Advantages and disadvantages

I was talking with my writing partner last night about what makes a script a fun, easy read. Having a good writing style (prose/dialogue/layout) helps greatly, of course, but equally crucial is the way in which the story unfolds. In the course of our discussion, I realized that two principles in particular are key:

1. Almost any reversal/twist that hurts the protagonist will be welcomed by the reader/audience. They want to see how the protagonist is going to get out of whatever fresh hell this is, so they'll keep reading/watching.

2. However, a reversal/twist that helps the protagonist will usually be met with something between wariness and outright scorn -- unless the twist has been set up beforehand, in which case it can be very satisfying.

It might seem odd that I use the terms "reader" and "audience" interchangeably, given that a person reading a script most likely knows a fair amount about screenwriting, whereas the average moviegoer has never so much as cracked a book on the subject. In fact, audiences know quite a bit about writing, even if they don't know they know it. They certainly know enough to distinguish clever writing from lazy, sloppy writing.

Case in point: If James Bond spends ten minutes/pages battling his way through a small army of Russian soldiers to retrieve a jetpack the size of a pencil, the audience will have no problem believing that he can use that tiny gadget to fly to safety. On the other hand, if Bond is being chased on foot by evil agents through the streets of London and just happens to come upon an unlocked car with the keys in the ignition, the audience will call bullshit immediately. And why? I mean, which is actually more likely -- a six-ounce cylinder that makes you fly, or one person in a huge city accidentally leaving their keys in the car?

The answer is that it doesn't matter. The audience isn't responding to the actual plausibility of those things; they're responding to the strength (or weakness) of the writing. When they say, "That wasn't believable!" what they really mean is, "The writer didn't earn my suspension of disbelief."

Pomodoro

I've been hearing about the Pomodoro system for several months now, and finally gave it a try yesterday. Upon reflection, I'd say it's easily one of the best tomato-based productivity enhancers I've come across, certainly more effective than downing a Bloody Mary before launching Final Draft, but maybe not quite as motivating as having a friend stand by with a jar of pasta sauce that he threatens to dump on your head if you don't meet your page quota.

For those unfamiliar, let's control-c/control-v some Wikipediary exposition:

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.^[1] The technique uses a timer to break down periods of work into 25-minute intervals called 'pomodoros' (from the Italian word for 'tomato') separated by breaks.

No doubt, there are any number of Ben Franklin-type people who will be eager to leap forth from the grave and claim that they were doing this exact same thing centuries or millenia earlier; but the point is that none of them came up with a catchy name for it. Speaking of which, that name comes from the kitschy kitchen timer that Signor Cirillo used in college:



It breaks down like so: 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. The exactness of using a timer turns out to be fairly helpful in stimulating focus and creativity: no matter how much time you have left in the day, it feels really important to be productive while the clock is running. The break is also timed, which prevents you from getting too engrossed in your chosen distraction. (You've got enough time to get a glass of water and check a few blog headlines, but not enough to go on a snacks-and-YouTube binge.)

The physical object shown above can be purchased here, but who wants an actual ticking clock taking up space when there are easily downloadable apps that accomplish the same thing?

OSX: Pomodoro sticks a little ticking clock in your upper-right status bar and uses Growl notifications to tell you when the timer starts and ends. This is what I used, and recommend.

Windows: Keep Focused is much smaller and simpler; it uses a little hovering clock that, annoyingly, doesn't seem to be dock-able. There are probably other programs out there but this is what I was able to find with some quick googling.

iPhone: Pomodoro Timer costs 99 cents but looks snazzy and seems worth checking out.

Doubling down

In real life, people don't change easily. Even small adjustments in behavior or attitude often take years or more. In a movie, a character needs to change pretty dramatically in two hours. Getting him or her there in a believable, compelling way is one of the greatest challenges of being a writer, and by "greatest challenges" I mean, of course, "hugest pains in the ass."

One thing is for certain -- a character to have an important, defining trait that the audience wants to see change. That's a given. If the audience doesn't think there's anything wrong with the character, they're going to lose interest, no matter what kind of fancy plot mechanics and exotic locations we toss into the mix. "Cares a lot about the environment" probably isn't a trait that we would want to see change, unless we're Dick Cheney. "Cares a lot about the environment but neglects daughter," now we're in the ballpark.

With that trait defined, our next task is to come up with a mechanism for changing it (i.e., the plot). For our environmentalist, what could that mechanism be? Maybe he's presented with a great opportunity to spend more time with the kid, to be a truly meaningful presence in the kid's life. That sounds nice, except there's a big problem with it, because it's not believable that the environmentalist would choose that path. And if he does choose it, right now at the beginning of the movie, he's already made the big change and the story is already over.

As an alternative, then, consider this -- the environmentalist is presented with an opportunity to be an even better environmentalist, except it requires neglecting the kid even more. Is it believable that the character would choose this path? Sure, since we already know that the environmentalism is a lot more important to him than the kid is. So instead of choosing to change his/her negative trait, the character chooses to double down on it. And hopefully, what that will do is bring the consequences of his life choices into much sharper focus and force him to realize the truth that he's been studiously ignoring this whole time, whatever that may be. Only now is he truly susceptible to change.

The right way to steal an idea

Sometimes great story ideas just pop into my head. Other times, I have to struggle to come up with one. (This is often because that great idea that came to me turned out to be impossible to, you know, execute.) During that struggle, I'll mine a variety of sources, including but not limited to:

1. My own life and people I know.
2. Things in the world that interest me.
3. Other movies.

That third one is inevitable for most writers, I think. Few of us like the idea of "stealing" an idea from another movie, but the more you write scripts and see movies, the more you come to realize that anything you write is going to have similarities to existing material. This isn't because it's 2010 and we're so starved for ideas that we're turning Mafia Wars into a movie; it's been true for a very long time. (Blah blah ancient Greece, Aristotle's Poetics, etc.)

It's okay, though. If you go about it the right way, you can extract a great idea from an existing movie without anyone noticing. It requires stripping away a lot of "story veneer" (for lack of a better term) to get at the core ideas that make the story special.

Novice writers often do the opposite, and keep only the veneer of a movie they like without touching any of the underlying principles. (This is also the case 99% of the time a studio chooses to "reboot" or "reimagine" an older movie.)

Example: Let's say you've picked Rocky to mine for material. Since it's such an obscure film, let's summarize it first. A small-time boxer and loan shark enforcer gets a shot at a high-profile match with the heavyweight champ.

To me, the "story veneer" on this is everything to do with sports/boxing. If you try to use Rocky as a model for another sports underdog movie, you're treading on territory that's so well-worn, you can see the concrete under the floorboards. And you may be more likely to miss out or gloss over the real heart of the story.

So what is the real heart of Rocky?

To me? It's about having lived through so much disappointment that your expectations are through the floor. You're at peace (or as close to it as possible) with the prospect of never meaning anything to anyone, including yourself. You'll just get by for as long as you can, and then you're done.

And then out of nowhere comes the opportunity to prove that you really are somebody -- and not just somebody, but one of the very best at something that truly means something to you. If you succeed, you'll be on top of the world, but if you fail you'll never live it down; you won't even have the luxury of toiling in obscurity, since everyone will know that you blew it.

So, if you're going to pull this off, you have to exterminate all the negativity that's been infecting your brain all this time -- learn to trust yourself, to love yourself. Build your self-esteem up to a level where it can be truly validated... or truly annihilated.

And then you have to take on the single hardest task that's ever been put in front of you.

***

Does that sound like it needs to be a story about sports?

Of course not. It could be anything from a romantic comedy to a heist flick. It's a general set of circumstances than affords a certain type of character the opportunity to become something much greater. There are a ton of ways to turn this into a blueprint for a great movie, without inviting any obvious comparisons to Rocky.

Notice that this story archetype, while highly flexible, comes with its own creative limitations that are helpful in funneling our thought process. For example, the protagonist clearly isn't going to be the President of the United States, or a superstar homicide detective, or the captain of the Harvard debate team. (If you want to put one of those characters in the lead, chances the story will have to focus on something vital being taken away from them, rather than the chance to get even more than they already have.)

Plan A

To be a good screenwriter, you must be a master of misdirection. Yes, just like a magician. (The Prestige is a great movie precisely because it recognizes the inherent link between magic and filmmaking and embraces it.) Fortunately, learning this skill as a writer is not as difficult (I don't think) as learning it as a magician. It merely requires us to envision a larger story than the one we're presenting on the page or the screen.

For example: Let's say we introduce a protagonist on page one or two. We want the audience to get a feel for him, we want them to invest in him... but we don't want to tell them everything he's going to be required to do over the course of the movie, because that would ruin the fun. In fact, the less we can tell the audience plotwise without losing their interest, the better. There's plenty of time for plot in the pages ahead; right now we need them to understand the person they're going to be spending the next hour and a half with. Often, the best way to do this is to set the protagonist up with a very specific plan for getting what he wants out of life. The audience will see very little of this plan played out in the movie (perhaps even none) , and that's fine; its mere introduction serves two very important purposes. One of them is, as already explained, to tell the audience some important things about the character's psychology. The other is to create drama when the plot comes along and derails our protagonist's preconceived ideas for what to do with her life.

Alternatively, it gives the protagonist a reason to refuse to embark on the quest that the plot represents. This reluctance was often a part of mythological tales, leading Joseph Campbell to coin the apt phrase "Refusal of the Call" to describe the initial unwillingness (or unreadiness) of a hero-to-be. Typically, the protagonist's ambivalence will be at least partially resolved by the end of the first act, which is to say that while he does accept his quest, he may not be doing so for the right reasons or with a fully committed heart. Nonetheless, the progression from "totally unwilling" to "partially willing" represents an important segment of the character arc. It's not always feasible to include this element -- action movies in particular have a need to get things moving quickly, which can leave little time for a character to refuse anything -- but screenplays that do a good job of incorporating it are often more satisfying.

If a character has a plan before the real plot begins, she also has something she can return to later in the story when the plot leaves her beaten and exhausted. Furthermore, the way that plan now appears to both the character and the audience -- somewhere between "no longer valid" and "utterly ridiculous" -- should demonstrate the vast distance that the character has traveled internally over the course of the story. The audience will be seriously impatient with the protagonist at this point -- "Why is he going back to the job/girlfriend/belief system that I thought he'd advanced beyond?" -- but on some level, they'll understand why he's retreating. The sense of hope and satisfaction that arises when the character finally throws off the old shackles and heads forward into Act Three can't exist if we haven't set up a solid "Plan A" in Act One.

Screenplays I love: Four Weddings and a Funeral

I don't know if this will become a regular feature or not, but I find myself wanting to say a few things about Four Weddings and a Funeral, one of my favorite movies/screenplays of all time. Paradoxically, Richard Curtis's script breaks many conventions of cinematic storytelling while, at the same time, exemplifying a story that could only be told as a movie. (It was beaten at the Oscars by a screenplay to which similar praise could be ascribed: Pulp Fiction.) The strict limitations it imposes on itself work so perfectly that they end up seeming like advantages, and the result is a highly accurate, endlessly satisfying portrayal of the hazards of love and romance.

Charles (Hugh Grant) is one of the most memorable protagonists in the history of romantic comedies. Much like John Cusack's portrayal of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything, the role came to define not only what we expect from a Hugh Grant movie, but what we expect from Hugh Grant as a human being. And yet for the most part, the screenplay tells us shockingly little about this character. We don't know what his job is, what his typical day is like, or even his last name. Up until the final minutes of the film, we only see him in the context of -- more to the point, in the shadow of -- other people's formal social events. (The one sequence in the movie that isn't a wedding or a funeral centers around shopping for one.)

To many writers, this kind of structure would be an uphill battle in terms of effectively setting up a character, but they'd deal with it as best they could -- seizing upon every possible opportunity to smoothly inject some exposition into the proceedings. Weddings, they might reason, are occasions where people are always introducing themselves and discussing their outside lives with strangers and rarely-seen acquaintances. But Curtis refuses to take advantage of any such loophole; Charles practically never talks about himself, and steers most conversations away from personal details. The few tidbits he drops here and there (saying that he could never get married, or that "[m]ost of the time I don't think at all. I just potter along" in relationships) are telling but vague.

So how does it work? How does Richard Curtis get away with all this? How does a vaguely defined protagonist walking through the same situation over and over add up to a great movie?

Well, first of all, it's a situation we all understand: not merely the experience of going to a wedding, but the period in our lives where it seems like everyone we know is getting married left and right. (Curtis himself apparently went to 72 weddings in ten years, so he knew whereof he spoke.) And as much as we might trivialize them as boring, useless social obligations, all weddings are powerful events that heighten our emotions. Even the wedding of someone we barely know (or wish we barely knew) is bound to serve as an occasion for some serious pondering of our life choices to that point. Attending multiple weddings in a short span amplifies those feelings. The writer knows this, the movie knows it, and the audience knows it -- without needing to be told. The same universal relevance applies when Charles falls in love with Carrie (quite literally at first sight) and deals with the difficulties, many of them hilarious, that their short-term romance entails.

Second, the structure of the screenplay gives it the kind of temporal scope that isn't typically feasible in a romantic comedy. Profound changes in characters' lives -- engagement, divorce -- happen offscreen between chapters, continually altering Charles's experience and perspective as time goes on. Months go by between Charles's first and second encounters with Carrie, though only minutes have passed on screen. He's still in love with her, but now she's engaged to a wealthy old Scot. Hope and joy immediately turns to heartbreak and painful rumination: a classic dramatic reversal made possible, again, by the film's atypical structure. By the third sequence, wherein Charles runs into Carrie while shopping for a wedding gift, enough time has passed that he's ready to let his feelings burst forth in a famously awkward confession... but it's both too late and too early for anything to come of it. Juxtaposing these scenes in a conventional script would never work; the drama would feel arbitrary and manufactured. But the film earns these compelling transitions by pinning its structure to the events that surround life changes, rather than the changes themselves.

Finally, the incredible cast of supporting characters serves to take some of the pressure off Charles without turning the film into an outright ensemble piece. (Curtis did attempt the latter in Love Actually, and the result, like many multistory ensemble films, was thinner and less memorable.) Even if we never completely know who Charles is, we're constantly presented with examples of who he isn't; thus, we form an impression based on the visible differences between him and his friends (and acquaintances, and strangers he bumps into, and so forth) and his reactions to their behavior. We also get occasional commentary from them on Charles's personality and life choices. Yet, they never seem to exist simply to fill these needs in the script; Curtis draws each one so vividly and specifically that they all feel like protagonists of their own individual movies -- an object lesson in writing secondary roles.

Four Weddings and a Funeral has aged well in the 15 years since its release, especially compared with the swath of wedding-porn embarrassments that the studios have churned out of late. It's clever, insightful, funny, and touching without trying too hard to achieve any of those characteristics. And best of all, it proves that screenwriting rules were made to be broken.

Useful scripts to read

When I started learning screenwriting in the late 90s, copies of screenplays weren't easy to find. There was the bookstore (for mostly older scripts in that annoying book-sized format), there were movie memorabilia stores and conventions, and there was the Internet, but the online pickings were slim (especially since PDFs weren't widely used yet). In 2009, however, screenplays are all over the place. Where once I tried to read pretty much every script I could find (since I couldn't find that many), these days I have the luxury of being selective. I try to read scripts that interest me, of course, but I also want them to enrich my knowledge of both the craft of writing and the current spectrum of work being done by professionals.

That said, here's a list of all the different types of screenplays that are out there, in ascending order from least useful to most useful (in my opinion/experience).

1. Commercially available screenplays of already-released films. The biggest problem with many of these: they're not really screenplays. They're transcripts of the finished movies, written (arbitrarily) in screenplay format. They describe what was on the screen, not what was in a writer's head. Most other scripts of this type are at least shooting scripts, which, again, often have little to do with the work of the original screenwriter. Instead, they probably reflect months or years of doctoring by other writers; preparatory revisions by the director/producers; and overly specific instructions to various departments (camera, sound, etc.). Meanwhile, that great screenplay that one person (or team) actually sat down and wrote -- the one that led to the movie getting made in the first place -- is nowhere to be found.

2. Screenplays for movies I've seen (often coincides with #1). A screenplay needs to create a vivid, compelling movie in the reader's mind. If the movie is already in my mind, then I can't gauge how well the screenplay accomplishes that goal. The language of the script can only serve to trigger existing memories, which isn't the same as creating new ones. On the other hand, reading earlier drafts can be both interesting and useful, as it enables me to see what changes were made along the way. I've done this with the recent movies Whip It and An Education, and it's clear that a lot of adjustments were made to both prior to (or possibly during) filming. In the case of An Education, many scenes were re-ordered or cut out entirely, all for the better (although Nick Hornby's ever-impeccable dialogue remained untouched).

3. Screenplays for not-yet-released (or unproduced) movies that were written on assignment. These days, this is most of them; spec scripts rarely get bought and even more rarely get made. But assigned scripts are less useful to me, because I don't know all the behind-the-scenes. With some of them, the writer is simply given a title and premise and then sent off on her own; with others, the writer may have 50 pages of outlines and sketches and notes to which he absolutely must adhere. The bottom line is that there are bound to be a lot of decisions in that script that weren't up to the writer; and the flipside of that is that there's no way to know how that script would have been received as a spec. Still, they can be good lessons on the art of working within someone else's framework, which is pretty much what professional screenwriting is all about. And they can showcase some pretty great writing regardless of the circumstances.

4. Spec screenplays that either sold or got the writer an assignment. The Holy Grail. These are the scripts that took aspiring writers from the sidelines to the big game -- that forced some executive somewhere to open her checkbook and give a chance to someone new. They're the best examples of what Hollywood is looking for in new writers... and they're becoming harder and harder to find as the studio system contracts and 90% of all movies appear to be written by the same four or five guys. Nonetheless, they're out there, and many of them are pretty thrilling reads from exciting new voices. These people made it; now it's up to me to work my ass off enough to follow in their footsteps.