THE HIDDEN STORY ARC. A WRITING LESSON

Sometime in the spring of this year, I started a new screenplay. It was about a young man named Jeremy Sand, who invented an AI program to get this masters at  MIT. This program turned out to have amazing potential as a business tool.

But Jeremy’s foundational notes were stolen from him before he left school by his roommate. His roommate, who was into gaming, used it to wangle a great job in New York.

Meanwhile, Jeremy, comes back home to New York, where he finds out that his father, Jordan Sand, who he always thought was a venture capitalist, is actually an industrial spy who uses all kinds of clever scams to extort information from one company and sell it to another.

Jeremy, upon finding out about this, becomes determined to help his dad get out of the spy business and help him develop his AI program into a saleable product.

Jeremy also tells his dad about the stolen data. And now the dad will use all of his industrial spy skills to get the data back from the company that has it.

There is a lot of layering and character development in this story, which all took about 200 pages to chronicle. But when I got there, I thought “Well, where does it go from here?”

And here’s the lesson.

I can take or leave this idea, because I brought this all on myself by not planning out the entire project beforehand. I was more interested in writing what was basically a stream of consciousness story. And, probably for the first time in all the (14) screenplays I had written, I realized that this story would only resolve itself in a very benign way, which would make it a poor drama.

So I went and edited out about 60 pages, and then put it aside, while I simply think about how this can be achieved.

Normally I wouldn’t mind painting myself into a corner, because mostly I am writing these things as brain exercises to ward off senility or whatever else can happen as I age.

But the moral of this post is that sometimes you will write something that doesn’t have a natural story arc. When this happens you have two choices. 1. Scrap it and move on to another project. Or 2. Be stubborn and figure out where the story arc is hiding.

Being stubborn by nature, I am choosing the second option. Because I think the story and the characters are interesting., And I also believe there is an arc there. It’s just hidden somewhere in the back of my mind.

So on we go.