Most Powerful Plot Construction Tool In Screenwriting - Jeff Kitchen

what do you believe is one of the most powerful plot construction tools currently in the film industry the one that i teach is called it's a three-step process called sequence proposition plot that was invented by william thompson price but was sat undiscovered in his book until i found it i've taught that to development executives at all that hollywood studios and they consistently say it's the most advanced development tool in the film industry it's really powerful and it's unlike anything that's out there and it's a very sophisticated tool for both plot construction and story development it um works with reverse cause and effect and uh structuring compelling conflict so that it's as i was saying before with making the overall story work first and then making each act work in each sequence in each scene it's you it's used for that because the first the first step sequence is reverse cause and effect it's the sequence of cause and effect that constitute the spine of the story the forward progression of the story so that using reverse cause and effect you have to have the mechanics of the story sketched out first you can't do plot construction until you have a story reasonably well figured out um so that with reverse cause and effect you start at the ending and work backwards so that you're you're looking at the ending and you're chaining back from each effect to its cause so you look at the ending and say okay well what would be the immediate cause of that ending and you find the cause of that and then you say okay what would be the immediate cause of that and the cause of that and so on and so that say it's a it's a um say it's a story about a uh someone who's being muscled by a mafia don no someone who's being muscled by a corrupt cop and the corrupt cop puts him in a good strong dilemma and there's no way out and it gets worse and worse and worse and this character finally figures a way out and that he makes a deal with a mafia don to set up this corrupt cop because the mafia don wants to take out this corrupt cop so the character sets a trap so that the crooked cop shows up to like rob him at the at the key point and the mafiadon swoops in and takes him out so the ending would be that the guy is free from the trap he was caught in before you'd say well what would cause him to be free it's that the mafia don snatches the crooked cop and disappears him the cause of that would be that the crooked cop swoops in to steal the loot the cause of that is that he sets up the heist the fake heist to lure the crooked cop in the cause of that is that he makes the deal with the mafia dawn so when you play that and that's all right dense part of the ending but you could see the cause and effect there where he makes the deal with the corrupt mafia don which causes him to be able to set up the crooked heist which causes him to have the the loot which causes the crooked cop to swoop in and take it which causes the mafiodon to be able to grab the cop and disappear which causes them to walk out of the trap that he was in so it's it's a way of of not only stitching together the story components by cause and effect but actually creating that cause and effect where it may not exist in other words if you have your story roughed out and you start doing reverse cause and effect and you start chaining backwards through from each effect back to its cause you may get to a point where there isn't a cause in what you've figured out so far and that may be a hole in your plot in the logic of the plot and you say well what would cause that to happen and you may come up with a bunch of different possibilities find the one that works and so then you have the next cause and then what's the cause of that so not only are you knitting it together as you build backwards you're taking what you've already got a story that's that you've sketched out but you're now it's like it's like the um when when you've designed a project and you know exactly what you want it to do then you bring in the engineer and say okay make all the nuts and bolts of this actually work here's exactly what we want but you got to do the engineering so we know how heavy the steel has to be how much concrete to pour and they'll give you hard numbers of like you need this much concrete and this much steel so there's one thing of what you want to achieve but there's another of the engineer comes in and makes it all tells you what to do to make it all work it's that kind of thing that as you take the story you've roughed out and stitch it together engineer it that you actually create the cause and effect as you build and the trick to that tool is that you are asking at each point only what is the cause of that effect rather than what happens before it because any number of things can happen before it but only one thing actually caused it so that's a way to help separate the necessary from the unnecessary it what it does is it frees you from the profusion of unnecessary detail the unnecessary kills scripts and that's one of the things i was saying i've trained a lot of um creative executives in at the you know the studios in hollywood in this tool and when i talk about separating the necessary from the unnecessary they're all going yes you know the unnecessary overburdens everything dialogues overwritten scenes that shouldn't be there whole acts which they're bombarded by the unnecessarily constantly it's one of the major symptoms they see of that scripts don't work that dialogue doesn't work the spine of the story doesn't work because there's too much there's you don't have the what's necessary and there's too much of the unnecessary it's a combination of the two so what merely happens before an event could be any number of things the thing that actually causes it is going to be among those things that happens before it but you're finding the the key links you're basically you're you're creating a chain as you work backwards and when you create the chain for the overall story the chain of events and you've rigorously included only that which is necessary to the forward action of the story and you've rigorously excluded that which is unnecessary to the forward progression of events that constitute the spine of your story then you've assembled it backwards out of your what the material you have and when you find holes in your plot you invent to fill them in so you're not only structuring it but you're also developing it you're creating when needed um then when you read it from the bottom up a causes b which causes c which causes d and so on that's the spine of your story whereas before you had a lot of clever elements to a story and it looked like it worked but you hadn't done the engineering on it to make sure it really worked and being able to stand back and look at your story like it starts here and it moves all through here it also enables you to get a good objective look at what you've created so far and it's not easy to get a good objective look at something you've been deeply immersed in for a while because this plot construction comes after you've done a lot of creation and development then you have to stitch it all together into something that actually holds water so when you stand back and look at it you may go oh there's the whole spine of the story in simple terms and you may go wow that's much better than i thought it was going to be or you may go god that really sucks i thought i had much more than this but there it is and i gotta like and you know it's it's it's it can it can be not working for you in any number of areas or you may go you know i always thought there was a some kind of problem in act two but i couldn't put my finger on it but boom there i see it right there and you can see that part of it is distinctly weak and it could be so much stronger and so you know maybe you fix it in an afternoon or maybe it's three weeks or maybe it takes a month maybe you have to read a couple great books or talk to somebody who really lived it and then you come back and stitch it all back together again and then look at it again and go much better but this one piece is still weak so you're evaluating developing structuring and it's all in the process of plot construction so once you've done the the sequence that's the sequence of events that the overall story consists of just the big picture then so that's sequence out of sequence proposition plot three-step process so the second step comes from price's proposition that we were talking about before using logic to pull all the story elements together into a coherent hole like we were talking about how pulp fiction has three different stories in it but tarantino did an excellent job of pulling those all together into a coherent whole it's not a mess of different stuff it's one thing that happens to be done in an unusual way but it's still perfectly crafted from a dramatic point of view it's it's extremely effective dramatically and great storytelling has got both so once you've got this tight chain of events then you set up a set up a conflict set up a potential conflict early on in the story touch off a fight to the finish later in the story and what price said is instead of doing a and b therefore c he said central to our job as a dramatist is to have the audience up on the edge of their seat at the point when the fight to the finish has only just started and they don't know how it's going to turn out so at the point when the fight to the finish has only just started the audience comes up on the edge of their seat like how's this going to turn out because we've got a powerful proactive protagonist and we've got a powerful proactive antagonist and we genuinely don't genuinely don't know who's going to win how it's going to turn out and so you set it up you touch it off you get the audience on the edge of their seat and you've either got the audience or you don't in terms of dramatic power on a scale of 1 to 10 how much are they on the edge of their seat if it's really powerful then you're going wow yes this i set it up i touched it off and i really got the audience if you set it up and you touch it off and you can see it's still kind of weak or it's actually quite weak that's the power that's what the proposition is for so you can propose it take an objective look at it and then evaluate it and then revise as needed if it's only like a seven out of ten and you're like no it needs to be i need a nine or a ten in terms of a scale of one to ten for how powerfully i have the audience on the edge of their seat at this point when the when what the whole story is built up to is unresolved then you amplify different aspects of it to get the audience that much more on the edge of their seat so you're you're creating a tight sequence of cause and effect then looking at the core conflict in the story because it's really just two boxers in a ring fighting it out it's two dogs fighting over a bone only one of them is going to walk away in the end in fact the oldest greek drama was only two characters on stage the introduction of the third character by sophocles was considered a major innovation in drama so the ability to see the core of your plot as two main fighters in a fight to the finish and only one of them is going to walk away helps you get right at the core of what makes your story work dramatically so um sequence is the reverse sequence of cause and effect that makes it tight this you set it up you touch it off you get the audience on the edge of their seat unresolved and if you're doing your job right the question in their mind about how it's going to turn out is really powerful then you've got as much dramatic power as you can bring to the to how you're dramatizing this story and then the last step is the answering of the riddle the completion of the action what how the fight to the finish shakes out in the back and forth between protag and his antagonist and who wins or loses in the end so reverse cause and effect set up the fight touch it off get the audience on the edge of their seat and wrap it up so that's sequence proposition plot and you do that once to the overall story which makes it tight and dramatic and well i'll explain that as i go along then as i said you break the overall story up into acts like you literally look at the chain of cause and effect that you did in reverse and you say okay that right there is the end of act one that right there is the end of act two so you've got your axe so you take act one and now you do sequence proposition plot to act one so you start at the ending of act one where it ends up and you've already got like if you had this chain of events this part of it is act one so you've got a chain of events right there that constitute act one you take that over here and you you so you look at that chain of events and you're going to start at the end again and work backwards through it and think it through in a little more detail so that you take what you've got and you say okay so the like the cop comes in and grabs the loot and the mafia guy grabs him and disappears him so now you're going to think that through in a little more it now becomes necessary to figure it out in a little more detail you didn't want much detail when you're doing the overall story because you want to just see the main building blocks with nothing else in there because that's got to work and if you get swamped by a profusion of unnecessary detail it can be hard to see the forest for the trees it can be hard to stand back and go wow that chain of events is the whole story you don't want extra you want it stripped down so you can evaluate it now it becomes necessary to think it through in a little more detail it becomes necessary to layer in a little more detail so you're thinking it through in a little more detail of like okay so is it like a bag of money or is it like diamonds or is it somebody that he was supposed to kidnap for the crooked cop and how would what would the rough mechanics of the trap consist of like where would the mafia guy be and how do they make it so the cop really puts his foot in the trap even if there might be clues that he might begin to suspect or he has good instinct and he's like something's wrong but he still puts his foot in the trap so you you it becomes necessarily necessary to figure out a little more detail and then you chain backwards to that to the to the you you're looking at what you already created like what was the cause of that is that he does the actual heist that the crooked cop wants them to do but there's some falsehoods in it because it's a setup how does that go down how does he do it is the crooked cop watching what is he taking is he swapping it for something that's a key part of the trap so you're you don't you don't want much detail because you you wanna it's hard enough to figure it out and too much detail can just come up the works um and then you go back to the next you you look at what the next cause was and think that through so what you've done is you may have like six causes that you started out with that you brought from the overall story and you've opened it up a bit more so maybe now there's 12 or something like that so you expand upon what you already had amplifying in detail and you've got more then you throw that act into a two-sided conflict where you set up a potential fight early on in the act touch off a fight to the finish later in the act get the audience up on the edge of their seat about how the conflict in that act is going to turn out and then a completion of that action of what's what's the rest of it so you've done sequence proposition plot so you've not only constructed the story but you're literally inventing your story development as well you're figuring out okay so what would actually be in that bag that helps make the trap work but the cop doesn't see the switcheroo or whatever you're gradually developing those details without getting into too much detail but you're you're literally fleshing it out you're literally inventing some of it you'll have the details already figured out some of it you're making up on the spot and then you're creating conflict in that act which there generally will be some conflict but you're really constructing it setting up a potential fight touching off a fight to the finish in that act getting the audience out on the edge of the receipt so the act itself has a high point of suspense at around the two thirds three chorus point that really gets the audience up on the edge of their seat and then complete the action so you've made it tight and dramatic then you do the same thing for act two you expand upon the cause and effect thinking each step through in a little more detail you amplify whatever conflict is in that act making sure you have a strong proactive antagonist and protagonist touch off a fight to the finish get the audience on the edge of their seat so act two really gets the audience on the edge of our seat it's compelling and and it's it you have a completion of the action within that act so now act two is tight and dramatic then you do the same thing for act three then you go back to act one and break that into sequences there are two to five sequences in that act and you take if this is the cause and effect for act one then you say okay so if this is the bottom the beginning and this is the end so you say okay so that much of it's going to be the opening sequence that much is the next sequence that much is the next sequence you take this chunk bring it over here and think it through in a little more detail you expand upon it and open it up and you're figuring out the mechanics of the cause and effect for that sequence and you're still rigorously excluding the unnecessary and using only that which is necessary to the forward progression of the action in that sequence and then you structure the conflict you set up a fight touch off a fight get the audience on the edge of their seat and resolve it within that sequence so that sequence you've now flushed it out thought it through made it tight kept the unnecessary out of it and structured compelling conflicts so that it gets the audience up on the edge of their seat two-thirds three-quarters of the way through the sequence and then complete the action so you do that for each sequence in the story maybe there's 12 to 15 sequences in the story maybe some more but that's a lot of work but so is 24 rewrites so you're engineering your script properly before you write it so you do it for all the sequences throughout the whole story then you go back to the opening sequence and you look at the cause and effect you've got for that and you break that into scenes you can say okay this chunk of it is the opening scene that's the next scene and so on so then you take that chunk of the opening scene that's the cause and effect that you've already figured out and then you at the scene level you think it through again you go backwards through it visualizing it in more detail what would be now you're down to final detail what would be the mechanics of who actually does exactly what and you're paraphrasing the dialogue so now you've got cause and effect for that scene and then you structure the conflict in that scene because you never want any part of your story to go flat dramatically you don't want scenes that are mere information they're mere narrative you want the scene itself to be tight and dramatic so two-thirds three-quarters of the way through the scene the audience comes up on the edge of the seat so you made it tight and dramatic and then you write that scene then you do the same thing for the next scene you you do the reverse cause and effect thinking it through in more detail dramatizing it and then you write that scene you go all the way through writing each scene as you develop and structure it and then you have a working draft and so that's the function of sequence proposition plot as a plot construction tool it also happens to be very much a story development tool the two go hand in hand and glove but it's a remarkably powerful tool price constructed it but didn't complete it he explains it very clearly but nobody else picked up on it and you know i read a lot of his students books and so on and they picked up on proposition and that really entered the the lexicon of structural technique for the dramatist not widely but it's it's certainly known um but none of his students were talking about sequence proposition plot his student who you know the two books that i read for three years that student student didn't even talk about reverse cause and effect which price went on and on and on about so i was like how could they not be seeing this but it was like you know finding an old rusty tool out in the field behind da vinci's old workshop that had just laid there for hundreds of years and nobody ever tripped over it and i found it and was like this works and i combined it with what his students did it really wasn't there price described it but didn't build it at all and he wasn't even satisfied with the proposition part of it but his student did a lot of detective work because he knew that price had a remarkably powerful tool but it died before he wrote his next book and explained it so he did a lot of detective work and pieced together made the proposition more sophisticated and powerful and then this other playwriting teacher made the proposition work even better and i used all of those and synthesized them together so this was like an old tool that i found synthesized together with some of what his students said and then i added to it and then worked extensively with it for many years so it doesn't really exist anywhere and when i started teaching people kept saying that they'd never seen anything like what i teach and that it worked better than anything out there so partly i didn't expose myself to other dramatic writing teachers because i didn't want to start pirating what they were saying i wanted to just stick with the with the uniqueness of this and it it works you know it's a complete working technique um but it's it really is like nothing people have ever seen and it really works powerfully and it's it's very much plot construction uh one of the things i say that's kind of fun is um i only teach one thing plot construction and dramatic principle it's kind of a coin in a certain way because there are obviously two things but plot construction comes out of dramatic principle if you understand dramatic principle the mc that the underlying principles that make dramatic structure work then dramatic principle informs plot construction they're very much the same thing in the same way that medical theory informs brain surgery or something like that they're they're very much different parts of the same animal okay so i hope that was clear absolutely are both books required reading or is one of them out of print actually neither price's book is very dense reading and hard slogging his students book is really excellent but i synthesize them to you can definitely learn from reading them but you can learn more quickly from studying my book writing a great movie because it it synthesized a lot of their tools into a powerful unit price's book is kind of like walking through thigh deep mud it's not it's hard slogging and it's it's a lot of work um [Music] so anybody can go find it it's it's easy to find but it's it's brutally hard work um and you won't find what's in my book in those books in a lot of ways you

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Length: 28min 43sec (1723 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021