I’m just finishing off decent drafts of two new novels: a thriller and a literary manuscript. Going back and forth between the two doing rewrites, I’ve been thinking about the steps I ask screenwriters to consider when I’m story editing their scripts. Lately, the heightening draft. 

As a story editor, I tend to start off by analyzing the structure of a screenplay. I’m a structure person myself—having found that writers tend to be naturally better at either structure or character. Of course, by the time you finish a script, you need to have both of characters and the structure whipped into shape. (Everything whipped into shape.) But I find very few writers pull off a first draft that’s accomplished in both areas, including myself. 

In my own scripts, I can usually click a decent structure into place early on. It will be far from perfect and the characters will demand it change as they grow more complex. But I like having a rough structure before rewriting the characters—I think it challenges them—and I usually ask the writers I work with to do the same.

Once I have this rough scaffolding, I like to take multiple passes rewriting the characters, taking a first long look at the protagonist before going to work on the secondary characters, each in turn. I find if I can create good secondary characters, they challenge my protagonist to behave in unexpected ways. Supporting characters always want something from the protagonist. (Or they should.) What do they want, and why? Does the protagonist want to give it to them? Why or why not? Is she unable to? Does she want to but can’t? How does their relationship change because of what the protagonist can or doesn’t or won’t deliver?

I go through a punishing number of stages when I do a rewrite (and a story edit; sorry folks). At each pass, I tease out different aspects of a story, looking to refine not just characters but theme and action and detail—and of course, try to force both myself and the writers I work with to cut everything we don’t need. Need having a flexible definition.

Then there’s what I call the heightening draft, making sure the stakes are as high as they can be. That way the characters—mainly the protagonists—have to make crucial choices throughout the film. What do they stand to lose if they don’t pull it off, whatever it is? What huge thing might they gain? Self-respect or millions or world peace? (In any case, of course, they probably don’t get it. Not exactly.)

In the majority of early drafts I’m asked to read, I find characters tend to sit around and talk, scene after scene. They usually don’t do very much. Instead, they talk about doing something, usually most of the way through the first act. Which can be fine, as long as the writer knows she’s just telling the story to herself before she starts nailing it in the rewrites.

Yet even in the next pass or passes, when the writer tries to get her characters moving (the movies?) I find she still doesn’t move them very far. I may see a supposedly second-draft script in which, say, a woman in a rocky marriage doesn’t leave her husband until the climax of the film. Instead, early on, she threatens to leave him. Or more likely threatens to threaten to leave him. Maybe she gets a little drunk or high along the way. Or drunk then high. Maybe she swipes through a few dating sites (biting her lip in the parentheticals). In some cases, this can work. Often, she probably should have left at the end of act one. Then things might have got interesting.

Many writers seem to find it hard to ask their characters to do something dramatic. (Or stupid, in real life. But dramatic.) To take risks. To play for high stakes. If your character wants to leave her husband, there are a couple of key questions to ask before you start writing. What will she lose if she leaves? What will she lose if she doesn’t? I ask writers I’m working with (and myself) to think wisely and widely about the answers, so they make the stakes higher than, say, losing her house.

Of course, given the price of real estate these days… Come to think of it, if your script is about real estate, fine. Losing a house can be pretty dramatic. In the first act. In any case, I like to see the stakes set up early on, so we know how much a protagonist is risking. Because we’re hooked when she goes ahead and risks it anyway, digging herself in deeper and deeper and deeper until she finally digs herself out—preferably on the far side of the world. Emotionally speaking. 

Writers can go overboard, of course, having their characters suddenly rob a bank, say, to heighten the action, while giving them no organic reason for doing so. But that’s a different problem. 

There’s also the question of how high you can reasonably raise the stakes before making your film either ridiculous or manipulative. 

One of the things I didn’t like about director Afonso Cuarón’s film Gravity (I loved Roma) was the artificial stakes given Sandra Bullock’s character. She’s an astronaut and when she’s in orbit, everything goes south. (If there’s a north and south in orbit). She’s in danger of dying and wants to make it back to earth—for the sake of her daughter. Really? What’s wrong with wanting to get back to earth so you don’t die? I found the daughter a construct and an embarrassment.

(She also sounded like a heightening note from the studio that should have been finessed, i.e. ignored.)

Sometimes heightening isn’t budgetarily possible. On one big-budget film I was writing, the director wanted a new action sequence. This was at a point in the narrative where the good guys had to escape the bad guys, who had taken them captive. In the first draft of the script, they managed to just sort of slink away. Through a dangerous cave, as I remember. But still. They slunk. (Slinked? Slank?) No real stakes. They had to get out and they did it pretty quickly.

Now the director wanted some heightening—and obviously something different from the action sequences already in the film. After thinking for a minute, I said, “You know, they could try to steal some horses from the bad guys.” (Period piece.) “But they end up starting a stampede, drawing attention to themselves instead of just, you know, slinking.” Cue the chase.

The director wanted his stampede. The producer, reading over the new pages I’d written, said, “You can have one horse.” When the director showed dudgeon, the producer repeated, “One horse.” And this was a film with a $85 million production budget. (It died in pre-production, along with my production fee, but that’s another story.)

Novels aren’t scripts. Obviously, I can write as many crazy stampedes as I want, or send my characters into orbit around Beta Centurion, or even into an unformed hazy fourth dimension without worrying whether the smoke machines might overheat and cause the fire department to shut down the shoot. (Another film I worked on. Yet another story.)

Actually, I don’t write that kind of novel. But in my most recent rewrites, I’ve been paying attention to the idea of pushing my characters to the emotional edge. Especially in the thriller, I’ve asked myself how can I set things up believably so the protagonist has to act against her own best interests, and does so boldly and convincingly?

Back as far as Aristophanes, artists have talked of the need for a tragic flaw in a protagonist. In the case of the thriller, my protagonist is deeply flawed. But I’ve reached for the edge not by heightening her flaws, but by trying to make her interests very humanly divided. She can’t do the right thing for the people she loves–not for all of them–without hurting herself. Yet she feels compelled to do it anyway. In the end, things work out pretty badly for her, although she makes sure her loved ones end up okay. That means we close on an unanswered question: Can she live with that?

It’s an interesting exercise, to put yourself through this series of rewrites. To be both editor and writer. I admit, in writing this article, I stopped for a while and switched back to the literary novel, rewriting a paragraph to make what one secondary character wants from my protagonist a little more defined. Only one paragraph, but I think it’s an important change.

All this for what it’s worth. The process might work for other writers. Might inform readers or film audiences what can go on behind the scenes. Or at least, what we’re trying to do, and sometimes bring off. (Roma. Go see it.)

Update: The literary novel, Time Squared, was published in 2021 by ECW Press. You can get it here.