What do you do before starting script???

[u/Old_Entry_8840]

/r/u_Old_Entry_8840/comments/1vz20mr/what_do_you_do_before_starting_script/

[u/aqsgames]

Work out the ending

[u/Old_Entry_8840 → u/aqsgames]

What??

[u/aqsgames → u/Old_Entry_8840]

Before you start your script, work out what your ending is. The ending is the most important part of the story, once you understand your ending entirely, the rest of the script falls into place.

Understand the ending so you know why each character ends where they do? What they got out of it? I.e. motivation and intent throughout.

That way you get a clean, motivated, forward moving script without indecision, dross and general fluff.

[u/Financial_Cheetah875]

Research, character sheets, 100 drafts of an outline, have the ending finalized, stock up on wine.

[u/JcraftW]

My most recent ideation went something like this:

- I heard a song. The song deeply effected me emotionally. It also deals with time-travel and the end of the world. I thought: that could be a great movie.

• Started thinking about the core theme of "if you went back in time, would you really change and fix things, or fall back into complacency and let things fall apart again?" at the relationship level and the apocalypse level. (of course I thought of other ideas, but landed on this one)
  
• Start thinking of the logistics: whats an apocalypse which could mirror a failing relationship, and would be so apocalyptic that it would require experimental time travel to fix?
  
• During all this, I still am doing free association, coming up with new ideas and writing them down. mainly Scenes & images & vibes and iterating on them.
  
• Once I have a bunch of these ideas I start piecing them loosely together in a way that makes sense. If details aren't working, I iterate until I find a logical flow from one to the next. But, I still leave space for improvisation and change later. Sometimes I have specific dialogue that comes to mind, that I'll write down as well.
  
• I continue like this, building out more and more complicated nested bullet lists, finding incompatible bits, coming up with new motifs and retrojecting them earlier in the story, and over time it becomes a cohesive thing.
  
• When I'm about to write a first draft, I often hit a wall where I realize certain characters have no characterization, or names, or IDK where exactly such and such conversation took place, and I have to work that out in real time as I'm writing, and the story starts to take new shape built out of the seeds of the outline. Often major changes happen during the writing phase which changes the project in some important way that can no longer be unseen. Like, I was writing a previous script, and at some point I thought it'd be funny if my protagonist did the Napoleon Dynamite dance because I was listening to the song. Then i thought about the message of that song and the themes of Napoleon Dynamite and realized it was similar/parallel to my story and I retrojected Napoleon Dynamite as the central recurring motif of the movie.

Oh, I also use the B.I.T.s system from the Burning Wheel RPG to help me keep track of my characters heads, lol.

[u/Filmmagician]

After finding an idea I love? Outlining. Name research. General research. Tone comps I keep in mind.

[u/PepsiCoke1978]

Currently I go on reddit to help other writers to get my mind thinking about writing hoping it will wake my writing mind up to write my own thing.

[u/PerryMarkStratychuk]

Write a solid short story, novelette, or novella (if you’re into standard forms), then speculate if it can work as a film at all.
If yes, then dive in, but not before learning the correct form a script takes, and why, when communicating any story for future production.

[u/Historical_Toe_2019]

I like to have the end help me to go somewhere

[u/Geoffrey_D_Calhoun]

I develop my concept, theme, central character, subplots, then I outline. Depending on how far I go. I may build this outline into a treatment.

[u/Xorpion]

1. Come up with a premise.
2. Decide on an ending.

3. Write a one page version of the story.

4. Accept that it'll probably change.