Do you need to know how it ends?
If you stroll the screenwriting blogosphere, you know there are all sorts of answers to this, all very well and passionately argued and all very contradictory.
There are those who say you’re foolish not to outline the entire arc of each character from start to finish, so you know the whole big picture before you begin. All kinds of stuff about index cards and cork boards and timelines and beat sheets.
There are those who say you need to have a pretty good idea of where the story is going or what the characters are gonna do so there’s a framework in which the people can play around.
And then there are those who say you just have to send the characters off and let them find the story themselves. Hippies.
And of course a million variations of these three.
I think I’ve tried them all, sort of, and I’m not sure which works best for me. I think it works best for me if I have a pretty good idea of what I want to happen, but not outline too strictly in the beginning. This way, I have a sense of direction, but there’s enough wiggle room to allow for some magic to happen.
If Magic decides to show up of course.
Yet with this rewrite I’m working on, I find myself worried because I don’t really know what’s gonna happen with one of the main characters. Normally I don’t worry about this. So why now? No idea.
Sometimes I think this character just needs to grow a little in the ensuing pages and take over from me (I know this is sounding pretty flighty, but I’m guessing any writers who happen to be reading know what I mean) and figure it out himself. But sometimes I worry he's endingless because he doesn’t matter and isn’t authentic.
Anyway, I’ll let you know. I’m about 40 pages in, and I think it’s going okay. We’ll see.
Magic, my dear, your presence is requested.
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2 comments:
It's either because I'm completely given over to commercially-ambitious writing, or because I'm so pathetic at plot, but whichever it is, I actually have to know the end. If I don't know the end, I will be incapable of figuring out the middle.
There's that old addage that there's only one ending your story could have, but it still surprises us when we see it.
I think it was John August who wrote a post once about how we're all tree people or forest people. Some people are detail oriented and see all the trees and write careful, detailed outlines.
Some people are forest people and see the big picture but not so much the details in between. Both are the right answer.
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