Thursday, May 20, 2010

Back in the Saddle Again

I am seriously rewriting the second half of my script. While I successfully reached both my 100 page goal and the end of my story within April, I have found a significant problem in my story.

The quest has no stakes.

I’ve set up that my hero, Jon Warder, is going on what may well be a fool’s quest as a point of honor, because there is nothing else he can do for the people for whom he feels responsible. I like that. It’s nifty.

But if he should fail in his quest? Nothing changes.  And if he should succeed? Well, he does succeed, of course, and it turns out to be very important, but at the time he takes the quest, we don’t know why it’s important. For most of the movie, it looks like if he succeeds, nothing changes.

So why should the audience care if he fails?

When laying out plots, nothing changes is the kiss of death.

I have two options. I can invest the viewer more in Jon’s honor, showing that he takes some great, personal, internal loss if he fails. Or I can establish real, physical consequences to the quest. They already exist, I just have to find a way to share them with the audience sooner.

Ideally, I should do both of these things.

The problem is that I did a good job tying the story together. One scene logically follows the next. There is pacing and flow. So I’m going to have to break it before I can fix it.

That’s the way it goes sometimes.

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