REVERSE CAUSE & EFFECT: The Secret to Making Scripts Work

How to use Reverse Cause and Effect to construct and develop a script. Once you've sketched out your story's basics, you start at the ending and work backward, chaining back from each effect to its cause, creating a tight forward progression such that A causes B which causes C. It enables you to stitch together the spine of your story with just its major building blocks. Working from the general to the particular, you gradually develop more detail as it becomes necessary. The ability to separate the Necessary from the Unnecessary is a crucial skill for the dramatist, freeing your from the profusion of unnecessary detail. This is a complex, specialized skill that requires training and this class will give you that know-how. The ability to strip your plot down to its core is like radically pruning a tree, exposing its trunk and main branches, allowing you to get at the script's essentials and make them work. Aristotle said that in constructing a plot, a writer "should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail."