Prewriting Your Screenplay

A Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Stories

Michael Tabb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351058254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Prewriting Your Screenplay cements all the bricks of a story's foundations together and forms a single, organic story-growing technique, starting with a blank slate. It shows writers how to design each element so that they perfectly interlock together like pieces of a puzzle, creating a stronger story foundation that does not leave gaps and holes for readers to find. This construction process is performed one piece at a time, one character at a time, building and incorporating each element into the whole.

The book provides a clear-cut set of lessons that teaches how to construct that story base around concepts as individual as the writer's personal opinions, helping to foster an individual writer's voice. It also features end-of-chapter exercises that offer step-by-step guidance in applying each lesson, providing screenwriters with a concrete approach to building a strong foundation for a screenplay. This is the quintessential book for all writers taking their first steps towards developing a screenplay from nothing, getting them over that first monumental hump, resulting in a well-formulated story concept that is cohesive and professional.

Act 1
Story origins

Chapter 1
Premise

Figure 1.1 Greg Lee Dampier–P is for premise: a writer’s superpower. It’s how the writer projects a personal truth into the universe.

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

–Jack London, Getting Into Print (1905)

In the beginning, there was darkness. A void. Most writers spend an endless amount of time staring at a blank page, waiting for ideas to come to them. There’s this great line from the movie Real Genius, “You can’t dictate innovation.” Yet that’s how most writers work. They wait for an idea/concept to dawn on them, or they go looking for it like a set of keys they misplaced. Those writers try to design a story from the outside, and then they work their way inside. Well, at least the better ones do. They try to reverse engineer a soul into an idea. Don’t get me wrong, a writer can reverse engineer a premise into an idea that already exists, but what happens when you don’t have that big idea?

Instead of waiting for an idea to come to you, I am going to share with you a routine to bring you to the idea. You don’t have to start with an external search for a story idea and backtrack inward on a search for meaning. Instead, you can start with the heart of the story, which is right inside of you. Throughout this book, I will break down how a series of steps taken in a specific order will lead to creating story ideas, so stick with me. This is a method I have used for years, and, because of this process, I have never had writer’s block a day in my life. You never have to stare at a blank page waiting for inspiration. Why? Because you actually have everything you need to start writing inside you already–in your heart.

Wow. That sounded incredibly cheesy. Nothing like trying to swallow a giant chunk of sharp cheddar. Let me wash that down with an explanation that isn’t quite so hard to digest.

I rarely start writing with a whole story idea in mind unless I’ve been hired to adapt a preexisting property or idea by a studio. Do you want to know why? What makes every truly great story striking is the unique voice from deep inside the DNA of the person writing it. The only thing nobody else can bring to a script when they write it is you. That is what makes each written work one of a kind and totally original. Only you can write from your perspective. We all have things that truly bother us, hurt us, scare us, and affect us deep and strong. That deepest part of our psyche is the place from which your truth, your ideas, and your artist’s voice will come. Tap into it.

I always figure that if my story comes from the heart first, the soul of the movie will be strong. That soul is a foundation worth building upon for any script. Unlike those who start with the story, working from the outside in, I am going to teach you to build from the inside out. That’s where I want to start.

Everything has to start with something, somewhere. I start every script with a premise, the core of a strong idea in all visual media. The idea should be presented as a single statement, no more than that. It must be an incredibly clear and succinct point of view that the writer intends to explore. Story and characters come later. First comes the creative spark. It’s the birth of a story idea whose origin stems from a single point.

The act of narrative creation is an exceptional metaphor found in the origin stories of our universe. Whether you believe in biblical creationism or the Big Bang theory, which are not mutually exclusive, this explosive act remains an uncanny parallel to concept conception. If the protagonist is the Earth and the other characters are the moons all around it, premise is the Big Bang itself, day one, and then there was light. Premise is the origin of all the ideas hurtling through space.

What exactly is a premise?

You’re going to laugh, but my take on this all stems back to my mother. Every single time she took us kids to a movie, without fail, she would ask us tikes, “What was the moral of that story?” What I didn’t realize at the time is that she was asking us what the writer was trying to say. She had no idea that she was training me for my future career. She’d have us boil the movie down to one thing. Every good movie had a single answer to that question.

Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” A writer needs one clear statement. My mother had me doing story analysis, figuring out the core value behind every single movie I saw, from the age of 5. By the age of 7, after every movie, no question was being asked. We’d just start talking about it before we walked out the theater doors. Looking back, it’s no surprise that I started creative writing for the fun of it when I was 6.

The most important question for a writer to ask about his story is, “Why?” Unless there is a reason, a story is just a series of meaningless events and circumstances. A mother kills her child, but that’s not a story. It’s a situation. The story is why she did it. Can you imagine a writer not knowing the answer to why? There’s this great, classic cliché of an actor constantly asking the director for his character’s motivation. Motivation grounds a story in reality and truth; it gives a character perspective. Writers spend so much time making sure they know why everything happens in the script because this why is what writers have to be able to make clear on the page. Everyone in the story development process is always asking one of two simple questions: why or how. The enormous irony of that fact is that the writer figures out why every character makes every choice, yet forgets to ask the biggest why of all.

Why write the story?

Have you ever watched a show or film that had all the right things that a good story is supposed have–characters, conflict, high stakes, love, great action, cool effects, etc.–but somehow it still managed to feel empty? That’s because the writer didn’t figure out what it was all trying to say. Some writers think cool ideas and characters are enough. It’s not. How can a writer expect an audience to follow a story if the writer doesn’t know why he or she is writing it?

Yes, the writer needs to learn from the actor here and ask, “What’s my motivation?” I think this is why so many actors find it totally natural to try their hand at writing; writers ask the same questions actors do. A writer needs the story to have a motive. Without that core, there’s nothing binding all those elements together to feel like it’s one story with purpose. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) remains meaningful to readers to this day because it reads as if it’s about much more than an old man who likes to fish. The same goes for all great stories, from the plays of Shakespeare to modern cinema.

You can call it a lot of things. A premise is the core belief system of the script and the lifeblood of the story. The best and most logical way to think about this concept was something another former USC student, screenwriter, and film school educator once said to me: “If you see the screenplay as a creative term paper, premise is the hypothesis of that paper.” Garrick Dowhen was right, and it’s the perfect analogy. Now, there can only be one premise per script, from which all the ideas it contains serve. Otherwise, the script loses its focus and sense of purpose. Premise is hypothesis. It’s the story’s purpose for existing at all.

I think of a premise in terms of how I would answer one specific question. The answer to that question changes based on where I am in my life. So, when looking for yours, maybe you’ll ask yourself the question I always ask myself:

If you could convey just one truth to the entire world from your deathbed, and all the world will hear it with your final breath, what would you say?

An analogy to explain this is that the writer is the power source, the story is the vehicle, and the premise serves as the power cables. Every script should have a premise in which to ground it. The premise is the electrical current that keeps the engine running no matter what note any executive gives the writer. As long as the writer can keep the proverbial battery charged, he or she has the grounding wire for powering the story. A strong premise allows the writer to march forward with whatever the studio throws at him or her. I’ve heard it wisely said, “Don’t give it 5 minutes if you’re not willing to give it 5 years.”

The premise and how important it is to you are why you won’t give up on this script after 10 rewrites for the studio. It’s why I can keep rewriting for as long as they pay me. An executive or a producer can ask a writer to change the characters, story, relationships, everything–but the premise stays the same. It gives the writer something to fight for and keep working toward.

The soul of your movie is on the line with every draft. You will be trying to crystalize this statement with each edit. A premise is the writer’s entire reason for telling the story and the main reason he or she does not get sick of writing it.

Premise is not a word, theme, feeling, story, question, plot, or tone. It’s not about a person; it’s about the world in which we live (even if your story is not set in our world). It’s a strong statement with a point to make; it’s the theory the writer is trying to prove or disprove. This theory defines the author’s perspective, helping readers and script analysts understand you as an artist and the kinds of things about which you were born to write. Whether the scribe is an optimist or a nihilist comes across in what the writer says with his or her story. The premise is what the writer will prove to be true at the end of his or her story.

The use of premise applies to all storytelling in all mediums, including comic books, television shows, and films.

Premise is the writer’s personal opinion. It’s a general-life statement. It doesn’t have to be nice; it needs to be what the writer believes. A writer will spend the entire script proving it. It’s like J. D. Salinger writes in Catcher in the Rye (1951), “The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” This’s what writers do.

To make a long diatribe short, the best screenwriters know how important sub-text is in dialogue. Your premise is the subtext of the overall story.

The very brief history of dramatic premise

For the original master of defining a strong, dramatic premise, we look to Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing, published in 1946. While Aristotle’s Poetics originally analyzed and taught the mechanics of plotting at the core of storytelling, Egri took a new angle. He felt that the best stories are character driven, and premise is at the core of any character-driven tale. It’s the premise that inspires the protagonist’s two journeys and defines his or her character arc.

Egri was writing about the concept of premise in scriptwriting long before Syd Field, William Goldman, and Blake Snyder and using it to analyze the classic stories that survived the greatest test–time. Egri’s mathematical equation for premise contains three variables: protagonist, conflict, and resolution. His phrasing is a simple formula with either a positive or negative result. The positive is traditionally worded as this defies/leads to that. The negative is that conquers/destroys this. I equate this to one of those simple math equations where something is either equal to, greater than, or less than the other side of the conflict. Some of Egri’s examples include Shakespeare’s classics, including Othello (jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love) and Macbeth (ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction). Now, none of those statements are ever stated in the dialogue of those famous plays, but the story continues to resonate over 500 years after they were written because of the subtextual truth of each premise. In the end, the technical phrasing of a premise doesn’t need to be complex. It just needs to be true.

That said, even Egri admits that it’s hard to start an idea knowing who the hero is, what the central conflict is, and how to determine the result of that conflict from the start. It’s just a lot to try to wrap your head around from the beginning. He says sometimes you have to come back to the premise as you research. Well, for me, if the starting step isn’t something you can do as the first thing, it’s obviously not the perfectly designed first step.

Therefore, before I break down how I create a premise differently, we need to ask…

What does a premise need to do?

The one constant is that a premise clearly states exactly what the writer is trying to say.

1. It states the script’s hypothesis.
2. It says a tremendous amount about the writer.

When figuring out a premise and starting to mine for that deathbed declaration, a writer asks him- or herself a series of questions all basically asking the same thing in different ways:

• On a subatomic level, what message can endlessly fuel a fire in your belly for finishing this story?
• What makes this more than entertainment?
• What makes your tale important enough that it’s worth years of your life to get it right?
• Why is it worth producing?
• What would you like to say to people you deeply love to stop them from making the same, stupid, self-destructive mistakes?
• What would you say to all the politicians running for office on either side of the aisle?
• How could we make life better?
• What could actually bring world peace into being?
• What quintessential thing about life does the world in general seem to not understand?
• Why do you want to keep breathing?
• What makes you want to stop breathing?
• If you could say one last thing to the one that got away, what would it be?
• If you had a day to live, don’t ask what you would do, but why would you do it?

Answer these questions for yourself.

The best premises are based on a personally held belief by the writer that is true yet contradicts common, public opinion. In Leaving Las Vegas, the premise is arguably proving wrong the old adage and widely believed common misconception that “Life goes on in the wake of deep, personal tragedy.” According to that movie, not even a new love can fill the aching gap left by the loss of true love.

The first half of this chapter has covered what a premise is, which leads us naturally to a question of how to create a premise.

Creating a premise

While Egri teaches that it’s per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• ACT 1 Story origins
• ACT 2 Character creation
• ACT 3 Culmination
• Final words of advice
• Bibliography
• Special thanks
• Illustrators
• About the author
• Endorsements
• Index