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Screenwriting Issue of the Day

Giving Feedback – Do Your Job!

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Once, several years ago, after I’d completed a first draft, I excitedly solicited a feedback exchange in a social media group I was a part of. A writer who’d purportedly written and sold a script of the same genre volunteered to read it, I sent it, and a few days later I got this back…

Read the first 10 pages – with all do respect – can’t go any further – boring and uninteresting writing – no depth or imagination to the characters – nothing pulls you into the story on page one or to page 10 – go over ur [course] notes to see where you went wrong or buy

Anatomy of A screenplay and put your script on the rack

I would have to write many pages of notes to get you in the game

Best

Pretty harsh, huh? My favorite part is “with all DO respect”. I guess if you’re gonna ‘do respect,’ do it write! Sure, it’s dismissive and snarky, there’s a lack of DO respect, and it’s a half-step above telling me to give up all hope; but do you see the real problem here? In the long run, what really bothered me was that, as a writer who’d agreed to give feedback, he didn’t honor his commitment.

When it comes to giving feedback, there’s loads of great advice out there about the mechanics of script dissection and evaluation, but what I’m really talking about here is mindset. When the writer enlists you for this crucial task, they’re trusting you to aid in translating their vision from the subjective creative echo chamber of their brain to the objective world at large, or, more frighteningly, the market. You have a job to do. What is that job? First, here’s what it’s not… 

  • Making it all about you – Showing off your own screenwriting prowess by picking out everything you would’ve done differently, and then sending the writer something that reads like a “top 100 list of the ways I’m better than you.”
  • Being an unconditional cheerleader – The other extreme. Usually, this happens when it’s a close friend’s work you’re reading, so you praise every single word, even the misspelled ones, calling them a creatively quirky stylistic choice, and tell the writer they’re an unadulterated genius with nothing to improve, regardless of the objective quality, clarity, and impact of the writing itself. This may sound unrealistic, but trust me. That nasty note above notwithstanding, I’ve exchanged feedback with some real sweethearts.
  • Treating it like an academic assignment – marching through it with your red pen and a mechanical “correct/ incorrect” mentality (“Oh, your description got inside the character’s head here, minus five points!”), rather than a storytelling/ marketability perspective, and handing them back something that’s more “graded” than assessed for its narrative effectiveness.
  • Copping out – Telling them that after the first few pages you already know it’s not good enough and giving no real guidance or tips to course-correct, except maybe vague book or course recommendations. SEE ABOVE (More on this momentarily).
  • Faking it – Instead of taking the time to read it, just picking out a few random scenes and making a few comments about them to give the illusion that you read it; and turning over a few disjointed unhelpful comments. 

All of these amount to misunderstanding the central tenets of the feedback-giving mission: 

It’s an employment/ business proposition: Even if the writer calls it “friendly feedback” or some other gentle euphemism, you should still think of it as business. This will put your ego in check. In a job interview, if the HR person asked about your interest in this company, would you think of that as a juicy opportunity for a power trip to pick apart and harp on every aspect of the business you think is “wrong”? If so, how do you like living in your parents’ basement? The dynamic here is that someone is employing you to enhance their enterprise, thus… 

Join the writer’s team. By agreeing to give feedback, you’ve taken on an interest, however small, in the direction this piece will go. You’re putting, at the very least,  your trustworthiness with this writer on the line, and purporting to put your best writing know-how into picking up this script, wherever it is now, and carrying it as close as possible to the end zone as defined by the writer. This is a task not to be taken lightly. BUT… You don’t want to cross the line and start offering notes like “I think it would be cooler if right here this character did x,” and “I would like it better if this scene ended this way.” You’re on their team, but not their new writing partner. this hasn’t become your script, which brings me to my next point.

You’re a hired gun. This should provide just about the right balance between detachment and commitment.In reverse order, the hired gun is committed enough that he’s made the client’s enemies his enemies, and will risk his own life to kill them. Luckily you’re not being asked to risk your life, kill anyone, or make any enemies (if you are, maybe pass on this one). But you should take on the writer’s desired outcome as your own; whether that’s to get the draft ready for a submission, iron out an Act 2 lag, flesh out one or more characters, whatever. But… the hired gun is also detached enough so that there’s no personal investment or emotional dissonance to get in the way of accomplishing the mission. So you should not get so emotionally involved in the writer’s script that you do things like forego your own work, relentlessly follow up on how your feedback was applied or not after the fact, or get involved in the writer’s decision about the next step. A hired gun doesn’t really care, as the job is just a job he took on under certain very strict terms. He’ll do his part and then move on with his life. If he’s not ready to do that, he’ll turn it down, as should you, so…

Get all the way in, or all the way out. If you’ve got too much on your plate already, you really don’t care for script-reading, or for some other reason you just have a distaste for the job from the outset, don’t take it on just to be nice! Politely declining to read and give notes is far preferable to giving half-baked, disinterested, or even fake feedback (see above) that can set the writer on the wrong track moving further away from their vision. If you’re not ready and willing to do the job right, don’t do it at all. 

So back to that love note I received,…

It’s fine to think my writing is crap. That’s just an honest assessment of the quality as he sees it. It’s fine to stop after ten pages. As mentioned, it wasn’t paid feedback, and ten pages is more than enough to get a feel for how the rest of the script will go. I dare say no script has ever been crap for ten pages and then morphed into greatness on page eleven (what a twist!). But what about that part where he said he’d “have to write many pages of notes to get me in the game?” Does he owe me that? Should he or any other generous offerer of feedback have to trudge through writing so bad that it’s hard to know what the intention was, and pen 120 pages of notes for a 90-pages script? Of course not. BUT… to read ten pages and then write a few sentences just saying it’s basically hopeless? Good thing this wasn’t paid feedback. What should he have done? 

Well, someone claiming to be on the level he did shouldn’t require this explanation, but here we go… He should’ve isolated one scene, or even one scene segment, that he felt was representative of a fundamental problem with the writing overall; missed opportunities for “depth or imagination,” description and details that were extraneous and don’t “pull you into the story,” whatever; and given me a few tips on what would be a better direction to take it. 

So, the lesson here is, in case it wasn’t clear or was too “boring and uninteresting” to follow (I’ve heard that my writing can be that way), NEVER give feedback like the note above. Actually, it’s too generous to call it feedback. He basically offered to give feedback and then withdrew his offer in a rather nasty, back-handed fashion. When a writer shows the respect and reverence to request your thoughts on their work, do your job!

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!

Inspiration

The Creative Process Behind Back to the Future!

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There’s a lot of good stuff here, including some specific plotting and structure techniques in how Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale constructed Back to the Future, one of the greatest feats of cinematic storytelling ever committed to celluloid! Enjoy!

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!

My Story Theories

The Not-So-Silent Treatment

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As anyone who read my post on loglines might guess, I’m in a phase of reevaluation and rediscovery of prewriting tools due to a new project. The latest object of experimentation is the treatment, or stylized synopsis of the script. The producer I’m working with asked first for a four-page, and then a 16-20-page treatment as a means of tweaking and developing the concept.

Much like the loglines, I’d previously thought of treatments as an annoying step that came in the marketing phase, to pare my script down to a document short enough to accommodate the time constraints and attention spans of producers or executives. I always found the process whittling the story down into an effective summary excruciating.

After learning that it’s commonly done prior to writing the script, I wasn’t much happier about that prospect. I’m a scene cards (index cards) guy. They’ve become my favorite tool for mapping out the significant plot points, so I can then adjust the structure until I’m able to kinda sorta watch the film in my head, and then dive into the screenplay itself. I didn’t see what could be gained by distilling and summarizing a plot that was still in development.

But, of course, I was wrong again…

The misconception that was really holding me back was viewing the treatment as a rote synopsis (recall that “effective summary” language used earlier). The utter stupidity of seeing it as simultaneously a promotional device, and an essay devoid of creative flair, where the story concept was laid bare to speak for itself, is unfathomable now. After some perspective damage control, I’ve discovered a whole new dimension of prewriting benefits, both artistic and mechanical.

There’s much more literary flexibility in the treatment than the script itself, due to the need to get to the point and economically convey the mood and tone. It’s permissible to spend some time in the characters’ heads, as well as the readers’. Of course, we still have to stay primarily visual and not hit them over the head with how they should feel at every turn, but there’s much more room for suggestion on these matters.

Throwing in some stylistic and provocative turns of phrase here and there; such as “She’s devastated to find out that…,” “He doesn’t quite buy that explanation, but he agrees,” or “And then they exchange a knowing smile. These two are working together!;” also hatches a graphical “emotion map,” an invaluable guide for the writer to reference and adjust along the way, which brings me to the more pragmatic aspects…

If the scene cards represent a blueprint of the story, then the treatment operates more like a miniature 3D model. It reflects not only the order and structure of the beats but also how they flow and blend together. Thus it goes beyond the mere framework of the story and gives a preview of how it will be told. This allows numerous plotting mishaps to be pinpointed and rectified in the treatment-writing process, and uniquely so, since they aren’t so easily spotted in outlining, scene cards, any other form of “beating out the story” that I’ve employed.

Its nature as a piece of prose rather than an itemized list of occurrences lends greater immediate visibility to how any change you make affects, not only that plot point but other narrative factors as well. Here are some issues it can help detect…

  • The overall timing of scenes, setup/ payoff pairs, obstacles, tense moments, reveals, and twists are awkwardly and/ or predictably paced.
  • Two significant events are butted against each other, but the logical cause-and-effect principles that would carry one to the next just aren’t there.
  • A character’s mood, actions, or motives change on a dime or seem inconsistent somehow
  • The characters are acting according to knowledge or motivations that they don’t have yet.
  • Scenes and sequences need to be added or cut to get to certain waypoints more smoothly and effectively.

This isn’t a magic bullet. Haven’t found one of those yet. Maybe a treatment is as useless to you as I once thought it was for me, but many of the issues above were caught and dealt with much sooner in the process this time around than on previous projects that had no treatment in the pipeline. Adding one on this go-around opened a new world to me. If you’re getting stuck in the development of your plot, maybe it can give you the same refreshed perspective! Give it a try and let us know how it works for you!

My Story Theories

Don’t Underestimate the Logline

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We’re all familiar with it, and many of us dread it. It’s that terribly brutal chore of condensing 100+ pages of story into a single sentence. It’s often invoked as a necessary component of the marketing package of your script once it’s complete and ready to be shopped around. However, the depth the logline’s purpose and utility go far beyond that. It’s a mistake to overlook it as a powerful prewriting tool, guide, and measuring stick for a developing idea.

According to John Truby, most scripts fail at the premise level, meaning that the foundational concept isn’t adequately fleshed out before the writer opens up Final Draft and gets going. Forming a logline isn’t the catchall remedy to this, but it can be the ideal starting point for troubleshooting. It’s a super quick, super efficient device to gauge whether your premise or situation has graduated to the level of a story; and to get you there if it hasn’t. 

The logline lets you know if the bare essentials are taken care of. In its most common and basic form, it represents the skeletal framework of 1) protagonist, 2) protagonist’s goal, 3) antagonist (or antagonizing force), 4) stakes (consequences if the goal isn’t achieved), and maybe 5) world of the story if it’s unique and/ or vital to the narrative.

Example – Logline for The Dark Knight: A masked vigilante hero must stop a sadistic domestic terrorist before his attacks destroy Gotham City.  Loglines can undoubtedly vary in form and structure, and will usually be modified later when the objective becomes marketing and promotion, but most of the time they’ll look something like this at the outset.

See all five of those pieces in there? If you can’t roll call these elements and articulate how they operate together in one concise sentence, then you probably have some fundamental story problems; and these are much easier to take care of at the prewriting stage than after you’ve written 25 pages and don’t know where to go from there.

This is coming from experience. I had an idea for an action thriller that I was so fond of, it seemed as if the entire story just played right out in my mind. So I just dove in head-first and started cranking out pages. Somewhere around the end of Act I, I hit a wall. Some glaring logic issues started creeping into my head that needed addressing before I could move on. A fellow writer, much more experienced than I, suggested taking it back to the logline to ferret out any missing pieces.

“Logline? Those awful one-sentence summary things they harped on in filmschool? Isn’t that for the pitch phase?” I’m not proud of my mentality or writing from those days. Anyway, I took his advice and the missing link came jumping off the page at me. 

I had a familiar but unique protagonist, with a clear goal, and his polar-opposite-in-every-way antagonist that had perfectly organic reasons to oppose him. The bloodbath finale between them was the image that made we want to write it in the first place.

BUT… 

Those logic problems came from one central notion: why wouldn’t he just walk away from the situation before said bloodbath ever ensued? There were no stakes. So many other building blocks were so clear, and so many of the plot points practically wrote themselves, that I’d developed a total blind spot when it came to the stakes. Who cares why he has to be in this situation? If he’s not, my awesome story can’t happen! That’s why! Well, I don’t think that’s going to cut it with a producer or manager.

This is where things really got interesting. It’s just stakes. No big deal, right? Just contrive some reason that explains his plight and traps him in it. I’ll have this script back up and running in no time; awesome story still intact. Not even close.

The narrative corner I’d painted myself into couldn’t have been a better arena in which to learn the indispensable nature of each of those logline components. It dawned on me real fast that they interconnect like the cells of a Rubik’s Cube. Change one, and you shift several others with it. The most precious ideas in the story were so dependent on certain choices by the protagonist, that the introduction of every type of stakes I brainstormed threw them off. 

I’d reached a storytelling impasse. My premise needed stakes, but the addition of stakes altered it into something I wasn’t so excited to write. So I shelved it, extracted some of my favorite aspects, and put them into a new script; one with a complete logline.

Is that idea dead forever? Of course not. No story issue is insurmountable, and it may just get another look someday. But the point is that looking to the logline allowed me to avoid digging deeper into a story that had already failed at the premise level and direct my time and effort toward something with a greater chance of success. So when you’re getting a newly-formed story concept off the ground, bypass this step at your peril.

What do you think? Do you agree that the logline is an important guide? Let us know!

Movie Reviews

Halloween 2018 Review: Murder by Exposition

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(Spoiler-free)

Alright, this review is admittedly late to the party, but there is a method to the madness. I’ll get to it shortly…

First of all, this is a solid sequel and worthy addition to the series. It takes a purist approach by following the groundwork laid in Carpenter’s 1978 genre-creating classic; it doesn’t set arbitrary values for itself like “higher body count” or “more exotic killings,” it doesn’t add extraneous and tangential plot detours to desperately contrive enough story for a new movie, and it doesn’t eat up copious screen time pursuing answers to questions that nobody asked.

All in all, the plot, cinematography, score, and acting effectively elevate the film to such levels that they compensate for some of its lesser qualities and make for an enjoyable watch that’s uniquely worthy of a trip to the theater.

Big deal, you say. That reads like all the other reviews for this movie. So now we come to the reason for this one. There’s a screenwriting elephant in the room that no one seems to be talking about, and I think deserves some attention. Many of the script choices in this movie are highly questionable, and some are just plain weird. Some subplots don’t go anywhere, some “twists” are merely plot contrivances to serve convenient ends, etc. but these are relatively negligible and even forgivable as they tend to fall below the line of suspension of disbelief. My beef with the writing lies elsewhere.

More brutal than the stabs to heart or claw hammers to the skull is the dialog that lands squarely on the nose. And I mean RIGHT on it. Let’s look at one brief exchange from the trailer…

When protagonist Laurie confesses that she hoped spree killer Michael Myers would escape from prison, and she’s asked why; her stunning reply is “so I can kill him.” Now, trailer dialog always entails the caveat that we’re hearing it out of context, so we’re left to think that maybe there’s more to this conversation and it’ll play out much better in its totality. But, no. Like virtually everything from Halloween’s trailers, what we see is what we get.

As a friendly reminder, I liked this movie and Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance in it, but there is no measure for the awfulness of this line. The dramatic punch that the circumstances suggest it’s supposed to have falls miserably flat due to its blatancy, total lack of nuance, and utter failure to do its job of delivering the emotion of the character with a certain eloquent poetry that would never be uttered by a gruff old vigilante speaking of shooting a slasher in the face, but is called for in the name of satisfying storytelling.

In the words of Christopher McQuarrie, “think of what you want to say, and then don’t say it.” Dialog is never just a filmmaker-to-audience conduit for story information. It should be an ornament that adds flavor and style to the film, while covertly imparting exposition under the viewer’s nose. There is no more exigent situation for heeding this advice than this moment from Halloween. Countless preferable responses could have elevated that moment into something like what it was intended to be. Let’s explore a few…

Laurie: Do you know that I prayed every night that he would escape?
Hawkins: What the hell did you do that for?
Laurie: So I can kill him. So I can finish what Dr. Loomis started.

Or

Laurie: Because what he needs can’t be done while he’s locked up.

Or

Laurie: Some animals shouldn’t be caged. They have to be put down.

Or

Laurie: The cops and shrinks don’t know how to deal with him. I do.

Or

Laurie: Because he doesn’t deserve to die of old age.

See? None of these are great. They’re the product of about three minutes of brainstorming, but I’ll stand by any one of them as superior to that black hole of subtlety that made it into the film.

After really harping on that one line, I hate to say that it’s not the least bit rare among this film’s dialog. Every spoken word either serves to explain the plot to us or intimate precisely what the character is thinking, leaving absolutely nothing for us to decipher for ourselves. Need further evidence?

Martin: We’re here to investigate a patient that killed three innocent teenagers on Halloween, 1978. He was shot by his own psychiatrist and taken into custody that night, and has spent the last forty years in captivity.

Laurie: I need to protect my family. You have no security system, Karen.
Karen: Mom, you need help!
Laurie: Evil is real.

Laurie: He is a killer. But he will be killed tonight.

It is certainly true that Loomis had some musing monologues in the original that were borderline clunky (and would have been laughable if not delivered by the likes of Donald Pleasance), but that can be at least partially chalked up to breaking in a new kind of character in a new subgenre; and it doesn’t nearly approach the awkwardness with which the speech in the latest installment comes across.

What’s troubling here is that so many other features of the movie are so good, and this one is so easily fixed with some quick and easy tweaking. Oh well, perhaps this will be addressed in the inevitable sequel(s).

What do you think? How did you find the dialog; and the movie in general? Let us know!

Inspiration

Predator (1987): Like Long Tall Sally… It’s Built Sweet

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This is one of the most accessible and enjoyable story structure breakdowns I’ve ever seen, and his nickname for Shane Black made me laugh out loud! Enjoy!