Screenwriting 101: Lisa Joy

“The most important one of the things about TV is it goes at such a pace that sometimes it can become predictable in some ways because you even know when the ad break is coming and what’s going to happen. You can just feel those rhythms. A part of it is it become intuitive.

But you also want to subvert that a little bit and make sure you throw in some surprises in TV and in film, keep things experimental a little bit and moving forward. I would say that from TV I learned the rigors of keep the story moving. Make sure something new is happening. Make sure you’re discovering new things at each turn. But not exactly in the same six act structure that TV would have necessarily.

To me, I wanted it to be more organic so there would be room for surprises that would surprise me. That I’d, if I stumbled across something and it seemed like a little bit of a digression, in TV I would normally cut that out, because frankly, you just don’t have time for network TV specifically. You have 52 pages.

Unless it’s really important, you just don’t have time for it on network TV. In the feature, you have a little more time to explore things and take small digressions, which you might not immediately understand the importance of those digressions, but later on I think they add to the fullness of the universe and help take a script to new level.

I tend to think that part of structure is learned. After writing and reading a lot of scripts, you start to get a feeling for: ‘Oh, God, the hero needs to be driving something forward at this point. He’s meandering around too much.’ I guess it’s craft, and you just keep practicing until it becomes intuitive.”

— Lisa Joy

From Go Into The Story interview, March 2014

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