Why Bank Robbers Would Make Good Screenwriters
By: Jeff Kitchen
Tags: Writing, Drama, Storytelling, Screenwriting, Script

What’s not in your script is every bit as important as what’s in it because the Unnecessary kills scripts. Ask any good bank robber. They know that their life depends on the difference between what’s Necessary for the job and what’s Unnecessary. They’ve engineered how to get in, get the money, and get clean away, and they’ll fight like maniacs to prevent anything from gumming up the plan. What makes a script work is a delicate balance of great storytelling and precision craft as a dramatist. Like the titanium skeleton of the Terminator, the bare mechanism of a working script is a thing of beauty that must be rigorously protected from unneeded additions.

Dramatic writing is an extremely lean literary form that demands total economy. Many amateur scriptwriters forget they’re writing for a performance medium — that the story must be performed by actors in front of an audience and if the audience isn’t constantly on the edge of their seats then it doesn’t work dramatically, no matter how clever the story. It’s a delicate balancing act to successfully dramatize a story, so once you get it right you need to defend it.

The work of the amateur is characterized by the Unnecessary, with scenes overwritten, bloated dialog and description, and worse — scenes that shouldn’t even be there. Sequences are overwritten or entirely unnecessary, and sometimes a whole act is unnecessary. For that matter, your entire script may be unnecessary. That may sound funny, but if you ever worked as a script reader, you know that it’s no joke.

So how do you do separate the Necessary from the Unnecessary? There’s a great technique called Reverse Cause and Effect that you use when you’ve sketched in the general outline of your story. Cause and effect is simple — bothering a bear cub causes its mother to attack. Starting with your story’s ending, you chain backwards from each effect to its cause, asking what directly caused the effect rather than what merely happened before it. Any number of things can happen before it but only one thing actually caused it. This frees you from the profusion of unnecessary details that can bog down any story, and the resulting chain of events constitutes the spine of your story. A causes B which causes C, with no tangential material veering away from the story’s forward flow.

Then you divide the overall story into acts, and you work backward through Act I, following the chain you created, now thinking it through in a bit more detail, but only as much as is necessary. You do the same for all the acts and then you divide them into sequences. Working backwards through the first sequence, you layer in yet a bit more detail, still rigorously excluding the Unnecessary. You do that for all the sequences and then divide each sequence into scenes.

You take the first scene and work backwards through it, weaving in a bit more detail and then you write that scene, breathing life into the structure you’ve built. Then you flesh out the next scene and write it, and you keep doing that until you’ve got a working draft. Because you’ve constantly incorporated only that which is Necessary while ruthlessly excluding everything which is Unnecessary to the forward action of your story, your draft is tight and clean, with no fat. Of course the script still needs work but it’s lean and solid, not some overstuffed mess. You engineer your script properly before you write it, which can free you from much of the misery of extensive rewrites.

I’m Jeff Kitchen and I am proud to announce Scriptwriting Mastery, my new training program for writers of all levels. Please check out my website, https://script.kitchen