TENSIONS & QUESTIONS

I reckon my stories have a fundamental question that they're trying to answer. The question for The Limit is "Will Peter find out who killed his son?" Knowing what theat fundamental question is seems to help me focus on telling the story.

In "Writing screenplays that sell", Robert Hauge describes the script-writer's primary job as "eliciting emotion from the person reading the screenplay." My take on the script-writer's primary job: to construct a question that's interesting enough that the audience will keep watching to find out the answer.

How to apply that structurally is to introduce the question as early as possible, and answer it as late as possible.

Questions:

-- What is the main unresolved Tension in this show?

-- What exactly are we watching to see what happens?

The Tension that drives an entire TV series, single episode, or feature film has to be big (in terms of its ramifications). If the show has a main character - and that's another section to add in - then the Tension is intimately tied to them.