Broken Frontier

We’re at the point now where the story really takes off. At least, where it really should take off. Unfortunately, for many storytellers, this is also the point where the sweet appeal of the first two sequences suddenly turns sour. Think of it like a road trip. The first part is the most exciting. Packing and filling the car up with gas and hitting the road and finally watching the back of the City Limits disappear in your rear-view mirror. But then you are faced with all those miles to drive. When you were a kid, this is likely the first point in the trip where you asked, “When are we going to get there?”

Consider carefully, then, why you asked such a question. Because you were bored. The destination had become the most important thing in your mind. The journey to get there thus became a hindrance. This is exactly what we want to avoid in our storytelling. We need to make the journey (seem like) the most important part. That way, the destination will really be the climax that it should. This is why the next four sequences must be created so carefully.

I should also point out that this is where the sequence approach to writing really helps. Using another method, such as the three-act model, the next 60 pages -- Act Two -- present themselves as a monstrous block of blank pages. The most common side effect from using that technique is that the writer runs out of material long before they get to the third act. This is what is known as “running into the wall.” And that’s a pretty apt description. I’ve run into the wall many times and it doesn’t feel good. Sometimes, in fact, the whole story can be wrecked.

The sequence method, however, breaks those 60 pages down into four sections of 15 pages each. This method further defines those sections by their purpose: to answer the dramatic question. Each of these sequences, therefore, represents an attempt by the Protagonist to answer the dramatic question -- to solve the problem, so to speak. What keeps the story interesting, of course, is that most of these attempts not only fail to solve the problem, but they actually complicate it as well.

Thus, Sequence C becomes the first attempt to solve the problem. As Paul Gulino mentions in his book on this method, because humans are what they are, this first attempt is going to be the easiest. At least, that’s what the Protagonist thinks.

Gulino uses Midnight Run to illustrate a good example of Sequence C and I’m inclined to agree with him that it is one of the best. In the movie, a bounty hunter (played by Robert De Niro) is hired to find a white collar criminal (played by Charles Grodin) and bring him back to Los Angeles before his trial. The problem is that the Mafia doesn’t want the criminal to appear at the trial and so they are looking for him, too. The dramatic question for the movie is: “Will the bounty hunter be able to catch the white collar criminal and return him to L.A. before his trial?” Simple enough.

And, in fact, the movie surprises us when the bounty hunter actually catches the criminal right off the bat. The problem is that the white collar criminal can’t fly on a plane and they are in New York. So the bounty hunter has to use a different method to get the criminal back to L.A. He chooses to take him on the train and Sequence C follows this action, from the plane to the train.

Unfortunately for the bounty hunter (but fortunately for the story), the Mafia interrupts the train trip, forcing the bounty hunter to move on to a different form of transportation. Each sequence gets increasingly more complex as the bounty hunter exhausts almost every form of transportation in his attempt to return the criminal to L.A.

I hope you can see that this method also exploits the ever-shortening attention spans of most audiences. We have a sense that the story is really moving on and that lots of things are happening. We are therefore prevented from thinking about the destination and are much more equipped to enjoy the journey.

In Toy Story (our Sequence B example), Woody’s first attempt to answer the dramatic question (“Will Woody be able to regain his position as Andy’s favorite toy?”) is to attack Buzz, sending him out the window. For a moment, Woody’s problem seems solved because Buzz is now gone. But the complication is that everyone now hates Woody because of what he did to Buzz, so now he must deal with the Buzz issue in a different way. The first thing he has to do is to go get Buzz back, which will lead to further complications, as we will soon see.

Take a look at a few of your favorite films and see if you can identify the first attempt to answer the dramatic question. If it doesn’t seem to be an attempt to answer the dramatic question, you may not have formulated the correct D.Q. When you’ve got a few, share them in the Forum.

Until next time, keep writing.

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For those of you both inclined and in the financial position to do so, I highly recommend the purchase of the two best books about the sequence approach to screenwriting: Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, by Paul Gulino, and The Tools of Screenwriting, A Writer’s Guide to the Craft and Elements of a Screenplay, by David Howard.