The Two Most Important Questions in Screenwriting.
What are the two most fundamental questions in screenwriting? I’d suggest that it’s 'What happens?' and 'What is it about?'
I'm often surprised when I ask a screenwriter 'what is it about?' and they proceed to tell me the the events of the story or I ask 'what happens?' and they start describing the thematics. Let's get into this common misunderstanding.
What happens is the series of events in sequence -not necessarily linear- from beginning to end.
What is it about? Now this is when I often see the wheels come off.
Imagine this, the writer has already told me what happens, and then when they start explaining what it's about I get confused. The confusion arises as I'm left wondering how they have arrived at their answer to what it's about. Have they plucked it out of the ether because it sounds intellectual? Sometimes.
Have they confused what it might mean to them with how anyone else might perceive it? Sometimes.
The disconnect is that early phase writers often see these two questions as unrelated.
Let's be absolutely clear here. These are two separate but inextricably related questions.
What happens in the screenplay should lead the reader to arrive at an understanding of what the screenplay is about. Conversely, what it’s about is built on what happens.
In other words, when we consider all the events in the story in the order in which they're presented, that combination should lead us to understand the theme, point or meaning of the story.
So here's my personal admission. I often develop a screenplay from a fragment, a moment that I can't let go of. I build scenes around this initial fragment until I have a series of events that eventually coalesces into a beginning middle and end. An iteration of what happens can come together relatively quickly, but and it's a big BUT, whilst I'm developing these events I rarely know what the film is going to be about.
At some point in the assembly of the story -or more precisely because of the assembly of the story- there's a moment of revelation when I discover what the screenplay is about. This is THE defining moment in the process. Once I know what the story is about I'm then able to make clear and focused decisions about what scenes to keep, what scenes I should lose or modify and what is still to be written. All future iterations improve markedly. Prior to answering that question I had no criteria for making those critical decisions.
So don't get it twisted people, what happens and what it's about are not the same thing, but they are inextricably linked. The answers to each rarely arrive simultaneously, but when we have answers to both, we have a meaningful way of navigating our screenplays. Without answers to these two fundamental questions there’s no way to predictably get a screenplay across the line.
Where do you start? With what happens or what’s it about?
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