How Professional Screenwriters Outline

If you have an outline and you follow it faithfully exactly like the outline says to do it then when you're done with the script you will have written the script of an outline. Hey you just heard a snippet of the interview I did with Jim Uhls, the writer of Fight Club. This is just one interview a part of the Behind the Curtain Membership that's coming on May 18th. To get more details on how you can get access to exclusive content like this sign up for the email newsletter at behindthecurtainfilm.com Enjoy the video So, oddly enough people think of writing as dialogue and to me writing is structure. Dialogue is the cherry on top. The cherry on top does not support the ice cream sundae it's it's a it's a delicious little added thing but the real story telling the real structuring that to me is the hard part writing building the the scaffolding the skeleton of the story if you will for a long time I tried to think out everything and the story even though I know things would completely change as like as I go on however now I've realized that it doesn't do me much good to think too much past the middle I mean I might know where I want to go I mean I write genre pieces so you have an idea what the third acts gonna be yeah you know and Kill Bill I guess she'll probably kill Bill with him but you know John Ruby you think you know where you're going and you're probably right and you have an idea of how you might want the ending to end as for you know for both a movie and for an audience but for the most part you can kind of work out more or less what's gonna get you to the middle but to think beyond that is kind of silly because by the time you get to the middle when you've actually been writing it well it's a different story now it's a different thing now you know you are the characters you know the characters things that you could never have known before you started writing are now they're in your blood it's like this entire month you know there is a mythology to my movies to some degree or another not mythology is delivered as as I write and I might have a checklist of things that I might want to do during the course of the time but some of them they are you know become irrelevant yeah and when other ones take their place and some things you thought could have been a big deal while they are a big deal and some things you may be half the reason you wanted to write it by the time you get to where that would happen and prints for something else that's not for this but by that time you get to the middle that's where you want to be you want to have it be this expert you want to be in the middle of the story you want to know who these people are and now with all this knowledge now you figure out where you want to go for the second half I'm trying to write to that spot where I don't know what's going to happen I'm trying to get to that trying to get off that that that that blueprint and I'm trying to get to that place where now the characters are telling me and the characters are exciting me I'd be being disingenuous with you to say that I kind of can construct the story I mean I never feel like I know how to construct the story except just like that's a great way what you just said like yeah dumping things on a table and like spreading them around like that for sure and hopefully getting lucky enough to kind of get enough things going in a row that feels like something worth doing something worth telling something worth going to shoot I open up a file final draft and I write about a page of story beats which would be single lines so spaceship on the way to the Sun you know seven characters or a door kind of a moment so it goes on and just single lines and the lines are the basic beats of the story and what I've got to the end I sort of take the cursor up to the top of the page so I've got about a page of lines I'd say the kind of back up to the top of the page and I've write the first scene and as I reach story beats I delete them so eventually so the script is getting longer and the story beats list which is only a page is getting shorter eventually I delete the last line and at that point I've got a full script and that's it that's a first draft and it will be crap but that's okay because I know that there's a couple of things I get from there one is you've got something to work with and it's getting to that point that's often the hardest yeah the nervous does influence Lee somebody said that if the author doesn't know where the story is going the audience can't possibly know I write really structuralist I have to start I really I spend I spend to this the first big chunk of time just working in little notebooks and all I do is I draw like arcs and split them out and see like sequences I need to basically be able to see the whole plot in my head before I can sit down and actually start writing or I'll get lost in the weeds so I plan and plan and plan then plan and this was like that only more so this was even more crucial for me to have the whole thing mapped out but then you actually get into it and as you guys who are writers you know you get into it no matter how much you plan you know it's it's like you plan out your map through the forest looking at like the map and in your cozy living room and then you get in there and you're actually hacking through the forest and you figure out stuff doesn't work and figure out new paths and so yeah it's kind of a mixture I guess I don't outline I don't outline I was well I I mean I say that I definitely don't outline before I start writing there is a moment when I do outline but it's only after I have a great deal of material I find when I outlined before I write it it's the fastest way to kill all my ideas I can't um I can somehow it makes everything quite literal for me I've never outlined before I use index cards it just kind of organizes my mind I've never index carded the whole movie because I don't think I've ever at the point when I've started writing a screenplay known everything that there is to know about the whole movie I've figured out how it's gonna start and I have some other things along the way but it's kind of like walking in the dark with a flashlight you could really only see as far ahead of you as as the light goes I think rules are great if you're in trouble and if you're not in any trouble with what you're writing they're absolutely useless and possibly worse than useless it may happen that every script has it has the characters established by page 10 and it may not I don't think there's any reason to be thinking about that when you're trying to write a script and it may be that every successful script has a reversal and have two-thirds of the way through and one another 1/3 of the way through I don't know it's not really an I don't see what you're gonna I don't I don't think that kind I think that kind of thing I think every time I read a script and it goes off it's because at that point the script is trying to be like a script and it's not and it's at that exact moment when it loses its individuality and it's interest I mean what I do is I do a very detailed step out under the story and then you break it down to like whatever all the scenes that need to be there I go and I put in all along all the scene settings of every scene so I know where you are and at what time you know and actually it's good to figure out so the the rhythm of day and night in in movies I mean Little Miss Sunshine is three days most films are like a few days and you want this rhythm between day and night you don't want to be cutting from day to day you know from one day to the next day you want to be moving up and down and so I'll go through and just do all the log lines not a log lines all those scene lights log lines and just put them in and you can see you can even see at that point if something if there's an action sequence that's too long or if there's something that you could Oh there could be another scene in here and once you've got all you know you got your 50 slug lines or whatever they are your 50 scenes then you just can go ahead and put your dialogue into them and what I started doing at Pixar now is doing what I call sequence outline which is you break the film down into you know fifteen or twenty sequences and I do it on four pieces of paper so it is a first act on one piece of paper which is the title of the sequence and then what happens in it and usually you have five or six sequences in your first act and then the second page is the second quarter of the film what you'll take you up to your midpoint the third page is the third quarter and then the last page and then you have your whole film is on four pages but it breaks down it by ACT basically you know you get to the end of the first page you get the end of the first act and you can just look at stuff and and because it's broken down by sequence you can figure out you know this right here can go over here you know you're able to visually see the whole film and I find that really helpful in terms of moving stuff around but with index cards I always feel like it's just too much it's just clutter everywhere you know on the floor of your apartment and it's better to just be able to put four sheets of paper in front of you and figure out why something isn't working or not I'm such a strong believer in knowing where you're going before you start out that hopefully once you've and inevitably things change you know I mean that's what you just things change but hopefully you'll at least get to the end of your first draft you know with a semblance of what you started out trying to do it's a big deal for me I can usually look at it outline which is usually about you know it's like I'll be able to just have scene headings you know and know her in her office or something like that where she realizes this or gets the first message or whatever it is and that will that will go for about three pages you know of that and I can usually start to see the rhythms and see what's wrong with with the piece and what needs to be thought more about we would sit in front of a corkboard three feet by five feet with a big thing of thumbtacks and a big thing of index cards and a whole bunch of sharpies magic markers and we'd sit down and we say okay what's the teaser but you know with any build it brick by brick each card represents a plot beat not necessarily a scene but you know three or four six eight cards might represent one scene and by the end of it you filled up this entire three foot by five foot cork board with a teaser and and the four act structure sitting there together or alone alone as much harder still and figuring out each plot beat is essentially that the good analogy I suppose is a bunch of engineers sitting around on their drafting tables or their communal drafting table and drawing the design thus drawing the architectural drawings for a skyscraper then you got to go build a skyscraper which is a huge amount of man hour and labor and you know all of that but you can't build that skyscraper unless you got the architectural blueprints to begin with and to us an actual sitting down and writing is it's kind of carefree compared to the breaking because I've got this outline I've got these these index cards and I know you know what happens next so the writing is a important part of it but it's not the hardest part and it's not to me the most crucial part you

Channel: Behind the Curtain

Views: 283,055

Rating: 4.9708281 out of 5

Keywords: film, video essay, screenwriting, lessons from the screenplay, quentin tarantino, coen brothers, behind the curtain, greta gerwig, aaron sorkin, aaron sorkin masterclass, masterclass, film school, filmmaking, screenwriter, writing process, how to write a short film, how to write a screenplay, screenplay 101, screenwriting course, kenneth lonergan, m night shyamalan, breaking bad, better call saul, fight club, tyler mowery, writer's block

Id: jAY5Y9XWu4I

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/camshell]

I like how the video shows that there is no one way, and among professionals opinions vary greatly.

[u/solo_loso]

the foot fetish animation was a stroke of genius. i’ll sign up just for that now

[u/TadBitter]

Great video. Though most of the non-outliners are outliers, as most professional do outline. And while I do believe in whatever works for you, I do find that newer writers, especially, would benefit from outlining as you can always tell a new writer's script due to its meandering, non-outlined methodology. Also, unless you're an A-lister, like the folks in this video, you are working on assignment, which means one of your required steps is typically... an outline. And if you can't nail the outline, you don't make it to the script phase of your deal. And it should be noted that we live in the golden age of television and in TV you have to outline. It's a required network and studio step. So again, if you don't know how to do it, you could run into troubles. You can do whatever you want when you're writing on spec, but the majority of paid work these days are feature assignments and television writing assignments, so it would behoove the non-outliners to hone that skill. Personally, I outline heavily. I write in prose as if someone is going to read it, even if it's just for me. But like almost all the outliners in the video stated, you're always going to deviate from the outline once you go to script. But the guide posts you've built in the outline will still keep you moving the story forward.

[u/Bookwizards]

Honestly, just vomiting out the first draft takes so much stress off of me. I know it's going to be horrible, but I have so much fun while writing it, and then I have a whole script I can read through and figure out what works, what needs to be cut, added, edited, etc.

It's when I arrive at the third draft that I get to really feel the characters and their true pivotal desires and needs. I generally find the central theme at this point too. I enjoy rewriting though. :^)

[u/W2ttsy]

This is very reminiscent of my experiences at work and many of the techniques here end up feeling very familiar.

I’m a product manager in a tech company.

We generally have an idea of what sort of product we’re going to build, what the moving parts are to get from ideation to deployment, and how we think the market will receive it.

However, that’s just our outline. It’s only after we start doing the deep dives, developing the features, looking at the tech specs, trying to figure out what’s actually possible, do we find that the original outline was too optimistic or too thin, or will change from what we originally thought it could be.

Interestingly enough, I resonated most with Aaron Sorkin on this, as I find index cards the easiest way to represent my ideas too; the art of them is getting to a point where you can write just enough words to explain yourself without it being too verbose or too vague.

This is something I’ve spent the last 5-6 years trying to master. It’s actually super hard, so if you’re taking this approach and hitting brick walls, don’t be discouraged. It’s just something that takes time to get right.

In the past I would have written a card like: “joe puts his card into the ATM and presses a PIN and then logs into his account”. Incredibly verbose and offers way too much information.

Now I write cards like “a user authenticates themselves using a credit card”.

Enough to share the idea, but lets a future deep dive session work out how to solve that problem.

Same with my screen writing at home. I tried mapping a story out once on a legal pad and found I was writing way too much, almost to the point it was actual scripting.

“A police car shoots along the highway, radio chatter in the background, the officer grips the wheel”.

Then I switched to index cards and it became “officer speeds to the accident site”.

[u/TheVitruvianBoy]

Interesting thing is that everyone does it their way; fascinating that Sorkin basically freewheels it, writing into the dark on index cards while Gilligan et al have such specificity in the cards that writing the scripts themselves is a joy.

Something else VG said is important for most of us; that it's harder to do any of this alone, as compared with breaking an idea in a writers room. I think individual writers, trying to 'make it' need to remember that; not necessarily using it as an excuse or a shield against criticism but remembering, during hard times, that this is possibly the hardest bit of the process and it's harder to do alone.

[u/Puterboy1]

Well, I just look at a script written by a professional and try to follow their structure so that it can look professional.

[u/CobaltNeural9]

Really really good I didn’t want this to end.

[u/aarondash]

I love the 4 page technique Michael Arndt shared. Like Alex Garland, I tend to do a full outline, sometimes writing a lot of the scene in completion, until I've come to the end of the film and then go back to the top and write each scene, based on my outline, erasing my outline as I go.