The Way of Story. Catherine Ann Jones
of what your story is, its style and major theme, as well as introduces your main characters. Just list the major characters, not all. Usually, my outlines are three to five pages in order to further delineate the story beats. Sometimes producers request longer outlines, called film treatments, so there will be no surprises when the script is finally written.
Now let us examine more closely what should be in the story outline, beginning first with the title of your story. A good title should be easy to remember and not too long. It should also provide a good clue to what your story is about. I have seen good films fade away because of a poor title. For instance, a wonderful film which stars Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti, Running on Empty (1988), came and went rather quickly. I think it was because of the title. No one could remember it, even after seeing the film. I heard people say that they saw this great film and wanted to recommend it to their friends — only they couldn’t remember the title! Also it is a puzzle as to what kind of story you will be seeing. “Running on Empty” — a racing movie? Many titles refer to the main character, such as Schindler’s List, Thelma and Louise, Lawrence of Arabia, Capote, and Driving Miss Daisy. Driving Miss Daisy not only introduces the main character but also the relationship of the main characters as well as the theme of the story. Not bad in just three words! Another Oscar winner, too.
A good title is important for the writer as well as the marketplace, because it helps the writer to focus the story. Many stories fail because they ramble all over the place, and it’s never really clear what the story is or even whose story it is. That is, who are the main character and main characters whose point of view is being explored? If it’s your first project, don’t try and put five stories into this one. One is quite sufficient.
Next comes the setting of the story. The world of your story is often the hook that draws the reader or audience in, right from the start. In the outline example given above, Italy is the world of the story. So the outline will describe luscious shots of the locale, drawing the audience in. Who wouldn’t want a holiday in Tuscany for the price of a movie ticket!
Then the main characters are introduced. The outline should be as concise as possible and written in shorthand, not necessarily in complete sentences. Forget English 101. Simply list your main characters in CAPS then their ages and a few words describing each and the relationship of each to the other main characters. Also CAP the name of your characters when they are first introduced in the script.
The Story is where you reveal the significant beats of your story. This should arise from character so that it will be a character-driven story. Not what happens but how and why he does what he does and how his actions transform him and those around him. This carries more weight and is certainly more interesting. This is so because it allows the reader or audience to identify with someone, and in this way, enter the story.
The Theme is next. Sometimes you may not know what your story is about until you complete a first draft. If you know already, well and good. The theme is about love and death in Love and Death in Tuscany. Theme is different from plot.
Let’s revisit a previously given example to distinguish between plot and theme. Gone with the Wind is not about the Civil War. The War is merely the backdrop or venue of the love story between Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. The theme might be: knowing what you want before it’s too late. Or, to love not an illusion, but what is real.
As I did in the last paragraph of the sample outline, you might wish to add some dialogue if it reveals character or gives a sense of style. Note Sylvia’s line, “Who but Phoebe could teach us that death is just another part of living?” This shows us what kind of character Sylvia is and also reveals the main character, Phoebe, illustrates both theme and story, as does the title, Love and Death in Tuscany. Hence, in a one-page outline, everything is more or less known. Outlines should be as clear and simple as possible as to the genre of the story (drama), problem (Meg’s coping with meeting her father for the first time while her mother is dying), and a sense of who the main characters are and their relationships to one another.
Both of the sample outlines are adaptations of another work, usually a novel or book, sometimes a true story, newspaper article, or play. However, the form is the same whether you’re writing an original story or adapting someone else’s.
A passing note on adaptations: Avoid literal adaptations. This is the main mistake writers make when adapting a book into a film. Film is a different medium altogether, a visual medium occurring in the present. What is important here is to serve the essence of the story, if not the literal facts. To quote a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter:
Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material, not the source material itself.
— William Goldman (All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride)
Another Oscar winner, Anthony Minghella (The English Patient) spoke at the Getty Art Museum about adapting the novel Cold Mountain as a film. “The job of art is not to document but to conjure what is more true than what is true. Cold Mountain (the novel) is set in South Carolina but we shot it in Rumania! What has meaning is an emotional truth, not a literal truth.”
I was once hired to adapt a classic novel of Finland, Wolfbride, into a feature screenplay. The challenge was that the novel or novella written by turn-of-the-last-century novelist Aino Kallas — though a wonderful idea — was a bit thin as a story. It was written as a simple fairytale with very few characters. And it was written pre-Freud without any psychological allusions. “The woodcutter lived with his wife,” etc. Also, note that this story about werewolves was not a horror story. Who could resist such a challenge, right? So I tried to tune into the essence of the story about a remarkable — if different — woman who falls in love with a werewolf and is burned at the stake as a witch in seventeenth-century Europe. First, I immersed myself in research of the period, both the history as well as visual images of painters of the period. The paintings of Brueghel were especially helpful. Then I added twenty-five characters to the story and fleshed out the major characters, making them three-dimensional. Adding psychological and erotic layers helped as well. I was inspired by the style of Ingmar Bergman’s art films, long favorites of mine. It is said that Hollywood films are about ordinary people in extraordinary situations while European art films are about extraordinary people in ordinary situations. Wolf bride combines both.
Later when I was flown over to Finland to meet the ancestor of the long deceased novelist Aino Kallas, the director was a bit worried, as I had taken such liberties with this known classic. A luncheon was scheduled by the director for me to meet the ancestor who zealously guarded Kallas’s reputation. It turned out that she was very pleased and even said that the script was faithful to the essence of the story — exactly what I had intended. All breathed a sigh of relief as we settled down to lunch in Helsinki.
So the moral of this example is to take liberty yet serve the story’s essence.
Here’s one more example of a story outline, also from a novel. This one is a family story targeted for Disney Films or Hallmark.
Close to Heaven
by
Catherine Ann Jones
(based on the book by Faye Gibbons)
THE SETTING
Rural Georgia, 1950. Thanksgiving Week.
THE THEME
Home is where people love you.
THE CHARACTERS
DAVE LAWSON, 12
JIMMI, 11, neighbor and tomboy
GRAN & PA, Dave’s rural grandparents
JOE, Dave’s hound dog
BESSIE, 70s, eccentric yet wise mountain woman
JEWEL ED, Bessie’s ne’er-do-well son.
RUBY, Jewel Ed’s woman
WILLARD,