by Jeff Kitchen
START USING DILEMMA, CRISIS, DECISION & ACTION, AND RESOLUTION IN YOUR OWN SCRIPT
Dilemma
1. Does your story have a dilemma or potential dilemma inherent in it? Remember, the main dilemma should happen to your protagonist. Does your central character feel trapped by some hard choices? What are they? Does this pressure build up, as though walls are closing in on him or her? If there is a dilemma inherent in your story, then define it clearly.
2. If a dilemma is missing from your material, then try out possibilities to create one. Look at the difficulty faced by your protagonist and then create a second, equally painful choice that complicates things for him or her. A dilemma will almost always enhance the dramatic power of your story.
3. Can you frame the dilemma as, It’s unacceptable to _________and it’s equally unacceptable to _________? A dilemma should always put your protagonist between a rock and a hard place.
4. Is the dilemma big enough in scope to carry your entire script? Does it embrace most of the story, or does it get resolved quickly and then vanish? Does the resolution of the dilemma essentially constitute the end of the story?
5. Will your audience care about the protagonist and his or her dilemma? Are viewers going to be riveted by it? Does it pass the “So what?” test? Is it a dilemma of magnitude? If not, why not? What would make it more intense, more significant, more substantial? What’s the worst it could be? Does this possibility radically expand your story? Don’t try to control the creative process too tightly or be afraid to get in over your head. With an open mind, you may stumble into a bold new dimension.
6. Create a two-column chart polarizing the two equally unacceptable alternatives. This will help you to separate and solidify them. The less abstract the choices, the more easily you can work with them. Get your hands dirty. Don’t try to be neat and orderly. Don’t fear being repetitive. Use this chart to go hog wild and really play with the dilemma.
7. Have you found yourself in a similar dilemma in your own life, even if it’s much smaller in scale? Write about what it’s like to be trapped in such a dilemma.
8. Can you gauge how this dilemma might impact strangers? Will the average people in the street care passionately about this type of story and this type of dilemma? Will they identify with it? Will they feel connected to it? Will it move them? Why? The dilemma has to be universal—it has to resonate with real people in the real world, or you will lose your audience.
9. How can you complicate the dilemma and add new layers, aspects, and dimensions to it? You may find that it’s much deeper and more complex than you first suspected. Remember that it takes a while for the obvious to become apparent, so you’ll continually have new insights about the dilemma as your story develops. But don’t forget, all these layers should still constitute one main dilemma, albeit a complex one.
10. Are you limping through the creation process or are you attacking it? Don’t be afraid of chaos. In fact, don’t settle for less. Put in the necessary time to generate genuine depth and power, and to tap into the true potential of your story. Give the viewers the ride of their lives.
11. Check periodically to make sure that the two sides of the dilemma are still equally unacceptable. Certain plot choices can sometimes undo the dilemma as the two unacceptable alternatives change in relation to each other. Has one side become less painful? If so, then you should beef up the other side to correct the balance. This will ratchet up your story’s dramatic power even further.
12. Take some time to write about your protagonist’s dilemma. Explore its personality, its flavor, its intricacies, its hidden recesses. Play with the dilemma, try on new things, turn it over in your brain. It’s not easy to hold the whole thing in your head. Putting it down on paper enables you to clarify your thinking and to see a complex dilemma more objectively. The more time you spend with the protagonist’s dilemma, the more fully and clearly you’ll be able to articulate it.
13. Get to know Dilemma inside out by comparing dilemmas in existing films. Compare John Anderton’s dilemma in Minority Report with Richard Kimble’s dilemma in The Fugitive. Put yourself in Kimble’s shoes so that you feel his dilemma, and then articulate it. Are the two dilemmas similar? How?
14. As you begin to understand your script’s dilemma at a deeper level, can you feel it in your bones? Do you carry it with you all the time? Does it deepen your insight into the people around you? Does it add to your plot?
Crisis
1. Does your story come to a crisis—a critical make-or-break point for the protagonist, a point at which a substantial choice must be made—roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the story? What does the crisis consist of? Articulate it clearly.
2. Does the crisis cause the dilemma to come to a head? Has the dilemma gotten so intense that both halves are at the breaking point? Is your protagonist about to cave in from the pressure? Remember that a crisis may occur when the protagonist is right on the edge of succeeding, so everything crashing down on him or her becomes that much worse.
3. What are the wildest possibilities for your crisis? The scariest? The most unpredictable? The most dangerous? The funniest? (Your response obviously will depend on what type of plot you’re writing.)
4. Look at a crisis as the worst possible things happening at the worst possible moment. Could any other awful incidents be heaped onto this moment? These may include events happening nearby in the plot that could be moved to coincide with and complicate the crisis.
5. In your own life, have you been caught in a crisis similar to your protagonist’s? Can you remember how it felt, even if it was on a much smaller scale? Writing about it may enhance your understanding and thus your ability to work with the crisis in your script.
6. Think about how the audience will be impacted by this crisis. Is there any way they can dismiss it by saying, “So what?” Can they see their own lives in it? Does it resonate on a universal level?
7. Defining the crisis for your plot can give fresh insight into the dilemma. This is also true of Decision & Action, the point at which a protagonist has to do something decisive about his or her dilemma. Looking back at the dilemma from its crunch point lets you see it form a new point of view. This hindsight can open up entirely new ideas for your plot. Stay flexible and keep your ideas in suspension, allowing new possibilities to work their way into your story.
Decision & Action
1. Does the crisis force your protagonist to make a critical decision? Does he or she take significant action as a result? Can you distinguish between the decision and the action? A decision alone is not enough; drama is the stuff of action.
2. Is the paralysis of the dilemma broken at the point of decision and action? Does your main character make a dynamic change? Does he or she begin either to pull things together or to fall apart at this crucial juncture? Remember, this is not yet the complete transformation that comes with resolution but the solid beginnings of this transformation—for good or bad.
3. Could this decision and action be more intense? What’s the most intense it could be? Experiment with extremes. Think of people you know who have been through disastrous situations; think of high-intensity situations you’ve seen in the news. How does yours compare? Does more intensity improve your movie?
4. Is the true character of your protagonist revealed at this point? What exactly is revealed about him or her? Is something new emerging? Is something clarified? Has something crystallized? How will this affect the audience?
5. Have you been in a similar situation, one in which you had to make a critical decision and action in the face of crisis? How did it feel? What if the situation had been even more extreme? What if at that point you had done something utterly catastrophic or incredibly heroic? Experiment with the possibilities.
Resolution
1. Does your protagonist actively resolve his or her dilemma? What does your protagonist do to wrap it up? Articulate this clearly. Even in a tragedy, the protagonist should be pro
active in completing his or her own destruction.
2. Are you clearly distinguishing between Decision & Action on the one hand and Resolution on the other?
3. Is the resolution fixed in finality so it won’t backslide or become undone? If your resolution is ambiguous, is that intentional or did it just somehow end up vague? Consider what will satisfy or disappoint your audience.
4. Is the resolution an ending worthy of a great movie? Is it substantial (even if it’s a comedy)? The ending should be the movie’s biggest moment. Does it complete the magic spell woven throughout the entire movie?
5. What are some other possible endings? Are you missing an obvious possibility that might better wrap up your story? Have you explored the extremes for your resolution? Try several radically different possible endings just to see if some great possibility is being overlooked. It’s a good habit as a storyteller. In the process, you might even stumble onto an entirely different plot for another script.
6. How will the resolution gratify the audience? If it’s a tragedy, will it knock the audience down with a powerful emotional experience they’ll never forget? If it’s a creative upbeat resolution, does the audience’s final mood meet your intentions and expectations?
Theme: Developing the Heart of Your Story
he way in which the protagonist resolves the dilemma expresses the Theme of the piece. Theme is what the movie is about—its soul, its heart, its animating spirit. Theme is the glue, the essence governing the dramatic material, shaping and binding the complete action of the protagonist into one central, coherent concept. A powerful theme from a great movie will resonate with the audience when the movie is over, and perhaps for the rest of their lives.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THEME
A clear statement of Theme provides a focal point, a unifying thread around which to weave the Dramatic Action. Playwriting teacher William Thompson Price, in The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle (New York: W.T. Price Pub., 1908), says:
All great or good plays are based upon Theme. You have only to refer to Shakespeare and Molière to determine the truth for yourself. The ordinary commercial play is one of situations for the sake of situations and not for the sake of Theme. Until we regard Theme of first importance, we shall have few good plays.
A simple example of “situations for the sake of situations” would be a soap opera: The nurse is having sex with the doctor that week for the sake of situation. It’s purely about titillation and intrigue, not about thematic depth.
Theme Permeates Your Script
Theme works from the inside out, saturating the plot and the characters with a certain energy. The writer is often not aware at first of the thematic depth in the plot, because the total focus is usually on telling the best story possible. But once the theme is identified, it lends a sense of vision to the piece, gathering the material into one main action and infusing it with resonance and a sense of meaning. This is not to say that you should bombard the audience with it, but the whole script should communicate it at an organic level to the soul of the audience. Price, in The Philosophy of Dramatic Principle and Method, says:
The highest form of plays involves the philosophy of life, so that if the Theme is not worth considering, there is usually little substance in a play. With a Theme your play will be about something . . . Theme does not stand alone. No principle does. Mere Theme will never make a play. But it is a definite something; it furnishes a spiritual atmosphere and the philosophy of the play; it gives the clue to the actual shaping of the play . . . the tone depends on it. It is the largest unit of the play.
Many writers can only clutch abstractly at what they think is the theme of their script. This inability to come to terms with a story’s underlying idea can weaken the material. The writer misses the clarifying and strengthening effect that having a grasp of Theme brings to the process. It’s important to note that the word theme—like dilemma—is misused extensively. People will say that the theme of a movie is, say, teen suicide, when that’s really just a story element or part of the plot. Focus on the way in which the protagonist resolves the dilemma—this will keep you right on the theme in the truest sense of the word.
Say you’re writing a tragedy (a rare type of film these days). Your protagonist, mistakenly thinking he’s being brilliant, does something destructive and stupid, such as betraying his best friend to resolve his dilemma, and it gets him killed. If we look at the way in which he resolves his dilemma, we are, in essence, looking at the mechanics of failure. Note that we’re not looking at what he does, but at the way in which he does it—his approach, his method, his thinking. He betrays his friend by way of this messed-up thought process, perhaps telling himself he can outsmart the situation, that he’s sharper, faster, and more deserving. In this example, we are looking into the mind of a self-destructive character who is skilled at self-deception and whose thinking is flawed.
Insight on the way a character resolves his or her dilemma can give us as viewers a powerful look at aspects of ourselves—perhaps a brutally unflattering look. It can be a wake-up call. This, then, is the governing idea, what the above story is about thematically: the thought process that lures us into destruction—something we see around us in our daily lives. This theme informs the entire plot and ties it together, sustaining the story, shaping it, animating it, driving it, and setting its tone. It imbues the world of the story with the flavor of loss and failure—even though we in the audience may not recognize it until the trap springs shut on us along with our lead character. The focus is on the mechanics of this guy ruining his life—both his tendency to ruin it and how he ruins it. There should be a substantial character arc, a downhill transformation, culminating in his death. But the writer may not wish to overtly telegraph the character’s impending failure. If the viewers come to care about him, then his failure will shock them profoundly. The theme will resonate on a deep level because the viewers will see the inescapably truth about their own failures and blind spots. That is the power of a great tragedy.
Theme Focuses Your Material
Your sense of theme will give focus to your story material. Think about your own life experience in relation to the example above. Think of those people you’ve known with destructive, deceptive, flawed thinking. If you know a psychiatrist, psychologist, or other student of human behavior, talk to him or her about these types of behavior patterns. Perhaps your own thought process has at times failed you in a similar way. Think about your own destructive behavior—how you were utterly compelled to do or say something catastrophic, and how nobody could talk you out of it. Delve to the bottom and really try to understand it at its deepest level. This will give you a clarity and focus that would help immensely if you were to write this script. A substantial comprehension of what’s coming across thematically in your developing script will inform your writing, your plotting, your character development, your character’s dilemma, your resolution—everything connected with your script. It will inhabit the soul of this script and imbue it with significant power, depth, and resonance.
THE USE OF THEME IN FILMS
Now let’s evaluate our six movies to see how each illustrates the tool of Theme. Note that each has particular thematic substance and magnitude.
The Use of Theme in Training Day
In Training Day, the way in which Jake resolves his dilemma is by sticking to his principles, refusing to be dragged into Alonzo’s corrupt system. Jake’s moral compass will not follow Alonzo’s lead, and he struggles to hold on to his integrity and his life. Thematically, this is what the movie is about: Doing the right thing. He knows what’s right and he fights for that with every ounce of strength as his dilemma is resolved. By the end, Jake is blazing with that energy, and the audience is infused with it, too. Screenwriter David Ayer and director Antoine Fuqua both said that this movie asks, “What if one man says no?”—a question that is clearly the underlying idea of the film.
The Use of Theme in What Women Want
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p; In What Women Want, the way in which Nick Marshall resolves his dilemma is by laying bare his soul to Darcy. He tells her the whole, unvarnished truth, allowing her to see into him just as he saw into her when he was reading her mind. He starts out shallow and closed off—the conventional male, complete with full Las Vegas treatment of women as second-class citizens and mere sex objects. But by seeing what makes Darcy really tick, he is able to transcend his own limitations and begins to experience a full, deep, and sincere relationship. This movie’s theme is about opening up to life and opening up to love.
The Use of Theme in Minority Report
In Minority Report, the way in which John Anderton resolves his dilemma is by cutting through deception, dissolving the smoke and mirrors that hold Precrime together. This is a film about liberation. Anderton frees himself from being hunted, from drug addiction, from guilt, and from a loveless life. He sets free the people wrongly condemned under Precrime, and he liberates the three Precogs from their forced jobs as police psychics. He does all this by finding and fighting for the truth within a paralyzing web of complex, powerful lies. He cuts through the sacrosanct illusions and superstitions that lock everything down in this future world. The film’s theme focuses on liberation from deception, from illusion, and from the haze of an enforced status quo.