To Outline!

All good things come to those who wait.

If you’re chomping at the bit to get started, don’t fret. When it comes to screenwriting, the vast majority of the work gets done before you write your first scene. For some, it’s a question of jumping straight in, getting the ideas out and outlining later. Whatever your approach may be, you’re going to have to outline at some point—and probably more than once—if you want your screenplay to be the best it can be. Personally, I prefer to invest my time in outlining up front. Even after completing your first draft, knowing how to take your story back down to outline can make the revision process all the more productive. By working on the backbone of the story, rather than massaging the surface, you’ll be able to identify key issues quickly and empower yourself to find solutions to them.

Think of your step outline as a complete, scene-by-scene outline of your movie. Some people like to work on this using index cards. If you elect to follow that method, you should dedicate one card per scene, and then lay them out and switch them around until you’re happy with the general look and feel of your story. However, that method made much more sense in the age of the typewriter than it does now. Computer software makes the step outline process much easier. The bottom line? Find a method that works for you. In this chapter, I outline what works for me. You can adapt to suit. Whatever approach you take, the goal will remain the same: to end up with an industry-standard step outline that takes you from “fade in” to “fade out.”

My preference is to outline using my usual screenwriting software. If you’re a student or educator, there are some great discounts available to you for commercial products. There are also some free, or inexpensive formatting tools you can download online.

Before you jump into outlining, let’s cover some basic formatting. For each scene you write, you’ll need to create a slug line. Here, you indicate whether the scene takes place inside (INT) or outside (EXT), the specific location and whether it takes place during the DAY or NIGHT. You needn’t be more specific than that, nor should you clutter up the page by indicating that it’s “CONTINUOUS,” meaning simply that the scene in question occurs immediately after the preceding scene. Your reader will assume that to be the case unless you change from DAY to NIGHT. Some of you will have noticed already that I omit periods after INT and EXT. That’s not in error. During my classes at UCLA, I adopted the formatting preferences of Richard Walter. (Final Draft includes a “Richard Walter” template or you can simply override manually the addition of periods.) I like Richard’s approach that aims for minimalism—nothing to distract us from the words on the page that merit our attention. When it comes to having your screenplay read by the studios, this kind of esthetic counts. It means business. At the end of the day, you are of course free to adopt whatever formatting choices you like. With all of this in mind, a slug line for one of my scripts might look like this:

INT   GROCERY STORE   DAY
(or)
EXT   FOREST   NIGHT

Now, let’s focus on formatting specifics inside the scene itself. Don’t get lost in lengthy passages of description. You really want to define who your character is by what we see them doing, not by how you describe their environment to us. For example, I could describe at great length a coffee shop in Austin and the people in it, from what they’re wearing to the way their hair is cut. But that serves little purpose. Instead, I want to look for a way to distill everything about that place into a pithy statement that grabs the attention of the reader and allows us to focus, instead, on what the protagonist (or other key character introduced) is up to:

INT   COFFEE SHOP   DAY

Writers and coders congregate at tables. Hipster heaven.
Behind the counter, JOE (35) mans the espresso machine.
On the counter, his phone BUZZES with an incoming text.
A CUSTOMER (28) checks her watch.

CUSTOMER

Could I get that to go this morning, maybe.

JOE

Hmmm.

CUSTOMER

My mocha. I’m going to miss the train.

JOE

I’ll be right with you.

The machine HISSES and emits steam. Joe jumps to attention.
It explodes coffee all over him.

In the sample from a scene above, you’ll notice that I keep description to a minimum. I also pick a gender-specific name: Joe. That saves me the need of explaining he’s a man. All we need now is to include Joe’s age, in parentheses right after his name. Joe’s attention is divided between the coffee he serves up and the message that comes in on his phone. (I capitalize the BUZZ of the phone to indicate that we hear the noise on-screen.) To add pressure to the situation, we give Joe an impatient customer who’s about to miss her train. Still, he ignores her. To make matters worse, the espresso machine explodes all over the place. We’ve yet to find out what the message received by Joe entails—and perhaps we’ll withhold it from the reader or viewer for a while, adding to the suspense. For now, we know the contents of the message must be important enough for Joe to become distracted, ignore his customer, and fail to notice the malfunction of the espresso machine. We don’t say any of that; we show it. In step outline format, the above scene might be rendered:

INT    COFFEE SHOP    DAY

Writers and coders congregate at tables. Hipster heaven.
Behind the counter, JOE (35) mans the espresso machine.
On the counter, his phone BUZZES with an incoming
text. A CUSTOMER (28) checks her watch. Joe is so
distracted by the message that he doesn’t notice the
espresso machine HISS. It explodes all over him.

If an important line of dialogue jumps out at me, I include that in my outline by placing it between quotes and underlining it for future reference.

Before going any further, let’s run a quick test to determine whether or not the scenes you have outlined will actually function as scenes. (We will have time to elevate them even further later. For now, we just care about them being acceptable.)

In its most rudimentary form, a scene consists of a setup (what’s going on when the scene begins), an event (something that happens in the scene) and a result. That result is typically expressed in terms of how the protagonist reacts to the event and how the other characters in the scene react to the protagonist. It could also encompass how the secondary characters react and how the protagonist reacts to them. In other words, just like movies, individual scenes must have a beginning, middle and end. Moreover, throughout this process, the scene must accomplish one of two things—or in a best case scenario, both. On one hand, it should contribute to the character development. On the other, it should move the plot forward (whether this in fact carries the protagonist closer to or further away from her goal).

Finally, I’ll point out an issue most inexperienced screenwriters face when they write scenes, brought to my attention by Hal Ackerman. (If you can’t take his UCLA class, you should read his book, Write Screenplays That Sell.) Your protagonist enters every scene with a want, or desire. Too often, in early versions of scripts, the character fulfills that want without sufficient opposition.

Let’s use my coffee-shop example above. Perhaps my character, Joe, has just found out that his girlfriend, Helena, is leaving him for good. She has even gone so far as to tell him that there’s no point talking to her. Joe suspects this is the fault of Helena’s brother, Charles, who doesn’t like Joe much. (What he doesn’t realize, however, is that Helena is a secret agent who has just been activated for an important mission and she’s trying to let him down easy. Over the course of our story, he’s going to find that out by stumbling into the middle of the mission and getting himself kidnapped by the bad guys.) Instead of sticking around to clean up the coffee machine, Joe immediately dials Charles, whose secretary picks up. She recognizes Joe’s number from the caller ID, informs Joe never to call again and hangs up on him. But Joe will not be so easily defeated. To the shock of his impatient customer, Joe vaults over the top of the counter and runs out the door. In his own way, Joe just overcame and responded to obstacle #1—“He doesn’t want to talk to you, and never call here again.”

But when Joe gets out in the streets of Austin, it’s rush hour. There are cars everywhere. Undeterred, Joe dodges between moving vehicles and almost gets run over. (He just overcame obstacle #2.) He runs into the office block and up to Charles’s office, where Charles’s administrative assistant attempts to stop him, to no avail. (That’s obstacle #3.) He runs down the corridor to find an empty office. Where did Charles go? A door in the bookshelves, cracked open, reveals a secret passageway.

Joe never achieves his goal of speaking to Charles in the scene described above. However, he has found out that there’s more to Charles than meets the eye—after all, what kind of person has secret passageways leading out of their office and why did Charles run? What I’ve illustrated here is a well-known writing technique that Hal Ackerman refers to as the red light/green light principle. In order to build suspense in a scene, it’s helpful to throw three clear obstacles at the protagonist. This is especially significant for the major plot beats. You want them to pop and keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

© SJ Murray, 2018