|
||||||||||
|
Subscribe to the Absolute Write Newsletter and get the Agents! Agents! Agents! report free! Click here.
|
Win a 1-year subscription to Writer's Digest by subscribing to Absolute Markets-- all paying markets for your writing. Click here. |
|
| |||||||||||||
|
|
Tension Holds Your Screenplay Together By David Terruso
The conventional wisdom about how to keep a screenplay moving along is to cram it full of conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict. Conflict in every scene. Well, not only is this nearly impossible, it’s also misleading. What keeps a screenplay moving along is not conflict, but tension. Conflict is two forces in opposition: two people arguing, someone trying to overcome racial adversity, someone running for her life from an axe murderer. Tension is simply this: The question of what happens next. My fiction writing teacher, Justin Cronin (PEN Hemingway Award-winning author of Mary and O’Neil) taught me that a novel needs to always hold some question for the reader, or else he’ll have no reason to turn the page. His advice is the basis for my definition of tension in a screenplay. Let me preface my explanation with this statement: The key to tension is not a tight plot with a lot of twists and reversals; it’s creating characters about which the audience cares deeply. Once you get your audience to care about what happens to your characters, you have them for the long run. Make your characters real. Make them flawed, complex, and vulnerable. That’s not an easy task, but it should be the first one you tackle when building any story. People care about people, not stories. That’s why we use personification when we write stories about animals. We make the animals like people so that we’ll care about what happens to them and so that we’ll understand them. (Of course, if you’re an animal lover, you probably care what happens to animals anyway, but you get the point.) The question that creates tension in your screenplay should be simple and important. Will Sheriff Brody kill the shark, or will the shark eat him? Will Dorothy get out of Oz and back to her family in Kansas? Will Marty McFly get back to the present? Can Royal Tenenbaum find redemption and reunite the family he split up? The question doesn’t have to be life-or-death, especially in comedy, but it has to be worth spending two hours to find out the answer. The problem with having conflict in every scene is that you end up writing a series of arguments and fights. Everyone is mad at everyone else for one reason or another. No subject or transgression is too small for a conflict. This can make the story, and more likely the characters, annoying. Also, constant conflict can lose its effectiveness. Sure, sometimes relentless action and confrontation can enthrall an audience, but oftentimes you can pack more of a punch with an ebb and flow. When things get quiet-- too quiet, as the saying goes-- that’s when the audience really gets nervous. If you’ve got your tension established, you can create riveting scenes that would otherwise be mundane. For example, your main character, Rick, is at his wit’s end at his job. He feels trapped. He buys a gun. Is he going to kill himself? Is he going to kill someone else? He takes the gun to work. It’s in his briefcase. We see the briefcase sitting on his desk. Rick’s boss comes in and gives him an assignment. The scene consists of a boss giving an assignment to his employee, supplying all of the pertinent details to the project and giving him a deadline. Boring stuff. No conflict. But we are leaning forward in our seats because all we can think about is what’s in the briefcase. Then Rick gets on the subway after work. He’s sitting there, staring at nothing in particular. The briefcase is on his lap. He sways slightly with the movement of the train. Again, we’re nervous and wondering what will happen next. And the guy isn’t even moving. But we’re thinking, Is he gonna do it now? What if someone comes up and says something to him? Or someone tries to mug him? This tension will make the clickety-clack sounds of the subway seem like a tense musical score. Maybe there is conflict in the two scenes I mentioned above. Maybe there’s a ton of internal conflict within Rick. But maybe there isn’t. Maybe he’s not thinking about the gun, about suicide, about killing someone. Maybe he’s decided in his mind that it was a silly idea and he’s going to throw the gun out when he gets off of the subway. We don’t know, and we don’t need to know. The scenes hold up because of the tension. It's what we're thinking that matters here. Earlier, I mentioned that an ebb and flow can really create more suspense than unrelenting conflict. Oftentimes, if you’ve set up a dire question, cutting to a quiet scene where little happens is more unnerving for the audience than immediately bringing things to a head. Some entire films are held together with this tension. A perfect example of this is American Beauty. In the narration of the second scene, Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham says, "My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This... is my life. I'm forty-two years old. In less than a year, I'll be dead." We watch the whole film wondering how and why Lester is going to die. It makes everything and everyone important. A good screenplay has one major question fueling the story, and a series of smaller questions that arise throughout the progression of the narrative. Take The Man Who Wasn’t There, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Cohen, for example. (Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen this film-- and it’s an excellent film from an excellent script-- then skip this part and read it after you have.) The question at the heart of the screenplay is, basically, What’s going to happen to Ed Crane? First, Ed blackmails his wife’s boss, Big Dave, because his wife is cheating on him with Big Dave. Ed conceals his identity while blackmailing Big Dave. So, our first smaller question is: Will Big Dave find out Ed is blackmailing him, and if so, what will he do to Ed? Big Dave does find out, and he tries to kill Ed. Ed kills Big Dave in self-defense. Now, the smaller question is: Will Ed get caught for murdering Big Dave and for the blackmail? Ed’s wife Doris is arrested for Big Dave’s murder. Now, the question is, Will Ed confess to save his wife from prison, or worse, the death penalty? Doris hangs herself while in prison because she is sure she’s going to be found guilty of Big Dave’s murder. The question now becomes, How will Ed go on without Doris? I won’t give away the ending, and I’ve left out one more twist that brings one more big question. But you get the idea. The tension from these questions in the audience’s mind makes the story compelling from beginning to end. There are scenes where the only thing happening is Ed giving someone a haircut, and we’re still completely engrossed because these questions fill our minds. Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying to mean that after you have a scene with a lot of conflict, you should balance it with a scene where nothing happens. Every scene in your script has to have a purpose. It has to give the audience new information about a main character, advance the plot, or both. If it doesn’t, get rid of it. Absolutely no filler in your screenplay. I don’t want to come off as anti-conflict. Conflict is vital to every screenplay. You still need as much conflict as possible in your story. I just consider conflict a blunt tool, and tension a more precise weapon. If you can glide seamlessly between the two, you’ll get the best results from your story.
By day, Dave Terruso is a mild-mannered editor at a standards publisher. By night, he's a screenwriter/novelist/actor/director/singer-songwriter who loves separating things by slashes and hyphens. Dave is currently a member of the Philadelphia-based sketch comedy troupe Animosity Pierre. He's working on his third spec script, a romantic comedy set on a college campus. |
Sponsored links 
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer! How to find a book publisher |
Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007
Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
|
