I’ve spent the past few days working on the plot for a sci-fi screenplay. It’s loosely based on the screenplay I worked on last year, but much pared down and changed in so many ways that it warranted starting from scratch with a new title.

I had an interesting chat with Deborah Chesher on the Artful Writer chat type thing last week, and we got round to talking about plotting. I bemoaned the fact that one of my major stumbling points on writing a feature is that I plotted carefully (or so I thought), only to find that as I wrote, I found better ways to tell the story.

Deb pointed out that the mistake I had made (and I kicked myself when she said it, as she was spot on) was that I hadn’t gone then back and revised the plot to reflect these changes. Result: I’d got myself stuck in a big hole and ended up with a weak story that I didn’t know how to finish.

So it got me thinking – how detailed does the plotting need to be? Obviously it needs to be detailed enough to know more or less everything that goes on in the film. At the same time, should it be so detailed that one minor change along the way blows the rest of the story out of the water?

In the meantime I’d been putting my new ‘convert-some-dramatica-reports-into-useful-outputs-for-outlining’ web page. One thing I was trying to keep in the back of my mind was not to put in too many steps, just concentrate on the key plot points. This got me thinking about ‘Backwards and Forwards’ by David Ball (which deals with plotting quite a bit), and suddenly it struck me where I’d been going wrong.

Previous attempts had failed because, in my eagerness to write, I’d not spent enough time plotting – really thinking about the structure of the story, and yet at the same time, I’d put too much detail into the plotting progress. I’d OD’d on the information spewed out by Dramatica and felt the need to use all of it (the new web page I’ve created actually strips out almost half of the PSR information now, and it’s much more manageable).

The result was verbose, unfocussed storytelling, with too many oppotunities to wander off the beaten track. Which I did, time and again. And then trying to go back to the plot to change it seemed like an impossible and pointless task as I didn’t really know where I was by that point, so I’d given up and gone home.

I’d created a plot with weak, brittle bones that could be easily broken, then spent the writing part of the process jumping up and down on it with my biggest pair of Doc Martins and getting upset when it limped away a messy pulp.

So this time I’m focussing on creating strong bones. Overarching plot movements that cannot (and should not!) be veered away from (at least in the first draft). The hero must do action A and then get to Action B. Thus I leave myself the freedom within the writing to create dramatic, taut scenes, knowing I have to get somewhere specific fairly soon and ensuring that everything I write is relevant to the story (well, that’s the theory).

Thus far I’ve ended up with a complete plot for a screenplay which, although not perfect, actually feels like a screenplay plot, rather than a novel plot (which is a first for me!). It still needs work to strengthen the bones even more, but it’s a good feeling to have worked it to this stage (and I even know exactly how it ends!).

One benefit to this more concise form of plotting, is that it’s much clearer where the plants and payoff’s need to go, and consequently more obvious how I can weave elements together to make them more fluid.

If it needs more or less info – I’ll worry about that in the rewrite. The key at this stage is to finish 120 or so pages, and actually have the words FADE OUT: at the bottom of the last one.

Let’s hope it all works out OK…