You’ve written a screenplay before, maybe even a few. Unfortunately, no one snapped it up and turned it into the Hollywood movie you were hoping for. What did you do wrong? All your friends said it was great. Well, chances are your script was doomed from the start because you didn’t really figure out your plot and characters before you started writing. So here’s how you create an amazing outline that will make your script get people’s attention.
First of all, you need to make a real outline. Not a few notes jotted on a napkin. Plan on spending a month taking your idea for a movie and plotting out the action beats according to the usual formulas you can find in any screenwriting book. Say your idea is — and I’m making this silly one up off the top of my head — “A crusty old man who doesn’t like kids gets into a fender bender and is sentenced to be a youth soccer coach.” Fine, what are the three acts? We know that he’s in front of the judge getting his crazy sentence at the first-act break. That’s around page 30. So up till then we need to set up the character, show the audience his world, get him into that car accident, and get him to court.
Act two is going to be about the hilarious trials and tribulations of the soccer games and other subplots going on in his life. You can figure all that out. But the second-act break is going to be the big setback that puts him back to the way he was before he had this journey (maybe the sentence is up and he abandons the kids before the big game). Then act three is your finale and resolution. So far so good.
But here’s the secret that’s going to make this whole thing sing. Now you’re going to write a separate document that just deals with character. Write a paragraph about who this guy is, and most important, what does he want. All great protagonists have to want something. In our story, the old coot wants to be left alone. Now we need to know what does he need. What he wants is where he starts off; what he needs is what he learns. So our guy needs to learn is that no man is an island, he needs people in his life. And you can figure out the back story that made him this way.
Now write out all the steps to get from A to Z. He starts off wanting to be left alone. At some point he makes his first realization that he cares about these kids. And so on. At the second-act break he falls back to his old self, but then in the finale, he reaches his final epiphany.
Once you have your character’s emotional journey, it’s time to synthesize your two documents. Put the beats of the emotional journey onto the plot points. This where all screenplays fall down. You have the scene where he’s coaching his first game, and you know he’s got to start caring here, but you don’t synthesize the two elements. Maybe your first draft had him watching the game with a tear in his eye. Wrong! Character is revealed through action! Maybe instead he sees the weak-player kid get picked on and despite himself he jumps in to defend the kid. Feeling sorry for him, he puts him in the game, but the kid blows the big play and they lose. Now the rest of the team is even madder at the kid and the old man feels responsible, so he takes him out for ice cream. They get to talking, the guy is opening up, and the young kid asks the man about his wife — and here we learn how she died. Then the kid says something innocent like, “You must be really lonely.” And boom, you’ve got a character moment through action.
Lather, rinse, repeat.