“Everything I write is in three acts, and I actually start with three pieces of paper. I have some notion of where each act begins and ends before I get to this stage. I know my people and I know roughly about how many scenes each act should be. I start from the beginning and end of an act, working forwards and backwards toward the middle. I know that somewhere there’s going to be a moment of this, a moment of that, and it’s like a matrix. I don’t work with cards, just one page per act. When I finish three acts, I page budget. I want to know I can tell the story in a distance that’s appropriate. And I’m rarely more than ten pages off.”
– Ron Bass (Rain Man, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Stepmom, Snow Falling on Cedars)
This is EXACTLY how I used to work and it reaped numerous finished scripts and very little roadblocks. Best of all, it structured everything out nicely WITHOUT having everything spelled out so that a certain amount of surprise and discovery could occur during the first draft creation.
Notecards and outlining were always slow poison for my scripts.
This SOUNDS very much like what Ron Bass had to say in "# 26. Outling Your Story" in Karl Iglesias' "The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters" on pages 51-52.
Now if Ron AND Jeff are doin' it, it must have some merrit to it.
Anyway, this approach sounds like a VERY good one. This whole "page budgeting" thang sounds like a real time saver too. My last two scripts came in at 184 and 281 pages, BUT I did manage to get them down to 118 and 114 pages.
Anyway, love hearing from the pros, Scott. And I've read Karl's book so many times the cover jacket is curling on the ends.
- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA
Uh… whatever Bass or anyone else calls this, it's OUTLINING.
Bass has talked about his method in different interviews over the yrs. It always sounds to me like he knows quite a lot about what happens in his stories before he starts writing.
Not having heard Mr. Bass in any interviews, I merely was gleaning from this soundbyte that this process was primarily rooted in structural issues and not actually outlining scene by scene. More of a "big picture" approach.
If he is speaking of traditional outlining, then I, of course, uh, stand corrected.