A Screenwriter's Companion by Joseph Dougherty

Author:Joseph Dougherty [Dougherty, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Television, Performing Arts, thirtysomething, Pretty Little Liars, Screenwriting, How to write television, authors, writing
Publisher: Fayetteville Mafia Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a risk to this talk of acts and structure: it can start to feel intimidatingly mechanical and restrictive.

When you feel overwhelmed, you can get out from under all that pressure by considering a different discipline, with an elegant structure of its own. A structure you experience every day. Music.

That music you love, the items on the playlist you take into your writing space with you, it’s built on the structure you’re looking for in your writing.

Think about what your script would feel like if it was music.

I think we’d all be happy to write something that feels like, works as well, means as much as the music we love. Since I don’t know what that is for you, I’ll have to use a couple of examples of my own.

One piece I lean on is the Andante of Bach’s Keyboard Concerto Number 7 in G Minor, BWV 1058, as performed by Glenn Gould. I could, and have, put these six minutes on a loop and spent an entire writing day with them. For me it’s all there. Statement, theme, development, and resolution. Organic, spontaneous, inevitable. The Glenn Gould performance is an easy find on YouTube if you want to give it a listen.

If you prefer a slightly more contemporary example of a musical structure worth reaching for in drama, break out Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Again: statement, theme, development, and resolution. It even has a discernible three-act foundation that transitions so smoothly you may not be aware of how deliberate it is.

We’d all be doing very well indeed if we could write a script as good as “Stairway to Heaven” is a song.

“And the forests will echo with laughter.”

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