Inspiration for the Screenplay Rewrite

I’m currently in the planning stages of launching into another draft of my vampire script, ‘Nightfall’. With a strong performance in both years of the Project Greenlight Australia competition, and plenty of positive and constructive feedback, I continue to work with this script in the hope of finally getting it to a saleable condition.

The good thing is that every time I read the script, I identify improvements to be made. And I’m not talking about changing a line here or there either. This latest rewrite (draft #8) promises to be one of the biggest and most radical overhauls as I am returning to the basic scene structures, characters and story arcs to recraft the script from the bottom up.

Steal From the Masters

A wise man once said “Good writers copy, great writers steal.”

When looking at how I could improve the basic structure of the screenplay, I looked at the classic story archetypes that best approximated what I was hoping to achieve. After all, why reinvent the wheel if someone had already defined the best structure for a romantic tragedy?

Most literary critics agree that there are only seven basic plots throughout all literature and that every piece of fiction is a permutation of one or more of these. If you would like to read more about the classic plots and the archetypes behind them, you could do worse than read Christopher Booker’s superb “The Seven Basic Plots”.

It was this idea that someone will have written my plot before me, and probably done a better job, that set me to thinking about exactly what the optimum structure would be for my screenplay. The realisation that ‘Nightfall’ was in fact a modern twist on Romeo and Juliet inspired me to look closer at the elements of the Shakespeare play to find inspiration for this latest rewrite.

A Shakespearean Screenplay

I started this preparation by mapping out Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet”, with Blake Snyder’s beat sheet approach to movies. Although I could just as easily sat down with the original text, by analysing the screenplay, I could check the timings and page numbers to monitor where key scenes fell. I’m sure it won’t surprise many of you to find that “Romeo and Juliet” falls quite neatly into the same screenwriting structure we’ve all come to know.

The three acts are clearly delineated with a major midpoint that dramatically changes the narrative direction in a way most of us could only wish for. The distinct separation between the hope of the first half and the tragedy of the second half, coupled with how the major events easily fall in exactly the spots every scriptwriting book would suggest, tells me that Shakespeare was the Elizabethan equivalent of Sid Field!

Applying the Lessons

Taking this “Romeo and Juliet” beat sheet, I began moving my scene structure around to match. This was scary, as key scenes that I had placed towards the end of Act 2 were now being shifted to just after the Act 1 catalyst. The scene I had pinned to my midpoint through all previous seven drafts suddenly found itself shoved back later into Act 2 with a whole new sequence becoming necessary to take its place. One poor character that originally had been a loose end in the structure suddenly found new life in death, as he inherited the midpoint position.

Scary as all this was, tearing the old structure apart and reassembling it with scenes now butting up against completely different neighbours has caused some fantastic creativity. Linking these scenes together in a new order created a lot of creative challenges, and they in turn have fed further character refinements, dialogue changes and so on.

Whether the final draft will still match the “Romeo and Juliet” structure so closely I can’t say. The script will eventually dictate how it wants to flow and I have to mould it into its new form, not restrict it in a structural straight-jacket. But the process of analysing classic story structure in this way has helped the creative process immeasurably and has jump-started this draft in a way that has me very excited.

Everyone has different approaches to rewriting their screenplays. Let me know how you manage rewrites.