Screenwriting : Outlines by Lee Matthias

Someone asked me how professional screenwriters write outlines. I replied:

Writers write. Whatever way it works for them. When you start out, you're looking for the process. And over time you find out the only process is your process.

There are writers whose outlines are nearly as long as the finished piece. There are others who just write it, no outline. Paul Schrader makes a scene list, maybe 30 to 50 items. Then he tells the story to people and watches their reactions. The story grows until it's maybe 45 minutes long. Then he knows it can work.

The stereotypical screenplay outline is an almost skeletal, present tense, short story-styled telling of the movie. As flesh is added, and it begins to talk, it becomes a treatment, then a screenplay.

When I set out to write my first original screenplay—I had written adaptations and short scripts before that—I was sufficiently unsure of myself that I needed to see the whole story somehow complete on a single page. I had studied the form and decided to do it like this: I turned the paper horizontally, and at top left, I drew a line about one third across to the right. Then, writing as small as I could, I wrote tiny narrow columns of sequences of scenes, side by side hanging below the line from left to right and down about one third of the page. That was act 1. Then, just below those, I drew another line from left to right indented a little from the left, and ending a little before the right edge. I hung tiny scenes from that line down about another third of the sheet. That was act 2. Finally, i drew a third line below those, across from left to right starting two thirds of the way in from left, and hung more tiny columns of scenes from it. Act 3. I extended the line with a little arrow from act 1 pointing down and back left toward the act 2 line, and did the same for act 2 to 3. It went across the top, zigged down and back, went across further to the right, zigged down and back again, and then across to rhe left all the way right. In that way, I had the whole movie before me, and it looked like a progression from top left to bottom right. That gave me the confidence to script it. I laugh at it now, but I needed to believe, and this enabled me to do that.

My current approach is this: I make a few notes. I add scenes as they occur to me. Some dialogue appears. More scenes. Pretty soon it's 20 pages. I set it aside. After a while, a few more ideas occur. It gets longer. More dialogue. More scenes. I set it aside. I think about it. Steam gathers. I wait.

When I can no longer resist, I begin reformatting the outline that has now progressed to a treatment, into a screenplay.

An outline is a moving target. It should be messy, full of margin notes, arrows running from page three to pages five and one. It should seem unbalanced, distorted. It shouldn't work yet. That's when you know you're onto something, because you already see the story in your head before you can tell it.

So accept your own approach, your method. It will change as you grow as a writer. This is normal.