Writing a Great Movie – Jeff Kitchen
You want to be serious about improving your screenplay or novel before applying the tools Jeff Kitchen presents in his book. All of them are challenging and, in the sense that disruption is the first step of reconstruction, they are disruptive.
Screenwriters talk about how hard it is to accept development notes. The successful writers maintain that responding well to notes is essential to surviving in the movie world. Using Jeff’s Sequence, Proposition and Plot tool is a lot like creating notes on your own project. If you're inclined to reject notes, if you’re reluctant to change what you've written, using the tool will be a very uncomfortable exercise. I have only spoken to Jeff briefly at a writers’ conference, but my take is that he would say, “Uncomfortable exercises are good for your writing.”
“Writing a Great Movie” includes descriptions of several different tools and I am going to deal with just one of them here. On the logline page for “Forged in the Fire,” I used Sequence, Proposition and Plot to describe the storyline. You can click here to see what it looks like.
There are two things about the tool that appeal to me – actually many more than two, but two that stand out. The first is what I think is called reverse causality and it works like this:
The first question you ask yourself is, “What is the object of this story? Why is this story important in the world? Why would anyone repeat this story? What is this story about?” If you, as a writer, don’t have an answer to those questions, why would you go on with telling your story?
The second question is, “What happens on screen, with actors, that demonstrates the object of the story?” Answering this question locks in a specific page or pages where the climax of the story occurs. It’s important to know who is on screen, what they’re up against and how they deal with it.
The third question is, “What causes that climactic action?” If your screenplay is well-constructed, the thing that causes the climax (maybe on page 97) can be found somewhere in the pages that precede it (maybe pages 94-95). Then questions 4, 5, 6, ... are, “What causes the action which you just described in the last step?” If your story is working, you will back up scene by scene until you finally reach the opening image of your movie.
All the world is not cause and effect, but sure as God made little green apples, if you can’t identify a cause for what happens on page 52, you might want to look long and hard at pages 47 to 51 to find out why/why not?
I said that two things about the tool appeal to me – and the second is like unto the first. What’s described above is the “Sequence” part of the tool – the reverse causality activity. The second part of the tool is “Proposition.” Jeff describes it better than I ever could but here goes: a) the antagonist does something to get under the protagonist’s skin, b) the protagonist responds – a little, c) the antagonist ups the stakes, sets off what will be a fight to the finish, and d) the protagonist takes up the challenge – engages in the fight to the finish.
Once the protagonist and the antagonist are joined in the fight to the finish, the reader (or viewer) should have in mind the Central Dramatic Question. It should be a two-part question of the sort, “Will the protagonist achieve what she came here to do, or will the antagonist prevent her and/or destroy her?”
There’s a French word, enjeu, which is usually translated “stakes,” as in, “what are the stakes?” My wife teaches French and she suggests that when used in a literary sense, the enjeu is the question to which the novel (screenplay, short story, etc.) provides the answer.
The wise writer hones the wording of his Central Dramatic Question as precisely as he can – and then strives throughout the novel/screenplay to show it so that he doesn't need to tell it.
I am sorry. The text on this page is dense and the concepts are compressed, perhaps too close together. However, if you think that great stories are meticulously constructed, that their parts are machined to extremely fine tolerances, then you may find Jeff Kitchen’s book an absolute gold mine of techniques and mechanics for writing a great movie (hence the book’s title).
Screenwriters talk about how hard it is to accept development notes. The successful writers maintain that responding well to notes is essential to surviving in the movie world. Using Jeff’s Sequence, Proposition and Plot tool is a lot like creating notes on your own project. If you're inclined to reject notes, if you’re reluctant to change what you've written, using the tool will be a very uncomfortable exercise. I have only spoken to Jeff briefly at a writers’ conference, but my take is that he would say, “Uncomfortable exercises are good for your writing.”
“Writing a Great Movie” includes descriptions of several different tools and I am going to deal with just one of them here. On the logline page for “Forged in the Fire,” I used Sequence, Proposition and Plot to describe the storyline. You can click here to see what it looks like.
There are two things about the tool that appeal to me – actually many more than two, but two that stand out. The first is what I think is called reverse causality and it works like this:
The first question you ask yourself is, “What is the object of this story? Why is this story important in the world? Why would anyone repeat this story? What is this story about?” If you, as a writer, don’t have an answer to those questions, why would you go on with telling your story?
The second question is, “What happens on screen, with actors, that demonstrates the object of the story?” Answering this question locks in a specific page or pages where the climax of the story occurs. It’s important to know who is on screen, what they’re up against and how they deal with it.
The third question is, “What causes that climactic action?” If your screenplay is well-constructed, the thing that causes the climax (maybe on page 97) can be found somewhere in the pages that precede it (maybe pages 94-95). Then questions 4, 5, 6, ... are, “What causes the action which you just described in the last step?” If your story is working, you will back up scene by scene until you finally reach the opening image of your movie.
All the world is not cause and effect, but sure as God made little green apples, if you can’t identify a cause for what happens on page 52, you might want to look long and hard at pages 47 to 51 to find out why/why not?
I said that two things about the tool appeal to me – and the second is like unto the first. What’s described above is the “Sequence” part of the tool – the reverse causality activity. The second part of the tool is “Proposition.” Jeff describes it better than I ever could but here goes: a) the antagonist does something to get under the protagonist’s skin, b) the protagonist responds – a little, c) the antagonist ups the stakes, sets off what will be a fight to the finish, and d) the protagonist takes up the challenge – engages in the fight to the finish.
Once the protagonist and the antagonist are joined in the fight to the finish, the reader (or viewer) should have in mind the Central Dramatic Question. It should be a two-part question of the sort, “Will the protagonist achieve what she came here to do, or will the antagonist prevent her and/or destroy her?”
There’s a French word, enjeu, which is usually translated “stakes,” as in, “what are the stakes?” My wife teaches French and she suggests that when used in a literary sense, the enjeu is the question to which the novel (screenplay, short story, etc.) provides the answer.
The wise writer hones the wording of his Central Dramatic Question as precisely as he can – and then strives throughout the novel/screenplay to show it so that he doesn't need to tell it.
I am sorry. The text on this page is dense and the concepts are compressed, perhaps too close together. However, if you think that great stories are meticulously constructed, that their parts are machined to extremely fine tolerances, then you may find Jeff Kitchen’s book an absolute gold mine of techniques and mechanics for writing a great movie (hence the book’s title).