Refining the Idea

Having examined your idea and decided that it can best be realized in screenplay form, your next task it to reduce it to its simplest statement. You must be able to answer the question: What is this script about? And you must be able to answer it in no more than two sentences. One sentence is preferable, and if you can reduce that sentence to one word, all the better. If you cannot do this, then you do not understand your idea correctly, and you will never be able to focus your screenplay on it. Your script will lack an ideational spine, a through-line, an integrity that only an underlying vision can give it. And when we talk about the central idea of the script – about its meaning – that is what we understand: What is the vision behind this work, and how best can we convey it through the medium of film?

For at every turn, at every scene change, with the introduction of every new character, this single, simply stated idea will be your guide. It will determine who and what you will write, and what value they will have in the script, because your choice of scene or character must serve the expression of your core idea. I have always found this to be true. Whenever I was unsure of what to cut to, or where the story should go, or which character I should focus on, I reverted to my single-sentence expression of the central idea and asked: Does this scene or character or dialogue serve to advance and elucidate the meaning I am trying to convey?

This is where many young screenwriters lose their way. If they have read the standard texts on writing the screenplay, they probably know that it must contain events, and even, that these events ought to occur at specific points in the text. And while, as I have said, I think this is utter nonsense, it is true that film scripts should be a framework of events – of things that happen and that can be seen – but that is only half the battle. Screenplays must also have meaning. As all art, they must convey a truth from the author to the audience. And herein lies the essence of screenwriting, or of any writing, from my point of view: Screenplays are not essentially about events; they are about Truth.

Not truths, with a small ‘t’ and a plural, but about Truth with a capital ‘T.’ If you do not believe that you are in possession of some form, some portion, of eternal, immutable Truth, and that you alone can bring that Truth to strangers in a unique voice with a unique vision, then please find some other line of work. And this is where your ability to voice your idea in a simple sentence, or even one word, comes into play. Your idea must be able to be expressed, in your mind at least, as a simple statement of truth. And this truth must reflect fixed, transcendent Truth, not changing, situational truth. Another, simpler way to put this is: Don’t tell people something they already know or could have figured out by themselves. Instead, tell them something you know to be true and that you believe they need to hear. That is what makes you a writer, and makes you worthy to be thought of in the same company as Sophocles and Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Beckett and Chekhov.

For you do want to be in their company, and you must remember that, as a writer, you stand in a tradition for which many people have suffered and been persecuted, imprisoned and even killed, because they dared to put the truth as they understood it into words and onto paper. And I am not just thinking of the great dramatic writers of our tradition – there were great comedic writers who also suffered and died for the integrity of their art. As a writer, your duty is to the Truth, first and above all. Not to make money or to please some studio boss, or to win a prize, but to use the medium of film to enlighten and improve humanity. And as the ancient masks of dramatic art depict – you can do this by making your audience laugh or weep or both.