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So, you’ve worked out both a strong conscious desire and unconscious desire for your hero. But how do you weave both throughout your story’s plot points?  In this post, we’ll take a look at weaving conscious and unconscious desire into the set-up, and in subsequent posts tackle the rest of the screenplay.

Let’s use Sideways as an example. We’ve chosen this film as it’s a great character study, with elements of comedy and drama. Action and horror films are not conducive for study on this subject as the hero has little or no arc. The arc being, of course, the hero’s character transformation from living a life driven by unconscious rather than conscious desire.

Set Up—Miles’ Conscious Desire

The set-up needs to quickly get across to the reader your hero’s flawed condition.

In the opening scenes of Sideways, we briefly see Miles and the state his life is in as ruled by his conscious desire. He’s middle aged, living alone and hung-over (again.) Basically, he’s stuck in the hole his conscious desire has dug for him.

Moving his car for the workmen is a major hassle. He’s overslept and late to pick up Jack for their wine tasting trip, but still takes his time getting there—flossing, stopping for coffee. When he finally arrives, he lies about the traffic.

He makes them stop at his mother’s house to wish her happy birthday, but then steals money from her secret stash. At his mother’s we also learn he’s still living in the past regarding his ex, Victoria, who he split up with two years ago.

Call to Action—Miles’ Conscious Desire Clashes with Jack’s

Jack, on the other hand, is the antagonist—the physical representation of Miles’ unconscious desire. He’s gregarious, out-going, confident, and a womanizer. The Call to Action turning point arrives when Jack tells Miles he’s going to get him laid.

It’s Miles’ conscious desire talking when he replies, “Jack. This week is not about me. It’s about you. I’m going to show you a good time.” Miles, stuck in his old mode of behaviour and mourning the loss of Victoria, has no intention of chasing women.

This is where Jack’s conscious desire and Miles’ conscious desire clash to form the first major conflict of the film—how will Miles react to Jack’s challenge? Miles’ initial reaction is fuelled by his conscious desire—he just wants to relax, play golf and drink wine. If Miles had his way this is exactly how the week would go down, but Jack’s conscious desire directly challenges this. Miles’ unconscious desire is soon to be awoken…

Check back for part two on weaving your hero’s conscious and unconscious desire into the plot.

Screenwriters are constantly being told to “set things up” in their screenplays. The opening scenes, heck, sometimes the whole first act, needs to “set-up the characters, time, place, and establish the world of the story.”

Hmm… We realize, of course, certain things need to be set-up, but we also think this kind of advice is the reason so many scripts from budding writers fail. Whole chunks of the first act end up being spent on back-story—explaining who the main protagonist is, where they work, who their friends are, their love life, their favorite donut shop etc. etc. It’s amazing how often we receive a script in which nothing noteworthy happens until page forty. And the main culprit for this is too much set-up.

So, in this post we’re going to de-bunk the myth of setting-up, and show how you should be writing your opening scenes.

When weaning screenwriters off the tendency to spend their opening pages explaining things, the phrase “Hit the ground running” seems to crop up remarkably often. There is simply no better way to put it—hit the ground running.

In other words, start your script with your protagonist already in forward motion. Something has just happened in the back-story, and when we first see them they are already acting on it. Or maybe nothing happened as yet, but within the next few pages something had better kick off!

It is important to remember that films need to grab an audience’s attention right from the get-go, and the best way to do this is by creating an immediate problem and, therefore, forward story movement. Story should always, ALWAYS, take preference over set-up.

Think back to some of your favorite films. They all seem to throw you in at the deep end of the story, don’t they?

So, you’re writing a script about a sheriff at a coastal town. Do you spend pages setting-up his family life, his friends at the local bar, and his job? And then on page fifteen kick-start the story by making a shark attack and kill someone? I hope not. In Jaws, a girl is dead from a shark attack by the end of the first scene. Chief Brody receives a call from the station telling him about the attack in the next scene. Just eight minutes into the film, Brody’s looking at the dead girl laid out on the beach, and the story is up and running.

As we’ve already mentioned in our post on misused screenwriting terms, Sideways begins the morning Miles leaves to pick up Jack for their trip. There are no setting-up scenes of Miles teaching class, writing his novel in Starbucks, or hanging out with Jack. We find out that he teaches English, has written a novel, and is friends with Jack along the way.

North by Northwest opens with Roger O. Thornhill dictating some notes to his secretary and jumping in a cab. All pretty mundane. But in the next scene he is apprehended by two men who stick a gun into his ribs. All of a sudden, Roger has a big problem, and it’s arrived by the second scene. Where’s the set-up?

Cut the back-story, hit the ground running, get to the main story as quickly as possible and you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of ninety per-cent of aspiring writers out there. We look forward to receiving your trimmed down screenplays very soon!