“Which Lie Did I Tell” is a classic Hollywood book written by screenwriter William Goldman in which he talks about how he became a leper in Hollywood.  The reason was that he had written a ‘stinker’ of a movie that lost the producer money.  You do not want to write a stinker.

There is one big problem beginning writers have when they sit down to draft their first screenplay – story.  Now, there are many finite elements that go into crafting a good story, but what I want to address here is choosing story or more specifically, which story do you tell?.

I recently critiqued a script that started out telling a slow yet intriguing story about salesmen.  I thought for fifty pages we were being set up for some kind of intriguing tale like Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross, but around the half-way mark, the writer suddenly veered off into a completely different direction to a world of horror.  It seemed like there were two stories being smooshed together. 

Whenever I say this to writers, their immediate question is “Why can’t I do both?”.  Let me first start by explaining that in this example, the two stories were only loosely linked.  It was as if they chopped off the top half of an apple tree and grafted it onto the trunk of a peach tree hoping it would grow into an orange tree.  The set up in the first half wasn’t paid off in the third act and it wasn’t fully explained how the world we were thrown into in the second half was inextricably linked to the world in the first.  The two worlds were so far apart that it didn’t seem likely the two could be reconciled.

Another script I reviewed had the same problem.  The writer was attempting to pull us through a journey in two places at once, which could prove to be interesting, however, there was too much sidetracking into the details and rules of the parallel universe.  The crux of the story was in the relationship between the two lovers separated by tragedy, yet the writer grew fascinated by this other world and got lost in it. 

A third script I reviewed started out telling the story of revenge and ended up being a story of corruption.  Only the likes of Steinbeck can get away with this.  And in a book as long as East of Eden, you can forgive his minor transgression. 

At the core of all three of these examples was one problem: Which story do I tell? 

It was clear that the writer of each script hadn’t clearly mapped out their stories and simply sat down to an empty Final Draft page and started typing.  They let their fingers do the walking and, without a roadmap, they got lost. 

This is fine to do when exploring the world and the characters, but you waste a lot of time and energy this way.  Chances are you fall in love with the words on the page and can’t see that there are any problems with the structure so you’re also less inclined to want to change it even when you should.  You fool yourself into believing you’ve finished the script because you have 110 pages, so when someone tells you to start over, you think “I’ll just tweak it” and then you end up with a prettier mess. 

What do you do when someone says you have two stories?  

The first option is to separate the two and write two scripts.  If you’re dead set on keeping the two together, figure out how they intertwine.  The true story typically lies somewhere between the two.  Figure out what your core concept is first and then take a hard look at your script.  Are these two stories necessary to tell this one story?  If so, then trim the fat from both stories and forge them together so that there is no way they can be torn apart.  But make it real.  Don’t try grafting them together to make an orange tree.

All movies are about ONE thing with a subplot or B story related to the core concept and tied to the main story.  They are not two separate stories.  Even fragmented movies like CRASH or Pulp Fiction appear to tell more than one story, but they don’t.  Films are about one core concept, one theme, one story.  Find it and tell it well.