Keep the Audience Hungry to Know
What does the audience want to know? Keeping them actively asking is the key to having them lean forward into the story.
Editing for New Information
Writing is rewriting. Amateurs write ten first drafts. They keep starting something new. Creativity without discipline.
Professionals add discipline to their creativity and write ten developing drafts, making sure each one improves in at least one area.
Revising and improving your work is a key part of writing. Playwright Steven Dietz, in his excellent essay on revision, talks about identifying and writing the Active Story Question at the top of every page of a draft.
https://www.playwrightsrealm.org/aspiring-playwrights-articles/on-revision-article
It’s a simple but powerful concept: At any moment, what question is the audience actively asking?
Dietz suggests checking this for every page of a script, and suggests you should expect a change every three or four pages.
That’s good advice for plays — but screenplays are far more compressed than plays. A key on-screen moment might be fewer than five lines, with not a spoken word of dialogue. You might have three new active story questions on a single page. If your audience’s core question changes only once every few pages, your story is probably moving too slowly.
So rather than writing the Active Story Question at the top of every page, I recommend marking every time it changes – even if it’s multiple times on one page.
Of course, this means that part of your job as a writer is trying to imagine what a hypothetical audience member is thinking and feeling.
What is the Real Question?
There’s a difference between the story question the audience consciously thinks they are asking, and the deeper emotional or psychological question underneath it.
The “surface question” – the one they might put into words if you interrupted the film to ask them (“Will she get the job?”) isn’t always the question they’re actually keeping an eye on.
There’s often a deeper emotional or psychological question under the obvious question:
- “Does she believe she deserves the job?”
- “Is she going to betray someone – perhaps even her own core values – to get it?”
- “How will she tell her husband if she gets a job with more responsibility and more demands on her time?”
If you asked viewers directly, they might not recognise these deeper concerns. But emotionally, I believe they are following them — and as the writer, you need to follow them too.
Fortunately, you have those skills. You can’t write a character-driven story without considering how your characters might respond to events and projecting what they might think and do.
You already have the skills; you just need to apply them to people watching your film, not just the people inside your film.
The importance of New Information
Looking at my own process, I realised I use an instinctive method to uncover those deeper questions and link them to the deeper answers.
That process revolves around new information — what it is, how it lands, how it changes what the audience thinks, and how it forces characters into motion.
Every shift in the Active Story Question is caused by new information:
- A revelation
- A realisation
- A clue
- A contradiction
- A behaviour that exposes an emotional truth
- A moment that changes what is at risk
Good editing is really an act of locating these information moments, sharpening them, and making sure the story’s momentum flows from one essential question to the next.
Takeaway
At the deepest level, the Active Story Question isn’t simply “What happens next?”
It’s: “What is the real new information here? What does this new information mean, and what will it force the character to do?”
After a while, this becomes second nature. Until it does, I suggest drawing a chart or spreadsheet that tracks, by character,
- What they think they know right now.
- What significant truth do they currently misunderstand or are unaware of?
- When do they find out something new that matters.
- How they found out.
- Whether they think it’s reliable.
- New line – back to question 1.
If you can keep the question evolving — not just shifting but deepening — you’ll keep the audience right where you want them: leaning forward, connecting dots, and waiting for the next piece of meaning to fall into place.
