I love men. I love their gorgeous big hands and their strong shoulders and their smoldery smiles. I love it when they fight over me and offer me the moon on a string and rescue me and helplessly adore me…
Oh, wait. Just up to the smoldery smiles. After that it’s a romance novel, which has its place, but not in a screenplay.
Like the clone man entitlement scripts that take up a third of the pile, the clone woman entitlement scripts are highly, immediately recognizable and equally bad at telling a compelling a story.
Do you have one?
- Is your heroine’s challenge to come to a decision and the story concerned with weighing every possible outcome of that decision?
- Is your heroine “good”? Is she nice? Sexually naive? Is she ever responsible for bad things happening?
- Does she want something but waffle about how to get it without hurting anyone’s feelings, being competitive or unfair?
- Does she wait for the antagonist to trip themselves up instead of taking them on head to head?
- Is she employed in one of the “girl” fields? Magazine writing, cake shops, teaching kindergarten, planning weddings, assistant?
- Does she pine for that one special man who doesn’t notice her until she comes out of her shell?
These stories are airy and insubstantial, and follow the general idea that if the protagonist does everything right and avoids the traps and pitfalls of being a “bad girl”, they will eventually be rewarded with their modest desire.
There’s just not much plot there. There’s nothing to root for or get behind.
There is a reason that your basic romance novel is not churned into studio films by the hundreds. Why not? They’re cheap to make, there’s obviously a huge mass market for them…what’s the issue?
The issue is that the protagonist is not in active pursuit of a tangible goal. They wait and they worry. That’s not a movie.
That one romance novel that took off took off because it’s a whack-off book. Did anyone like that girl? Her whole thing was saving a control freak from himself with her sparkling clean vagina. This is not a tangible goal.
Anyway. It will be interesting to see what a woman screenwriter (Kelly Marcel) and a woman director (Sam Taylor-Johnson) do with the material.
To change up your W.E.S. it is important to focus on decisiveness. Decisions must be made for the plot to move forward and escalate. If the point is you can’t, at least turn that into serious consequences for your protag to deal with. She can waffle and dither, but she has to suffer for it, and realize that it’s ruining her life, and change it.