Storyteller's Rulebook #171: It’s Impossible To Learn If You Feel You Shouldn’t Have To

Sadly, we now have seven active remotes in our living room (TV, DVR, Blu-Ray, DVD, Wii, Speakers, and AC, I think).  I consider this to be an annoyance, but my wife (usually a sweet-tempered soul) considers this to be an affront.  It offends her sense of how the world should work.  Whenever I fumble with the pile of remotes, she indignantly laments aloud that she would have no idea how to turn on her own TV if her life depended on it.

But…is that true?

We’re talking about a massive amount of time and resources she’s already invested here:  over a thousand of dollars worth of equipment we have acquired over ten years of marriage, hundreds of DVDs she has purchased or received, an infinite cornucopia of cable and Netflix programming now available instantly. All denied to her.

Now you have to understand, my wife is very technically proficient.  Over at her own much-more-successful-than-mine blog, she codes her own html and creates and embeds sophisticated videos and podcasts.  Tech does not intimidate her.

So why does she declare that all is lost when the remotes come out?  I mean yeah, it’s annoying, but there’s basically a five-step protocol to determine which remotes to use in which order.  It would take her maybe ten minutes to learn it and then she’d know it forever (or until we get our eighth remote.)  Considering that she’s about a dozen times smarter than me, this wouldn’t be a big strain for her.

But I totally believe her when she says she can’t learn it.  Of course she can’t.  And here’s why: she feels that she shouldn’t have to. And as long as anyone feels that way, learning is impossible.

I’m the last person to cast aspersions here.  I have wasted years of my life refusing to learn things that would have taken me an hour or two to master, simply because I thought that I shouldn’t have to. That’s mostly what this blog is all about.  Every time I figure out something new, like with the last two rules, it seems so obvious as soon as I say it, so why did it take me so long to figure out?

As writers, we’re constantly being fed poisonous messages by crappy writing teachers and flattering books: “Listen to your muse.”  “Be intuitive”  “Be innovative.” “Don’t force it.”  “Don’t overthink it.”  True geniuses, we’re told, don’t put rules on their storytelling.  Great writers follow their heart or their gut, never their head.

But eventually you figure out that the people telling you this have had no success of their own.  You realize that even a brilliantly original iconoclast like Hunter S. Thompson taught himself to write by re-typing “The Great Gatsby” word for word.  You realize, in other words, that writers, like everybody else, have to learn to do what they do by analyzing what came before.  In the end, you have to learn all those rules that everybody says you shouldn’t have to learn.

That’s the real hard work of learning to write: learning to accept that you need to learn it.  If you can do that, you’re 90% of the way there.

Storyteller's Rulebook #170: Every Scene Needs Its Own Hero

Obviously, in most scenes you write, your hero will be in the scene, and will also be the hero of the scene, aka: the person we admire and want to see triumph in this interaction.  But that’s not always the case.

In some scenes, even if the overall hero of the story is present, the audience is actually rooting for someone else.  Sometimes we’re rooting for someone else to set the hero straight.  Frequently, for instance, when Buffy and Willow disagreed, the audience sided with Willow.  Buffy was better in a fight, which made her the capital-H “Hero” of the show, but Willow was wiser, which made her the “hero-of-the-scene” for most of her scenes with Buffy.

And what about scenes that don’t have any of our “heroes”?  There still needs to be conflict within that scene, and the audience should be able to pick a favorite to root for in that conflict.  Think of the scene in Die Hard where we cut away to the local news coverage: the anchorman mistakenly refers to Stockholm Syndrome as “Helsinki Syndrome” and his co-anchor rolls her eyes.  Even this small scene has its own hero and villain.

Even if the scene merely consists of two villains, then that scene also needs its own “hero” that we want to see “triumph” in this interaction.  We should admire one villain’s reaction to this situation (even it’s only to admire the competence of his or her villainy) and we should disdain the other.

If your hero and villain keep running circles around inferior scene partners in separate scenes, then the audience will get more and more excited about their eventual confrontation. The audience will start saying, “Wow, these two both dominate every scene they’re in!  What happens when they’re finally in a scene together?”  Which one will continue to dominate, and which will be humbled for the first time?

This rule is something you need to keep in mind when you’re building your ensemble: You have to multiply everything by two.  It’s tempting to say, “Okay, the aliens invade and we show how the whole town reacts, so we cut back and forth between the sheriff and the priest, and the school teacher, and the general at the army base, and...”  Wait, stop!  In order to write actual scenes, you’re actually going to need two cops, two priests, two school teachers, two army commanders, etc, at each location.  And each of those pairs need contrasting personalities because you’ll need to have conflict between the scene partners.  Doesn’t that make you re-think you inclination to have so many settings?

Storyteller's Rulebook #169: Move Up the Timeline

Here’s another big breakthrough for my understanding of structure.  There’s a big paradox in the rules of sympathy/empathy that I somehow never noticed for all these years.  We all know that, on the one hand…

• Your hero should be clever and resourceful from beginning to end.
• Your hero must shift being reactive to proactive in the second half of your story.
• Your hero should have a corrected philosophy and a corrected goal by the ¾ point in time to prepare for the climax.

Okay, so this means that, by the time the climax arrives, the hero is large and in charge, yes?  And yet, in the final quarter of the story:

• The hero should nevertheless be the underdog for most of the climax.
• Everything should seem to be hopeless until the latest possible moment.
• It’s inherently unsympathetic for the finale to happen at a time of the hero’s choosing.

On first glance, this makes no sense. How can the audience demand that the hero be proactive, and yet also disapprove of a hero for choosing the time and place of the climax?  If your hero is planning everything, then shouldn’t the final battle happen exactly when he or she wants it to happen?  And shouldn’t the hero have cleverly and competently accounted for everything, and therefore no longer be the underdog?

Luckily, there’s one simple solution that resolves this paradox and solves all of these problems.  Yes, the hero should plan when and where the finale will take place, but then the bad guy (or some other outside event) suddenly moves up the timeline.

As soon as you notice this trick, you’ll suddenly see it everywhere.

• I now realize that this is what was going on in Star Wars: “We’ve stole the plans that will allow us to attack the Death Star (Yay, proactive!), but before we can attack it at any old time (Boring, too powerful), it showed up to attack us! (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail! And it explains how they were able to get away before!) (As I pointed out in this post, the whole idea that the Death Star was also attacking them was added in post-production.)
• And for that matter in Empire Strikes Back: I’m finally going to take the initiative to get trained in the Force by Yoda (Yah, proactive!) But I have to cut training short against his wishes because Vader is attacking my friends. (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail!)
• Likewise in the original cut, (but not the final cut) of The Terminator.  We’re attacking the lab that will make the Terminators (Yay, proactive!), but the Terminator has figured out what we’re doing and he’s lying in wait to attack us (Scary! Now we have to improvise, and maybe fail!) (In the final cut, Cameron decided to chop out the turn to proactivity, and save it for the sequel.  In this case, nobody missed it.)

This trick allows the good guys to fall way behind without losing our sympathy.  If the good guys execute their plan just the way they wanted to, and yet it all goes wrong, then they look like idiots.  But if they’re suddenly forced to improvise and they screw up, then we sympathize— Hey, they did the best they could in a tough situation!  At least they didn’t sit around waiting to react, they were preparing to take the fight to the villain…but then the villain suddenly took the fight to them.  That’s how to be a proactive underdog. 

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #1: The Master

This was a love-it-or-hate-it movie.  Every time I tell someone that this was my favorite movie of the year, I find myself doing so with an apologetic tone, expecting to receive exasperation in return, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised more than once to hear instead, “Thank you!  I thought I was the only one!”

Rules it exemplified:

1. The Past is a Foreign Country, So Learn the Language: My favorite thing about The Master was that I wasn't thinking at all about screenwriting or other movies as I watched it.  Instead, I was overwhelmed by memories of my two grandfathers.  Despite the fact that they were extremely different men, Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell was a fascinating combination of the two at their most troubled.  I felt like Phoenix must have known them personally to capture them so well.  PTA and his actors captured the lost language of the ‘50s with uncanny precision.
2. Every Hero Must be Volatile: Overall, I loved how the movie, thanks to Phoenix and Hoffman's unbridled, unfiltered performances, seemed to hum with volatility in every scene.  I was squirming in my seat the whole time, fearing the next inevitable combustion of matter and anti-matter.
3. Show Us a Relationship We Haven’t Seen Before:  The movie did what I never thought it could do: make me sympathetic to Scientology, by putting it in its proper historical context of the PTSD-wracked ‘50s and showing that, for thoroughly-damaged individuals like Freddie, who were impervious to conventional psychotherapy, only direct confrontation by a fellow nutjob provided any hope of self-help.  The violently symbiotic relationship that the two form is utterly believable to me and yet unlike anything I’ve seen onscreen.  I debated in my head for days whether or not the positive results (for Freddie) justified Hoffman’s megalomania.

Don't get me wrong, like almost everything else I saw this year, the movie was somewhat bloated and shapeless, and not the sort of thing that anyone should try at home, but Paul Thomas Anderson transcends traditional moviemaking wisdom here and writes with lightning onto the screen. For once, I’ll have a not-so-anxious Oscar night, because the movie I think should win isn’t even nominated.

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #2: Lincoln

I’ve praised this movie already, but let’s go into more depth...  

Rules It Exemplifies:

1. A Hero Needs Special Skills Learned in the Past: The lesson of Lincoln, and Lincoln, is that the greatest weapon a president can have is the ability to disarm (and thereby defang) his adversaries, which Lincoln does with an endless stream of inappropriate (but pointed) back-woods humor. (This is a weapon that LBJ and GWB also wielded expertly, for good or ill).  Kushner and Day-Lewis masterfully recreate Lincoln’s canny charade: folksy hick on the surface, quick-eyed political mongoose underneath. 
2. A Movie is About a Person’s Problem: Kushner famously started out by attempting to cover 1863-65, but he got though hundreds of pages without making it to 1864, so he started over.  Then he tried to just cover the four months of 1865, which turned out to be 500 pages!  (Somebody publish that version please!)  Spielberg, to his infinite credit, got to page 100 and said, “Hey, that’s a movie right there, let’s just stop at the end of January.”  This isn’t really a bio-pic: it’s just the story of one problem: the passing of the 13th Amendment in the House.  Of course, in Kushner’s capable hands, that’s enough to give a full and rich portrait of the man with the plan. 
3. Successes and Failures Should Be Ironic: I talked here about how every step of this process is deeply ironic, but…

...Since I seemed overly-dismissive on that point last time, let me describe in a little more detail how this seemed to be different from the Spielberg I’d come to know and loathe.  My chief problem is Spielberg’s tendency to eliminate all irony and ambiguity from his movies.  I discussed Amistad last time, but there are so many more examples…

• The real Oskar Schindler was just as heroic but far less saintly than the movie version, and he would have made for a more complex and human movie.
• After a nice tense scene in Saving Private Ryan in which the platoon is left riven with doubt about whether or not they should have let that German go, he helpfully comes back and kills off a few of them, eliminating all ambiguity…
• …and my all-time favorite example: The titular reports in “Minority Report” (indicating uncertainly about what the future will bring) turn out to be mere red herrings, and in fact Tom Cruise was falsely fingered for the crime not because of any unknowable gap between fate and free will, but simply because he was framed by his boss.

There were still glimpses of these problem in Lincoln: John Williams’s clunky score shifts gears between “this is a meaningful scene” and “this is a funny scene” with all the subtlety of a record-scratch, and Janusz Kaminski’s typically over-pretty cinematography tends to ladle on the pseudo-profundity at precisely those moments that Day-Lewis would rather underplay. 

My reflexive distaste for Spielberg is still strong enough that I give most of the credit for this movie to Kushner and Day-Lewis, but I am nevertheless willing to admit that the old duffer left me very pleasantly surprised this time around.

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #3: Argo

Allow me to warn you upfront that my attempts to praise Argo may get buried under complaints about Zero Dark Thirty. They make for such a perfect Goofus and Gallant pairing.  

Rules It Exemplifies:

1. Know the Way the World Works: What makes Argo so good is the same thing that made Zero Dark Thirty so phony.  ZDT shows us what the CIA wishes it was: swaggering, hyper-focused, ultra-serious ass-kickers in a world full of pansies. It attempts to re-write a sloppy, shameful, sadistic, ten-year-long fiasco into a brilliant step-by-step manhunt by Very Serious People. Argo, on the other hand, starts by admitting the simple truth: The CIA, by design, is an agency of last resort.  All they can do, at their best, is dive into messy situations and try to make the most of the mess. ZDT imagines stoic superheroes doing righteous work in a black and white world (or, more to the point, white vs. brown), while Argo’s spies are everyday schlubs doing an absurd job in morally-murky situations the best way they know how.  Argo had its own falsifications (pretending they were almost caught at the end when they weren’t) but, crucially, its not lying to itself, or us, about how the world works.
2. Listen to Real Cops and Criminals: I’ve read way too many CIA memoirs and the casual argot in Argo rang true in so many little ways, whereas every macho “You can’t handle the truth!” line in ZDT rang laughably false.  (ZDT actually showed one of its not-tough-enough bosses practicing his putting in the office!  Base your details on original observations, not clichés that you picked up from old New Yorker cartoons!)
3. Ideas are the Enemy of Observations: But Affleck’s eye for detail also serves a deeper purpose.  He keeps circumventing our urge to form parallels between this story and our current troubles.  Instead, he keeps reminding us that 1979 is a foreign country, giving us an avalanche of amusing “I forgot all about that!” period details (I love the wrecked Hollywood sign!). His all-too-human Iranians (sometimes scary, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes both) would rather look back to 1953 than look ahead to 2012. 

Tomorrow, the other movie that might win on Sunday…

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #4: Django Unchained

I thought Inglorious Basterds was good but very overrated, so I was quite surprised at how much better I liked this follow-up...  

Rules It Exemplifies: 

1. Genius Doesn’t Innovate, It Cultivates: At first, Tarantino wanted to be Godard, (he even named his production company A Band Apart) and they did have certain things in common: both were bold, visceral, post-modern, wildly talented bad-boy rulebreakers. But it soon became clear that Tarantino would never measure up.  Where Godard was lean, Tarantino was bloated, where Godard was prolific, Tarantino dawdled.  Each contrast favors Godard over his imitator: sublime vs. juvenile, poetic vs. ham-handed, visionary vs. derivative…  But now, with his two latest movies, Tarantino has finally come into his own.  He’ll never equal Godard, but he now stands within spitting distance of inheriting the legacy of one of Godard’s great influences: Sam Fuller.  Fuller’s movies were deranged tabloid visions of America at its best and worst extremes.  He sacrificed sensitivity and subtly in favor of telling the raw truth as he saw it.  His movies were bracing, brutal, and bizarre, with peripatetic, episodic structures that forced you to re-set your narrative expectations.  This is the legacy that Tarantino has belatedly embraced. Django lines up nicely alongside Fuller mid-period masterpieces, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, as a full-throated howl of unfocussed American rage.
2. Plot Motivates, Character Complicates.  Though this movie is once again self-indulgent and too long, I give Tarantino credit for pulling way back on the amount of plot.  In the movie’s best scene, the plot has seemingly resolved…but one of our heroes just can’t resist his overwhelming urge to vent his spleen and ruin it all.  Tarantino is finally learning that, in the second half, volatile character complications should drive the conflict, not an endless torrent of external plot events.
3. Villains Need a Solid Motivation, Too: Yes, the gore was typically excessive, but for once it wasn’t driven by meaningless psychopathy. I was delighted to finally discover a movie in which the villains were not motivated by a love of chaos.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson, give horrifically logical performances.  Both characters coolly and calmly pursue their own best interests (and neither actor winks to us to let us know that he doesn’t approve).  In this movie, everybody only wants what they want.  Nobody wants to do good for good’s sake, and nobody want to do evil for evil’s sake.

Tomorrow, the return of Goofus and Gallant…

Best Hollywood Movies of 2012, #5: The Campaign

I’ve already spoiled the results, but you guys have convinced to go back and show my work, so once again, here’s my annual Oscar week best-of.  As with all of Adam McCay’s movies (though he was only a producer and co-writer on this one), The Campaign is meandering and bloated, with a fairly random second half, but, as usual, he somehow got me to check my narrative expectations at the door and go along with the jokes.

Rules It Exemplifies:

1. Invest Possessions With Emotion: Specifically Zach Galifianakis’s pugs, who serve many purposes here.  They start out as just an opportunity to “pet the dog” (establish quick sympathy) and show what a down-home guy he is, but then Will Farrell attacks him for having Chinese dogs, so his campaign manager makes him kick his real dogs out and replace them with manlier American dogs.  From this point on, the exiled pugs lurk outside Galifianakis’s house, staring in accusingly as everything that goes on inside, nicely representing his excised conscience.  We know what it will mean when he lets the pugs in...
2. Comedy Requires Pain:  I can get bored with political stories in which neither party is identified.  I’m the first to admit that both parties are just about equally corrupt these days, but that’s doesn’t mean that they’re corrupt in the same way.  These “who knows which party it is?” stories deny themselves the gift of specificity, limiting themselves to strictly generic observations.  This movie scores more effective points against both parties by naming names. 
3. This is the sort of world where…: The reason I hired a babysitter and went out and saw this movie was because of the bust-a-gut trailer moment when Will Farrell punched out a baby.  Now you know that I’ve complained about CGI, but here (as with this other rare exception), it was a boon: If the punching of that baby had been at all realistic, nobody would have laughed.  But the slo-mo ripple of the punch across the baby’s face makes the joke work because it’s not realistic...  Comedy requires pain, but just enough pain to get a big laugh that doesn’t turn into a scream. 

Tomorrow, a much blacker comedy...

What’s the Matter with Hollywood (Or Is It Me)?

In response to my last post, some of you suggested that I write more about recent movies. And, indeed, this is the time of year that I usually talk about my favorite Hollywood movies of the year and how they reflect various pieces of advice that I’ve given. In preparation for just such a piece, I got caught up on a lot of movies from this year…and I was kind of horrified.

Picture above is Entertainment Weekly’s averaged-out grades (albeit using a bizarre selection of critics) for most of the movies that came out this year. I’ve added the running time for each one, and my own grade for the ones I saw. (“F” means that no scene impressed me, “A” means every scene impressed me.)

Looking at the results, you’ll notice a few things:

• In most cases, my grade is much lower than the critical average, often extremely so. 
• The running times of almost every one is obscenely bloated. Not one of these movies needed to be longer than two hours. Even my favorite, The Master, could have shed those extra 24 minutes and not missed them.
• But the real problem, of course, is that almost all of these movies were either sequels, remakes, adaptations, or written/commissioned by the director. Almost none, in other words, were “original specs” purchased on the screenwriting market.

(Two movies that I thought were surprisingly not-bad, Safe House and The Campaign, are missing from EW’s list. I would have given both a solid “B”, and both, I’m glad to say, were based on original specs. Dredd is also missing, which, despite fairly good reviews, I would have given another “F”.)

Based on this evidence, I see causes for concern:

• Clearly, my tastes are drifting further from the critical consensus, which makes me feel increasingly unfit to speak to what sort of movies people should be writing.
• I primarily aim my advice to writers of original spec screenplays, but the market for such screenplays has almost entirely disappeared. 
• The increase in running time is an indicator, above all, of clout: The studios are so skittish that they say “no” every chance they get. As a result the only movies that actually get made are projects that no one at the studio is allowed to second-guess or say no to, either because of the director’s clout, the franchise’s profitability, or both. These aren’t movies, they’re juggernauts, and they simply steamroll over producers, critics and audiences, pummeling all three into submission.

So what is an amateur screenwriter to do? The answer, quixotically, is to continue writing original specs anyway. Even if they sell, there is almost no chance that they will get made, but you have to sell one or two first in order to be considered for the remake/sequel/adaptation assignments that make up almost all of the available work, for now and for the foreseeable future. But it becomes increasingly hard to know if you’re doing a good job, because there are almost no successful examples to compare yourself to, (and those that do sneak through hardly inspire would-be writers to greatness.)

In the meantime, do I write a best-of? Part of the problem is that even the movies I liked best were profoundly weird. I thought The Master, Lincoln, and Django were all pretty great, but would I really advise any writers to emulate them? These, too, were “clout” movies, totally insulated from the pressures of the market. Each does a lot of things that original specs simply aren’t allowed to do, so what’s the point?

This all helps explain my lack of recent posts, but rest assured that I have been developing some in-depth new material, including a brand new Ultimate Checklist that will debut soon, so stay tuned. (And the book is coming along nicely, too!) Meanwhile, I should probably take the advice of some of you and start looking again to older movies for inspiration and analysis, hoping to protect the wisdom of the past until the barbarian hordes have passed and a new movie renaissance can begin.

Where Was I?

Hi, guys, sorry for the no-warning black-out.  I suddenly got sick and tired of hearing myself pontificate.  I do miss blogging, though, and I intend to come back soon, but I'd like some suggestions for what would you guys would like to see next.  I've gotten some emails with some good suggestions but I thought I'd throw it open to everybody. What topics have I not yet covered?  What ramifications of my past pieces have I not yet considered?  Any old features you'd like to see return?  Let me know, and maybe you'll see that topic soon. (And be sure to check out this neat, new Pulp-o-mizer!)

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.” --popularly attributed to Plato

Hey guys, remember how I said to burn through all of your good ideas?  Well, I took my own advice and I’m out of material for the time being.  I’ve been working on more posts, but they’re not coming together. Time to recharge my batteries.  Please check back in a week or two.  Thanks!

Now You Can Revise, Conclusion: You’re a Poet But You Don’t Know It.

There’s one aspect of screenwriting that I’ve never discussed on this blog: the quality of the prose in your descriptive paragraphs.  I’ve avoided it because many beginning screenwriters are way too focused on this tiny aspect of the art.

As Carson at Scriptshadow likes to point out, screenwriting is 99% storytelling and 1% writing.  If you’re telling a great story, no one will care very much about the quality of your prose.  On the other hand, if you’ve got a sloppy story and you’ve wasted hours dressing it up with Ellroy-style cool-cat descriptions, then your reader will be infuriated.  Your screenplay is not “professional” just because you took out all the pronouns.

But, with all that said, there is something to be said for bettering the quality of your prose, just enough to get people to actually read it.  Most screenplay readers, including myself, get in the habit of just glossing over the prose paragraphs and only reading the dialogue unless we lose track of what’s going on.  Why?  Because the prose is usually just too turgid to wade through.

The danger is what John August calls “Dungeonmaster prose”, wherein the screenwriter categorically describes the size, shape, and contents of each room, as if walking the reader through a “Dungeons and Dragons” module. 

In reaction to this, some screenwriters have adopted a “macho haiku” style, as perfected by Walter Hill’s screenplay for Alien (and never successfully replicated by anyone else.)  The problem is that, in the end, you are more of a dungeonmaster than a poet: you really do need to describe everything well enough for your reader to picture the setting and understand everything that happens.  When I read these macho pronoun-less screenplays I usually can’t figure out what’s going on.

The trick is to describe just enough to set the scene without boring the reader.  And yes, along the way, you want to have punchy, fun prose. Here are some dos and don’ts:

• DO introduce major characters using colorful descriptions of their “type”: “In walks BRIAN, mid-30s, the sort of guy who offers to help you move the first time he meets you.” 
• DON’T bog down your action scenes with needless similes: “The henchman’s head snaps back so fast you’d think it was an angry mongoose.” 
• DO assume that the reader has been in this sort of location before: give a sentence or two describing what type of bar it is, but please don’t mention that it has barstools.
• DON’T use a simile instead of a description: “Brian enters a bar that might as well be the armpit on the world’s sweatiest plumber.”  (I swear to you I’ve read descriptions like this.) 

Punchy, high-impact sentences reward your reader for reading.  The way to do this is to embrace your inner poet, and I mean Frost, not Bukowski.  It wasn’t until I did some work crafting advertising taglines that I realized how basic the connection was between catchy writing and old-fashioned poetry: it’s all about alliteration, assonance, parallel construction, and, yes, rhyme.  At first I blanched: I can’t really rhyme, can I?  That’s so tacky!  People won’t be able to take it seriously!

Then (and this literally happened) I looked over at the cover of the book I was reading, Naomi Klein’s rousing and deadly serious economic history of the last half century, “The Shock Doctrine”.  And I suddenly realized: “Hey, that title isn’t merely descriptive!” It rhymes!  And that makes it more memorable, which makes it more powerful.  She did that on purpose!

Remember two entries back, where I ended my post by saying, “Every choice is a chance to multiply the meaning.”?  You’re allowed to get away with stuff like that. Don’t knock our socks off, but don’t be afraid of punchy sentences, either.

But whatever you do, and this is the last time I’ll say this, don’t worry about the prose during your first draft.  Just clarify everything.  You’re going to have to change it all anyway, so all that work would be for nothing.  Punch it up once you’ve done everything else.  And now... you’re done!

Now You Can Revise, Part 6: Use the Final Draft Tools

You’ve probably written your screenplay using Final Draft software, because that’s become the industry standard, but even if you didn’t, you might want to import it into that program now, because Final Draft has great, little-used tools that help you fine tune your script.

Many of these tools are intended for use by other professionals, such as line-producers or actors, but they come in handy for screenwriters as well:

• As I’ve talked about before you can use the “Speech Control” tool to hear Stephen Hawking read your script out loud.  Not only is this the most foolproof way to proof-read, it also highlights awkward sounding sentences.  There was a certain TV show this season that contained this line: “There are walls even a man as dextrous as you can’t climb”.  No actor can deliver that line well!
• You can also export “scene reports”, listing the page-length, location, and cast for each scene.  These tell you which scenes are way too long, which locations we see too much of, and which minor characters should probably be combined or eliminated.
• You can export individual “character reports”, which allow you to see each character’s dialogue isolated into its own document, making it very clear if that character’s voice is consistent.  This is the time to make sure that character has a consistent metaphor family, default personality trait and default argument strategy.
• It also allows you to cut out instances of multiple characters using the same turn-of-phrase.  In one episode of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”,  Detective Logan shows up at a crime scene and get briefed about the victim by a street cop:  “He was blackmailing a local newscaster” “Gay sex?” “Nope, call girl.  Think Spitzer, not McGreevy.”  Then, just two scenes later, Logan is in the lab talking to an expert who points out that a bomb was both old-fashioned and cutting edge.  The expert sums up by saying, “Think Tony Bennet, not Steve and Edie”  These are two completely different characters in different places, using the same distinctive turn-of-phrase!  

It’s perfectly natural to make these mistakes.  During your first draft, you can’t be bothered to create full personalities for every minor character, and there’s no reason you should, since you’re going cut out and combine a lot of these characters in subsequent drafts. 

But once your screenplay is approaching its final form, you need to go back and eliminate embarrassing examples like these, in which it become instantly obvious that each minor character has the same personality: yours. Now that Stephen Hawking is reading your script aloud, these errors should stand out like sore thumbs,

Next time: the finale: You’re a Poet and You Don’t Know It

Now You Can Revise, Part 5: Set Up More of Your Pay-Offs

A little bit of repeat here from much-older pieces as I continue to recontextualize and tie things together for the book…

It took me a long time to realize that heroes need special skills.  You can’t just start out with a blank-slate everyman who encounters a problem and solves it by reacting in the way that anyone would. 

Instead, the hero must rely on a specific set of special skills that pre-date the movie.  Harrison Ford in The Fugitive was a doctor, so he finds ways to use his medical skills to clear his name.  Will Smith in Enemy of the State is a lawyer, so he uses those skills to get the NSA off his back. Neither one of them suddenly busts out with kung fu moves...

In those cases, the heroes made use of their day jobs, but often you’ll find that those aren’t enough to get the hero out of every scrape, and the hero suddenly need a heretofore unmentioned skill in order to overcome a specific obstacle.  Each time this happens, you can stop, go back, and pre-plant a reason those skills exist, or you can do what I do: just keep going, and fix it later.

You wrote your screenplay by going forwards, but now’s your chance to re-write it backwards.  Set up a plant for every pay-off, so that, as the audience gets to gets to each twist, they’ll say “Ah ha!” instead of “Yeah, right!”

The trick with pre-establishing special skills is to do it subtly and organically.  Here are contrasting examples:

• In Aliens, Cameron establishes early on that Ripley can run the fork-lift exoskeleton, which will come in handy later.  He hides the significance of this by turning the plant of it into a nice little stand-up-and-cheer moment, wherein Ripley proves that her lowly dock-loading job can be useful in her new military setting.  By giving the moment a meaning of its own, he hides the fact that he’s really just setting up a special skill that Ripley will need later.
• In Salt, on the other hand, Salt’s husband is an expert on spider-venom, which seems random and apropos of nothing.  Only later, when Salt uses a ridiculous spider-venom bullet do we realize why they put that in there.*

You can also write backwards to pre-establish things that will go wrong for your hero.  A recent episode of “Breaking Bad” began with an odd little scene establishing that a young boy was motor-biking around the collecting spiders.  The audience then forgot all about it until he showed up later, at the worst possible time.  (This also provided a nice visual thematic metaphor: you can’t bottle up evil for long.)

This is why, as per the breakdown I got from Simon Kinberg, producers are so focused on the amount of plant-and-pay-off in your script: it shows that you literally know your stuff backwards and forwards, that you’ve been circumspect, tightened all the screws and battoned down the hatches.  This assures them that the script won’t fall apart under pressure.

*Referring back to the debate in the comments of this post, this is another reason why I allow myself to make minor decisions, such as the hero’s previous jobs or the spouse’s expertise, somewhat randomly as I write the story, instead of trying to make every detail thematically significant in the first draft.  I often have to change those details later in order to shore up developments in the plot, and I would be reluctant to do so if I had already made them thematically significant.

Now You Can Revise, Part 4: Add More “I Understand You” Moments

We’ve all had the experience.  You’re sure that you’ve met your perfect match.  You rhapsodize for hours about everything that made you fall head over heels, but at the end your friend just shrugs and says, “Are you kidding me?” 

The problem, of course, is that your hormonal response is distorting your reality, and your cool-eyed friends are evaluating the shelf-life of this new relationship dispassionately, asking: Do these two have enough in common?  Will they treat each other well?  Most importantly: Do they need each other?

In a “first person” novel, you can try to capture the subjective experience of falling in love, but screenwriters have a much harder job.  Movies are always in the “third person”, which means that the camera eye never gets to fully identify with one of the lovers, so it must take the perspective of that dubious friend. 

(You can try to cheat, like West Side Story did, by using subjective camera effects to capture Tony’s besotted vision of Maria, but even back then viewers just rolled their eyes.  The camera eye is not the hero’s eye, and we will always see more than he sees.) 

So this is one case where you don’t want to write what you know—don’t trust your own distorted memories of love and/or heartbreak, and instead think back to the relationships of your friends.  Which relationships did you root for, which ones infuriated you?  Which ones endangered your friends and which ones saved them?  Most importantly, how did you know that they were right for each other, maybe even before they did?

Whether your first draft is one huge love story or the romance is a minor element, you may be shocked to discover, once you’ve gotten some notes, that nobody sees what you see in the love interest. 

The reason that so many love stories fail, and so many lame love interests drag movies down, is that the filmmakers have failed to add “I understand you” scenes.   As I described here, the entire massive seven-book, eight-movie “Harry Potter” juggernaut seriously falters because nowhere in all those mounds of franchise did Rowling or any of the screenwriters put in any “I understand you” scenes between Harry and Ginny.  She’s just “the girlfriend”.  

The revision is your chance to add that element of understanding, but it’s tricky.  Given that your hero starts off with afalse goal and a false statement of philosophy, it’s tempting to make the love interest the character who’s lecturing your hero from the beginning to adopt the right goal and philosophy, but then you risk drifting into another category of alienating character: Just as you don’t want a hero who just says no, likewise you don’t want a stick-in-the-mud love interest, such as the kind you find in Old School, and many other manchild comedies.  (These love interests also violate the rule that “People Only Want What They Want”.  At the end of the day, nobody really wants to save you except you, and maybe your close family)

Better “I understand you” moments don’t have anything to do with wanting to change the other person and everything to do with accepting: We don’t root for the Beauty and the Beast to get together until the beast gives Belle his library.

Sometimes you can establish that they understand each other before they even meet.  Ironically, we know the heroes in Friends with Benefits will bond because we see that they have a shared dislike of relationships.  And what could be more romantic than the song that drifts from Maurice Chavalier in the city to Jeanette MacDonald in the country in Love Me Tonight?

Just as when you have to occasionally check with your buddies to make sure you’re not blinded by love, only once you’ve gotten notes on your screenplay will you know how well your romance is playing.  Don’t be surprised if you have to give it a firmer foundation.

Happy MLK Day

Celebrate by speaking truth to power...

NOW You Can Revise, Step 3: Build a Theme Tree

It’s very hard to worry about theme when you’re writing the first draft. Yes, you need to have a vague sense of what it all means, but you’ll never be able to make the plot and character motivations make sense if you’re constantly trying to say something profound.

In fact, you may have to allow the meaning of your story to change as you write it. You can’t force your characters to do things that they refuse to do. In the end, their actions may make a different point than you thought they were going to make. Whatever you do, don’t force them to act a certain way because you want to prove a point.

As you write the first draft, simply assume that, if the thematic question is linked to the dramatic question, and everything is sufficiently ironic, then meaning will accrue. As a result, however, when it’s time to tackle your later drafts, you may find that your theme is so indistinct that it’s barely detectable.

But wait, you say, isn’t that good? After all, you want your theme to resonate in the audience’s bones, not rattle around in their skulls, so shouldn’t you pitch it just below the frequency of human hearing? Well, yes, but if that’s the case then, like any good sub-audible hum, it has to be persistent.

Now that your story and characters are set, you should go back and second-guess every minor choice you made and change many of them to subtly reinforce your theme. When we write, we inevitably make a lot of choices at random, just to keep writing: What job does the hero’s spouse have, where are the heroes when they get the big news, which blunt object is used for the killing, etc.

I’ve discussed before the way that a masterpiece like High and Low finds all sorts of ways to weave the the idea of high vs. low into every fiber of the story, but this is something that less ambitious movies should do as well.  Enemy of the State is a fun little thriller about a labor lawyer who receives damning evidence about the NSA from an old friend, then has to go on the run for his life. The movie has the “good vs. good” theme of security vs. privacy. This theme is explicitly stated by the hero’s wife, who works for the ACLU, but it’s also reinforced throughout in subtler ways...

• In the beginning, he’s trying to win a labor law case by using a secret videotape against some gangsters. It’s not admissible in court, but the gangsters don’t want it exposed.
• Who got the lawyer the tape? A young woman he once had an affair with. The affair is over, but he now he must hide the fact from his wife that he’s still working with her.
• Where is he when he runs into his friend? A lingerie store, shopping for his wife, but because of his past affair, he’s afraid that she would assume he’s buying for someone else.
• Why is he there? It’s Christmastime, which means that they’re hiding presents from their son, and he’s hiding the fact he’s raided their gift stash, which complicates things later on.

These are all things that subtly make that point that we all do things that we don’t want exposed to scrutiny, even if they’re not illegal.

I suspect that none of these details were in the first draft, since they aren’t essential to the story, but once the plot had been worked out, screenwriter David Marconi went back and replaced whatever random choices he had originally made with new details that subtly tied into the theme. I’ve heard this referred to a making a “theme tree”, yoking every detail together into a vast system of root and branch that all feeds into an organic whole.  Every choice is a chance to multiply the meaning.

Next: Strengthening the relationships...

NOW You Can Revise, Step 2: Cut Ten More Pages Out

If you’re anything like me, your first drafts will be far too long, and then, as you begin to re-write them, they’ll get even longer, as you add the elements that are needed. But the hope is that, once you’ve expanded these things enough, they’ll begin to contract. If you can create a new scene that makes the character’s flaw poignantly palpable in half-a-page, then you can eliminate those ten pages that merely implied the flaw. As you clarify things, then hopefully the less-clear pages will start to just fall away.

But even after that process is done, you still might end up overlength. Script-readers are overburdened, and the shortest scripts get read first. Everything you send out has to be lean, lean, lean. In fact, I would guess that the most common note writers get from their agents is this, “I love it, don’t change a thing, just cut out ten pages!” But how on earth are you supposed to cut pages without changing the story?? Well, there are some ways…

I mentioned one trick while discussing Easy Living, which was written by the great Preston Sturges: Cut out the middle of scenes. In one scene, we see Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold start to argue about compound interest in the back of a car, then we cut to an exterior shot of the car crossing town, then jump forward to them getting out of the car once the argument has reached a crescendo. Later on, Arthur walks into work wearing her new mink and eyebrows are raised, so then we jump inside the boss’s office as she’s already halfway through trying to explain how she got it.

In each case, Sturges uses a cut to from outside to inside to hide the excision. The same trick was used when they decided they had to cut a line out of Chinatown: the fact that the conversation moved out of the office hid the fact that part of the conversation was missing.

But you can also cut chunks out of the middle of scenes even without cutting away from the space you’re in. If you’ve got multiple conversations going on, you can hide time jumps every time you cut back and forth between them. The 40 Year Old Virgin cuts between four guys who are speed-dating, and manages to compress an hour down to five minutes, without resorting to jump-cuts.

Other classic tricks include:

• Try cutting out the first two lines and the last two lines of every scene, so that audiences hit the ground running each time and end on a question that propels them forward.
• Go through every scene and ask yourself, “If I cut this scene entirely, would anyone miss it?
• Look for places where two crises happen back to back and ask yourself “what if these two crises hit at the same time in the same scene?” This is also a great way to keep the audience from getting ahead of you. They’re playing checkers so you have to play chess.

Next, let’s strengthen the theme…

NOW You Can Revise, Introduction: When It’s Finally Time to Fine Tune

My previous series, “How To Re-Write” began with the admonition: “Don’t Revise, Re-Write!”. The first instinct of screenwriters is to finish a first draft and then “tweak it” every time you get notes, so I wanted make clear my position that the second draft should almost always be a complete re-write of the first. This might easily apply to the third and fourth drafts as well.

But, let’s face facts. Though I’m reluctant to admit it, in the end you do get to a place where you need to start tweaking, and that’s a whole different set of skills, so let’s talk about those in this series.

In the previous series, we looked at ways to overhaul your plot and characters. It’s important to tackle those changes first, before you waste any time refining the language or trimming individual scenes. After all, once those overhauls start to snowball, everything is going to change, and you don’t want to find that you’ve fallen in love with some well-polished scene that now has to go.

Buy by the time you’re actually ready to revise, the personality of the main characters and the general order of events are pretty much locked in. The changes you’re making here are less likely to snowball, so now you can start sharpening each plot point, punching up every line of dialogue, highlighting the theme, etc.

But you’re still going to be cutting scenes, cutting minor characters and/or combining them, and maybe even cutting out sub-plots. When doing so, it’s good to keep in mind...

Step 1: The Only Way Out is Through

As a general rule, it’s best to cut out anything that doesn’t move the story forward. Always interrupt your characters before they get a chance to apologize, skip over fallout scenes, and remove any repeated beats.

In The Fast and the Furious, Paul Walker infiltrates Vin Diesel’s gang and seduces his sister. Later, he has to dramatically confess to the sister, in the middle of a crisis, that he’s a cop. Sometimes afterwards, she reveals the secret to Diesel and his gang, but we never see that scene, despite the fact that it was presumably quite intense, because, for the audience, it would be a repeated beat.

What’s even more remarkable is that, even when they finally confront each other, Walker and Diesel don’t discuss the betrayal! That would be “fallout”, and the script doesn’t need it. The discussion at that end is entirely about whether Walker will arrest Diesel, without any “You betrayed me!” recriminations about the past. A great way to speed things up is to keep your characters talking about what’s going to happen, not what happened previously.  The audience won’t miss it.

Next, step 2: Cut ten more pages out...

Storyteller's Rulebook #168: Sometimes Sympathy Can Trump Empathy

I love data!  I was going to move on to a new series, but I generated a big pile of new data last week, so I figured I should crunch it some more, and I’m glad I did... 

I’ve said before that sympathy isn’t always necessary, but empathy is, and, generally speaking that’s true.  So how do you gain empathy?  Well, as I’ve said in the past, the hero should be misunderstood and surrounded by fairly rotten people, who subject the hero to undeserved humiliation.

But when I looked back at the four movie characters I covered last week, I noticed something interesting.  The first two characters, Cady in Mean Girls and Peter in Spider-Man, fit very nicely into the model I described above, but the next two, Max in Rushmore and Juno in Juno, did not.  Max and Juno aren’t really misunderstood: in fact, everyone around them can see their problems more clearly than they can.  Likewise, they aren’t really better than the people around them.

Before, when we did “Jerk Week”, we looked at five guys who were assholes, but were still better than the people around them in many ways, and they were very misunderstood.  As a result, we weren’t sympathetic to them, but we were empathetic.  But Max and Juno, I now realize, represent a totally different type of jerk: When they start out, we are sympathetic to them but we’re not empathetic. 

Max and Juno both have a lot of personality.  We are instantly plunged into their subjective world-views as soon as each movie begins: Rushmore starts off with a dream sequence and Juno with heavy voice-over.  They bombard us with their opinions: Max’s intellectual idealism and Juno’s witty snark.  And the degree to which these movie work is the degree to which we find them charming.  (Those who aren’t charmed tend to hate these movies.)

But for most viewers, these movies can forego the usual empathy-building tricks (misunderstood, bad parents, better than the people around them, etc.) because the characters are so sympathetic that less empathy is required, at least at first. 

From there, however, both movies tread a tricky path.  In each case, our sympathy intentionally decreases (our impression of Max goes from precocious to pretentious, while Juno’s misanthropy starts to curdle with too much exposure) as our empathy steadily grows.

But this leads us to another anomaly: the empathy is created in unexpected ways.  I’ve warned readers in the past that only unjust humiliations build empathy, while justified humiliations have the opposite effect, alienating us from the character.  But there’s a caveat: in the situations I was referring to before, such as the beginning of Iron Man 2, the hero thinks his humiliation is unjust and demands our empathy, which we’re unwilling to give.

But Rushmore and Juno show us a different kind of justified humiliation:  in these cases, the heroes are ready to hear and accept the criticism, making the humiliation especially painful.

Think of the scene where Juno accuses her stepmom of being lame for obsessing over dogs that she doesn’t even own, only to discover that her stepmom foregoes owning them only because Juno is allergic to them.  Or think of the scene where Max meets his teacher’s date and breaks down crying.  These are the right humiliations at the right time, and break through these heroes’ shell of cool, hitting them where it hurts.  Seeing that the heroes understand that they deserve this makes us feel intensely empathetic towards them.

So now we have two types of non-off-putting jerks: misunderstood misanthropes with bad parents and self-satisfied, too-clever-for-their-own-good kids who need to learn to turn off the charm and get real.  In each case, avoiding audience alienation is difficult but not impossible, if you know what you’re doing.