So, for my next trick…

…I’m going to pull a screenplay out of a hat.

(“That trick never works!”)

Screenplays are interesting beasts: unless you’re doing a weird experimental art house film, a movie script follows a tight structure.

Act One introduces you to the protagonist’s life, sets up their thematic situation, and propels them into the main plot arc with what’s often called the “catalyst” or the “inciting incident.” Act Two sets up subplots and develops the character arc: just as the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist drives the plot arc, the relationship between the main character and an influence character, often either a love interest or a mentor, drives the character arc. Act Two also kicks off “try/fail cycles” as the protagonist begins to try to solve the problem presented by the plot arc. In the second half of Act Two, tension rises, the stakes get higher, and the situation becomes progressively worse. Act Three starts with the protagonist choosing (and it’s always an active choice) to head into decisive no-turning-back territory. In an action story, failure often means death (or worse), but no matter the genre, losing means losing everything—at least in context—and winning still means the protagonist’s life is irrevocably changed.

This may sound dreadfully formulaic. In a sense, yes! But it’s the formula of dramatic structure. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive: not “this is a secret recipe we’ve discovered that guarantees commercial and critical success,” but “we’ve looked at a lot of successful screenplays, stage plays, novels, and other stories over literally centuries, and there are definite patterns here that it’s worth understanding.”

If you’re familiar with the hero’s journey, you’ll recognize it fits into this pattern, but so does the heroine’s journey, and so do all sorts of other stories that don’t follow that mythic structure. My novel Goddess uses a classic screenplay structure fairly closely. While most of my other works just aren’t long enough to do so, if they have multiple scenes you may well see a roughly similar shape. Inciting incident, rising tension, high-stakes climax; protagonist, antagonist, influence character; an arc for the main character that’s driven by the plot, but has different problems and payoffs.

(You’ll notice I didn’t mention Saida & Autumn, even though it’s my longest work. It’s somewhere between a slice-of-life story with dual protagonists and a romance. The former kind of story doesn’t have conventional plot arcs at all, just character arcs. Romances—not “stories with strong romantic elements,” like Goddess or “The Sea Monster of Dorgissey Harbour”—have their own classic story beats and structure. A great book to read about that topic is Gwen Hayes’ Romancing the Beats. Even so, Saida & Autumn is far too loosey-goosey with those beats; I wouldn’t be able to sell it to Harlequin’s new Lesbian Furry Giantesses line, not merely because that’s not a real thing. But both Saida and Autumn have their own character arcs, as well as separate intertwined plot arcs.)

Anyway, the point is that to write a good screenplay—which I hope I’m going to end up with—you need to do a lot of planning. This makes it, well, less than optimal for serialization.

So I have a crazy idea: write about the writing process.

I’ll talk about the tools and books I’m using, what I like and don’t like about them, what I’m using from them and what I’m avoiding. I’ll probably use some of my past work as examples, along with more popular films. And I’ll talk about what I’m doing with my script specifically.

Even with that hedge, this won’t stop the script from being a first draft. Unlike Saida & Autumn, if I get to a point in the draft where I realize I needed to set up something in an earlier scene, I’m probably going to tell you that up front and make the change.

Now, I haven’t entirely decided how the whole serializing thing will work. Screenplays have pretty specific formatting conventions you can only meet by publishing as a PDF, but an equally vexing problem is that there’s no such thing as a “chapter break” in a screenplay. There are scenes, but they don’t have page breaks. So I’m going to either have to do a series of short little PDFs that contain the proper scene bits, or do a “close enough” text rendering in Patreon posts. Or a hybrid of the two. If you have strong opinions about PDFs, pro or con, please leave a comment below. (Really. I don’t get enough comments.)

Finally: as previously warned, May will be a kind of weird, light month around here schedule-wise. The screenplay plotting is well underway (the Dramatica StoryGuide Report runs 20 pages and could get longer, and I’ll explain what the hell that means later, I promise), but I haven’t started the screenplay itself.

As for other related projects: I’ve tried to get in touch with an artist about illustrations for Saida & Autumn with no success so far, but hope to have news on that front during May. Those of you at the $9/month level or above will automatically get ebook copies of that, along with a new ebook version of Goddess eventually. (This will include the Christmas story posted here.) Anyway: you’ll hear from me again later in the month, even if I can’t promise what the schedule will be. I’ll be talking about the screenplay more, too!