3 Questions a Screenwriter Should Ask When Developing A Story

In writing look for something that’s pretty basic. Does your story grab your reader and does it flow, does it have a natural flow? Does it make the reader want to turn the pages?





Most writers realize that you have control over those second two. The audience doesn’t have to know everything all the time. And the characters don’t have to know everything all the time. You can withhold some information, you can play games. Sometimes applying constructivist psychology to the storytelling process adds to the story. That simply means that most of our experience in life, most of our experience in reality is based not on knowledge but on inferences we make based on clues. So that you have what is called top down processing. Top down is you see something in the world and your brain automatically compares what you’ve experienced before with what you are seeing and then you make a conclusion.

Bottom up processing is you see things and it goes into your brain and you make note of it and you store information. There are short cuts that we’re doing all of the time. You’ve never seen the back of this chair but you’ve seen chairs so you assume the back looks like any other chair. It would be a surprise twist if the back of this chair had a dragon hiding out there because that’s not normal (what you’re normally associating with that concept).




Just a very simple example, suppose I show you a movie and there’s a husband and he’s buying his wife flowers, chocolate and an anniversary card on his way home from work, okay? Then meanwhile you see the wife has got something she’s hiding in the bedroom drawer. What are you going to think? Well it’s pretty obvious isn’t it? He wants to make love and she has other plans. That’s where the audience is going to go and you could play it off where he comes home with the flowers and she pulls out a knife when she is with him. Or you could then disclose later that he’s a knife collector and the surprise is this is a present for him. This is something he’s been looking for. She saved up for it and she wants to give it to him as an anniversary present. And then you find out that he poisoned the chocolate.

You just told a twist which is telling two stories at the same time. The one the audience thinks its seeing and the one it is actually seeing. You are relying when you do that kind of thing on the audiences propensity to figure it out and be smarter than you and once you’ve got them going that way you can have all kinds of fun.