Your Screenplay

Having problems with your scenario. You know how it starts, but the middle and end are at a loss. I can tell you this much. Place to start should be a place where you finish.

A good script is a perfect circle, and let me explain how and why.

You like to start up the story with its characters who live in their idea of ​​the world. Perfectly peaceful existence is shattered and it's never ending scramble to return to a perfect life.

Sounds crazy?

Remember the godfather?

In the opening scene?

The family is happy and intact. They were celebrating a wedding. He and his inner circle in complete control of the world that will be attacked from both inside and out. This world is destroyed. Best man was killed. Sonny, his eldest son was killed, his enforcer was killed and his youngest son Michael was beaten. From this point of the never ending quest they are left to put the universe back in their proper order.

The last scene of the film, after all the violence and bloodshed, Michael was in his father's place as the Godfather of business as his father when the movie started. All is right with the world. The natural order is restored.

You can look at the saga as Lord of the Rings, and the same applies. Where is this story begin? Home, safe and comfortable. After endless searching where to finish. Frodo and Sam back to where they started. Missing finger here and a lot of bruises are back in a perfect world, who had to flee.

Some stories begin with this perfect world shattered, but through flashbacks revealed through the story. The character always trying to find away or back to your idea of ​​the world. Some characters do not realize that their world was great, until they venture outside their comfort zone and having all their illusions shattered that they really appreciate what you have going for them. A great example of this is in the UK less classic Mona Lisa, starring Bob Hoskins.

Your characters do not travel if the story arc will be a great and memorable, they travel along the circle. It has traveled round the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy has to leave home to realize that there is no place like home.

Send your images to the big adventure, but always keep the end zone in sight. Place it on the head looks a lot like the place just left behind.

I do not want to say that it should be stable walking toward a place that had just left. Put obstacles in the way. See if they can jump through hoops endless succession, but in the end it all if they are proved to be valuable to let them come home. They do not need heroes welcome, but they need to return to the world in which they feel very welcome. There is a line in one of the greatest westerns of all, driving high country, where the water to say that all you want at the end of the day was to return home justified. He wants to go into the world, to do what in his honor will allow him to return home and knowing that he could not do things any other way.

See Michael in The Godfather or Lord of the Rings trilogy and the characters of these things done his way. Always driven by his own code and in the end he was back in the world where they belong.

The greatest stories ever told are not straight lines. They are rocky hills and valleys, but traveled as Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, they have come full circle and the fuller the better.

I am a part time film maker who have 2 blog on this topic. One scenario deals with other film makers.