By Olga Agafonova
Back at the end of October, I got
a professional screenwriter to review my first screenplay. The good news: the
science-fiction elements are fresh and exciting and merit development. The bad
news is that nearly all the dialogue has to go as does the entire second act. Also,
the main character is too detached for the audience to care about him. Lots of
work to be done.
And that’s what I’ve been up to
in the last few weeks. I’ve read Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain for sci-fi goodness, I’ve signed up for a
structural writing class to address plot problems and I’m using Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing to bring my
characters to life.
The Lajos technique asks the
writer to describe each character’s physiology, sociology and psychology in detail.
For example, my protagonist Ryan Callaghan is a 40-year old male with a Ph.D.
in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins. His mother died when he was three,
his father was never home; he was raised by his maternal aunt who encouraged
him to study the sciences. He is an agnostic who doesn’t care about politics, a
scientist who enjoys the company of other straightforward, talented people, a
private man who recoils from violence and fanaticism.
The idea is that if you provide enough
background for a character, he will begin to do certain things naturally in the
play while avoiding others. In other words, the character will be true to
himself. So, I can’t have my guy join a religious cult half-way through the
play because that’s not in his nature. I can, however, have him behave in an
arrogant and judgmental way because that’s one of the weaknesses I’ve built-in
to his psychology.
In the structural writing class,
we are being taught to chuck Syd Field’s three-act model and to instead use as
many as nine acts, each escalating the conflict somehow. The point here is that
using so many acts, each with its mini-escalations building up to the climax in
Act VIII, makes for a more dynamic screenplay. So, if the play is about Joe
Schmuck’s miserable life, in Act I an old lady backs up into his car, in Act
II, he is passed over for a promotion, in Act III his house burns down, and so
on until in Act VIII he’s ready to jump off a bridge but then something happens
and it all works out in Act IX.
Having invested six months of
effort and a bit of money into my screenplay, I really do hope all the work
pays off and I get a better result in the second draft. I’d like to enter the
play in a couple of competition next year and see what happens. The West Coast
beckons and I’d like to heed its call.
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