BOTH outer and inner conflict must be made active and visible.
3. Conflict must get nasty.
Screenwriters should abandon all instincts for being nice. At least on paper.
Screenwriting classes are filled with genuinely good souls; honest, warm people who value their families above all else, who live the Golden Rule each day, and meet the world with kindness and compassion. Unfortunately, the stories they create sometimes prove just how nice these students really are. None of their characters treat anybody badly. Nobody tries to stop anyone else from getting what they want.
For a script to succeed, you’ve got to get mean.
It’s your job to figure out the very worst things that can possibly befall your hero, then find the most shocking ways to make those very bad things happen. Not just once or twice but in a dramatically rising manner throughout your whole script.
When asked who the adversary of their story is, many new screenwriting students aren’t sure. Or they mention some secondary character who’s in no position to stir up any serious trouble for the hero. I’ve had writers tell me they thought their story didn’t need an adversary at all.
Good bloody luck.
When told conflict must be increased and toughened, sometimes a writer will try to fix things by having his powerless adversary burst into a scene and start shouting. Not necessarily about anything in the plot, mind you, just shouting. Then the adversary retreats to the story sidelines until a few scenes later when he strides forward to rant once more. Then withdraws again.
Conflict is not effective if it only starts and stops.
When your plot moves in jerks and fits and feels episodic, assess the strength and commitment of your adversary. Reconceive the story to include a central, powerful adversary who can provide conflict that gets ever nastier throughout.
4. Conflict should develop and grow to become more and more challenging for the hero.
The principle of change is never more vital than at the core of story conflict.
The battle must build throughout all the pages of a script. If conflict requires only one scene of real collision between the hero and adversary, and that scene gets put off so it can serve as a climax to the story, you end up with a hero stuck in the middle of the movie for a long stretch with nothing to do.
Did anyone say “passive hero”?
It’s quite a common problem and it can be solved forever by using the Hero Goal Sequences® approach to story construction.
No small number of scripts have crossed my desk that offer the following scenario. Loving daughter Phyllis receives a proposal of marriage from grease monkey Ralph, the man of her dreams. But Phyllis knows if her adversary dad hears about an engagement, he’ll say no. Dad hates Ralph.
Phyllis worries. Phyllis asks friends what she should do. With another thirty pages of Act Two yet to go, Phyllis writes in her diary and cries, then asks Aunt Sarah what her thoughts are. Finally, near the end of Act Two, the daughter musters her courage and confronts dad, tells him she wants to marry Ralph. Dad shouts “over my dead body” several times. The heated climax scene plays out until dad breaks down in tears, expresses his boundless love for his daughter and agrees to the wedding. Dad hugs Phyllis. For Act Three, we watch the daughter’s happy wedding.
One confrontation scene alone cannot create a movie.
And a story concept built around one scene of genuine conflict leaves nothing for Act Three. A happy wedding isn’t an act. It doesn’t allow for the powerful dramatic conflict required there, too.
A marriage opposed by parents can be shaped into a fine story. Try Romeo and Juliet. But no plot can survive if conceived so that conflict does not develop in growing stages throughout the entire movie.
5. Conflict should surprise the audience.
Every story must offer the audience an intriguing conflict with unexpected turns.
This is perhaps the single greatest challenge for screenwriters today because everyone in the audience has already seen thousands of movies. But scripts that claw their way out of the slush pile and into the land of produced films invariably contain some element of the unexpected in their storytelling.
Juno presents a story so simple, so obvious, that at first we may expect very little originality from the film. But every character in it proves to be complex and compelling. Sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) quickly begins reacting to her pregnancy in unexpected ways. And who’d have thought the adoptive dad Mark Loring (Jason Bateman) would turn out to be a bigger child than Juno herself ? It’s a simple story but with unexpected twists.
TIP: Here’s an important suggestion that by itself is worth the price of this book. When outlining your screenplay, write down on 3x5 cards, scene by scene, the next most logical thing that could happen in your story. Create a plotline where, after each scene, the next clearly logical thing unfolds. Now line up those cards and tape them to the wall above your computer. A scene spine for your whole movie.
Then — whatever you do — DON’T do that.
A writer should never, ever accept the easy or obvious plot way out.
Surprise your audience.
6. Conflict must be believable.
The Number 23 is about an Animal Control officer named Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) whose wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) gives him a mysterious journal that she finds in a secondhand bookshop. Walter discovers the book echoes his own life far too closely. He feels a creepy, growing bond with the detective hero in the story named Fingerling (also played by Carrey). The book sparks in Walter an overwhelming obsession with the number 23, which rapidly draws him down a cruel, dark path toward madness.
Eventually this loving family man comes to fear that he’s fated to murder his wife just the way it happens in the mysterious red journal. As Walter sinks into desperation, he must also solve a real-life murder mystery that forces him to face terrifying revelations about his own past.
I was captivated by The Number 23 for a while. Then at some point the plot became so stretched, characters so inconsistent, that I just didn’t care anymore. The whole thing became hokum.
Complex plotting often results in conflict believability problems.
This script lost touch with “reality” in the fictional world it created. We are asked to accept that the hero discovers he’s a former homicidal maniac who was locked in an insane asylum for years, but got released and forgot all that so now he hunts dogs for a living and nevertheless he’s a good husband with a loyal wife and loving son who don’t seem to mind he’s going nuts while seeking revenge on a stray neighborhood fido after his wife just happens to find an unpublished manuscript in a second hand book store written by the hero himself relating his past life fantasized as a detective who kills his girlfriend so the hero’s now worried he’ll kill his sweet wife especially after he finds the bones of the first girl he murdered but his wife will stand by her man, all the while the number 23 is supposed to relate to everything but doesn’t really.
Come on now.
When characters begin behaving in ways that hold no human truth, when they start doing things that serve no purpose except to advance a tortured plot, the audience feels betrayed. They step outside the movie and become critics.
The night I saw The Number 23 in a theater — a film that wanted very much to be taken seriously — by the end the audience was roaring with laughter.
Keep conflict believable.
7. Conflict