What’s in your script should just be the very tip of the iceberg of what you know about your characters and situations.

I think I first got this from Robert McKee in his book Story. And it’s something that comes up all the time in the work I do with writers.

I’ll ask some question about the people and events in their material — the underlying situations and motivations beyond what’s on the page. And they’ll answer by referring to a particular scene or moment in the script that addresses that in some way.

And I’ll say, “I’m not asking about what’s currently on the page, or what you’d tell the audience, but the deeper reality beyond that.” And often, they won’t have an answer, because the extent of what they know about their story world is basically all in the script. They haven’t thought beyond that, because they didn’t realize they needed to.

But here’s the thing: the best scripts ring with authenticity and confidence because the writer knows far more than what’s explicit on the page, and somehow that informs what is on the page.

So let’s talk about what that should include…

Back story

This is an obvious one. Most writers understand that they need to have some sense of what happened before what’s on the page. The question is how much do you need to know. What’s important?

My answer is this: those events and dynamics that have shaped the characters and situations into whatever you’re going to be focusing on as central story problem. You don’t need irrelevant minor details, but you do need to know why the key players are the way they are and what happened that caused the various conflicts and issues you’ll be centering on.

This especially matters if you’ve created a world with fantastical or futuristic elements, where the audience needs to get up to speed quickly on how and why this world is the way it is, and how it’s different from our own. What happened that caused all of this? That needs to seem clear and believable. You as the author probably need to know ten times as much as what you’re telling them, about this and everything else. But what you’re telling them (ideally showing, not telling) has to be complete enough that they get it and have an easy time buying in.

Who the characters are

This includes back story but goes deeper into their personalities, wants and feelings. What makes them unique as individuals? What drives them? What do they need? How are they flawed? 

Again we’re not looking for random details like their favorite color, and you don’t necessarily need to write bios that track every event of their lives. But it can’t hurt to go pretty deep into imagining their childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and key relationships and experiences that have shaped them. What you really want to understand is their psychology. Tools like the “Enneagram” can be helpful in getting to the heart of who they are and why they are that way.

Ideally you want to know how they would respond to most situations and people, and why. Where you have a clear picture of them as types but also as unique individuals who have some qualities that might seem counter to their overall type. (This helps make them feel dimensional.) If you imagine them in high school and think about where they would fit into the social ecosystem, and why, that can be really useful. Most of us probably haven’t changed that much since certain beliefs about ourselves were cemented back then, right? But the good news is that your story might be the opportunity for some of your characters to finally break out from all of that. But first you need to know their starting points.

What’s happening between the scenes

I think the key to plotting out a strong story (some call this “breaking story”) is to get really focused on what each of your central characters wants and is thinking at the end of each scene. Where are they now? What’s the new status of their central concern in the story? How has the game changed because of what happened in that last scene?

Really check in with each of them and ask yourself what steps they might take next, to try to get what they want. You might not actually include those steps in the script. But you’ll know where your characters are at, internally, at all times. And if you can imagine their continuous life experience throughout the story, beyond whatever scenes and actions you end up including, you’ll be on the right track.

This helps with writing the best dialogue, too — the kind with subtext. If you know what they’re thinking and feeling at all times, you can make that clear to the audience, even if they don’t make it clear in their dialogue. In other words, they say one thing, but underneath that, they are thinking something else. Feeling something else. Driven by motivations they might be hiding from the other characters.

Final thoughts

What it really comes down to is that you’re the creator of the world of your story. That’s largely true even if it’s an adaptation of a true story or pre-existing material. You have the right and responsibility to be the “God” of that world. You make the decisions. You’re the authority. And your readers need you to claim that authority and exercise it. So if they were to ask you what’s going on in the characters’ lives and minds within and between scenes and before the story began, and what led to the events of the story, and what’s happening off screen that matters, you’d be able to easily answer all of that. Because all that work is the underwater part of the iceberg that you’ve created. And what is on the page will be much stronger because of it.