WHAT OCCASION OR EVENT SERVES AS THE CATALYST

4. What Occasion or Event Serves as the Catalyst?

There will be times you would like to skip this question, leaving it until the

last, and there will be times you’ll be able to answer it immediately—only to

find that the catalyst changes with each draft of the script. Either way, you

are engaged in discovering what it is that you want to say, rather than what

you think it is you want to say. Still, it is important to realize that a screen-

play should not be considered complete until the catalyst is in place.

Calling up our image of Icarus trying to occupy himself with the gull

feathers, in the answer to Question 2, and knowing that the climax must take

place during his flight, it first seemed to us that the catalyst, or agent for

change, in the script must be the moment when Daedalus conceives of

escaping on wings made of feathers and wax. The difficulty was that

Daedalus was not our protagonist. Therefore the question became this: How

could we involve Icarus in this pivotal event?

We turned to Aristotle, who has some very practical advice for dramatists

in his Poetics: “In constructing the plot and working it out . . . the playwright

should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing

everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action,

he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook

inconsistencies.”

Close your eyes with us, then, and imagine a stone chamber at the top of

the tower. Imagine Daedalus busy at the only table with his parchment and

stylus. Imagine young Icarus, restless and bored, with little to do and noth-

ing to look at but his father, the sea, the sky, the sun, and the gulls that perch

on the open parapets. Imagine a pile of the feathers he’s gathered and the

ways he invents to play with them—trying to make them float, keeping

them up with his breath, pasting them onto his skin with water or spit so

that he can spread his arms wide and pretend to be a seagull . . .

Ask yourself what this particular father would do if he were disturbed

while working. Probably he would rebuke his son sharply; only then,

because he is by nature a “cunning artificer,” would he realize that there

might be a way to construct real wings of feathers and, yes, candle wax.

In answer to Question 4, then, the catalyst will be Daedalus’s realization,

at the sight of Icarus imitating a bird in flight, that he might be able to design

wings on which he and Icarus could escape.