It’s one of the first questions industry professionals will have on any piece of material: “Whose story is it?”
What they mean by that is who we’re focused on – who is our main character? Meaning the one individual with a strong problem/goal that they’re trying to resolve.
For feature films and novels, there is often one such character. And if that’s the case, we do well to focus virtually every scene on them – on what they’re doing and how it’s going regarding that big objective they’re pursuing.
So often scripts don’t do that. They don’t make clear whose story it is from scene to scene and they wander around from character to character. They don’t seek to get the audience “inside” a particular person emotionally who becomes their representative in the story.
One of the most common blog posts of mine that I still refer writers to is an older but evergreen one on this issue: “subjective point-of-view.” That means we’re looking “through” a particular character’s perspective at everything that happens in the story. Not looking “at” a group of people from an objective distance.
Subjective POV tends to get readers much more emotionally involved in a story. When done well (meaning their goals and emotions are clear and relatable from scene to scene), it makes them care about the character and what’s happening. Which I think is a writer’s primary job.
But what if you’re following more than one character? More than one story? I’m glad you asked.
Many movies, novels, plays and especially TV series have more than one character we’re meant to get subjectively inside of. With their own problems they try to solve. Their own stories.
Take the much-lauded series Hacks. The two lead characters Deborah and Ava both have ongoing challenges they can never quite resolve in the series. They have personal needs they want to fulfill. And in any given episode (including the pilot) they have a specific intention they pursue (i.e. problem to solve) that meets with much conflict and has a clear beginning, middle and end.
That means we have multiple stories intertwining. Often their manager and sometimes other characters also gets stories in episodes, from their point-of-view. You might call them “C” or “D” stories with Deborah and Ava’s situations usually acting as the “A” and “B” in any episode.
If you’re telling multiple stories in any script, whether it’s a “dual narrative” or a huge cast with many ongoing personal challenges, the thing to remember is that each of these stories needs to stand on its own. Meaning the audience needs to be able to invest in whatever that character is pursuing and dealing with. And the scenes in that story need to be told subjectively – meaning focused on their clear desires, emotions, plans and goals and how conflicts affect those as they actively try to get what they want.
What doesn’t tend to work as well are scenes with a vague point-of-view: more “objective” scenes that depict multiple characters talking or doing things but aren’t focused on a particular “main character” pursuing some agenda and encountering conflict. We want to avoid those like the plague. Many scripts I read are full of such scenes and aren’t “showing” (i.e. dramatizing) the struggles we all want to see.
My general rule is that every scene should focus on the main character of a story (and if you only have one story, like in many features, that means that character is generally in every scene).
If you have a villain like Darth Vader or Hans Gruber in Die Hard, sometimes you can cut briefly to them at times to show the next villainous thing they are doing or planning, to up the tension. And it’s a bit like telling a second story from their perspective, albeit one we’re rooting against.
But other than that, I tend to question the value of scenes focusing on secondary people who don’t have their own story. I would suggest either promoting them to the role of additional “main character” (which means really giving them a story goal and make their scenes subjective in pursuit of that), or demoting them to a secondary role where they only appear in scenes a true main character is driving, and have some role to play in what that character is doing and wanting.
It might sounds like a rigid or extreme approach at first, but I think if you study produced movies or series or published commercial fiction you love, they all tend to operate this way.
Feel free to comment with questions or any disagreements!
