The first script I wrote after I moved to LA - my second ever completed script - was an action flick about a former henchlady for the mob who was in witness protection. She had to get from one part of town to the other withing a matter of hours, but she was coincidentally being chased by another henchman for her former boss as well as a couple of cops for no apparent reason.
I'd love to go back in time and give myself notes. Instead I sent the script to a contact who sent it around his management firm where it was universally panned. So I blew that opportunity. On the upside I learned some things about my strengths and weaknesses and that I was nowhere near ready for a professional writing career.
There were a lot of things wrong with that script, but the biggest problem was my lack of a force propelling the story forward. I knew the beginning and I knew the ending and I figure I needed some fights in between. So I made them.
Story get dull? Make a fight happen. My protagonist stumbled on some cops and decided to beat them up for a really stupid reason. Then later on the story was getting dull again so I decided I should have a car chase.
Basically I came up with a story without any depth and made up fight scenes to make sure it was long enough to qualify as a feature.
I learned not to do that anymore.
Instead, I let the story guide the events. A character is shot and needs to get to DC to stop a government conspiracy. The other day I was thinking, I don't have enough story here. I need some fight scenes. And then I went, nooooo don't do that, dumbass.
Think. Where would this story go if they were real people?
A character is shot. What would a person do if they were shot? They go to the hospital. So my character goes to the hospital, the bad guys track him there, he has to get out of it because he still needs to make it to DC.
This seems like common sense, but it's amazing to me how I didn't think of it when I was writing my ill-fated second screenplay.
Events have to push the characters to make decisions and the story comes out of those decisions. You cannot put a bunch of scenes together and make a story.
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