A story can’t maintain reader or viewer interest if it doesn’t build. In other words, to stay interesting it has to become MORE interesting.
Upward and onward should be your catch phrase, in the sense that the tension has to increase as you race to your climax. (No double entendre intended.)
If you check out the film On the Rocks on Wikipedia, here’s what you’ll see:
On the Rocks is a 2020 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. It follows a father and daughter (Bill Murray and Rashida Jones) as they tail her suspicious husband (Marlon Wayans).
Long before I got into the television business, back when I was a television viewer, I would go off on a rant about cop shows at a moment’s notice. “Why are people’s lives always in danger?” I would shout. “Why does TV always have someone looking down the business end of a gun?”
Now that I’ve been writing a good long while, I know the answer. The reason television gives us so many cop shows and medical shows and lawyer shows is that in those situations something very important is always at stake – usually someone’s life. You don’t get higher stakes than that, and without the risk of a very big loss, all the audience can do when it sees your hero being agitated is yawn and say, “Who cares?”
Even when I don’t have a show in production tons of spec scripts are sent to me. Most are spec screenplays, but both they and the spec teleplays share one common flaw. Their writers are so worried about overwriting that they under write the material and fail to draw the reader into the characters’ state of mind.
If your reader isn’t pulled into the story and made to know and share the feelings of the characters, especially the main characters, then your script isn’t going to work. It won’t appeal to producers or actors or directors, and if by some chance it gets made it will fall flat to the audience.
Although F. Scott Fitzgerald, not exactly known as an action writer, said it best: “In movies, characters are what they do, not what they say.” This is the most important thing you can keep in mind when writing any script for film or TV, and believe me I know how hard it is for people like us to remember.
After all, we’re writers, aren’t we? We live and die by the word.