Screenwriting Tips

ALIEN, AVATAR, coincidence, GROUNDHOG'S DAY, set-up, STAR WARS, structure - December 01, 2022

GIMME GIMME GIMME

In story development there is a term: gimme. A gimme is a story beat that’s built on a coincidence. There are big gimmes and small gimmes. Typically, a well-constructed story has room for one big gimme. Even then, the big gimme is usually found in the set-up, i.e. the coincidence that either creates the set-up, or gets our protagonist into the set-up. For example, in AVATAR our gimme is that Sully’s brother was fitted for a Na’vi avatar, so he’s the only person who can also inhabit it. In ALIEN our gimme is that Ripley’s ship the Nostromo just-so-happens to...

ELEVATING THE SET-UP

I’ve read a lot of scripts in which the core set-up is predicated on the characters being dumb and doing dumb things. In some genres (comedy, horror) this is usually fine, and perhaps even a plus. But generally it’s cheating; forcing stupidity onto the characters is an easy way to get the story ball rolling. The stronger approach is to elevate the set-up, and the way to do that is to make the characters as intelligent as possible. We can still get the story ball rolling, but instead of relying on easy choices, now we have to look for new...

Theme

Recently, I was working on a script rewrite. Most of the notes I had gotten were fairly straightforward, and I thought turning it around would take perhaps a week at most. But then I realized… wait, we’ve never figured out our themes; the script doesn’t yet have a clear thematic statement. This is really basic, foundational stuff, and it didn’t occur to me until late in the development process. That’s because it’s very easy to get caught up in the spinning gears of plot and character. But the themes are just as important, because this is the true “what this...

Story Structure

Today I want to talk about structure. If you are a writer, you will inevitably talk or be asked about the structure of your film. When I first started writing, I remember thinking, “What does it mean for a story to have good or bad structure?”. You can’t Google, “story-structure”, and learn how to write your story in the right way, so how do you crack the code? This article will hopefully offer some insight into what it means to have a well-structured script, but I want to do it from a birds-eye view instead of analyzing every “beat” a...

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GIMME GIMME GIMME

ELEVATING THE SET-UP

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Story Structure

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