J. Mitchell Lane

Anyone who has ever written anything can tell you that you will always come to a point where either you don’t know what to type next, or will scrap what you’ve spent the past few days, weeks, months, or years writing because it doesn’t meet up to the standard for yourself that you have in your head. They could also tell you that it’s probably the most frustrating thing in the world to have something appear different on paper than it does in your imagination.

I have been working on the rewrite for the FAULT series for the past few days and finally was able to lock down a process that works for getting the image in my head onto the paper while staving off writers block at the same time.

FAULT has seven main characters. That’s right. Seven. My normal process for writing a story is to just sit down and write until it’s either all on paper or I get frustrated with the outcome. Since seven minds is a lot of information to store inside my fuzzy big head without it exploding, this process doesn’t work very well at all for FAULT, and I decided that this time around I would try a different approach.

Every story has to have something for it to be interesting. You already know what this is: conflict. This time around I mapped out a very simple journey that each character needs to go through in order to keep things interesting for you, the viewer. It just so happened to be the same number of steps as the number of episodes I was planning to write before the pre-production process begins. Keep in mind this is for the overarching storyline, not for the storyline of an individual episode. Here it is:

1. Sanity / Insanity (Confusion / Status Quo)

2. Degradation / Growth

3. Crossroads / Choice

4. Journey

5. Final Reaffirmation or Retraction of that Choice

6. Sanity / Insanity (Confusion / Status Quo)

Several of the steps have multiple sides to them. These can be easily varied depending on the character in a way that makes the journey for that character most captivating and develops the most connection with the viewer. They can also be varied to prove a point (hopefully through viewer-character connection rather than preachiness)

I’ve started developing the specific journey for each character individually while keeping in mind that they need to stay tied together. Once the “chart” for each character and the question their struggling with answering is complete, all that’s left is to drop the story into screenplay form. Since everything is already mapped out, the plan is for the dialogue, the subtext, the characters actions and the rest to feel much more complete and whole that just seven characters that whimsically came out onto a page, even if whim does play a part in the planning stages. Hopefully it will feel like all of the character’s journeys tie together.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. It seems to be working for this particular storyline and writing has become much easier, but I’m not sure if it applies to all character journeys.

What do you think?