6 Planning Steps That Make for Good Writing

Surprising lessons from a screenwriting class

I believe it was a sponsored Instagram post that directed me to the free course; Writing the Short, being taught by a professor of screenwriting at New York University Tisch School of the Arts: John Warren.

With all the hubris of a writer, I didn’t expect to learn anything I didn’t already know.

But it was free, and this way I could kind of pretend to myself that I was attending a class at my dream school.

What I ended up coming out with, however, was a better understanding of the importance of not rushing the planning stages and a new perspective on the task as a whole.

This one is for any writers out there who might need a new perspective on character, story, and format.

How to Assess Your Idea

It is all well and good knowing you want to write something, and even better when you have an idea, but what about the practicalities of the idea?

Whether it’s a short you can make yourself or a big-budget flick, there is a glass ceiling when it comes to what you can afford to do. It’s okay to get lost in the creative process, setting your story in space, or having a 12-page action sequence, but try to remember there is an anchor of practicality tied to your big toe to keep you grounded.

It is important when you are still in the tinkering stages to ask the right questions from your idea. What is the mood you are trying to get across, what is at the core of your story keeping it powered, keeping it alive, keeping it moving forward? Does it matter if it’s not set in space? Does it need five locations to get the point across?

When you have the bones of an idea, make sure it stays solid for when you start building on it. Otherwise, it’s a bit like playing Jenga. Removing pieces and rebuilding on unsteady ground.

Pick One Protagonist — Yes, One

You might have an ensemble of characters who all go on a journey together, but there is only ever one protagonist. Know who they are and what they want.

Does the protagonist have an objective? It sounds so easy but is often overlooked as you get excited constructing your story, characters, etc. The objective is the driving force of the protagonist’s journey. It’s the thing they want more than anything else in the world and is kept at a length that is just unattainable from them.

This central character of yours has both an inner need and a flaw. It’s important that you don’t get the two mixed up.

A flaw is something that can be noticed by the audience, for example, a character’s selfishness, compulsive need to please, hubris. It affects their actions and also makes them relatable to the audience. This flaw is corrected over the course of their journey.

The inner need is something that isn’t always obvious to either the protagonist or the audience. It manifests itself once the protagonist thinks they’ve gotten everything they thought they wanted — only to discover the one thing they really needed all along (often staring them right in the face).

It’s hard to talk about the protagonist without bringing in the antagonist. The most important thing to remember is that the antagonist can be anything that stops your protagonist from getting what they want.

Bonus (and spoiler!): the antagonist can also be transformative. For example in the series Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zuko starts out being the main antagonist, until the third series when he joins the Good Guys. A big, bad antagonist had already been set up to replace him so it doesn’t feel unrealistic.

Craft a Logline

Once you have your idea — your protagonist with an objective which is just unattainable and an antagonist who stops them from getting what they want — you’re ready to put pen to paper. Kind of.

Your logline forces you to know your story because you can say it in one or two sentences. Make it lean, and make sure it hits all the main points of your story.

Jamie hates talking to people, but he has to be the top seller at Best Car Sales for three months straight if he wants to get his hands on his dream car and win back his ex-wife. When his boss brings in hotshot seller Ingrid, who wants the same car as Jamie, things get competitive.

In the above example I made up, we have a protagonist, who has a flaw. We have their objective, the stakes, and an antagonist who makes it difficult for them to obtain.

The Three Acts

The three-act structure is a tried, tested, and true method for plotting out your story with certain points to hit. Unless you know it inside out and both need and understand how to manipulate the device for your story — just stick to it.

The beginning

The first act sets the stage for the entire story.

It is where you want to hook the reader by setting up all the core elements of the story.

A lot of times the rule for script readers and many industry professionals is to judge the script on the first ten pages. Even some competitions ask for the first ten pages of a feature and an outline as their submission requirement. It’s important to make your mark here by telling the reader what they’ll be getting, and what they have to look forward to if they keep reading.

It is important to establish the “normal world,” the protagonist, and their objective right at the beginning.

The two main plot points to hit in the first act are the inciting incident and the call to action. The first is what sets in motion the story, turning the protagonist’s world upside down, and the second ensures the protagonist goes on that journey.

The middle

The dreaded second act is probably what keeps most writers up at night.

The second act can be like quicksand if you’re not prepared.

The middle of the story is half of your story. It starts a quarter of the way through and lasts until three-quarters of the way. It is the biggest chunk of your story and it is all about obstacles.

All the scenes in the second act are leading to the ultimate test, the more conflict/drama the better. Make sure that the obstacles grow in a degree of difficulty for the protagonist in order to raise the stakes.

Write a list of 25–30 obstacles, more if you can think of them, and categorise them low, medium, and high so they can be inserted appropriately throughout the story. It is important to remember that we are not exactly trying to torture our protagonist but instead trying to see how they will behave with each new conflict, seeing a change over time.

If you haven’t established a solid objective that is almost unattainable which you always come back to, the story will get away from you in this act.

The end

It is time for your protagonist to finally slay their dragon.

The third act needs to deliver a satisfying ending to the story.

This is where the protagonist faces and then overcomes their biggest fear. There is a moment of reprieve, and then they realise they want more.

It is time for the inner need to surface.

Jamie has the car and his ex-wife. He is triumphant, but that feeling doesn’t last. What he realises is that he was lonely and just wanted to be noticed, and what he needed was more than a car, it was a friend: Ingrid.

The resolution to your story is when the protagonist corrects their flaw, and the end of the story sees a rebirth in the protagonist and a return to their normal world with a new perspective.

Drumming out the Beat Sheet

I knew a beat sheet existed — I just didn’t want to write one. I was that eager writer foot-tapping my way through the planning process until I could finally open up my screenwriting application and start the magic. I got to the end of several scripts without more than a few pivotal scenes scrawled down — but I admit it was a hard journey.

Herein lies one of the most important things I learned from the course;

The beat sheet is the writing.

The beat sheet allows you to have all your scenes (your story) laid out in front of you. It allows you to move and tweak and make sure there are no plot holes that will throw things off later down the line.

Each scene has your protagonist moving forward towards their objective and the final act. Imagine that each scene bumps into one another and tells the reader something new about the protagonist.

A beat sheet also allows you to make sure there are no arbitrary choices, and to understand why each scene exists. Essentially a scene should not be able to be removed without impacting the story as a whole.

One of the most common ways to draw out your beat sheet is by using index cards. I typically follow the “12 Sequence Outline” and end it there, but indexing every scene would organically be the next step from this and would be structured as follows:

INT. BEST CAR SALES. DAY Jamie meets Ingrid [This is the scene in a nutshell]

[Below are the main points of the scene and shows how they flow]

• The boss introduces Ingrid to the team.
• Jamie is rude to Ingrid by not saying anything.
• It is overheard by Jamie that Ingrid wants the same car as him.

Establishes: Introducing Ingrid, the stakes for Jamie. [Know the importance of the scene at a glance]

It will be a lengthy process, and will arguably take more time than the physicalities of writing, but that’s the point. The beat sheet is the story, the writing is essentially putting it in the right format.

The Technicalities

This might be incredibly useful to some people and completely useless to others, but I found knowing the technicalities of drafting a script helped me stop waffling.

Overwriting is a given in the first draft, but it would be best if you didn’t have pages and pages of your darlings to kill when it comes to further drafts.

Here are some numbers to keep you in check, but remember these are guidelines and will vary depending on the length, genre, or theme.

• Act One: 1–2 pages for a short and 15–25 pages for a feature.
• Act Two: 6–7 pages for a short and 60–70 pages for a feature.
• Act Three: 1–3 pages for a short and 15–20 pages for a feature.
• There are approximately 52 scenes for a feature-length.
• A scene is approximately 2.5 pages long.

Once again this is just a guide, you might have your own given specifications but it’s interesting to know. As creative as writing can be, there are ties that occasionally bind the process, but once you understand them, you can make it work for you.

Despite Writing the Short specifically looking at how to write short films, it still teaches the fundamentals of story and structure, which can be applied to other forms of storytelling. Feature-length, novel writing, and to a degree writing for television.

Short films are often made into movies (Code 8, See You Yesterday, Blue Story), movies are adapted for television (Bates Motel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Wars) and books, as we know, form the basis for most of the above (Pride and Prejudice, The Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Vampire Diaries, Normal People).

The disciplines may have their own adjustments but the “hero’s journey” and other tropes are universally studied, applied, and planned out techniques.

These are just the most important tips I picked up from the course, feel free to seek it out — you never know what you’ll come away with.