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Chapter 3

Writing the

Story Outline:

From Vision to Marketplace

I write outlines a lot. Not always scene by scene, but the basic story points.

— Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost, Stuart Little 2)

AS A PLAYWRIGHT and short story writer, I never wrote story outlines. Knowing now all I have learned from writing screenplays where structure is crucial, I would first write an outline before writing any narrative form.

Why? There are two reasons: it helps to nail the structure of the story, and it is an excellent marketing tool. It lets the buyer know in three to five pages exactly what the story is. Writing the list of chapters in a book serves roughly the same purpose. So whether submitting a book proposal to an agent or publisher or trying to sell a movie idea, writing the story outline helps to move the writer from vision to the marketplace.

Working in Hollywood gave me the opportunity to learn how to write story outlines because they are required to pitch or tell your story to studio or television executives. Remember that in the beginning storytelling was primarily verbal, oral traditions handed down from one fireside to another. This tradition is alive and well in Hollywood.

Not many know the origin of the word “pitch” but it might help to understand how important it is. The story goes that during the Spanish Inquisition, Torquemada would tell imprisoned playwrights that if they could interest him in an idea, he would let them live long enough to write it. If not, they were dropped into a large vat of boiling tar, hence the term “pitch.” So never underestimate the value of a well-executed pitch!

When I first came to Hollywood as a New York playwright, I was invited to pitch stories to executives. They would ask if I had a story outline to leave with them. You rarely pitch to the person who has the power to green light the project, but to someone lower on the totem pole. They, in turn, go and pitch to their boss. Hence, it helps them — and you — if they have a concise and clear outline to refer to when they in turn tell your story to the powers that be.

In olden days in Hollywood, studio heads such as Louis B. Mayer would say, “Just tell me the story” — not let me read the story. The fact is, most Hollywood execs do not like to read. Jack Warner (Warner Brothers) once said, “I would rather take a fifty- mile hike than crawl through a book.” Sam Goldwyn (MGM) remarked, “I read part of it all the way through.”

Early on, I actually received a rejection letter from one of the top three talent agencies in Los Angeles which stated, “I read your title page and don’t feel it’s right for us.” Title page means simply the title of the screenplay and my name! (Hollywood is not for the faint of heart!)

No sensible architect would embark on building a house before spending ample time on a blueprint. Writing a story outline provides the necessary blueprint for building story.

Once I served as a writing consultant for a new client’s feature screenplay and had to tell him to cut the first forty pages, as his story did not really begin until page forty-one! Had he spent time on his outline, this could easily have been avoided.

Naturally, some things may change when you are in the process of writing your narrative. No outline is written in stone, though it serves as the foundation for your story. By writing and re-writing your outline, the story structure becomes solid. This way when you go to MSS or script, you can save a lot of time and grief in re-writing.

When first asked for an outline by a studio development person, I asked if they had a sample so I would know the correct form to follow. “There’s no special form,” I was told, so I made up my own. My students and clients have found this a useful sample, but feel free to create your own, if you wish.

LOVE AND DEATH IN TUSCANY

by

Catherine Ann Jones

(based on the novel by Isabelle Holland)

THE SETTING

Italy, the seventies

THE CHARACTERS

PHOEBE, 30s, from Alabama now living in Italy, eccentric free spirit

MEG, 15, her rebellious daughter

COTTON, 30s, artist and friend

PETER SMITH, 40s, English, irresponsible but charming lover of Phoebe, a classical scholar who earns his living by writing porn novels

ALAN GRANT, 40s, Meg’s father now an Anglican priest

SYLVIA, 50s, wealthy American who owns a 15th- century castle, outrageous and wonderful

THE THEME

A character-driven drama about love and death. A confrontation between spiritual and human love.

THE STORY

PHOEBE, an extraordinary woman who lives by her heart and no rules, makes a meager living as a tour guide in Tuscany. She has just learned that she will die within six months to a year. Concerned about her illegitimate daughter, MEG, 15, she decides to reveal who the father is. She contacts him and has him come to meet the daughter he never knew existed until now.

ALAN, now a priest, is troubled by doubts about his calling which are further challenged when he reunites with Phoebe — whom he refers to as a force of nature — and discovers parenthood in his confrontational relationship with Meg.

MEG is at that awkward stage, trying to discover who she is. How to react to a father you thought was dead and who never knew he even had a daughter? Then when you learn your mother is dying, anger is easier somehow.

PETER, Phoebe’s charming but rather helpless lover has an alcohol problem and is not a suitable candidate for fatherhood.

COTTON, gay and a close friend of Phoebe’s. Ever since she can remember, Meg has been in love with him. She wants to remain with Cotton rather than her unknown father, which only intensifies the conflict between her eccentric, unpredictable mother and herself.

SYLVIA, outrageous, generous, and perceptive, is a close friend. Five marriages later, Sylvia lives in a 15th-century castle and surrounds herself with only interesting people. “Who but Phoebe could teach us that death is just another part of living?”

As you can see, this outline is only one page in length. It is for a feature screenplay or two-hour television movie. Later I did a fifteen-page treatment of the same project. A one-pager is sometimes useful as it concisely tells your story, and helps you focus the story, as well as serve when trying to market it. It offers a glimpse 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, Pa’s son, Dave’s uncle

HOYT, Dave’s father

ELMER HULL, 70s, lives next to Hoyt’s boarding house

HATTIE HULL, 60s, Elmer’s bossy wife

PITTER-PAT, Elmer’s pet rooster

THE STORY

Three years after his mother’s death and feeling overworked and betrayed by his emotionally distant, rural grandparents, DAVE, 12, runs away to the city to find his father. JIMMI, 11, a tomboy neighbor, follows him. Together, in a perilous adventure through the Georgia mountains, a scrape with a mountain lion, and chance encounter with BESSIE, an eccentric yet wise mountain medicine woman, Dave arrives at the city for the first time in his life. He learns a valuable lesson from ELMER HULL, an elderly black man who loves a pet rooster more than anything. Finally, Dave manages to track down HOYT, his father, only to make the sad discovery that his father is a thief and the one — not his grandparents — who betrayed him by selling his mother’s things.

Returning to Bessie just in time to save her life from JEWEL ED, Bessie’s no good drunken son who has returned to steal his mother’s hidden savings, Dave grows up fast. Discovering Bessie’s quilt patched from bits of the people she has loved (Jewel Ed and Dave among others); Dave asks if he can stay with her. Bessie, truly wise, says he belongs with his grandparents who love and miss him, even though they “ain’t the kind to make a big show of how they feel.”

The truth about the past helps Dave discover himself and realize that the grandparents he left behind are his “home” after all. Dave returns home just in time for Thanksgiving.

Notice also that there is plenty of space on the page, not overly crowded, which makes it all the easier to read. A writer’s job in writing the marketing or selling story outline is to make reading it as easy as possible. It should have the same flow a good movie has. Remember that the agent or editor you are submitting your outline to has to plow through dozens of such outlines or proposals daily. Don’t give him an excuse to put yours down before reading to the end.

What will make one story outline stand out above all the rest?