The Issue With Writing Risky Narratives

I’m currently writing a second draft of my first feature length script. It primarily revolves around a summer I had a few years ago, where I was invited by some friends I wasn’t particularly close with, to go hang out with them a few hours away. I hung out with them every few days and essentially fell into a different life, where everyone was drinking and doing drugs, and everyone who already knew each other, didn’t know me. It led me to come up with a script about an outsider who learns to grapple with new friends, and I thought it was a great starting point, until my main issue arose being the conflict.

I have a hard time writing conflict, because I think conflict in movies largely tends to be overdrawn with big, excitable villains or world ending events, when in real life conflict tends to be the absolute tiny, minute things like a miscommunication or tonal shift. My scripts, as you can guess, lean towards the natural and realistic. I want to write about real people, real dilemmas and real relationships. Conflict then becomes a bit of an issue, because what can I write into my story of a beautiful summer with new friends that makes sense? In real life there was no conflict, just the ticking timer of everyone going to various corners of the country for university. A ticking timer in this case then, can actually work. The brilliant example would be Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. 

Before Sunrise by Richard Linklater (1995)

The moment-to-moment conflicts in this script happen when the main two characters argue or disagree about topics, but it’s never a full villain or conflicting force, just human discussion. The real conflict of the story is the fact that they have to leave each other at the end. There’s a timer on their story, and we as an audience question whether they will set out to do what they need to do by the end of the night. It’s such a beautiful and realistic conflict, and it was something I dabbled with in my script until I think I realised I could challenge myself further. I added a love interest.

FYI this love interest wasn’t based on a real person!

I thought about writing this article today to express how fascinating and terrifying a nuanced story could end up becoming. I knew when said love interest came into the picture, that it wouldn’t be enough to just tell a story of a man liking a woman. I thought it would be fascinating to try and tell an asexual love story, as someone who has grappled with asexuality before, and as someone who has, from memory, never witnessed an asexual love story before. I wrote a story about the complicated feelings of a man who wants to be with a person but this person can’t be with him. He doesn’t understand his asexuality, but the person understands theirs. I had a miscommunication, I had two characters with different attitudes, I had several underlying conflicts with other characters, and a topic that was hard to genuinely express properly. It was a challenge.

The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos (2015)

My ending then came around after several months of on-off writing. It’s a scene where both characters are sitting in a bedroom, and the love interest fully states where they are emotionally. They mention how they don’t like physical relationships, and that they can’t be with the main character. A part of my brain thought, what if the main character then says something like “but could you be physical with me?” and they kiss and it’s all happy-ever-after type stuff.

It was obviously an awful idea, like it would downright be disrespectful, but it made me think how easy it is to fall into these pitfalls as a writer, particularly writing complicated stories. I’d like to imagine lots of people who like writing things like this, do it with a good intention, that they want to share stories and make people feel things. It’s natural though, that a lot of people will slip up. Imagine watching a film about an asexual girl who keeps having to thwart off a guy who doesn’t know if he’s asexual, and then in the end he just changes her sexuality? It’d be awful, but I can see why someone who can get lost in writing plot heavy stories can think it’s a good idea. Someone could be too laser focused on plot-twists and character arcs and all of that, they don’t actually think about whether it’s suitable or not.

I had no point, as per usual, with this article. I’m just trying to finish a second draft of a script and I’m trying to make sure it’s not accidentally wildly offensive, which to my surprise is very hard to do when writing something complicated. One wrong line and suddenly it’s cancelled, but that’s a risk I want to take with my writing. Not to say I’m intentionally trying to offend people with it, but I do want to make something risky.

(You can read the first 10 pages of my second draft of this script on my website if you want.)

Thanks for reading this!