As I was coming up with a bunch of characters for the new story idea I had, I needed to know how they fit with each other and with the story. I felt the cast I was developing was good, but didn’t know how they would all fit, or if I had too many of them to fit it what was meant to be a roughly 90 page screenplay.
Luckily, I stumbled across a perfect tool for this dilemma.
While I was watching YouTube, a video from the channel Film Courage caught my attention with a title that boldly stated if you can’t answer these questions, you don’t have a story. Naturally intrigued, I clicked on the video, and was introduced to the 6 Essential Questions.
These were a writing tool to apply to each of the characters, focusing on the main ones, but could also be used for the most minor who barely make an appearance. If a writer knew the answer to these questions, they would be able to work out everything that happened in their story, and why.
These 6 Essential Questions were:
- Who is the character?
- What do they want?
- Why can’t they get it?
- What do they try to achieve their goals?
- Why doesn’t that work?
- How does it end?
In order to answer these questions, the writer would have to have a quick bio of a character, the motivation that drives them in the first act, the actions they take in the second, and a general roadmap for the third that worked towards a conclusion. The more characters this was done for, the more the writer could piece together not only the direction the story would take, but its ultimate destination.
This technique for outlining was remarkable, and I set to work to see how many characters I could answer these questions for.