As I make my way through a late-stage read through,  I’m happy to find far fewer calamities in need of exorbitant time and attention to remedy. Hopefully this is more indicative of progress than self-delusion. Time will tell. I am, however, running into some anomalies that may threaten my story integrity.

I’m reading a lot of cool scenes and sequences that play out just the way I envisioned them in the earlier days of developing this concept. There were always certain things that I wanted to happen a certain way. Essentially I had several ends in mind, and then went to work constructing the means, as well as the plot points to bridge them together. I’d always assumed that this is how stories were crafted, but could I have been mistaken about this?

Just today, I watched an interview with Tarantino in which he intimated that, in early drafts, he doesn’t tend to write with a definite ending in mind and work backwards. He starts with the characters, the world, and the situation. As these elements develop, he lets them tell him where they’re going and how they’ll get there. Early in the process of penning The Hateful 8,  he didn’t know who’d poisoned the coffee!

I realize that this free-hand, organic method of story creation is just his particular style, and there are as many different ways to do this as there are writers, but hearing his approach and reading my own work got me to thinking…

Am I sacrificing the most natural and creatively consistent progression of my plot and arcs of my characters for the sake of hitting certain beats the way I originally wanted? Many of the major events and actions of the story were conceived of (and outright decided) before I’d really fleshed out my characters and the rules governing their universe, and my script may be suffering for it.

I have several instances of characters making mistakes that they might be too mature within the narrative to make, saying things that perhaps they should know better than to say, and taking action that seems to somehow not fit into the context of the movie.

So, my plan at this point is to do a pass with only this “filter” in mind, to make an effort to really evaluate the characters and setting I’ve created, and consider whether maybe they’re telling me to go a different direction with them than what I had preconceived. I believe that by ironing out some of these beats, and coming out of this with something more congruous, I can make for a more satisfying read (and watch!).

How about you? How do you go about plotting out your story? Let me know below!