How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 11: Raid the Public Imagination

If you don’t want to raid the public domain, you can simply raid the public imagination. Ted Elliott memorably described this as “mental real estate” and talked about how he and his writing partner raided it quite profitably for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Another great example is Men in Black. There was a longstanding urban legend about mysterious G-Men in black suits and glasses who would show up after any mysterious event and intimidate people into saying nothing had happened. Even if you’d never heard the legend, it tapped into a universal fear of government suppression in an iconic way.

Likewise, you don’t have to make a extensively-footnoted docu-drama like JFK in order to tap into fears about assassination conspiracies. Movies like The Parallax View, Winter Kills and The Package do the job just as well.

I pointed out before that there’s no better source for short film ideas than Paradox Publishing’s graphic novel compilation “The Big Book of Urban Legends”. For feature-length ideas, you could do worse than to raid the rest of that series, which offered more in-depth looks at other twice-told tales that infect the public consciousness. Their “Big Book of Conspiracies”, “Big Book of the Unexplained”, etc. collect and codify those nagging, unproven suspicions that lurk outside the realm of confirmed fact.

The simplest version of this tactic is shown by the movie Safe House. If the movie had just been titled Kill the Spy! it would have sounded too much like something we’ve seen a million times before. On the other hand, if it had been titled One Day in Johannesburg, it might not have piqued anybody’s interest.But most people have some vague idea that spies uses something called a “safe house”, and yet we’ve never really seen a movie set there, so that was a piece of mental real estate waiting to be claimed. By choosing the name Safe House, they said to the public, “It’s a genre you know and love, but it’s an angle you haven’t seen before.” A name like that is gold.

Okay, that’s it for now. Below, you’ll find the tag for this series. Feel free to send it to your future fans when they ask you, “Where do you get your ideas??”

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 10: Raid the Public Domain

I probably don’t need to tell anybody this, because it’s all the rage right now, but the public domain is a great source of story ideas. One of the most popular movies of last year was Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, leading to an avalanche of edgy re-interpretations of fairy tales and other children’s stories.

Of course, if legal sanity had prevailed, we would now have everything from the 1950s on back entering the public domain, but corporate power has declared war on this precious natural resource by constantly extending copyrights. Copyrights were created to reward innovation, but now they do the opposite, encouraging their owners to wring a thousand years of blood out of every old stone. It now seems unlikely that most post-1910 works will ever enter the public domain, much less anything from the 21^st century.

But that still leaves a treasure trove of works to plumb, including works that still have recognizable names and easily-adaptable stories. I’ve toyed with adaptations of “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Man Who Was Thursday”, both of which have very modern themes that still resonate today. All you have to do is update the setting.

It used to be hard to figure out which works were in the public domain, but the internet makes it much easier. Just look up any work you’re curious about at Project Gutenberg. If it’s available to the public, they’ll know, and they’ll have the whole text available for download at the touch of a button. Cut and paste it into a new document, then start reshaping.

But as I said before, this well is currently being over-tapped, and after we have a dozen failed fairy tale updates in the next year, then it may become poisoned for a few years. Tomorrow, for our grand finale, we’ll look at a variation that works just as well...

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 9: Show Us the Other Side

One day, Billy Wilder was watching David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter, about a veddy British adulterous couple having a series of guilt-wracked assignations. They’re ashamed about every part of the process, including the fact that they have to stay out of sight by doing the deed in the apartment of the man’s friend.

That friend is barely seen onscreen—he has nothing to do with the story, but Wilder couldn’t stop thinking about him: that poor schmuck who has to come home to a sullied bed. The character stayed with Wilder for years until he finally turned into C.C. Baxter, star of The Apartment.

Likewise, it’s not hard to figure out the origin of The Other Guys: it begins as two hard-as-nails supercops watch some bank robbers driving away…They look at each other and decide to take a so-crazy-it-just-might-work leap off a building and onto the bad guys’ car…But it was a little too crazy and they simply splat dead on the ground. That leaves the case in the hands of two paper-pusher cops who are more used to riding desks.

Of course, this can be a dangerous way to create an idea: you don’t want to end up with the abstraction of an abstraction. Instead of writing something that merely comments on someone else’s metaphor, it’s important to fill in the missing half of the original metaphor and connect it back to your own hopes and fears. On Scriptshadow, I recommended the book “Fat Vampire” for adaptation, which has a good example as its premise: Why does becoming a vampire always mean that you remain forever beautiful? What if it just kept you forever fat?

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 8: Flip Another Movie’s Genre

In order to sell a pitch, you need a catchy logline. My latest script, which I’m getting notes on today, couldn’t have been more simple: “The thriller version of [a well-known comedy]”. (I’m not at liberty to say which yet, but it’s one of the movies in the list at right.) Once I said that, everybody could instantly see the appeal.

This has been done a lot over the years: Throw Momma From the Train is explicitly the comedy version of Strangers on a Train. The recent spec sale From Mia With Love is basically the comedic version of the dreadful Nicole Kidman thriller Birthday Girl. A movie I mentioned yesterday, Chronicle, could be called the thriller version of Zapped.

Here’s the zany action-comedy version of Taken: A divorced CIA agent, who is convinced that Europe is a cesspool, can’t reach his daughter in France on the phone, so he rampages across the continent trying to get her back, while she constantly tries to ditch him. Along the way, his hysterical fears of Muslims are turned on their head when he gets mixed up with a beautiful French-Socialist-Muslim lady-spy. Meanwhile, his daughter, looking to borrow money, pays a surprise visit to his ex-partner, only to stumble onto the fact that he’s now an illegal gun runner. Now the dad and the French spy have to team up to save his daughter after all, unexpectedly falling in love along the way!

Here’s the thriller version of The Hangover: The introverted brother-of-the-bride is reluctantly invited along on a wild Vegas bachelor party by the groom and his friends. These guys turn out to be corrupt cops by day and drug dealers by night. When they run into rivals in the midst of the party, things get violent. The brother-in-law has seen too much, so they inject him with something that wipes out his short-term memory and leave him at the scene to take the rap. …But he wakes up early, avoids the manhunt that’s looking for him and searches the city for clues as to what happened in the missing hours, so that he can clear his name and nail the real killers...

These things write themselves!

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 7: Pull a Genre Element Out Of Its Genre

For the second half of this project, let’s look at ways to tap into pre-existing stories...

For a long time, genre stories and realistic stories were strictly separated. Stories with fantastical elements happened in fanciful settings. If someone got superheroes, they put on tights and fought crime, because that’s the appropriate genre for that story element.

But now those assumptions have been blown to hell, for good or ill. There are lots of stories that take a fantastical element and put it in a realistic setting. This especially happens in found footage movies like Chronicle and Cloverfield. This can be a very fruitful way to create a new story, but it also had its pitfalls.

On the one hand, why not? If done right, such movies can turn our genre expectations upside down, forcing us to see these familiar genre elements with fresh eyes and reject the tired familiarity of the stories we’re used to. These elements are injected with a new rawness and immediacy, allowing our enjoyment of them to be revivified.

On the other hand, the danger is that the writer will try to have it both ways. In movies like The Dark Knight (which I thought was overrated—heresy, I know…) you have a lot of messy real world politics rubbing up against the fact that, in the real world, no one would dress up as a bat to fight crime.

Even worse, you get movies like Hancock. In one broadly comic scene early on, Hancock literally shoves one guy’s head up another guy’s ass. Later, in a very serious scene, the two guys deal with the trauma this has caused. Nuh-uh. Not allowed. Don’t ask us to consider the PTSD caused by silly, unrealistic stories.

A great example of taking a genre element out of its genre was shown by the excellent French movie Poison Friends. It begins as typical thriller: we meet a group of friends in a competitive academic program who don’t suspect that there’s a sociopath in their group, telling devilish lies and pitting them against each other for his own selfish purposes. We expect things to escalate until the knives come out, but instead, the group gradually realizes that this guy is just a dick and they shun him from their lives. The movie becomes a straight-up drama as we see the exposed sociopath try to pick up the pieces of his wasted life.

You might not associate such a movie with something like Chronicle or Cloverleaf, but they have the same essential set up: How would you deal with a monster like this in real life, rather than if you were in a genre movie? When done right, this can be an electrifying question.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 6: Start with an Image

A man waiting at a lonely crossroads suddenly realizes that a cropduster pilot is plunging down towards him with death in his eyes. Why? A house lifts up out of the city, carried aloft by thousands of helium balloons. Who’s in it? Where’s it going?This is one of the most exciting but dangerous ways to generate an idea. You’re essentially starting with the poster: an arresting image that would make anybody want to see more. All that you’re missing is characters and a plot and a theme. The danger, of course, is that once your hero comes to life, he’ll think of easier ways to get down to the Amazon. If you start in the middle, there’s no guarantee that your hero will want to get there.

I’ve had an image in my head for a while: a horde of Tyrannosauruses rampaging down the streets of modern day New York. How did they get there? And who will discover the cause of the problem? And why will the audience love that character? And what does any of this have to do with any genuine emotion of mine? Most importantly, what is the metaphor here? The image gives me none of this. It’s just a great poster.

Ultimately, it’s much more organic to start with a universal emotion and extrapolate an extreme situation from it, rather than starting with an extreme situation and reducing it back down to the emotion at its core. But it can work either way, if you’re very careful.

Pixar is especially good at this. I would imagine that most of their movies began with an image (toys coming to life, a mouse-chef in a human kitchen, a ruined planet covered in trash), but they don’t move forward until they’ve connected those concepts to very universal emotions.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 5: Search For Empathy

Occasionally there will be a small news item that will seize hold of the nation’s collective subconscious, generating dozens of famous stories. One such story was the arrest of deranged loner Ed Gein, who provided the basis for dozens of horror stories, the best of which was Robert Bloch’s novel/screenplay “Psycho”.

Movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre imagined what it might be like to be one of the Gein’s victims, but Bloch’s genius was to ask himself, “How could I make this guy sympathetic?” (The answer, as always, was a disapproving parent.)

Likewise Zoe Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal”, which Patrick Marbur adapted into an excellent movie of the same name, dared to find empathy with a female high school teacher who begins a sexual relationship with a student. The title of the American release of the book spelled out the source of Heller’s idea: She read a spate of news stories about similar cases and wondered, “What Was She Thinking?”

The most famous example of all was probably Citizen Kane. Far from being the cruel denunciation that William Randolph Hearst imagined it to be, the movie is actually an extraordinary act of empathy. Welles may have set out to topple a giant, but he wound up ennobling his deeply-flawed target. Instead of finding a villain in Hearst, he found a kindred spirit, and the movie acts as an unheeded cautionary tale for Welles’s own life.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 4: Do the Craziest Thing You’ve Ever Wanted to Do

Who hasn’t thought, after a bad break up, that they’d rather just wipe the whole experience out of their mind? Well guess what: in a movie, you can! Hard sci-fi starts with existing technology and extrapolates where it might go, but zanier stories like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind start with our hopes and fears and invent some vaguely-explained tech to make them manifest.

And you don’t have to go all the way into science-fiction. Take High Fidelity: I doubt that Nick Hornby ever actually called up all of his exes going back to elementary school and asked them what was wrong with him, but as soon as he had the idea, he knew it would make for a good novel and movie.And Jonathan Ames obviously didn’t actually chuck his writing career to become a cragslist-private-eye, but he considered it long enough to realize that it could make for a good TV series.

All three of the above stories worked, but be warned that this can also be a way to generate dubious gimmick-driven hokum like Yes Man, in which a man says yes to everything for a year, or self-indulgent messes like Synecdoche, NY, about a man who transforms his whole life into an elaborate theater piece.

These are all stories about the sort of grand romantic gestures that people make in their head but never in real life. The difference is that the first three projects are all about characters who come to realize the folly of their grand conceit, whereas the latter two stories supposed that these enterprises could be a source of profundity.

Ultimately, there’s a reason that we only do these sorts of things in our heads. If you’re going to try to turn one of these grand romantic gestures into a movie, then your hero needs to come to realize this sort of self-indulgence is a bad idea.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 3: Tap Into Your Irrational Fears

One problem with serial killer movies is that the victims are over-motivated to stop the killers. A serial killer is so obviously evil that opposing one is a no-brainer. If fears are perfectly rational, then your story runs the risk of being too generic. If you want to write a story that’s specific to your character’s psychology, then make your character’s most irrational fears come true.

Every pregnant woman suffers the occasional fleeting fear that this process is actually entirely unnatural and there’s a monster growing in her belly… That’s why Rosemary’s Baby resonates so powerfully.

And this doesn’t just work for horror movies. Who hasn’t idly wondered, in their more paranoid moments, “What if everyone around me is in on a secret? What if my life is secretly being manipulated for the amusement of others?” The Truman Show made those fears come to life in an especially trippy way.These movies work not simply because the audience worries about Rosemary and Truman, but because we feel a creeping sense of dread that our own craziest fears are being exposed to all the world and made manifest. We can’t help but wonder: if this fear can come true, what’s to stop all the others??

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 2: Start with a Unique Relationship

It’s fascinating to go back and re-watch the first six episodes of “30 Rock”. All of the elements of greatness were there, but they didn’t add up, because the show hadn’t found its focus. Liz’s boss yelled at her, to little effect, and she yelled at her employees, to little effect. The individual characters were hilarious, but these were all relationships we had seen before.

Then, suddenly, in episode six, everything snaps into place, and the show re-centers itself around a new, never-before-seen-on-TV relationship. Despite the fact that she’s a loosey-goosey ultra-liberal girl-about-town, Liz reluctantly accepts an ongoing offer of mentorship from Jack, her type-A ultra-right ultra-sexist boss. This odd but mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationship quickly became the heart of the show, and it has been ever since.

As I’ve said before, movies are defined not by unique characters but by unique relationships. This is good because we’ve already seen every type of character onscreen before. I’ve met a lot of oddballs in my life, but none that were totally unlike anything I’d seen onscreen. There’s always some movie somewhere that’s already gone there. Likewise with the heroes, villains, and love interests I’ve encountered. But I’ve had plenty of relationships that I’ve never seen onscreen before.

Think about times in your life when a teacher suddenly needed your help, or a favor turned into an bizarre feud, or a love affair turned into something else entirely. If this was a fascinating relationship that we haven’t seen onscreen before, then you’ll find a treasure trove of fresh, un-cliched emotions that you can tap into.

Can you find relationships from your life that are as incongruous as those seen in Paper Moon, Midnight Run, Election, etc? If not, you can always invent one from scratch. Simply take two very different types of characters and force them to rely on each other in a unique way.

How to Generate a Story Idea, Option 1: Imagine the Worst Case Scenario

True story: Many years ago, four Atlanta businessmen decided to take a weekend trip to the woods of North Georgia, hoping to canoe a river one last time before it got damned up. They didn’t plan things very well, and soon found themselves hopelessly lost on the river, far away from their cars or any town. They gradually came to realize, however, that the woods around them were filled with backwoodsmen. What happened next?

I’ll tell you what happened. Some mountain folk invited them back to their cabin, fed them a great meal and then escorted them back to their cars, with a warm farewell and an offer to stop by again anytime.

As the four men were on the way home, one of them wondered aloud, “Gee, what would have happened if those mountain folk hadn’t been so nice to us?” Things might have ended there, but one of the four men was James Dickey, who wrote the novel (and later screenplay) “Deliverance” based on that supposition. Ever since, the whole world has associated the fine people of North Georgia with psychotic depravity. No good deed goes unpunished.

One can carp about the ethics of throwing one’s rescuers under the bus like that, but it’s still a good lesson to writers: if the worst thing that ever happened to you wasn’t that bad, feel free to write about the worst thing that could have happened to you.

This gives you a chance to tap into the fears you actually felt, even if they turned out to be unfounded. After all, what really fuels Deliverance isn’t the (invented) evil of the tormentors, but the (very real) feelings of feelings of masculine inadequacy and disconnectedness from nature that grip the isolated men.

How to Build a Scene, Epilogue: Mix and Match

Last week, I talked about how to juice a scene, and I ended with a checklist of all the elements a great scene has. But one thing I didn’t talk about was what you could do if one or more scene failed the checklist. You have three choices:

1. Beef up the scene
2. Cut the scene
3. Combine two or more weak scenes together to become one rich scene with a lot of subtext.

Resist the urge to add elements to beef up a lacking scene. Listen to the scene: If it’s lacking, that’s telling you something. Transform the text of this scene into the subtext of another scene, or vice versa. Let’s go back to that episode of “Breaking Bad” that I charted: It has one seemingly small scene that could have been four scenes. Each of these confrontations could have been its own scene:

1. Walt Jr. tells his dad that he wants a new name and new identity.
2. Later, Walt confronts his wife to ask if she knew about this, she says that she supports Walt Jr.’s decision.
3. Later, Walt’s wife confronts him with her hurt feelings about his disappearances and lies.
4. Later, Walt’s meth partner Jesse reaches out to him for help, Walt refuses him.

Instead of presenting these four confrontations as separate scenes, the show layers all four confrontations on top of each other in one small scene: 

A friend comes to pick up Walt Jr. in the morning and accidentally calls him by his new name. Walt asks his son about this and he meekly confirms the new name on his way out the door. Walt, shocked, goes to ask his wife if she knew about this. She says she did, and explains it by saying “He wants his own identity” and “Your disappearance really hurt him.” Walt realizes that she’s talking about herself, not their son. He’s about to say something when the phone rings: Jesse is facing another crisis. Walt lies to his wife about who is on the phone and tells Jesse he’s on his own. By the time he gets off the phone, his wife is angrily leaving the house. All four confrontations can happen at the same time because they’re more subtle:

1. The first confrontation is replaced by symbolism: The name change says it all, relieving the need for an “I want my own identity” confrontation. The friend’s slip of the tongue allows the information to come out without the son confronting the dad.
2. Walt’s larger confrontation with his wife about his lies hides as subtext within the smaller confrontation about their son’s name change.
3. Walt doesn’t have to tell his wife “there are things I can’t tell you” because Jesse calls and she sees that.
4. Walt doesn’t have to tell Jesse, “you’re messing up my life,” because we see that happen.

Four potentially melodramatic confrontations all happen at once, but the way it plays out, none of them feels melodramatic. Indirect confrontations are less upsetting to the characters than direct confrontations, which means that you get to have more of them.

How to Build a Scene: The Checklist

(Welcome Reddit readers!  I wrote more about Breaking Bad in the follow-ups to this post here and here and I expanded on the checklist here)

I’m not sure that these rules can be applied to your scenes before you write them—you’d be putting up too many walls in your way blocking you from finding out what the scene wants to be about. As with most of the “rules” on this blog, this list is far more useful for rewriting than pre-writing. I was originally going to call this series “How to Juice a Scene,” and maybe that would have been better after all—if a scene is lacking something, this list will help you identify what that might be:

1. What is the main action of the scene?
2. What expectations for this interaction have been established beforehand?
3. Which of these events have been foreshadowed?
4. How emotional is the setting?
5. What’s the character’s strategy? (tricks and traps)
6. How does the plot progress at the end?
7. Which old questions are answered?
8. Which new questions are asked?
9. Is this a reversal or an escalation?
10. Are there hints of a character’s past?
11. Is there reblocking?
12. Is there one touch? (push and pull)
13. Are there objects exchanged? (give and take)
14. Is there a counterpoint to the tone?
15. Does someone talk about something other than the plot?
16. Does subtext replaces text as often as possible? 

(It occurs to me that I never actually mentioned that last one in this series. I’ll do it now: Make sure that you’ve substituted symbolism or unintentional character reveals for intentional reveals as often as possible.)

Of course, a checklist like this is also a tool for analysis: occasionally breaking down a well-written story and figuring out what makes it work is always a useful exercise for writers. I’ve finally been catching up with “Breaking Bad” and wow- It’s just as brilliant as everybody told me it would be. When I came up with the above list, I tested it out on the next episode I watched, and I thought that both the list and the episode came through the process pretty well. This is a breakdown of every scene from an episode in the middle of season two called “Down.” Click to enlarge, of course…

How to Build a Scene, Part 6: Don't Stay on Topic

Stories must be lean, and we’ve already established that you have a lot of work to do in a small amount of space. And yet, you’ll end up with a totally unappealing story if your characters only say what needs to be said to move the plot forward. The best way to combat this is to make sure that in every scene, you go off topic at least once.

Add a counterpoint—an oddly funny note in a serious scene, or a deeper note in a comedy scene. On TV, “Mad Men” does this beautifully. At the movies, the Coen brothers have made a career of it. (I think of the scene from The Man Who Wasn’t There where Frances McDormand, in jail, tries to confess her infidelity to her husband, but can’t stop complaining about the blubbering inmate next to her at the visitors’ table.)

Make sure at least one character talks about something that has nothing to do with the plot. This needn’t be idle chit-chat that stops the conflict, it can actually be another source of conflict. As I pointed out before, the person your hero has to talk to shouldn’t be sitting around waiting to have a conversation, they should have something else they want and need to do, forcing the hero to compete for their attention.This can be an oddball distraction that adds to the hero’s frustration whenever they try to move the conversation back to more serious topics, like the inspector’s wife’s culinary adventures in Frenzy, or Gene Hackman’s attempts to build his house in Unforgiven. Or it can be a red herring that threatens to derail the conversation…

My all-time favorite dialogue scene is not from a screenplay or play but a novel. No one wrote better dialogue that than the late Ed McBain, who wrote 55 novels about the detectives of the 87^th precinct. Way back in the second novel, 1956’s “The Pusher”, they’re after a big dealer and so they arrest a small fry to get information. They ask him his last name: “Hemingway”. They ask him his first name: “Ernest”. They get mad and threaten to beat him, but he doesn’t understand why. They snort that they doubt that just happens to be his name, too. He insists that he has no idea what they’re talking about.They gradually realize that this guy has gone through life with this name and yet he’s never once heard of the author of the same name, which makes it very clear how utterly bleak his upbringing was. The dealer, meanwhile, is stunned to realize that his father, who he never met, gave him the name of some famous manly-man before he disappeared—a message about how to act that he failed to receive until now… All of this is just a distraction from the business of the scene: getting the guy to give up his supplier, but what a distraction. I can’t remember who dunnit at the end of the novel, but this heartbreaking little scene has always stayed with me.

How to Build a Scene, Part 5: Tricks and Traps

Until the 19th century, most armies would just march right at each other, but Napoleon perfected the “flanking maneuver”, in which one army would sweep around and attack the other from the side. This became every subsequent general’s preferred method of attack, even though it quickly turned comical. In the American Civil War, both sides were obsessed with Napoleon and determined to outflank each other every time, so the result was thousands of armed men endlessly circling around each other in the woods, only fighting when one army accidentally backed into the other.

Here’s what this has to do with scene construction: Once you know what your characters want and what obstacles are in their way, it’s time to figure out what strategy they will use to get it. In every scene, one or more of the scene partners is pursuing an objective and encountering an obstacle. If that obstacle is another character, then the solution will probably involve either seduction, friendship, or belligerence (and sometimes all three). Each of these three methods requires strategy…
 

Of course, your characters can walk right up to one another, state their case plainly, reasonably discuss every possible objection, come to a resolution, and then move on. But they won’t seem like human beings. We human beings won’t even admit to ourselves that we want what we want, much less to each other. As a result, we hide our true objectives in every possible way. Real life conversations, even with people we love –especially with people we love—are full of little verbal tricks and traps.

In any negotiation, those who lay out their positions first always lose, because it allows their opponents to position accordingly and outflank them (see: our president). This is true whether you want a kiss or a confession or a treaty. This is why clever people play their cards close to the vest and lead their verbal sparring partners on until they can trap them with their own words.

Don’t assume that only unsympathetic or devious characters do this. Anyone who is clever and persuasive knows that they must pepper their conversation with tricks and traps. Watch this scene from Twelve Angry Men. As a lone holdout juror in a murder trial, Henry Fonda pretty much plays the ultimate living embodiment of human decency. He’s one of the most humble and noble heroes in the history of movies. And he does it all with tricks and traps... 

Fonda sits there right up until the very end of this scene hiding a big secret that’s burning a hole in his pocket: the knife he has found on the street.But he doesn’t walk into the room and present his exculpatory evidence right away.No, he waits and lays traps for his eleven opponents.He insists that they speak first, laying out their cases for conviction, knowing that ultimately they will have no choice but to brag about the supposed uniqueness of the murder weapon.He’s hoping that they’ll literally throw the knife in his face, so that he can dramatically throw the identical knife he found right back in their faces.At the end of this scene, his patience pays off.

Fonda is not some righteous blunderer who stumbles upon the truth. He’s a steely but wily crusader who verbally traps and defeats his opponents one by one. That what makes him heroic. All compelling characters, whether heroes or villains, serve their own cause best by laying verbal traps, outflanking their opponents at every turn. Those who get fed up with maneuvering and simply plow straight ahead (as if they were at Pickett’s charge) lose their battles and lose our sympathy.
 
(BONUS: This video has the best YouTube comment ever: Well said, TheSuperSnoopyLover. Well said.)

How to Build a Scene, Part 4: Push and Pull and Give and Take

Some say that screenplays can’t have any scenes over two pages (two minutes onscreen). That’s a little extreme, but it’s true that you can’t have more than two pages of conversation without any written directions breaking up the dialogue. If the scene goes longer (or even if it doesn’t), you must seek opportunities to “re-block” it, as they say in the theater... Force the characters to their feet, give them a lot of stuff to do. Break off two people from the group for a brief private conversation, then re-intergrate them. Even at a table you can create mini-scenes for two characters where the others seem to fade away...

You need to know the same stuff that they teach directors and actors: characters need a goal in each scene and the other characters need to be the obstacles in their way, in every sense of the word. You already know that scenes need “push and pull” and “give and take”, so turn these metaphors literal.

Let them actually shove or yank on each other. Let them actually give each other significant objects or take them away.

I generally have a “one touch” rule: two characters should touch each other once and only once in each scene, whether it’s a punch or a shove or a slap or a persuasive-hand-on-the-shoulder or a caress or a clinch. This is payoff for both the literal and figurative chasing that’s been going on throughout the scene. Directors will have to figure out this stuff anyway, but the writer, too, can dictate how far apart the characters are at all times, and use that to convey a lot. When they touch, that’s the climax: one character has reached the other: can they seal the deal? Whether or not, it’s time to move on.
Let’s look at ten minutes of Hitchcock’s most underrated masterpiece, Shadow of a Doubt. Written by Thornton Wilder, it starts out with a heartfelt Americana setting similar to Wilder’s play “Our Town”, then quickly sours. A teen girl named Charlie is convinced that their lives will be so much livelier when her wandering namesake Uncle Charlie arrives, but she gradually realizes that he is the infamous “Merry Widow Killer,” now on the lam.

From minute 20 to minute 30 in is essentially one long scene. It begins in the middle of Uncle Charlie’s welcome dinner, as he gives them each presents and almost gives himself away by giving his niece a ring stolen from one of his victims. The scene continues as the father’s friend visits and pulls him outside to discuss their favorite crime stories, but we cut back inside as Uncle Charlie finds an incriminating article in the paper, and concocts an elaborate ruse as an excuse to tear it out and discard it.

Though this is ten minutes in the same location, it re-blocks continuously: Uncle Charlie crosses the table to give the parents their gifts, then the two Charlies pull off into the kitchen for their exchange. They regroup at the table, but Uncle Charlie decides to cut the scene short when a discussion of merry widows comes up, so he tips over his glass and gets them all up on their feet again, then the whole family splits up into smaller groups for the remainder.

The scene’s got tons of give and take, of course, because of all the gift-giving. Hitchcock understood the power of objects to reveal character. Uncle Charlie is using these gifts to dissect them and reveal their flaws (A mink again! The gift of doom!), only to have his niece turn the tables on him and use her gift to reveal his own secret (when she finds the inscription he missed.) Ultimately, his last object-taking in this scene will spell his doom, when his niece later investigates just what he removed from the paper.

Hitchcock knew that the easiest way to encapsulate the meaning of a scene was to end on an object changing hands, concretely passing on meaning, not just from one character to another, but also from this scene to those later scenes that will reference that object again.

But Charlie’s uncle doesn’t just give her the ring, of course: he first says “give me your hand” (which is not a fair trade.) His seduction of the family is as physical as it is psychological. The two kids, who are comic relief, take their gifts immediately without contact, but he has to touch each of the adults (once and only once) to get them to relent and take his tainted gifts. Later in the movie the touches will turn more violent, as push comes to shove, but Hitchcock also understood that any pat on the head could be a prelude to a knife in the back. As a writer, you’re charting that progression of physical contact as surely as you’re escalating the dialogue.

How to Build a Scene, Part 3: Choose an Emotional Location

I’ve talked before about the value of choosing locations that keep your characters on their feet, but think about locations that emotionally heighten scenes as well. Every scene will become much more interesting if you can set it in a place that your hero either longs or loathes to go, rather than in a neutral place that they have no feelings about. Either way, you’ll make it tougher on your them.

If your heroine has to say something to her now-married crush, and he ushers her into another room for the conversation, have it be his bedroom and not his living room. Every time she takes a step closer or farther from that bed, she’ll feel it.As I mentioned before, The Town does it wrong. A bank robber has to woo the teller that he held up, so he meets with her at a Laundromat, then a Dunkin’ Donuts, then a community garden. These are neutral locations. If he has to talk to her again, why not force him to go back to the bank to do it? That’s a very uncomfortable location for him. It will constantly remind both him and the audience of the essential danger of this relationship.

This is your world. If you create a setting with subtextual meaning, then that’s one less thing you have to cram into the text. You take the burden off the dialogue. Don’t make your characters keep saying what they’re worried about, put what they’re worried about in the room, between them and their goal, and force them to physically go over, under, or through it to get what they want.

Don’t get embarrassed. The audience is far more accepting of unlikely locations than they are of melodramatic dialogue. If you give your actors a lot to react to, then they get to underact. If you make them churn up all the drama through dialogue, then they have to overact. Make it easy for them by choosing a location that is as extreme as you can get away with. Don’t just lower your archaeologist into an ancient crypt, make it an ancient crypt filled with snakes (after you’ve pre-loaded the scene by mentioning that he really hates snakes). Don’t just put him undercover at a Nazi rally, put him face-to-face with Hitler! Now you’ve got a memorable scene.

How to Build a Scene, Part 2: Figure Out What The Scene Has To Do

Obviously, the main question you have to ask yourself is: What is the main action and end result of this scene? But there are also some other questions you should remember to ask…

1) Is this scene a reversal or merely an escalation? I used to think that every scene had to be a reversal, but ironically, this quickly becomes boring. In every scene, the character is trying to get to the next step, but they cannot always succeed. In some scenes, the tension should not break, so that the problem merely escalates. These scenes may lead the hero to change tactics, but not change course. Rather, the hero just recommits with a little more knowledge and a little more intensity.

2) Which questions will be answered and what new questions will be asked? The best way to get from scene to scene without jarring the audience is by having the first shot of this scene answer a question posed, explicitly or implicitly, by the last shot of the previous scene, so that’s the first question you’re answering. But if you want to move the plot forward you’ll reach back and answer other outstanding questions as well, then ask some new ones…

The most obvious way to do this is to have the character ask an unanswered question out loud (“How could he be murdered in a locked room?”), but the shot itself can also pose questions (Whose point of view is this?) Cutting to a new person asks a question (Who is this person? Are they important?). Showing a mysterious action works too (What’s this character trying to do?)…

In a movie like Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, sometimes we know what the heroes are doing and so the question we ask is, “Will it work?” Other times we don’t know and so our question becomes, “What are they up to?” Usually the next scene answers these questions, but sometimes we get no answer until the end of the story, when we can finally see the full picture. Of course, if you put too many enigmatic scenes in a row, you’ll lose your audience. But if you have too many scenes that just set questions up and then knock ‘em down, then the story will seem plodding and episodic, not building a larger narrative. Mix quick pay-offs with longer mysteries.

3) What opportunities are there to reveal a little bit more about a character’s past (whether they’re in the scene or not)? One thing I’ve learned about exposition is this: never info-dump when you can info-drip. We all hate scenes in which the hero gazes off into the distance and tells us about their childhood. Instead, sprinkle teasing tidbits of information about the larger world of your characters throughout the story...Instead of stopping the story to tell your audience and bunch of info they didn’t ask for, you get to tease it out bit by bit, so that this, too, becomes a source of suspense. What is this incident they don’t want to talk about? Why happened in Paris? What happened in Chinatown? Why is that musical pocketwatch so important to him?

Once you know what you need to do, the question becomes where to do it? We’ll pick up there tomorrow…

How to Build a Scene, Part 1: Stop! Go Back!

Screenwriters, playwrights and novelists have a wonderful tool that serialized writers lack: we can write backwards. If you find you’ve run into trouble with a scene, or a character, or a plot, don’t try to plow forward and write your way out of it. Plow backwards, and bury the seed of the solution far enough in the past that it’ll be ready to sprout just when you need it. As with most other problems in life, the best time to fix a scene is before it starts:

• If something wild is going to happen in this scene, can you foreshadow it? The audience is less likely to say “this makes no sense,” if they’re too busy saying, “Oh, this must be what that was referring to earlier! How clever!” “Doctor Who” gets away with this trick a lot.
• Can you establish that the characters have painfully unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen? A reversal is so much more upsetting if we know that the character (and the audience) were fully expecting and depending on a totally different outcome. Maybe you can add a little brief scene beforehand where the hero rehearses how well they think that it’s going to go… Or if they’re about to find a key resource is gone, then you end the previous scene by giving them a boast about how they’ve got an ace in the hole.
• Can you pre-load the dialogue with meaning? If the hero said, many scenes back, “I always know she’s coming back because she always says [blank]” Then, in this scene, when she doesn’t say that, we instantly guess how serious it is, at the same time our hero does.

Think of the scene in Singles where Bridget Fonda sneezes and her humbled ex-boyfriend Matt Dillon automatically mumbles, “Bless you.” That’s it, but it’s a wonderful love scene, because we had heard her tell a friend many scenes back about how heartbreaking it was that he never said that. Rather than put them in that elevator and force them to spew reams of dialogue about how he’s changed and how she’s maybe ready to believe him, we get a wonderful two word scene that convinces us they will get back together, because the writer was clever enough to lay the groundwork beforehand.

Audiences love this. We love learning the secret language of characters. We love knowing that, for her, “bless you” means, “I love you.” We love it especially when we forget all about it, then see it suddenly pay off much later. Only if we know the characters’ expectations beforehand can we experience the same emotion reactions at the same time as they do. This is true emotional identification.

How to Create a Compelling Character, Conclusion

This all started with George Clooney on “ER”, and the week I spent attempting to figure out why his chaotic introduction was so compelling, even though I was going through a harrowing medical saga of my own at the time.

The hope is that these eleven steps can help in trying make that sort of connection with an audience. If this still isn’t exactly a recipe you can use from scratch, then maybe it can at least answer the question of why some characters are so much more compelling than others.

As some of you have guessed, I conceived these posts as the outline for a possible book, even though I had doubts about that idea—Does the world really need another screenwriting manual? But I reassured myself that it might be worth doing anyway when I thought about the different kinds of people that need to create compelling characters...

In entertainment, it’s not just screenwriters but also directors and actors (especially if they’re starting with a weak script)... Every type of writer, from novelists to journalists to historians, whether they’re starting from scratch or re-shaping the details of an actual life... Salesmen, speechwriters, activists—anyone who’s selling their own ideas or somebody else’s… For that matter, anyone who’s ever had to write a resume or cover letter…Everybody needs to know how to transform a life story, even if it’s just their own, from a shapeless mess into a compelling narrative.

Allow me one final example from my own story: Shortly after I began chemo, I got a chilling visit from an old college friend who had gone on to become somewhat of a big-deal doctor (Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, etc...) He took me aside and confided an unfortunate secret that he felt I needed to hear: The most important thing I could do to stay alive was to make sure my doctors remembered me, and the only way to do that was to make my story a lot more compelling than their other cases.

Doctors, he admitted, only allow themselves to get upset if certain heart-tugging patients die (new parents, for example), and they unintentionally reserve their best care for those patients. For the rest, they quickly decide that, if this patient dies, it must just be their time.

Why should this be so? Doctors, after all, are paid to care about everybody. And they do care, deeply…about their first fifty or sixty patients. But after that, every patient starts to seem the same: the same backstory, the same symptoms, the same complaints, the same prognosis. Worst of all, a sneaking suspicion comes over them that they care about their patients more than those patients care about themselves. Patients won’t change their lifestyles even when doctors tell them they must to survive. So doctors stop investing themselves very much in most individual cases, just to protect themselves emotionally.

Does this sound familiar? Doctors, it turns out, are a lot like script-readers, who are also supposed to care about the manuscripts they get, but quickly get fed up with generic stories about passive protagonists who can’t even be bothered to care about their own lives—so why should anyone else?

What I took away from this warning was that you can’t just go to the doctor’s office and “seem sympathetic”. You have to create a compelling character. Make it clear that there’s more to you than whatever their first impression was—quirky and unique details that make you memorable. Describe your symptoms using shocking new metaphors they’ve never heard before, so that they can really imagine the pain. Show them that you have a great life with a lot of goals so it’ll be especially sad if you can’t reach them. Let them know you’re motivated and resourceful—that they can trust you to take two steps for every one they take. And most importantly, constantly remind them that you’re facing a very tight (and literal) deadline, so you need them to work with impassioned urgency.

My point is that these are good skills to have for lots of reasons. Wake a doctor up. Wake a script reader up. Wake a publisher up. Wake an audience up. Let them know that this time it’s safe for them to really care, because you have what it takes to magnetically compel them along through an emotionally satisfying journey.