Plotting

"The way of considering your clues as you take your clue and you make it secret and you can hide it. And those are three different things. And I think being able to visualize that, like we talked about the painting and this hanging in front of the safe and then the dust that's on the painting."

"The voiceover.. is coming from the middle of the film. So Judd the Narrator has more information than the Judd we're seeing and experiencing it with... Which actually makes the plotting somewhat more difficult because he's acting on knowledge that without the knowledge that future Judd has - so it's coloured for us."

"If you're writing something that's *not a mystery*: how does thinking about secrets and clues from your character's perspective help you... build plot?"

"For me, often when I'm structuring stuff, the first one of the early questions for me structurally is what is the midpoint? Because the midpoint will help me work out whether I've got enough juice."

"Because ultimately, if you end up with a scene outline and you've got X number of scenes, you'll have enough fuel for a feature. [...] If you know that you've got 40 scenes, that's a feature."

"I know that I personally really tend to use a five-act structure on anything that's longer than 20 pages. I just find it more helpful for me to have five acts and the turning points and the climaxes and etc within that."

"for me, often when I'm structuring stuff, the first- one of the early questions for me structurally is what is the midpoint? Because the midpoint will help me work out whether I've got enough juice."

"I do think it is related to plotting, and you can actually write your plots out like that. There is a question that the audience asks if the character is in pursuit of something that is answered by the end of the scene, and that answer ends up setting up the new scene, right?"

"I think the two, I wouldn't even necessarily call them problems because I think they are part of the process. But I think the two main things that I find when I hit the end of my first drafts is getting a first act that balances pacing with information. That to me is kind of a hard problem."

"I think what is useful about the log line is the traditional kind of log line of when something happens to this protagonist, they must blah, blah, blah, blah. It's essentially, it's talking about your inciting incident."

"In terms of process, which is separate from plotting, I will do a brainstorming stage and I just come up with ideas of what things could be. But when I start putting it into order, often the first tent pole or whatever you want to call it that I'm trying to put into the ground is what does the midpoint look like?"

"if you write a logline and it's really hooky but it doesn't actually really reflect anything that takes up more than 10% of your screenplay, I find that pretty disingenuous, not just disingenuous, but unhelpful."

"what does the second half of the movie look like? I think there's a lot of people that because writing second acts is so unpleasant that they want to skip to the, you know, the low point and then the, and then coming out the other side."

"the midpoint is often the most structurally important thing, right, that it's effectively your- the audience is getting bored, what do you give them new, what do you give them that's new?"

"a lot of rom-coms in the 30s and 40s had a secondary or tertiary romance that helped carry that midpoint through. And a lot of romances now, a lot of rom-coms are starting to do the same thing because that's super helpful and it helps both break it up and also can parallel and can cause other events."

"I think we should talk about developing from a concept so that you have enough narrative fuel before you start writing and also going, what do, in our experience, when do we know we've got enough to go to pages? Pages, because I think that's possibly another issue is that they've just jumped out of development into writing pages too soon."

"I think the biggest thing that I've learned is that I think all these story beats are here. But I think what is actually an unhelpful idea and concept is that there is three acts."

"Specificity creates the appearance of authority. Picking page 12 sounds more researched than around page 10, which is what most people say is around the 10 minute mark. Page 12 sounds specific and it kind of gives it a bit of an authority."

"The biggest criticism that I've heard from the pro writers about these gurus is that these are all great tools of analysis. They're not necessarily good tools for content creation. You are a screenwriter, you're looking at a blank page and you're like, you know what? I'm going to pick up this book and it's going to tell me how to write this story."