Tag Archives: storytelling

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!

My Story Theories, Screenwriting Issue of the Day

Is Your Protagonist an Attention-Hooker?

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If we contemplate all of the possible failings a story can have, it becomes clear that nearly every one of them is some permutation of “losing the audience.” Naturally, the surest way to lose them is to never have had them in the first place. Since the spine of most narratives entails a protagonist on a mission with some goal in mind, it’s often said that we have precious few pages to get the reader on board with our hero. If we don’t, then nothing – not the coolest action-packed scenes with the wittiest dialog, the sexiest character dynamics, or the trickiest twists and reversals – will save it from the deep clutching quagmire of audience disinterest. It’s not enough to give them pretty things to look at, they must be along for the ride, with some kind of emotional investment in where it’s all going. That’s what keeps them reading and watching.

So how do we accomplish this? What’s the “right” way to set up the protagonist to get the audience involved? There’s an entire school of screenwriting named after the idea of having your hero “save a cat” as an introduction, to get the reader on their side, but of course, there’s a lot more to this issue than that (which is duly acknowledged in the Save the Cat literature). We’re often told “he/she doesn’t have to be likable, just interesting,” but what does that really mean?

One important component is curiosity. The audience is sitting down to watch the movie after having a great deal of the plot leaked to them through the promotional materials, in addition to their general cinematic expertise of all the genre conventions and tropes. So in those first few minutes (pages), you must fight against this foreknowledge and create some questions in their minds as to how things will turn out for our hero. And their desire for answers should be emotional, not purely intellectual.

Again, how? Well, the good news is – it’s not a rigid rule, but a spectrum of emotional engagement. Your protag just has to be somewhere on it.

The Emotional Engagement Spectrum

This range of interest, to the best of my estimation, runs as follows. At one end is total sympathy, in which we genuinely feel for the protag and want them to beat the odds (another necessary ingredient) and achieve their goal. Toward the middle would be empathetic support, in which we have a fairly shady and corrupt anti-hero who is surrounded by much worse specimens who make him shine by comparison, and we want to see him defeat those whose wickedness outdoes his own and possibly achieve some kind of redemption in the process. At the “low” end would be morbid curiosity. Here we follow a despicable individual with no redeeming moral qualities, but there’s something intriguing about his/ her character in relation to the goal that makes us stick with them to see if they achieve it.

Let’s have a look at some examples:

Andy Dufresne

Why does The Shawshank Redemption – a prison movie with no gunfights, no car chases, and no romance; that was a box office failure – have such enduring appeal? There are many virtues here, not the least of which is Andy Dufresne. Has there ever been a more likable and sympathetic protagonist? Remember how he was set up? When we first lay eyes on Andy, he’s sitting in his car, on the verge of tears, swigging whiskey from the bottle, with a gun. Though an armed man clearly stalking someone, he has the look of prey more than predator. Through a purely visual presentation, we already get that he’s an underdog, pushed to desperate extremes, experiencing what is probably the worst night of his life. All of this is confirmed When we start intercutting with his wife and her lover, and his testimony as he’s tried for murdering them. Here he also shows great poise, earnestness, and even some cleverness as he professes his innocence to the prosecutor. Then he’s condemned to two life sentences. So we have an innocent man, sentenced to a literal lifetime (two!) of undeserved suffering, victimized by a ruthless system in a cruel and unfair world. In less than seven minutes of screentime, we’re on Andy’s side and want to see him get out of this.

Léon

In The Professional (entitled Léon outside the US), the titular assassin is set up with an oft-used (for good reason) technique of giving one impression of the protag, and then spinning it in a new direction to subvert the audience’s budding notions and add texture to the character. Léon is briefed on his next job by his employer Tony. A few seeds are dropped here that Léon isn’t your garden-variety scumbag hitman. While Tony has a bottle of hard stuff in front of him, Léon’s drinking milk, and being told that he’s to give an unreasonable gangster a talking-to on behalf of a more reasonable one. He delivers the message, with a blade to the guy’s throat, after unceremoniously wiping out his entire entourage of bodyguards. Afterward, this certified killing machine goes shopping for more milk, then home where he has an unexpected encounter. He meets his twelve-year-old neighbor Matilda, shows genuine concern for the bruises on her face that obviously came from her abusive father, then subtly agrees to keep her smoking a secret. So we have this fierce and able warrior with a soft spot for his weak, innocent, defenseless acquaintance, whose family, we soon find out, has mounting trouble with some very dangerous characters. Who wouldn’t want to stick around to see how this shakes out?

Louis Bloom

As we creep to the lower end of the spectrum, we come to Lou Bloom of Nightcrawler. His opening few minutes consist of him stealing materials from a construction site, trying to lie his way out of it when he’s caught by a security guard, and then assaulting and robbing the guard. For all we know at this point, we’re meeting the antagonist (which isn’t entirely untrue, I suppose, but that’s for another post). But, once again, things take a turn. When Lou sells his stolen goods to another construction company, he doesn’t just take the money and run. Lou applies for a job. He asks to be taken on as a construction worker right there on the spot, and he pitches himself pretty hard. He even offers to start as an unpaid intern! Of course, his sociopathic tendencies precluded him from spotting the imprudence of offering to work for someone you just sold stolen goods to, and Lou is turned out to seek employment elsewhere. But here we have an unstable criminal, but with a sincere desire to get a legitimate job and earn his keep. We may not particularly like the guy, but anyone can identify with the hopeless feeling that no one will give us a chance to show what we can do (aspiring screenwriters, anyone?), and from here we’re left wondering if Lew will get his chance, and what else he’s willing to do along the way.

Patrick Bateman

And now we come to the bottom of the barrel. How can you get any lower than a narcissistic, psychopathic, Wall Street executive serial killer? I give you Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. After a series of atmosphere shots around a trendy hipster restaurant to set up the world and introduce the theme of runaway shallow materialism, we settle on Patrick and his “friends” gossiping about colleagues, ribbing each other about their personal lives, and generally wallowing in their frivolity. But then we get the first hint of who this story is about when Patrick goes on a sarcastic rant about world social issues that’s ironically intriguing. It shows that he’s completely cognizant of mainstream moral values and willfully rejects them. His only goal seems to be “to fit in” (as he expresses later). Then he truly distinguishes himself among his superficial, borderline sociopathic cohorts when he goes to the bar and issues an extremely graphic death threat to the bartender for refusing his drink voucher and making him pay cash. Here it goes from a question of stability to one of self-control, and we hang with him out of pure morbid curiosity to see how long he can maintain it, what’ll happen when he loses it, and what the ramifications will be in this fairytale world of delusional excess.

Now let’s have a look at a few films that fail at this:

Patience Phillips

Who can forget that 2004 masterpiece known as Catwoman? Sure, it’s easy to scoff in hindsight, but this movie had quite a bit going for it when it was announced; One of the hottest actresses in Hollywood at the time, who had already proven she could blend sexy with badass, would be playing a beloved character from the Batman mythology with a built-in fanbase. What could go wrong? Let me count the ways. We first see Patience floating face-down in a stream, presumably dead. Not a bad opening image, but simultaneously the awfulness starts. We’re treated to a clunky, expository voiceover telling us how unremarkable, monotonous, lonely, and unfulfilled her life was to this point. And this voiceover follows us like a persistent mosquito as we cut back a few days, and Halle’s been outfitted with a painfully unconvincing costume of stringy hair and baggy clashing clothes to show us she’s “nerdy.” Her boss reprimands and nearly fires her, then issues her a tight deadline in a confusingly heavy-handed and unnatural exchange. From here, things really go off the rails. She fails to quiet her noisy neighbors (gee, I wonder if this is a setup for later), then there’s an extremely awkward scene where she climbs out her window to save a stray cat (must’ve read that book) and gets rescued by a handsome cop who thinks she’s a jumper. Then, as she races to meet her deadline, she stumbles into her boss’s secret shady meeting with criminals and “hears too much.” From here, she gets chased and shot at by guards and falls into the chemical waste-filled stream, and we’re back where we started. So, what can we make of this mess? Well, the character did encounter several hardships and misfortunes that put her in a precarious position, but the situations are so oddly illogical and unbelievable that they invoke the wrong kinds of questions from the audience, those dreaded ones that start with “Why would…?” It’s really difficult to develop an emotional connection to a character whose plight 1) is explained rather than shown, and 2) entails a stream of occurrences that defy all logic and aren’t in any way believable, even within the fantasy-based story world.

What? Bad example? Too easy a target? Okay, let’s look at a “film” that succeeded at the box office, but failed at engaging the audience with its protagonist…

Sam Witwicky

Once we finally meet Transformers‘s protagonist, after some prerequisite explosions, Sam is introduced as the quintessential high school geek whose classmates include the jock bully who’s inexplicably fixated on harassing Sam, and who’s dating the hottest girl in the class, who inexplicably can’t take her eyes off Sam. Yawn. Sam’s getting his first car and is upset that his dad’s about to buy him a used one instead of a new Porche. (His dad drives him past the Porsche dealership first as a joke that he totally falls for. Hilarious, right?) Then he “gets chosen” by the 1977 Camaro Transformer Bumblebee, which he drives to a lake party where he runs into Jock Bully and Hot Girl, who inexplicably breaks up with Jock Bully at a really convenient time and Sam is able to give her a ride home. Bumblebee tries to get him laid by breaking down and playing sexy music, Hot Girl offers to fix it, then just bails. That night Bumblebee starts and drives himself, and Sam chases after him, thinking his car’s being stolen, and we’re pretty much off to the races. Here we have a clear-cut case of failure to arouse any curiosity whatsoever. We may enjoy watching Sam’s adventures for the visual spectacle they deliver, but is there anything the least bit intriguing about him that we haven’t seen in a hundred other “high school geek” characters? Not only do we not wonder if he’ll get the girl and save the day, but we can confidently predict an awful lot about how he’ll go about it. So what’s there to care about?

By looking at these examples of failed protagonist setups, a few things become apparent. It’s obvious that these filmmakers understood the necessity and even the conventions of setting up the protagonist, as both of them “went through the motions” of endearing their main characters to the audience, but it takes more than a few cookie-cutter “good deeds” or “underdog” scenes to evoke any kind of emotional concern. We have to ride the line between enough uniqueness to make them feel like a person rather than a plot delivery device and enough relatability and logic to root them in our universal understanding of the human condition. Too easy, right?

So, hopefully, you gleaned something from this take on engaging the audience with the protagonist. As we can see from how these pros pulled it off, there are many ways to skin (or save) this cat. You can go about it by a variety of methods, but two things you can’t do are is skip it, or gloss over it! If you do, you have a dud on your hands (at least from a storytelling standpoint). So what do you think? Got any insights about how to get the reader hooked into the protag’s journey? Let us know below!