The Scriptwriting Idea

At first glance, this may seem like the easiest part of scriptwriting, the
beautiful seed motivating you to start writing in the first place. But before
pen hits paper or finger hits key, there are important considerations to make:

First, can you pitch it?

Not necessarily in a room, at a person, but more generally: how concisely

can you get your idea across?
This is important for two key reasons:

 The clearer the idea, the better it will translate to the page.
If explaining your idea on paper or to a friend takes you down multiple
conceptual cul-de-sacs and has you constantly backtracking to clarify key
details, the likelihood is the idea isn’t ‘ready’ yet.

 Down the line, that pitch, that logline (a pithy sentence capturing the
story) or treatment (a few pages outlining story, character and tone),
might be the difference between getting your script read and getting
nothing.
This is why so much stock is placed in ‘high-concept’ ideas (i.e. stories in
which the draw is the premise, rather than character, execution, theme, tone
and so on.) It’s the difference between STAR WARS and PATERSON).
Essentially, it’s far easier to break down a high-concept idea than it is a
character piece.
This isn’t to say that your rumination on the complexities of life as an out-of-
work furniture salesman needs shelving, just that it becomes all the more
important to nail down the specifics of the idea ahead of time.

Know Your Story

There’s that ubiquitous quote that’s often attributed to Mark Twain:

Write what you know.
But it’s often taken a little too literally, confining writers to their own
experiences and potentially hampering imagination. It’s perhaps better to
look at it the other way around: know your story.
You can be as sure as anything about that core premise, about the top-level
bureaucrat who discovers an underhand government scheme to launder
money through state-run daycares, but if you’re hazy on:

 the way she speaks

 where she’s come from
 her backstory before the film starts
 why she does what she does
 whether people like her
 whether she’s lonely
 what her innermost turmoil is
 how the world works
 what type of government it is
 why they chose daycares
 what the side effects of this madcap scheme might be…
…even if these things are never directly stated… that blank sheet of paper
might as well be a brick wall.

Know your story. Know your world inside and out, even the extraneous
details you think no-one will care about, and writing it becomes ten times
easier.
 

Tailoring the Scriptwriting Idea

So you know your world; you know your characters; you know your story.
This is where we hit the broader considerations:

 Who’s this story for?

 What’s it trying to say?
 What’s the best way of telling it?
 
Who’s it for?

It’s easy to dismiss the first of these as sliding on that cold, intellectually-
inhibiting ‘marketing hat’, but there’s more to it than that.

It’s about tone and execution.

Take a simple premise: A law enforcement recruit faces internal prejudice as
she takes on the first make-or-break case of her career.

That sentence applies just as well to ZOOTOPIA as it does SICARIO.

It’s an exaggerated example, but the point is that the same base story can be
told a million different ways for a million different people, and if you
don’t decide which you’re going for, your script is doomed to meander
aimlessly.
Plus, actually putting that marketing hat on for a moment, it’s essential to
know your audience.
Is your film about once-successful businessmen struggling to come to terms
with middle-age and the rise of younger, more determined competition likely
to appeal to teenagers? Perhaps not, so that extended gross-out comedy scene
in the romantic subplot that could alienate an older viewer is probably worth
leaving out.

Again, an exaggeration, but it illustrates the point: deciding who we’re

aiming at affects the course of the story itself.

As Robert McKee puts it: