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Book Reviews

Review: Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science To Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel by Lisa Cron

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One of the most anxiety-inducing elements in all of writing is “structure.” We all go on and on about its importance, the efficacy of its numerous paradigms, and its elusive overall nature. It’s perhaps the most controversial concept of the craft. Many consider it an absolutely crucial roadmap, necessary to carry them forward. Without the guideposts of the inciting incident on page 15, the Act Two turn on page 30, the “all is lost” moment on Page 85, etc. they would be totally lost. To others, this is all nothing but a stifling roadblock that only serves to hamstring their creativity and subvert their inspiration as it tries to cram their square ideas (in terms of shape for the sake of this metaphor, not in terms of hipness) into these round-shaped predetermined inflexible plot beats. Sometimes we get so frustrated with a story idea that we can’t make fit into this formulaic scaffolding that we just want to throw out the whole concept of structure and tell the story we want to tell. Well, what if there was a way you could, while still adhering to a natural storytelling scheme that would churn out an effective yarn? Let’s have a look at Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere) by Lisa Cron.

Cron comes at this storytelling thing from a whole new angle. Rather than the external plot, of things just happening in the world of your book or script, her contention is that it all stems from the internal struggle of your main character, between an ingrained desire and a self-sabotaging misbelief. Cron labels this dynamic the “third rail” of the story, that activates it and gives it life, thus literally every other component of the narrative emanates from it. So all creative decisions are made from the inside out, based on the (very Aristotelian) idea of “what would my character do next, based on what is happening and, very importantly, what has happened to him/ her in the past to shape how the decision of where to go next will be made.” So, this represents a total departure from the story structure-dictated dilemmas such as “how do I make a death moment happen for her?” or “I need to change his goal at the midpoint, so what should the new one be?” This is story composition off the beaten path, and it can lead you to some intriguing places.

The layout of Cron‘s book is extremely user-friendly, as it’s not all abstract prescription about story design, but it actually details the development of a novel from the ground up; one that’s being written by Cron‘s friend, author Jennie Nash. So we get a real-time case study of the thought process at work; every step, and misstep. The whole thing starts with why you want to write this story in the first place, then goes on to who your main character is, how he/ she got this way, and therefore what lead up to the impossible situation that will be the main conflict of your story. It goes into how to build one minor conflict onto the next, and eventually to the ultimate culmination, how to handle secondary characters, etc.

Enjoy making scene cards to map out your story? No problem! Cron has a system for doing just that, with a card specifically compartmentalized into sections with certain prompts. The answers to these prompts get to the heart of your scenes and bring out their ultimate purpose and utility in the overall plot. This excises a lot of aimless guesswork (speaking from experience) from beating out your story, and there’s virtually no question about the order or usefulness of scenes to contend with. The cards are split into rows that detail what happens (the external) and why it happens, in terms of the protagonist’s primary inner struggle (the internal), so they blaze parallel trails between your hero’s inner and outer journeys, keeping you honest all along the way.

“That’s all good and well for a novel, that can be all about a character’s inner thoughts and psychological struggles, but I’m a screenwriter, working in a visual medium, so it’s all about the external actions.” Not so fast. The ultimate object of Cron‘s cultivation of the characters’ inner conflicts is precisely to dictate their outer behavior. Story Genius leads us to tangible actions while providing a metric to keep them consistently in character.

A few things to consider when taking on the Story Genius challenge: Cron‘s “my way or the highway” position is laid out in no uncertain terms, and she doesn’t pull punches in taking the entire paradigm of story structure, and every one of its incarnations, right to task and enjoining the reader/writer to toss it straight out the window, not to be pondered again. So giving Story genius a shot involves setting aside some principles that may have become quite precious to you on your journey. But hey, don’t all significant leaps forward start with an open-minded approach and a step outside your comfort zone?

The Story Genius approach has also been particularly useful for me in rewriting a completed script. It’s provided some solid criteria by which to judge each scene’s service to the overall piece, as well as its logical coherence, so that it may be modified, shifted, or axed. Cron‘s standards have also planted some big red flags in character choices and behaviors that were misaligned with their core inner conflicts. This method has really streamlined and clarified my vision on more than one project.

If, among your writing woes, you find yourself meandering through your plot, waffling and indecisive about where to take it, and beating your head against the wall to decode its structure (again, experience), then I can’t recommend Story Genius enough. It’s been a game-changer (a term I don’t use lightly, and usually not at all) for my writing and it may just be what you need to get unstuck on a current piece, get going on a story idea, or straighten out a completed work that just doesn’t quite feel right. In other words, if you’re a writer at all, looking for a clear narrative direction to go in and the conducive thought process to take you there, Story Genius by Lisa Cron is not to be missed!

Screenwriting Issue of the Day

Derail Your Plot To Get It On Track!

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First, the bad news…

Recently, while trudging through a page-one rewrite (those are always a breeze), I found myself in a familiar (not to downplay its awfulness) predicament. In my steadfast resolve to knock out this draft from start to finish, I’d written myself into a corner, or several corners if the metaphor still holds ( I don’t think it does). It went like this – I had an idea of where I wanted my plot to go but didn’t see how the stuff I was currently writing could reasonably get there. I wouldn’t call my condition the dreaded b-word (you know the one), but I was definitely stuck. (No more parentheticals. I promise.)

This lead to me adding things, things, and more things. Entire expository scenes and new extraneous characters were popping up in my story to bridge logic gaps and steer the narrative in my intended “right direction.” The anatomy of my script became nightmarish. The core meaning of the story that had initially drawn me to this concept was getting buried under a muddled mass of fluff, to the point where it was becoming unrecognizable. The plot was wandering aimlessly. I was re-committing the same sins that had necessitated the page-one rewrite in the first place.

I took stock of what I was writing and I wasn’t sure whose material this was, but it wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t sure who was writing it, but it wasn’t me. There was a severe lack of “me” all the way around this thing. No, this was some other guy, who was writing a term paper of sorts, in strict chronology, with mandatory requirements imposed by… someone? And what was his tool of choice to fulfill those requirements? Plot contrivances employed to rationalize other plot contrivances! I got into such a tangle that I started asking those questions that can be lethal to a writer’s motivation: Is every word I write taking me further in the wrong direction? Do I need to go all the way back to the concept phase and rethink my whole idea? Should I maybe scrap this piece altogether and start that other one I’ve been pondering? Am I really cut out for this writing thing?

But it wasn’t time to hit self-destruct quite yet.

And now, the good news…

Having already wrestled with creative roadblocks in several forms, I’d found that taking a short break from the process to reboot my perspective was usually in order. So, while catching up on my consumption of Better Call Saul, cookie dough, and Bourbon; my decompressed mind conjured up a way out of this abysmal slump that might just help you too.

Interestingly, my instinct to go back to the source wasn’t actually wrong in principle, only in content. The solution simply involved asking BETTER QUESTIONS, the type that everyone should ask when they lose their way: Why am I doing this? Why do I want to tell this story at all? Why this one instead of another of those creative bugs infecting my brain? The answers were just as useful as they were reinvigorating. They got me unstuck and in a better flow than I had before all this happened, when I was writing insincere fodder with blissful ignorance.

Why am I doing this? This one’s easy. I’m doing this for the enjoyment of it, for the unparalleled excitement of having my creative impulses pour out through my fingers and take a form that some like-minded (and maybe even some differently-minded) readers can recognize and appreciate.

Why do I want to tell this story at all? This one isn’t so hard either. I wanted to tell this story because I have a perspective on life that’s uniquely mine, and by putting these characters that I have in mind in these situations that I’ve conceived of, I can try to express that perspective in a way that connects with people to make their experience of reading/ watching my work as satisfying as it was for me to create it.

At this point, I realized that scrapping the idea was no longer on the table, and the tougher question with the more actionable answers was to soon to follow…

Why this one instead of another of those inspiration bugs infecting my head? Because I was excited about this and that particular sequence; the moments that would be a true pleasure to write, where the characters were pushed to their limits and forced into the actions that would define them and make them memorable, the points where the audience and the characters thought things were going one way, and then they take a sudden turn, and the plot unfolds in a surprising and satisfying way to subtly convey my theme.

Once I realized all this but didn’t see it happening the way I wanted, I just snapped and said, “I’ll write that scene that really needs to be in there to keep me excited about this thing, and even if I jettison the whole thing, it’ll be fun to write that scene. And that’s what this is all about, right?” So I did exactly that, and, it came together nicely. But what about when that scene was written? Where to take it next? And what about this big timeline gap standing between where I’d gotten stuck, and this completed scene?

Rinse and repeat. I thought, what’s the next most important scene for me to include in this sequence, to make this a story I’d be interested in as a writer and as a reader? It was a scene that takes place a little down the road from the one I’d just written. That scene was also a blast to write, and some unexpected gems found their way in there to enrich it as I went. I did this again and again, without regard for what came next, only what came next in importance to me.

After a few more scenes were done, I’d worked my way down to one that actually occurs between where I initially got stuck and that first “priority scene.” So, instead of being lost near the start of the journey, not knowing how to get where I wanted to go, I now had a series of waypoints laid out in front of me, and I just had to figure out how to connect them. This took some adjustments and alterations, but that was part of the fun too! And in the course of this, I really got the feeling that I had overcome something.

Things continued to happen in the process that surprised me. The characters told me what should happen, and each sequence came out a little different than I’d planned it. Most importantly, this all rejuvenated my enthusiasm for what I’m doing.

But now let’s come back down to earth. This wasn’t a magic bullet that just launched me into the stratosphere. I’m not writing this post poolside at my new place in the Hollywood hills, where John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart once arm-wrestled to decide who would eat the last cigar butt. But it did generate a wealth of inertia that continues now and has me barreling through this draft with renewed confidence that I will complete it, my only limitations being time constraints and the fact that my typing skill falls somewhere between infant and nineteenth-century Santa Fe pack mule. If I hit another snag, I know that I’ll handle it, and it may very well involve another joyous discovery!

So… if you find yourself similarly confounded; take a step back, consider your grander purpose for all this, let go of any overly-rigid “plans” that might just be stifling your inspiration, and move forward according to your priorities. Let us know how it goes!

Book Reviews

Review: Story Maps: TV Drama: The Structure of the One-Hour Television Pilot by Daniel Calvisi

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A well-written film these days is a beam of sunlight punching through a dark cloud of disappointing, unengaging fodder. There’s an abundance of CGI-laden spectacle, pretty digitally de-aged people in pretty computer-enhanced places doing fancy things (inspiring surprisingly little emotional response), but where have all the complex characters navigating twisted challenging plots in the tensest and most gut-wrenching situations imaginable gone? Well, they’ve gone to television. It’s no big revelation that TV is where visual storytelling is at its peak in recent years. It’s now become commonplace for the biggest Hollywood stars – actors, directors, and definitely writers – to suddenly turn up working on TV series. This move that was considered a step down in decades past is now looked at as an upgrade in many ways, certainly in terms of pure narrative quality. So, more and more of us are turning our sights from the big studio lots to the staff writing rooms and looking to break into television writing.

The good news is that in this “Second Golden Age of Television” overlapping with hyper-expanding technology broadening the possibilities for the viewing, broadcasting, and production of series content, the opportunities are numerous and growing for the aspiring TV writer. The bad news is that, after so many years of motion picture dominance, there’s a relative dearth of information out there about how to write for TV, particularly in terms of “beat sheets” and general structural guides. Everyone can name numerous essential classics detailing how to structure, plot, and characterize a feature screenplay. And while a lot can be found in that sphere that applies to all formats of storytelling, with TV you’re talking about an entirely distinct business model with very different goals and markers of success than movie writing. When I embarked on the daunting journey of writing my first television pilot (first episode of a series) a few years back I felt kinda lost as to how to go about structuring it. My saving grace was Story Maps: TV Drama: The Structure of the One-Hour Television Pilot by Daniel Calvisi.

Like the shows we want to create and write for, Story Maps: TV Drama is multilayered and multidimensional. On one hand, it’s a quick, economical, streamlined primer to get you up to speed and ready to churn out your original pilot in short order, yet at the same time it contains enough insightful material to allow for an extremely thorough and in-depth study of deeper nuanced narrative devices behind some of the greatest and most successful pilots in recent TV history.

The book is arranged deductively, general to specific, starting with an overview of the character and current state of the television industry; particularly the parameters, vernacular, and qualities that distinguish it from the movie business. Calvisi also offers some insights on TV’s fast-evolving and ever-flexible nature, elucidating the growing possibilities for new writers and the prudence of steering your career in that direction. Then we’re onto the mechanics of writing the pilot. This section begins by laying out and detailing the foundational components that seem essential to a strong pilot. Each one is brought into focus in terms of its uses and service to the overall episode, and grounded in accompanying references to what’s worked in a diverse hand-picked array of great series. These citations continue throughout, serving as fantastic guideposts illustrating the validity, varying techniques of implementation, and range of possibilities for each element covered.

From here it’s time to start mixing the ingredients into more and more detailed Story Maps, assembling the pilot’s skeleton and squaring away the technical issues of getting a teleplay written. As the steps get finer and more nuanced, it funnels down to the meat and potatoes of the book: the Beat Sheet.

Prior to discovering Story Maps, most everything I found online concerning a one-hour TV episode’s structure offered simply a traditional three-act feature film’s beat sheet, but diced into more acts to allow for commercial breaks, each concluding with an essential cliffhanger “act-out.” If I was lucky, they might also throw in a few pointers about the importance of elevating the subplots to “B” and “C” stories and suggestions for how to balance them. Gee, thanks a lot, guys. I guess you get what you pay for. Calvisi’s Pilot Beat Sheet delivers on the promise of its title. It’s a lucid, illuminating roadmap. It absolutely adheres to the “form, not formula” mantra, maintaining creative flexibility (more on this below) while showing the vital waypoints on the path.

Then nearly half the book is dedicated to one of those devices that we often wish for, but rarely get – a satisfying nexus between reading the script cold and having a conversation with an industry insider about it – there’s a detailed breakdown of each selected pilot teleplay by Calvisi showing his beat sheet in action. This is where the aforementioned flexibility is really highlighted. He elucidates all of the deviations, variations, resituating, rearranging, and occasional (well-reasoned) omissions of the beats, giving us a look at how the scripts differ from the final product, how different genres and moods call for different approaches, how artistic risks can pay off, etc. He does this for Scandal, Mr. Robot, True Detective, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Mad Men. The experience of watching these pilots, with the script and Calvisi’s breakdowns handy, is about as close as most of us can get to sitting down with the writers and picking their brains.

The only caveat I would include with this one is that it does seem geared toward those of us with some prior knowledge of storytelling and screenwriting, particularly of features (for which there’s also a Story Maps installment), rather than for total newbies. But if you have some pages under your belt, and writing for TV is indeed in your sites (and if it’s not, think about it!), this one is indispensable. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Book Reviews

Review: The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage or Fiction by Erik Bork

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One of the most prevalent and vexing feedback notes we can get is “it’s just not working,” thus initiating the never-ending punishment and agony of “making it work” (more on punishment and agony later). But a real pro can always whip a story into shape, bringing whatever concept he’s confronted with, whether his own or inherited from another writer, to a working and engaging plot, right? Well, not so fast.

I’ve actually received the comment that I’d done a respectable job buttressing unworkable plot points with the circumstances and exposition that made them almost dovetail believably into the story. Of course, the troubling part about this was that we both knew it wasn’t a compliment. Applying a tourniquet doesn’t close the wound.

Maybe what separates the pros from the up-and-comers is their ability to discern a workable story idea from one that’s just plain deficient at its core, and, in its present form, can’t be made to work, no matter how many hours or how much grief the writer is willing to throw into trying. This is the skill that’s explored in The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage or Fiction by Erik Bork.

In his assent to screenwriting prominence, Erik Bork started as a dude from Ohio who made the big move to LA, wound up temping for 20th Century Fox, where he was assigned to assist some actor guy you may have heard of, named Tom Hanks. He was in on the development of From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers, both of which he helped write and produce. On the latter, he worked with some producer guy you may have heard of, named Steven Spielberg. This experience sounds, on one hand, like a dream atmosphere in which to develop one’s career surrounded by first-rate mentors; and on the other, a brutal thrown-into-the-deep-end scenario. Either way, the author’s credibility doesn’t seem to be an issue.

Bork opens the book with an insightful briefing on the modern market. He professes that the more things have changed, with greater capabilities to create content on modest budgets and resources, the more they’ve stayed the same, with the continued need to get past the gatekeepers if you want to put your stuff in front of a sizable audience, thus turning it into a career. He then lays out a catchy blueprint on how this can be achieved through the proper vetting of your idea.

As we all know, at the heart of every story is a problem, so Bork has couched his quick and concise guide into an acronym that spells out the most crucial elements of a story concept in the following way…

  • P – Punishing to the protagonist from start to (almost) finish
  • R – Relatable characters and situations we can empathize with
  • O – Original: “give us the same but in a different, unique way”
  • B – Believable logic/ character actions, even in an unreal world
  • L – Life-altering stakes should be involved
  • E – Entertaining material that fulfills genre expectations
  • M – Meaningful enough to leave a lasting emotional impression

Don’t be turned off by the neatness of how these factors fit the acronym. Bork didn’t’ choose them lightly, and backs each one up with solid hard-won wisdom about its vitalness, how it operates alongside its counterparts, and its place in the hierarchy as far as how much wiggle room you have with it.

As you may have gleaned from my previous review, lately I’ve been delving into more specialized books that cover specific components of the script or steps of the process. If there’s an ideal go-to reference that you should crack first, it would be The Idea. Once you run your concept through Bork‘s gauntlet, and you’ve got all of the cylinders firing, then you can more confidently move forward to the mechanics of plotting, character development, twists and turns, etc. with far fewer headaches and self-loathing contemplation about whether you should just throw in the towel and sign up for an online typewriter maintenance course, or is that just me?

As mentioned, The Idea is a short read. However, despite being dense with useful content, it’s also an enjoyable journey through the PROBLEM elements. It’s laid out in a way that’s extremely accessible to writers at all levels, usually detailing the most common ways that new writers tend to fall short in each of the techniques, the mindset that led them astray, and how these can be remedied.

The story concept is where it all begins. If you want to create great fiction from the ground up, then giving this component its due attention and scrutiny may be the single most valuable habit you can add to your craft. Several of this book‘s insights were immediately actionable for me, and the impact it’s had on the quality and my experience of writing, is immeasurable. If you’re having trouble with your process that isn’t easily identified, chances are it can be traced back to the issues addressed in The Idea, but don’t just take my word for it. Pick it up and let me know!

Book Reviews

Review: The Plot Machine: Design Better Stories Faster by Dale Kutzera

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Stumbling blocks are inevitable in any form of writing. Fiction writing carries some special challenges, and one of the most vicious monkeys on the screenwriter’s back is the formulation of a logical, well-structured plot. Plotting complications might arise in the prewriting/ planning phase, in the midst of cranking out the pages, or, worst of all, when you’ve completed a draft and realize your story thread has serious issues and needs some damage control. It’s a scary feeling to write a slew of scenes that are working for you, only to zoom out and realize you’ve lost your way along the narrative through line. Even the coolest beats are pointless if they’re just dangling in the ether, or drifting by on a winding, dead-end street.

These hiccups can take a variety of forms, affecting (or infecting) your script in a number of ways, and looking to one of the classic, standard, comprehensive screenwriting bibles may not always be the most straightforward or efficient troubleshooting route to take. Sometimes what you need is a specialized tool geared directly at what’s ailing your story. The best such tool I’ve encountered in a long time is The Plot Machine: Design Better Stories Faster by Dale Kutzera.

Did you catch that word “design” in the title? Well, Kutzera means exactly that. He comes right out and states, “this is a design guide, not a writing guide,” at one point analogizing story planning to architectural engineering and the final movie to a solidly constructed building.

Through his chosen method of taxonomy, or classification into ordered categories, Kutzera effectively deconstructs, simplifies, and distills the plotting process into a readily applicable workflow, or rather, one of several possible workflows depending on the type of story you’re going for. He neatly catalogs some of the most prevalent and successful types of endeavors, archetypal characters, brands of character arcs, possibilities for your death moment, and so on. This technique essentially is The Plot Machine, and it ticks like a Swiss watch.

Don’t let these cold pragmatic overtones (or the page count) fool you. The conciseness doesn’t render it light so much as dense. There’s a surprising degree of depth and thoughtfulness built into The Plot Machine. It begins by taking a step back to ponder the overall purpose of stories and storytelling and then bears this in mind as a referential guidepost throughout. This same principle is applied to each tier of the system. We’re prompted to consider the core functions of each plot element or to ask ourselves a few simple up-front questions about what we hope to accomplish in its development. This serves as an aid to our creative choices, a course-correcter to keep us on track, and a hedge against the problems that tend to come up later if we overlook these factors.

With the essential overarching intentions established, he funnels down to the nuts and bolts of the process. One of The Plot Machine‘s key features is its focus on prioritization. The objectives seem to be maximized economy and minimal need for revisions and rewrites in the end, as you will have built a solid foundation at each stage before moving onto the finer details and ornaments. So if you’re diving into a new script, The Plot Machine can offer a place to start shaping your plot (hint: it’s not on Act 1, Scene 1, Page 1), and a full unfolding of where to go from there in terms of what narrative components you have to work with, ways to structure them, and how the sequences you build can lay into the storyline. If you’re having trouble with a script that’s in the works, these same procedures can just as easily serve as a quick-reference problem-solving guide.

If all this sounds too rigid and formulaic, think again. The Plot Machine’s starting point is your own creative inspiration, as Kutzera prescribes beginning with what you have in mind for your movie idea, whether that’s a particular character, situation, genre, or whatever. He also points out the infinite avenues open to the plotting process due to the disparate demands of different types of stories, and the virtues of understanding the conventions so that we can turn them on their heads. Not every plotline needs a midpoint reversal, not every protagonist needs to refuse the call to action, and who’s to say the slayer can’t join forces with the dragon in Act 3?

The Plot Machine can be a boon to your writing regardless of where you are or how it’s going. Its only weakness, near as I can tell, is also one of its greatest strengths. As mentioned, it’s a design guide, so it doesn’t delve into the mechanics or fundamentals of screenwriting, telling you how to color within the formatting lines in your description (until it’s time not to) or how to keep the rhythm and cadence of your dialog in tandem with the tone of the piece. If you’re looking for those things, you should turn to one of the classics. You won’t find it in The Plot Machine. However, you will (quickly) come away from it with an enriched understanding of how to configure your story, why you’re writing it, and perhaps why you write at all.