t as clear. Which means you’ll likely violate rule #1: Give your character non-stop things to do. After Divorced Dan decides what to eat that first night and maybe after he does his laundry, what does Divorced Dan do?
Well, smaller movies typically use one of two things to drive the narrative. The first is a character who’s trying to get his or her life back on track. A good example of this is The Wrestler. The Wrestler is both trying to repair the broken relationship with his daughter as well as get ready for the big wrestling rematch with his nemesis. These two things always give him something to do. Each scene can push one or the other storyline forward.
The second thing small movies use to drive the narrative is money. This is why you see all these small town Coen Brothers films being about money. It’s to make sure the characters always have something to do (get the money). Hell or High Water is another recent example of small-town characters needing money.
But money doesn’t have to be a brief case with 100,000 dollars in it. Or a giant score from a bank robbery. It could be as simple as your hero isn’t able to pay his mortgage at the end of the month, which means he’s going to get kicked out. Once a character’s back is up against the wall, they have no choice but to act. Which means – you guessed it – they now have non-stop things to do. Every scene is going to be about getting that money.
So, to summarize, give your character a goal and they will always have something to do.
This leads us to the second rule, which is: THE THINGS THEY DO MUST MATTER. Let me paint a slightly adjusted scenario of the above movie idea. In our new movie, the hero doesn’t need money by the end of the month to pay his mortgage. He’s going to be fine either way. But let’s say he still wants money. So you put him through the exact same paces as the other character. He asks his friends and family for money. He asks for an advance at work. Maybe he tries to rob someone.
In every one of these scenarios our character is abiding by the first rule – he has “non-stop things to do.” However, there’s one major difference: those things don’t matter. How do we feel if his friend turns him down for money? We don’t feel anything because we know he doesn’t need the money. It’s got to matter for us to care.
Take one of my recent favorite films, Good Time. Brothers Connie and Nick try to rob a bank and Nick gets caught while Connie escapes. Connie has to bail out his brother within 24 hours or his brother gets sent to one of the most dangerous prisons in the state, where he’s not likely to survive. The next several scenes follow Connie trying to scrounge up the money to bail his brother out.
In one intense scene, he goes to his ex-girlfriend, who he recently ghosted, and convinces her to come with him to pay for his brother. It’s a great scene because he doesn’t like this girl anymore but she still likes him. So she’s asking him if this means they’re back together and he has to lie to her and say yes in order to save his brother. But the main reason the scene works is because THE SCENE MATTERS. We know that if he fails to get the money out of her, his brother could die.
That’s not to say all stakes must be life or death. But something has to be on the line in a scene for the scene to work. In my new favorite show, “You,” the main character, Joe, meets with his girlfriend’s best friend at a coffee shop. The best friend hates Joe and wants the girlfriend to dump him. Joe has to make nice with the best friend so that that doesn’t happen. There may not be a big chunk of money involved in this scene but the scene STILL MATTERS. If Joe fails to win over the friend, he could lose his girlfriend.
It’s really as simple as that. If you want to write a good screenplay, give your characters non-stop things to do and have those things matter.
Thanksgiving To-Do List: Get some writing done over the holiday weekend! We’ve got an ANYTHING GOES Amateur Showdown coming up in February so you’re going to want to be ready for that. I’ll be talking about that more as the year winds down. We’ve got a new Black List in a couple of weeks. We’ve got a maybe possibly probably newsletter hitting your inboxes in the next couple of days. And finally, whatever you do, do not – I repeat DO NOT – eat any pumpkin pie this weekend. We must stop the proliferation of this vile dessert. It starts with you.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYBODY! Gobble-gobble.
