I started a screenplay eight years ago completely on a whim – an image leaped into my brain while I was stuck driving the Sepulveda Pass on my way to work. When I got to the office I immediately opened Word (GOD, I wrote screenplays in WORD back then!) and wrote five pages. No plan, no idea for an ending, just five pages to capture that image and follow it for awhile.
I continued writing like that for a few weeks, both in LA and a trip up to a film set in Montana, and eventually came up with 40+ pages with only the barest conscious design to them. I really like these pages – always have. Adam says it’s some of his favorite screenwriting of mine, and he’s among the few who’s read enough to make a judgment like that.
But I ran aground – got to the end of a scene, had no idea what happened next, and there it sat. I would read it maybe once a year, maybe polish a stage direction or something, but never found the way forward.
Last week, I moved it up the list of projects on which I’d like to make some progress, and started scratching out some ideas on where the plot could go. And yesterday, during lunch, I suddenly knew the right, real ending of the thing. It was satisfying, it was true to the characters, it would provide suspense and surprise, and it instantly made it impossible to even consider the former ending.
And all I did was step far enough back to – and this will sounds strange – ask if I was asking the right questions about the ending. If you search and probe long enough around the assumptions on which you’ve based your story, you might finally find that thing which it had never even occurred to you to change; but once you have, you wonder how something so obviously wrong could have become part of your foundation to begin with.