When I first started thinking about writing this book, I wanted to find some kind of tool that the screenwriter could use in order to recognize and define various problems of screenwriting. But as I began writing, I became aware that I was really writing about the solutions to various problems, and not really identifying them. It just didn’t work. So I began to rethink my approach. To solve any kind of a problem means you have to be able to recognize it, identify it, and then define it; only in that way can any problem really be solved.
The more I began thinking about the “problem,” the more it became clear that most screenwriters don’t know exactly what the problem really is. There’s a vague and somewhat tenuous feeling somewhere that something is not working; either the plot is too thin or too thick; or the character is too strong or too weak; or there’s not enough action, or the character disappears off the page, or the story is told all in dialogue.
So I began analyzing the Problem-Solving process. The only way I could make this book work, I realized, was to recognize and define the various symptoms of the problem, very much the way a medical doctor isolates the various symptoms of his patients before he can treat the disease. When I approached the Problem-Solving process from this point of view (and it is a process), I began to see that there’s usually not just one symptom, but many symptoms. It soon became clear that many of the problems in screenwriting share the same symptoms, but the problems themselves are different in kind; only when you analyze the context of the problem can a distinction be made, and it is those distinctions that lead us on the path of recognizing, defining, and solving. For the truth is that you can’t solve a problem until you know what it is.
With that in mind I began to understand that there are only three distinct categories of The Problem; when you’re writing a screenplay, all problems spring either from Plot, Character, or Structure.
The art of Problem Solving is really the art of recognition.