The conventional wisdom about how to keep a screenplay moving along is to cram it full of conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict. Conflict in every scene. Well, not only is this nearly impossible, it’s also misleading. What keeps a screenplay moving along is not conflict, but tension. Conflict is two forces in opposition: two people arguing, someone trying to overcome racial adversity, someone running for her life from an axe murderer. Tension is simply this: The question of what happens next.
My fiction writing teacher, Justin Cronin (PEN Hemingway Award-winning author of Mary and O’Neil) taught me that a novel needs to always hold some question for the reader, or else he’ll have no reason to turn the page. His advice is the basis for my definition of tension in a screenplay.
Let me preface my explanation with this statement: The key to tension is not a tight plot with a lot of twists and reversals; it’s creating characters about which the audience cares deeply. Once you get your audience to care about what happens to your characters, you have them for the long run. Make your characters real. Make them flawed, complex, and vulnerable.
That’s not an easy task, but it should be the first one you tackle when building any story. People care about people, not stories. That’s why we use personification when we write stories about animals. We make the animals like people so that we’ll care about what happens to them and so that we’ll understand them. (Of course, if you’re an animal lover, you probably care what happens to animals anyway, but you get the point.)
The question that creates tension in your screenplay should be simple and important. Will Sheriff Brody kill the shark, or will the shark eat him? Will Dorothy get out of Oz and back to her family in Kansas? Will Marty McFly get back to the present? Can Royal Tenenbaum find redemption and reunite the family he split up? The question doesn’t have to be life-or-death, especially in comedy, but it has to be worth spending two hours to find out the answer.
The problem with having conflict in every scene is that you end up writing a series of arguments and fights. Everyone is mad at everyone else for one reason or another. No subject or transgression is too small for a conflict. This can make the story, and more likely the characters, annoying.
Also, constant conflict can lose its effectiveness. Sure, sometimes relentless action and confrontation can enthrall an audience, but oftentimes you can pack more of a punch with an ebb and flow. When things get quiet-- too quiet, as the saying goes-- that’s when the audience really gets nervous.
If you’ve got your tension established, you can create riveting scenes that would otherwise be mundane. For example, your main character, Rick, is at his wit’s end at his job. He feels trapped. He buys a gun. Is he going to kill himself? Is he going to kill someone else? He takes the gun to work. It’s in his briefcase. We see the briefcase sitting on his desk.
Rick’s boss comes in and gives him an assignment. The scene consists of a boss giving an assignment to his employee, supplying all of the pertinent details to the project and giving him a deadline. Boring stuff. No conflict. But we are leaning forward in our seats because all we can think about is what’s in the briefcase.
READ MORE...by Dave Terrusohttp://www.absolutewrite.com/screenwriting/tension.htm
Copyright © 1998-2007 Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
By day, Dave Terruso is a mild-mannered editor at a standards publisher. By night, he's a screenwriter/ novelist/ actor/ director/ singer-songwriter who loves separating things by slashes and hyphens. Dave is currently a member of the Philadelphia-based sketch comedy troupe Animosity Pierre. He's working on his third spec script, a romantic comedy set on a college campus.
