Facing the next draft - in the middle of one myself so thought i'd share this

 
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Facing The Next Draft

Creating and Using Motifs

 
 


Paul Henreid and Bette Davis initiate a recurring visual motif in Now, Voyager

We all know the feeling. You've put in months of effort and completed a draft of a screenplay. It's good, but you know it's not finished. It'll take at least one more draft - maybe more - to really make it shine.

But what are the right changes - the ones which will make the story better, which won't undermine it and send you into a spiral of fruitless rewrites?

Here's a tip which should help you improve your next draft. First of all, though, the golden rule when you've finished a long, demanding piece of work:

Don't do anything!

When you've finished your script, leave it alone for a while. Go and do something else, preferably something unrelated to writing. If you start work on a new draft immediately you may become stale, or even start resenting the idea of working on your own story.

Then, when you do go back to your script:

Think about motifs.

Many budding writers overlook the use of recurrent motifs, but they're a crucial screenwriting tool - a powerful way of creating cohesion and giving stories an emotional pay-off which will stay with the audience long after it's left the cinema.

And when producers read a script with well-worked motifs, they know that its writer has studied the craft of screenwriting and mastered its special demands.

What is a motif?

A motif could be a visual image, a scrap of dialogue or even a sound which is repeated through a story, taking on more resonance as the narrative progresses and ideally playing a large part in its climax, when it has become charged with unexpected meaning.

Motifs can be a great way of giving a story cohesion, creating emotional depth and allowing the audience to feel that it is piecing the story together itself, rather than passively receiving it.

A visual motif in action.

Cigarettes are a motif in the classic romantic melodrama Now, Voyager (1942), scripted by Casey Robinson. When they first meet, Paul Henreid gallantly lights Bette Davis' cigarette. Later, when they know each other better, he famously puts two cigarettes to his lips, lights them both, and passes one to her.

This gesture comes to symbolise their growing intimacy (and stands in for any more physical expression of their relationship). At the end of the film, when he repeats the gesture one last time, it has taken on a new poignancy - as a symbolic farewell to their affair.

Interestingly, Davis and Henreid never refer directly to the cigarettes - they're shown as something which the couple understands mutually, on an unspoken level. Visual motifs gain from this unvoiced quality, becoming a kind of signal passing directly from the film-makers to the audience.

Applying the idea.

Even if you weren't conscious of the device when you wrote your first draft, your script will almost certainly contain sounds, images or other things which could become motifs. Go through your script again, looking for these elements and thinking about how they could be made to recur in a significant way through the narrative.

Clearly, they must emerge naturally from the story and carry their intended meaning in a believable way - unless you're deliberately going for an absurdist effect, when an odd or unlikely motif is justified.

In Now, Voyager Bette Davis is characterised as a frumpy and repressed spinster, the archetypal "maiden aunt" who blossoms in the course of the story. In that era, smoking could seem sexy and symbolise a woman's growing emancipation - much less credible now that we know about tobacco's health impacts. What could substitute for cigarettes as a motif in a contemporary love story?

Visual Story-telling.

Thinking about motifs in screenplays is a useful exercise, not only because it can strengthen your narrative but also because it tends to focus you on the visual, non-verbal sides of story-telling. Have fun with it!

Please feel free to copy this item into your blogs or websites. All we ask is that you link to our site at www.euroscript.co.uk and credit the author - Ian Long.