The Hunger Games

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the movie.

In spite of The Hunger Games’ massive success at the box office, many viewers have complained that the movie is not as detailed as the original novel. I always find this comment ridiculous. While novels and films share hundreds of techniques that make for a good story, they also have at least one major difference: novels are a narrative medium while film is a dramatic one. When people dismiss the movie for not being as “good” as the book, they fail to see the key story elements, found in book and film, that make this a worldwide story phenomena.

The Hunger Games is the latest example of a huge blockbuster hit constructed by combining the myth genre with video game story elements. In my Genre classes, I have long pointed out that Myth is the basis for more blockbuster hits than any other genre by far. Book author and screenplay co-author Suzanne Collins understood this powerful technique right from the premise. In one of the most important of all Greek myths, Theseus and the Minotaur, every year King Aegeus must send seven young men and seven young women to be eaten by the Minotaur in ritual payment for a crime.

Like J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter stories, Collins has woven myth elements throughout her story. Main character Katniss is based on one of the major Greek goddesses, Diana, the huntress. When she and her fellow tributes show up in the arena, they are driving chariots. Like Romans watching gladiators kill gladiators and animals slaughtering Christians for sport, the rich dandies of the Capitol watch on live television as children butcher children. When Katniss shoots an apple with her arrow she repeats the act of legendary freedom fighter William Tell.

All of these mythical and ancient historical references give the story an appeal that can transcend age, gender and cultural boundaries. But that’s not enough for a hit. While myth is the foundation of more blockbusters than any other genre, it is almost always combined with one or two other genres to unify and update the myth form. In the case of The Hunger Games, Collins has combined myth with science fiction. This mashup of ancient past with distant future gives the audience the sense that this story isn’t specific to a particular time and place; it is universal. It is the essence of human beings.

Collins also uses science fiction to take the capitalist foundation of America society to its logical extreme, where competition for show and money has taken on life and death stakes. Like Rollerball and Westworld, the players in this competition are pawns to the big corporate money, and if you lose you die.

One of the biggest mistakes that science fiction writers make is that they create a futuristic world that is so bizarre, so unlike anything we know today, that the audience is alienated from the story almost before it begins. They may continue to watch but they will have a clinical attitude to the story throughout. And this is the kiss of death, in fact the single biggest reason that many science fiction films fail.

Collins has avoided that problem by creating a recognizable future world. Again her technique has been to connect past to future. The rural mining town of Katniss’ District 12 reminds me of 1930’s America, with the film’s shooting style reminiscent of Margaret Bourke-White’s photos of the drought victims of the Dust Bowl. This familiarity gives the audience an emotional connection to the story world. Although there are many elements that tell them this is a futuristic abstraction, the multiple references to America’s past, and in some cases present, tell them this is a story about today.

Besides the myth genre, the other key to the huge success of The Hunger Games is its deft use of video game elements. Video games are a relatively new story medium, and their massive influence on novels and film is just starting to become clear. I’m not talking about transmedia here, where a specific video game is turned into a novel and/or a film. These are almost always failures because the creators/producers try to boil all the permutations of a video game into a single story that can be written or filmed.

The trick to combining video games with novels and movies is not to transfer a particular video game story but to apply the story elements that video games do especially well and that appeal to a large audience. For simplicity sake, let’s focus on two elements, story world and keeping score.

Because video games allow a player to take a number of different paths through the same world, there is an extreme emphasis placed on a story world with lots of details and surprises. The difficulty of translating this story element into a novel or film is that these media have a single story path, so you can’t allow too much exploration by the reader/viewer without losing narrative drive.

But, driven by the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter stories, allowing the audience to explore a detailed story world is probably the single biggest change in commercial storytelling in the last ten years. The exquisite detail of the Potter world was mind-boggling. And a big reason Rowling was able to create that kind of detail in novel, and then film, is that she had seven books to do so.

Collins has three books to detail her world and uses the full array of techniques. First she creates the overall arena, which is a totalitarian society within which this moral horror can believably occur. She then sets up fundamental contrasts within the arena, with the rich, powerful amoral Capitol set against the poor, starving rural District 12. Within this macro-arena of high contrasts, she then creates a second smaller arena, the field of battle. This arena must have a clearly defined wall surrounding it to create the pressure cooker effect, whereby you build the conflict under such extreme pressure that it finally blows sky high.

Keeping score is the most obvious story element that distinguishes video games from other forms of media. Video games are essentially the combination of sport and story, or quantified drama. The biggest drawback to this element is that it destroys ambiguity; you either win or you lose. This is the main reason many critics have not yet given video games the accolade of unique story medium (they’re wrong, by the way). But keeping score also has great value. Since in most video games you are the main character, keeping score tells you exactly what you, as both main character and viewer, have accomplished in the story.

In The Hunger Games, of course, the element of keeping score is so fundamental it is right in the premise. This is a tournament to the death, “Survivor” with life and death stakes. In Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, another book and film heavily influenced by video games, we get a life and death fight between the two titans of evolution, man and dinosaur. But The Hunger Games is even more horrific, because this is a fight among children, and 23 out of 24 must die. Each contestant has different psychology, skills and training. And as in any game, luck will have a big role to play as well.

The game is also fixed. The contestants from Districts 1 and 2 are the only ones trained for this event. Naturally they usually win. But ironically, Katniss’ greatest weakness, her home in the starving 12^th District, is also her greatest strength. She practices survival every day of her life, and she is a master of the bow and arrow.

Collins does something very interesting to turn the great weakness of keeping score into a story strength. What the player/main character accomplishes at the end of a video game has a very all-or-nothing quality. But in great storytelling what the character accomplishes, known as character change, is deeper and more subtle. Character change is not based on how many bad guys the hero has defeated, or on the sensual charge the player experiences in the process. Character change comes from how a character challenges his/her psychological and moral self.

In The Hunger Games Collins turns the tournament-to-the-death element of keeping score into the lever by which Katniss can have both a psychological and moral change. The tournament creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma on a massive scale, representing all of society. Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the great insights in all of philosophy and game theory. In the classic setup, two prisoners are placed in separate interrogation rooms and given a choice of confessing to the crime or staying silent. But the authorities rig the choice so that each prisoner, without knowledge of what his partner is doing, must confess, because to trust his partner and stay silent risks death if the partner is the only one to confess.

Because only one player can survive the Hunger Games, the mini-society in which they live is one of total paranoia and distrust. Katniss’s distrust is heightened even more when she discovers that Peeta, her fellow tribute from District 12, has joined the alliance formed by the trained killers of Districts 1 and 2. Yet, over the course of the battle, she is not only able to trust him, but perhaps even love him. And when faced with the ultimate Prisoner’s Dilemma – whether to kill this person she loves – she makes the moral decision that risks her own death but also takes her to higher humanity.

Some critics have pointed out that The Hunger Games is a breakthrough for Young Adult fiction, especially for girls. Maybe so. But the big lesson of The Hunger Games has nothing to do with the age or gender of the reader-viewer. Simply put, if you want to give yourself the best chance of writing a blockbuster book or film – a longshot at any time – write a myth-based story with video game techniques.

Mad Men

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the episode.


As head writer on a show that has been on hiatus for 17 months, Matthew Weiner faced a huge story challenge in the opening two-hour episode. And it’s not yet clear whether he solved it or not.


The vast majority of TV shows have a tremendous advantage when it comes to creating narrative drive, in that they have clear, achievable desire lines. Cops solve crimes, lawyers win cases, doctors cure diseases. Desire, the hero’s goal in the story, is the object of measure in any TV episode.


But one of the main reasons Mad Men catapulted above all other TV shows when it first appeared is that it wasn’t constructed around a lead character with a clearly achievable goal every week.
Don Draper is an ad man, and his goal from one episode to another is never the same. Instead of repeating the same story every week, Mad Men could make every episode totally new, its own work of art, through a complex story weave of multiple characters with ever-changing goals.


This is great for story and character complexity. But it wreaks havoc on narrative drive. Instead of a single, propulsive force, a Mad Men episode is a crosscut among ten or more storylines, all happening simultaneously. The more you crosscut, the more you move sideways, and the less narrative drive you have. Result: you lose huge chunks of your potential audience.


Matthew Weiner has been more than willing to make that bargain in the past. But now he has to write a two-hour opening episode for an audience that hasn’t seen the show for 17 months. He doesn’t have the benefit of a single clear desire line to kick-start the massive story engine. And he is hemmed in by certain events that have happened to his characters at the end of the last season. Don is engaged. Joanie is pregnant, by agency partner Roger Sterling. Don’s ex, Betty, is married to someone else and never comes to the office where all the action is. And the actress who plays Betty is pregnant, so she can’t be in the opening episode anyway.


What all this means is that Weiner essentially has to do two hours of crosscutting to re-establish the various weaknesses and problems of his huge cast. He begins with Don already married to his new wife. That’s probably a good idea, because there wasn’t much he was going to get out of stringing that engagement along. But until now Mad Men was built on the contrast between Don selling the American Dream at work while living an unpleasant, and occasionally nightmarish lie at home. At least in this first episode, Don is relatively happy at home and a no-show at work. So the narrative must be carried by others. The problem is who.


Joanie is stuck at home with her new-born. This highlights the contrast that she and Peggy have always represented on the show of talented women who are held back by their gender. But as long as she is paralyzed at home by her problem, she can’t provide a driving desire for the episode. She finally takes action when she brings her baby to work, and the episode immediately catches fire with two excellent scenes. In the first the various women in the office take turns holding the baby, with Peggy wanting nothing to do with it. Then she has a nice bonding moment with financial partner Lane Pryce, who assures her that the office is falling apart without her. But this comes fairly late in the episode.


Peggy doesn’t have much to do here except feel frustrated coming up with a winning ad for beans. That leaves Pete, a pushy little whiner who is even more obnoxious than usual in this episode. He battles Roger for a bigger office that befits the success he has achieved in bringing clients to a firm that is having serious money problems.


Given the immense challenge Weiner faced in coming up with this first episode, we should probably be amazed that it was as good as it was. Now that he has taken care of all the set-up work for this season, he may be able to take the show in some exciting new directions as Mad Men takes on 1966. But for writers who love the craft, this episode points up lesson #1 in television: it all starts with desire.

Downton Abbey

The latest example of the coming of age of the television medium is Downton Abbey. In the old days of TV, each episode of a show was a self-contained story. The problem was introduced in the opening scene and solved 44 minutes later. By the end of the season, the audience had seen 22-24 versions of essentially the same story.

Notice this guaranteed that the TV medium as a whole could be nothing more than a factory of generic story product. Then Steven Bochco showed everyone that the real potential of the medium came not from a single episode but from an entire season. Instead of being film’s tag-along little brother, TV could tell its stories on a canvas ten times the size of a feature film.

In story terms, this meant, above all, interweaving multiple story lines over many episodes. No longer confined to a 44-minute straightjacket, the writer could get at a deeper truth by using film’s unique crosscutting ability to compare and contrast storylines.

Set in an English country house (more exactly a castle), beginning in 1912, Downton Abbey takes this multiple storyline approach to the extreme, so far having tracked the stories of 33 different characters. The question arises: what techniques does writer Julian Fellowes use to take this multiple storyline show to the highest levels of the TV form? I’d like to focus on two above all: story world and character web.

Story world is one of the main structural elements in a good story, consisting of the society, the minor characters, the natural settings, the social settings and the technology of the time. Downton Abbey has one of the most detailed story worlds in television or film, and all of these details have been chosen and created by the writer.

The first key choice Fellowes made in the story world had to do with placing the characters in pre-World War I England. This allowed Fellowes to work in the fabulous TV genre of historical epic (Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire). The Crawley family will stand for all of England at a time when England was about to undergo some of the most radical changes in its storied history. In the Anatomy of Story Masterclass (called The Great Screenwriting Class on CD), I talk a lot about the advanced story world technique of placing the characters between two social, or historical, stages, when society undergoes a relatively sudden shift. This highlights the forces of change acting upon the characters, so the audience focuses on how they adapt to these forces, and whether they do so in time to avoid their own destruction.

Fellowes uses another advanced story world technique by focusing not just on a family, but on a system, with highly defined roles, hierarchy, set of rules and values. Just as the American epic, The Godfather, depicts a family that is part of a mafia system, Downton Abbey’s family and servants are part of the British class system. This rigid system organizes and divides people in two fundamental ways, by wealth-power-status and by gender.

While any system is trouble for the characters trapped within it, it is tremendously useful for the writer. It gives Fellowes an almost unlimited number of permutations for conflict, which means he can not only run these oppositions as long as he wants to write the series, but can also make each individual episode extremely dense with conflict scenes.

Notice a system also gives the writer an extra level of depth for every character in the story. Even the most powerful character in the hierarchy, aristocratic father Robert Crawley, is enslaved in some way by the rules, values and expectations on which the system is built. And the least powerful character in the hierarchy, scullery maid Daisy, becomes heroic in her efforts to better herself against tremendous systemic forces and in her determination to do right by the dying soldier who loves her.

Over the course of the series, Fellowes has combined these two techniques – the changing social stage and the enslaving system – to give him the overall story path that each character will play out. World War I was a huge fulcrum for change in England, and even a network as old and powerful as the British class and gender system must bow to its awesome force. In simple story terms, the characters move toward equality; the rich and the men lose some of their power, while the poor and the women gain in power. The magnificent castle becomes a place for soldiers to recuperate, the aristocratic daughters act as nurses, one marries a mechanic, and the rich father can do nothing but accept it.

Closely connected to the story world is a technique I call “character web” (again for full details on this important technique see The Anatomy of Story Masterclass). Character web has to do with how all the characters in a story are connected to one another, which both helps to define and distinguish each of the characters and makes this story, with these characters, unique from every other story. Another advantage to placing the story within a social system is that it makes it easier for the writer to come up with a unique character web. The characters are all part of the same system, but they are distinguished by being in power – upstairs – or being out of power – downstairs, being male or female, by what role they play in the family and in the house, and so on.

On top of these basic distinctions, the writer can then add structural differences and subtleties. Here Fellowes borrows heavily from a fairy tale technique, refined by Jane Austen, which is the three sisters. The eldest and most beautiful, Mary, carries the main love storyline with the cousin who will inherit the house. Edith is the plain and resentful second sister unable to find a proper mate. And Sybil is the youngest who attacks the system by marrying the mechanic.

Of course, many stories have been set within the English class system. So the writer has to come up with a way to distinguish this character web from all the others. Fellowes uses a number of techniques to do so, but the most interesting one for me is how he depicts the upstairs characters. In the vast majority of British class stories, especially those written in the last hundred years, writers have depicted the aristocrats negatively, as the enslavers of those who work for them or those unlucky enough to be born poor.

And with good reason. While upper class characters aren’t at fault for being born into an aristocratic family, they do run a system that makes it virtually impossible for the vast majority of citizens to achieve anything close to their true potential in life. The history of American storytelling is defined largely by the principle of the individual creating, and often recreating, himself (for example, Huck Finn and Jay Gatsby). By contrast, the central hallmark of English storytelling has been a fixed self, determined almost totally by whether the individual inherits or fails to inherit the family fortune.

But that’s not how the upper class is defined in Downton Abbey. Yes, the entire plot is generated from the fact that a total stranger and distant cousin inherits the vast family fortune which then radically alters and jeopardizes the future of the three aristocratic daughters. But the aristocrats in this story are not evil, or even bad. Quite the contrary, the enormously wealthy head of the family, Robert, is probably the most positively portrayed character in the entire web. When the Titanic disaster shifts the inheritance to cousin Matthew, Robert could fight it with his powerful connections, and probably win. But he refuses to do so because it would be illegal and worse immoral.

All the aristocrats have their personal flaws, as all well-written characters do, but they are essentially good and decent people. Far more surprising though is that Fellowes depicts their exercise of power in a positive light. The simple rationale is that they are providing stable, paying jobs along with a good home for people who otherwise would have nothing.

Similarly, Fellowes doesn’t portray the servants as freedom fighters going up against the powerful in a terribly unjust system, but as children happy to play their roles in the larger family and thus intensely loyal to their masters. The benefit of this approach is that the characters are surprising and the overall character web is distinct from most other depictions of the British class system.

But the cost is immense. While I love following the beautifully woven trials and tribulations of this loving extended family, I occasionally feel like I’m watching a British Gone with the Wind. Sure, the blacks are all slaves in that world, but Tara is such a bustling happy place, run with love by that benevolent dictator with a heart of gold, Gerald O’Hara. No wonder that even the lowliest black character finds living out his role in the plantation family so comforting. Isn’t it a shame the Civil War came along and destroyed such a beautiful world?

You can’t have it both ways. Just because you show decent aristocrats doesn’t mean their exercise of privilege and power isn’t terribly destructive. Just because you show poor or uneducated people happy in their roles doesn’t mean that they aren’t enslaved and possibly forfeiting a much deeper happiness and fulfillment in their lives.

Fellowes depiction of the system as essentially beneficial is the greatest flaw in the construction of Downton Abbey, and is what in my mind prevents it from reaching the top echelon of works of art in this amazing medium of television. But we’re talking about extremely rarified air here. Anyone who wants to create their own series, or who just loves television, would be wise to study this show to see the techniques of a master writer.

Best Original Screenplay 2011

It’s that time of year again when Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back. For the last 10-15 years, the awards have been highly ironic, since the best work has come largely from the independent film community, not the major studios. While the studios have been busy making money from superhero franchises, the indies have been making original and compelling work that has approached the quality of American TV drama. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in this year’s Best Screenplay category. The Oscar nominations came out this morning. But I have found the Writers Guild awards to be a better gauge than the Oscars of the year’s best writing. Nominated this year for the WGA Best Original Screenplay are 50/50, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, Win Win, and Young Adult. The most glaring similarity among all these films, besides their high quality, is that four of the five combine comedy and drama, while the fifth,Bridesmaids, is a straight out comedy. Normally comedy doesn’t get anywhere near the respect it deserves, especially at awards time. But when you combine it with drama, you get a powerful hybrid where the comedy comes out of real people and their pain, and the serious drama is leavened by the often-ridiculous nature of life.

I liked all of these scripts, but the real surprise for me was the sleeper film, Win Win. This is a comedy drama combined with a sports story, and the film’s ability to weave all three threads into a seamless whole is exceptional (the fact that a second, equally-fine sports drama, Moneyball, came out the same year is amazing). Sports stories can be dramatic and inspiring, but they are almost always unbelievable. First, they try to compress too much improvement into too short a period of time. Second, they often use actors who have the athletic ability of a snail. The resulting lack of authenticity is deadly. A sport is a physical and mental craft. Like screenwriting, it takes years of training and practice to do well. The result, when played at a high level, is art. Film, as the sensual and realistic medium par excellence, is potentially unmatched in bringing the thrill of this art form to the audience. But you have to know how to do it. And the writer of Win Win does. The first key to Win Win’s success is that its main character is not the athlete but the coach. The comedy and drama comes out of this character’s journey, with the elements of the sport, in this case wrestling, hung on that line. Coach Mike Flaherty is a family man and a lawyer in a small town, and he’s in trouble from page one. Times are hard, his practice is dying, and he doesn’t want to tell his wife. He’s also the wrestling coach at the local high school, and they haven’t won a match all year. This is putting tremendous psychological pressure on Mike. But another technique that writer-director Thomas McCarthy uses to kick the film to a higher level is that Mike doesn’t just have a psychological flaw. He makes a moral mistake. When he sees the opportunity to make $1500 a month as the guardian of a senile old man, he grabs it, even though the way he does it is illegal. With that as the foundation and spine of the story, McCarthy then brings in troubled high school kid Kyle from out of town. Kyle, who is the old man’s grandson, is a scrawny-looking, 120-pound boy with badly bleached hair. He is also a fantastic wrestler. Directors often say that casting is 90% of their job, and director McCarthy did his job to perfection. He knew that the success of this little indie sports-comedy- drama rested on the authenticity of his kid wrestler, even though actual wrestling takes up only about a quarter of the film. The actor, Alex Shaffer, was a New Jersey state wrestling champion, and he has skills that you just can’t fake. Of course the reason most directors don’t use real athletes for lead roles in their sports movies is that real athletes don’t have the acting chops. But this kid does. Sure, he’s no Paul Giamatti, who plays Coach Mike. But the boy’s understated, closed-off performance is perfect for this particular character whose family troubles have shut him down emotionally. By making this Coach Mike’s story, McCarthy grounds the kid’s entrance, the sports story, in small town reality and connects the two storylines – sports and drama – through the two lead characters. The success of one line and character means the success of the other, and the rest of the film becomes a kind of love story between the desperate coach and the troubled boy. The high point of the film is the coach’s revelation that this scrawny stranger isn’t just a wrestler, he’s a phenom. The boy won’t help Mike with his financial and moral problems, but he will make a big difference to Mike’s loser team. And any coach will tell you that the chance to work with just one player of this caliber is coaching nirvana. It’s also pure gold for the viewer. I will admit that part of the pleasure this viewer took from Win Win came from the fact that when I was a young man I had the opportunity to coach some of the best players in my sport of squash. Making a strategic suggestion that a great player would then execute brilliantly was a thrill I will never forget. I also found myself, as a high school sophomore, playing on the same team as a tiny, 14-year-old freshman who was so incredible he regularly beat the best college freshmen in America. Unfortunately, he left after one season because there was no one on our team who could challenge him in practice. But while my personal background may make this story especially appealing to me, it is the writer’s craft that makes it work. The middle of Win Win tracks the rising success of the star wrestler, the team, and the emotional connection between coach and player. But the hidden moral issue must eventually rear its ugly head. Once again we see the value of founding this story on the hero’s moral flaw. Not only does the story escalate to concerns much larger than sporting success, the plot veers from the predictable sports beats of progressively bigger victories. I won’t go into specifics about the film’s ending. But the writer effectively turns the sports plot back to the dramatic interplay between the moral and emotional issues of the main character and his family. Win Win, and the other films nominated for Original Screenplay by the Writers Guild, are a promising sign that the underestimated and complex Comedy genre may finally be gaining the respect it deserves. But, as I always point out in my genre classes, the trick to transcending the form, and making your script stand above the crowd, is to combine Comedy with Drama. If you learn how to turn these two story strands into one, you will be very hard to beat.

The Tree of Life

Want to solve the mystery of Tree of Life? This is one of the most original films to come along in some time, but most people don’t know what to make of it. They suspect something important is going on, but they don’t have the experience to know what it is. The secret is in the genre and the story structure.

One of the best techniques for standing above the crowd in professional screenwriting is combining two genres that don’t normally go together. Writer-director Terrence Malick has done just that, connecting the Masterpiece form with the Memoir-True Story.

To really see how and why Malick creates this bizarre hybrid, you really need to go back to his 1978 masterpiece, Days of Heaven. The story is so primal it seems Biblical: a man pushes his girlfriend to marry a dying farmer to get a piece of his fortune. This moral tale takes place in a magnificent but incredibly harsh natural world, in the turn-of-the-century American West, complete with betrayals, revenge, fire and locusts. Sections of the film are connected by fast-motion photography of plants growing and the earth moving through its daily cycle, like a nature documentary. And the whole story is told through the memory of a 13-year-old narrator. 

Notice that Malick’s basic technique in Days of Heaven is to set up a very top down Biblical story while also setting up a very bottom up view of man deeply embedded in the natural world. This combination of Biblical with naturalistic is unique in modern film, but it was a hallmark of late 19^th century authors like Thomas Hardy. The combination seems like it shouldn’t work because the Biblical and the natural feel like opposites. But in fact Malick shows that they are both grand systems that try to explain how human life works.

This background from Days of Heaven points up the key story technique Malick uses to combine Masterpiece with Memoir-True-Story in Tree of Life: he sets up an extreme contrast between vast story frames and incredibly short scenes.

A mainstream Hollywood movie usually focuses on a few characters in some generic present, and tells its story through 50-70 scenes that average 2 minutes apiece. Tree of Life places the characters within massive frames of nature and history, but tells its story in 200-300 scenes that are often without dialogue and no more than a few seconds long.

These frames include the creation of the universe, the evolution of life on earth, including dinosaurs, the Oedipal battle between fathers and sons, 1950s suburban America and ultra-modern, present-day city America.

Malick’s use of huge story frames isn’t without precedent. Most famously, in James Joyce’s story of a boy growing up in Catholic Ireland, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, hero Stephen Dedalus writes in his geography book: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe.” 

As in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, these story frames are not just categories by which Malick defines his characters. They are also systems, and they quietly but inexorably lock the hero of Tree of Life, along with his family, within a powerful slavery.

Of all the many frames in this story, the main one is the “storyteller,” oldest brother Jack as an adult, played by Sean Penn, who remembers his childhood upon hearing of his younger brother’s death. If we recall the discussion of genres and story shapes in the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, we can see why this storyteller technique is the second key to combining the Masterpiece genre with the Memoir-True Story in Tree of Life.

The desire line, the spine, in a Masterpiece story is always some version of “finding a deeper reality, contrasting time, perspective and system.” For Memoir-True Story, it’s “to find the meaning in one’s own life.” Using his brother’s death as a trigger, Jack recalls his boyhood and in the process tries to make some sense of the meaning of his own life. Because this is a memory story, Malick is free to play with the past in any order he chooses, and show time frames that vary from the evolution of the universe to a memory only a second long.

After setting up all these massive frames of time, space and character in the early part of the film, Malick then goes in the opposite direction, the sensual, to tell the main story. One effect of the 200-300 short scenes is that the viewer gains a sense of flow, process, and becoming at every level of life. Just as Van Gogh’s paintings of objects are simply packages of lines of force, the objects here, from bursting stars to desert rocks, have energy literally flowing through them.

The combination of sensual images with short scenes becomes a different kind of story language, a visual poem, and much of the film plays like a silent movie. This is Malick’s cinematic version of stream of consciousness, far more believable and emotionally real than most voice-over narrations that play over standard-length scenes of dialogue.

No matter how short most of these moments are, each is an event, an action which, when strung together in sequence, gives us the story of a boy growing up in America. The father is a harsh, sometimes physical disciplinarian while the mother is a gentle ethereal woman with infinite love for her three boys. Our hero is the oldest of the three, and he does some things to the middle brother, now dead, that show a jealousy, a nastiness, and make him feel guilt now that he remembers those actions as an adult.

Over the course of the story, the outside world, the killer systems, invade the boy’s life. The father loses his job in the factory, along with his belief in the American ethic of working hard to rise to the top. And the boy has to leave the house that he grew up in.

Unlike his father, Jack has grown up to be a successful man in business. But the modern skyscraper environment he lives in seems a major loss compared to that house of his childhood. That’s why he remembers. And that’s why he mourns, not just for his dead brother but for a community, a fleeting moment in the span of a human life when he was free and loved and full of potential.

As this naturalistic story plays out, the second strain, the Biblical, the spiritual, comes through in the scenes as well. First by the fact that these aren’t just brothers in their actions. Our hero is Cain to his brother’s Abel, even if he didn’t finally kill him. Then there are the voices of the heavenly choir that play throughout. There’s the use of voice-over where we hear the beliefs of Mother and Father.  And of course there’s the communal ending.

In Jack’s mind, they are all together again at the seashore, walking through the water as requiem music plays and the ethereal choir sings. Father carries the dead son. And Mother says, to death, to the universe, to God, to something, “I give him to you. I give you my son.”

I wish I could say I loved this incredibly ambitious film. But I didn’t. My response to it was similar to what I’ve discovered about Citizen Kane: everyone respects it as one of the great films of all time, but I don’t know a single soul who loves it.

If you want to take a shot at writing a masterpiece of your own, it’s instructive to see why this occurs. Story frames, whether of time, point of view, or system, are fundamental to advanced storytelling. They are what allow the audience to see deeper and to see bigger than they can with their own eyes.

But there is a great danger. The more frames you place on a story, the more you literally back the audience away and drain emotion from the experience. It’s like placing a window frame around a window frame around a window frame around a character. You can see intellectually what the person is doing, but finally you just can’t feel it.

John Truby Interview Part 2

Question: How do you know a story you want to turn into a screenplay or novel can carry an entire movie or book? There are many factors that determine a good story. When you are first considering whether a story idea will work as a novel or screenplay, look especially at two structural elements, which you can see right in the premise line: the desire line and the opposition. The hero’s goal provides the spine of the story, and it must extend all the way to the end of the story. So make sure the goal is difficult to achieve and will require the hero to take a lot of complex actions to reach it. When considering the probable opposition in the story, make sure you can identify one character as the main opponent who wants to prevent the hero from reaching his or her goal. Then see if you can think of other characters who also oppose the hero’s desire, but for different reasons, and use different strategies than the main opponent. Question: Does character come from plot, or plot from character?

This question represents the Catch-22 of storytelling. Plot is the sequence of what your hero does while going after a goal. Character is not some separate entity from plot, automatically full grown at the start of the story. Character is defined by what your hero does over the course of the story. In other words, plot and character define one another. You can’t have a great plot without a strong, complex main character to generate those actions. And you can’t have a great main character without an intricate plot to test him to the depths of his being. Think of the relationship of plot and character as a feedback loop; when you improve one you automatically improve the other. The most important thing to remember is that character and plot must be organically and intricately linked for the story to be great. Question: What defines a good story? So many things. But fundamentally a good story is, once again, plot coming from character and character coming from plot. Most writers think plot and story are identical. They aren’t. Story is the perfect union of character and plot. A good storyteller actually tracks two lines: the character’s success in the action line and the character’s internal change. The audience wants to see the hero succeed in both lines. The writer makes those two lines one by connecting plot and character under the surface, through the story structure. There are many techniques for connecting plot to character. I explain these techniques in my Anatomy of Story Masterclass when I go through the 22 building blocks of every great story. Think of the 22 building blocks as the specific beats where plot is connected to character, from beginning to end. They’re especially useful for giving writers a precise map to the middle of the script, where 90% of scripts fail. Question: The universe someone creates in their screenplay can be as big as a universe, or as small as an apartment. What factors determine what the size of your story world should be? Story world has become one of the three or four most important elements in a good script. Much of the incredible success of the Harry Potter stories, for example, comes from the amazing details of the story world. I talk a lot about this in my Anatomy of Story class, because so few writers understand how to create and detail the story world. They think the story world is wherever the story happens to take place. In fact the story world holds an incredible amount of meaning for the audience. The first step in creating the story world is figuring out the arena. The arena is some kind of wall that surrounds the world. Everything inside that wall is part of the story. Everything outside it is not. Once within the arena you then link the world to the main character. In other words, the world of the story is an expression of who your hero is. Then set up the major pillars of the story world, and these are often in some kind of opposition to each other. For example, within the vast world of Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings, plants and water represent the forces of love and life while mountains and metal represent the forces of absolute power and death. Question: Writing good, crisp dialogue is one of the toughest things to do. How do you give each of your characters an original voice when they speak? This is another of the misunderstood elements of good writing. Certainly a character’s personality plays a role in how each speaks in a unique way. But the real trick to this technique has to do with two crucial structural elements: the character’s need and desire, the first two of the seven major story structure steps. Knowing the great weakness that each of the characters must overcome in their lives and being clear what each character wants in the story give you the fundamental “character” of the character. It’s who they are deep down. These two elements are the most important determinants of how each character talks. You then add on top of that each person’s unique personality, background and values so that every character has a distinctive voice. Question: What is the biggest misconception about learning and understanding story structure? Most writers never move past 3-act structure, which is deadly because 3-act is a mechanical, arbitrary way of dividing story. You can divide anything into three parts, but that won’t help you figure out a story that is complex enough to work at the professional level. Real story structure, also known as deep structure, is organic. Instead of being imposed from the outside, it comes from inside the hero. Or to put it another way, it’s how the hero develops as a human being by working through a plot, a sequence of actions that tests that hero to the fullest. Shifting from 3-act to organic story structure is not easy. Three-act is a magic bullet we all desperately want to work. But it won’t work. So let it go. Organic story structure requires knowing your hero with tremendous depth and being able to come up with story events that will inexorably lead that character to fundamental character change. If you can make the shift from 3-act to organic story, the payoff is huge. It’s what makes you a professional. Question: Could you name 3 non-screenwriting sources writers should be learning from to sharpen their craft? I’ll give you two. These are sleeper books that every serious writer should know and study carefully. They’re not easy to read, but they hold within them profound knowledge of the craft of story. 1. The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard, the best book ever written on story world 2. Anatomy of Criticism, by Northrup Frye, especially the first essay on the theory of the hero Question: There seems to be a lot of “re-booting” in Hollywood these days. They just wrapped the redo of “Total Recall,” they rebooted the “Batman” franchise, etc. What’s the best advice you can give when it comes to redoing, rebooting or re-visualizing a previous screenplay? The key to the best reboots of the past ten years - Casino Royale (The Bond series), The Bourne Identity, Batman Begins, Star Trek and most recently, Rise of the Planet of the Apes - is that the writers have given their hero a weakness and need. Weakness-need is the first of the seven major story structure steps. Until about ten years ago, action and myth heroes were rarely given a deep character flaw because the conventional wisdom said that the superhero had to be upstanding and “heroic” the entire story. The conventional wisdom was wrong, because it gave writers a boring character and meant the plot was just a repetitive series of action stunts. Giving the hero a weakness and need in a reboot not only makes the character more complex and engaging to the audience, it grounds the plot in character and makes it personal. That both delights the audience and makes them care. Question: When you’re reading a screenplay, what are the danger signs you see in the first few pages that you just know will mean trouble in the script? The biggest red flag: the writer doesn’t know how to catch the reader in the first 5-10 pages. And that means they don’t know story structure. Most writers have heard you want to catch the reader quickly, they just have never been taught how. Once again it has to do with understanding how story structure really works. When I go through the 22 building blocks of every great story in the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, I explain all the key structural elements that you must include in the opening 5-10 pages to catch the reader. And I guarantee that if you do those things you will not only catch the reader you will take him or her on a story journey they will never forget. The craft of story is not easy. But it can be learned and mastered. Don’t be intimidated by it. Take it step by step, and one day you will say with pride to anyone who asks you who you are: I am a writer.

John Truby Interview Part 1

Question: What’s the best advice you can give writers to help them develop their own unique voice and style? Voice and style are among the most misunderstood of all elements in storytelling. Voice and style aren’t simply a unique way of talking and writing. Voice and style come from content. Successful content comes from having an original story idea that is structurally well told. And this combination is extremely rare. This question is really about the writing process. Telling your story with a unique voice and style comes near the end of the process. The beginning of the process has to do with coming up with an original story idea, and that involves digging into your premise and using story techniques that show you the elements of the idea that are totally unique to you. The next part of the process is a story structurally well told. This involves all the techniques that go into character, plot and story world. If you master all of these techniques, you are 90% of the way to writing with a voice and style that is unmistakably yours.

Question: Could you describe the conventions of the key genres in Hollywood? Most writers believe that genre writing is a matter of learning certain conventions. But genre conventions are relatively superficial story elements that have little to do with writing a terrific genre script that stands above the crowd. I refer to genres as the first rule of Hollywood: they’re what Hollywood is really in the business of selling, because they’re what a worldwide audience wants to buy. So as writers we must give them what they’re looking for if we want to win the screenwriting game. As I point out in all my genre classes, the key to genres is going beyond conventions and learning how they really work under the surface. Each genre is a unique and highly detailed story form with anywhere from 8-15 special story beats (story events). You must not only hit these beats, you must transcend them. In other words, you have to twist the beats in an original way so the audience gets to have their cake and eat it too. In the third day of my Anatomy of Story Masterclass, I explain how the 12 key genres – from which 99% of films are made – really work, and where possible how to transcend each form. These 12 genres are: Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Myth, Action, Detective, Crime, Thriller, Memoir-True Story (including the biopic), Love, Masterpiece, and Comedy. I also explain how to write the all-important Mixed Genre story, because the main story strategy in Hollywood is to combine two, three or even four genres together. Question: What are common myths about being a successful screenwriter in Hollywood? 1. It’s all about who you know. Yes, Hollywood is based on relationships and of course you have an advantage if you are a close friend of George Clooney. But surprisingly, it’s not much of an advantage. The fact is, very few writers have the skills required to write a professional-level script Hollywood wants to buy. When you get the rare opportunity to make a high-level relationship, you have to walk through that door with one helluva good script. You won’t get a second chance. The big shots need to know that you are a professional, a master of the craft. One of the few advantages that we have as writers is that it just has to be there on the page. It’s hard, but with commitment you can do it. 2. If I could just pitch my idea to the right person, I could get a script deal and be on my way. Pitching is a joke. Unless you have the credits of an Aaron Sorkin or a Steve Zaillian, you are not going to be able to pitch to anyone but the assistant to the guy who makes copies. And if you did somehow get in to pitch to people with real weight at a studio, this is what they will always say to you: “That’s a really good idea. Now go write the script and I want to be the first person to read it. Bye.” Ideas are a dime a dozen. What’s rare is a professionally written script. And since the recession of 2008, even the top writers in Hollywood are having trouble getting a deal from a pitch. So forget pitching and go write a good script. 3. Every screenplay has three acts and 2-3 plot points. This one-line summation of what’s known as “3-act structure” is the big lie that every beginning screenwriter is taught, and it kills the career of 99.9% of them. Three-act scripts are mechanical writing at its worst, and the 3-act approach produces a simplistic way of thinking and writing that guarantees you will be an amateur forever. Just to give you one example, the average film that comes out of Hollywood has anywhere from 7-10 plot points, and if you are working in the detective, crime, or thriller genres, you will need even more. In plot hungry Hollywood, who is going to win the competition between your 3 plot-point script and a script with 7-10? Three-act writing is for beginners only. You’ve got to learn the techniques the professionals use to be successful. Question: When a writer has an idea for a screenplay, what questions should they be asking themselves before writing? The idea stage is the single most dangerous moment for a writer. Why? Because you have almost nothing to go on. Yet you have to somehow dig deep into the idea and determine right now if it can work as a 110-120 page script. This is where craft and technique come to the rescue. When you apply the techniques for breaking down a story idea, you find out a fact that might amaze you: 9 out of 10 ideas should never be written as screenplays. They are simply too full of structural problems you can never fix, no matter how good you are at story. One of the biggest mistakes amateurs make is that when they come up with a story idea they get so excited they immediately start writing script pages. They get 15-25 pages in and then hit a dead end from which they cannot escape. Instead, start by looking for the structural problems that are embedded within the idea. Focus on the probable main character and whether the idea can sustain a plot that is complex enough to generate up to 120 pages of story.