tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64689122614978990742024-03-19T05:18:11.522-07:00John Truby's Screenwriting TakeJohn Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comBlogger140125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-64859070522092127442013-04-23T15:52:00.000-07:002013-05-17T15:53:10.544-07:00What a Mother Knows<br />
Leslie’s Lehr’s <i>What A Mother Knows</i> gives me a wonderful opportunity to talk about story in the novel. I saw this book develop through every step of the rewriting process. So I can give you a close-up view of how this novelist crafted a successful work of fiction in today’s competitive marketplace.<br />
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<i>What A Mother Knows</i> opens literally with a bang: main character Michelle Mason is in a car crash that kills her passenger and puts her in a coma. When she awakes, she has lost a good part of her memory, and her 16-year-old daughter has disappeared. As she looks for the missing girl, she must confront the crucial question: how far would you go to protect your child? The answer to that question comes in an ending that is both shocking and totally justified.<br />
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Any piece of fiction is the product of literally hundreds of structural decisions that will make or break the final novel. In <i>What A Mother Knows</i>, the biggest decision of the entire writing process was shifting from an overall story structure and genre that didn’t work to a structure and genre that did. Lehr’s first version of the book was a drama structured with an advanced crosscut between two different story lines in time. This is the structure you would use if you were trying to write what’s known as “literary fiction,” since it allows you to play with two of the three keys of advanced novel, time and point of view.<br />
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But Lehr realized that this wouldn’t do, because a slow crosscutting comparison couldn’t sustain a narrative line. As she said, “so much felt dark and internal, and it placed too much pressure on the reader to connect the details.”<br />
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Lehr knew that the single biggest element in popular fiction today is narrative drive. So she shifted structures to one of the strongest of all storylines: the detective-thriller. Now the personal drama and the complex moral challenge inherent to her story would have plenty of narrative drive to rush it along and create maximum suspense.<br />
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The main technique Lehr used to make this new structure work was to base her thriller on something deeply personal, a mother’s love for her child. Structure forms like thriller and personal drama seem like opposites, but they can be mutually beneficial. This is the same technique Stephen King uses when he builds his horror stories on regular families. The technique is to construct a thriller on top of the real, identifiable feelings of the average person. Thriller gives the drama excitement and plot. Drama gives the thriller a solid base of deep feelings. Done right, it’s an unbeatable combination.<br />
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The third genre in the story blend in <i>What A Mother Knows</i> is romance. Love is not only a natural experience for this main character, it is deeply embedded in her character change. Character change should always guide the plot. And in <i>What A Mother Knows</i>, romance is part of Michelle’s rejuvenation, the true endpoint of her search.<br />
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Another major structure decision Lehr made was to extend the mother’s search outside of the city. The city is the classic detective arena. But this mother- detective covers the entire breadth of the United States.<br />
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Structurally, what Lehr is doing is extending the detective line out to the myth arena. This is hard to do. But the reason for doing it, indeed why it has to be done, goes back to the fundamental question of the novel: how far a mother will go to save her child. Turns out this mother will go very far.<br />
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The main challenge in extending the physical boundaries of the hero’s quest is the risk of losing narrative drive. You have to have complex story work to literally drive a story that far, and the story has to build. In the Anatomy of Story Masterclass, I talk a lot about the all-important technique of the vortex. Vortex is where we set up a funnel pointing to the final battle, and this funnel not only creates a convergence of all characters and actions, it interweaves all the genres into a single powerful line.<br />
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Sure enough, as the story moves toward the powerful climax, Lehr connects and builds both the detective and the romance lines. When these lines crest near the end, Lehr’s decision to extend the physical search, to go for the larger scope, ultimately pays off with a bigger ending.<br />
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Another key decision that intensified the ending was when Lehr chose to give her hero moral, as well as psychological, flaws. Not only does this make for a better story, it also prevents critics from labeling and dismissing the book as “chick lit.” This isn’t just about a woman’s emotional attachment to her child, which however valid is still totally within a woman’s world. The story is also about the central moral issue of being a parent.<br />
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Lehr tracks the moral argument of the story from the opening scene. Michelle is driving and her passenger, someone’s child, gets killed. Notice the moral line is based on the same deeply personal love of a mother for her child. And that means the ending pays off not only the plot line but also the moral line. That’s good writing.<br />
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Interestingly, the final scene – in my opinion the best scene in the book – has remained largely unchanged through the entire writing and editing process. This is one of the benefits of knowing your ending at the beginning of the writing process. And having a final scene this good makes a big difference if you want your novel to be popular as well as good.<br />
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I hope you will read <i>What A Mother Knows</i>, because it shows the unique pleasures that come from story in the novel. And for all you novelists out there, this book will show you all kinds of techniques for succeeding in the incredibly competitive world of fiction writing today.<br />
John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-28994202709388664122013-03-26T15:49:00.000-07:002013-05-17T15:50:27.679-07:00Starbuck and The Bachelor<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size: 12px;">Recently, I experienced one of those moments of serendipity where the contrast of two cultural events leads to some surprising insights. Within a few days of each other, I saw the final episode of <i>The Bachelor</i>, followed by the French Canadian film <i>Starbuck</i>. <i>The Bachelor</i> tracked, in its most recent season, a man choosing from 25 women to be his bride, or as he liked to put it as many times as possible, “the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” <i>Starbuck</i> is a fiction film about a 42-year-old man who discovers that he has fathered over 500 children through a sperm bank.<table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
The obvious similarity between <i>Starbuck</i> and <i>The Bachelor</i> is that both stories focus on the male role in the mating dance. But what we should study as writers is how each works through a particular genre to make its case. <i>Starbuck</i> uses one of the eight sub-genres of comedy, the traveling angel story (for the story beats of Traveling Angel and the other 7 major forms, see the <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_comedy.html" target="_blank">Comedy Class</a>). <i>The Bachelor</i> relies on the love story and one of the major forms of television, the reality show. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<i>Starbuck</i> appears to be just another example of the low comedy, also known as gross out comedy, that has taken over Hollywood for at least a decade.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size: 12px;"><br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
After all, the entire movie is based on the comic contrast of a vast number of human beings resulting from one man’s seed. But that would be a serious misreading of the film. The high concept premise is just the setup for the overall comic story structure – the traveling angel form – that is the real secret to the film’s success. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Of the eight major comic sub-genres, the traveling angel comedy is the only form I have never seen fail at the box office. I recently did a structure breakdown of <i>Intouchables</i>, a very successful traveling angel film from France. Other examples include <i>Amelie</i>, <i>Chocolat</i>, and <i>Mary Poppins</i>. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<i>Starbuck</i> twists the traveling angel form in that the hero doesn’t enter a community in trouble. The writers establish him up front as a total screwup who has gotten his girlfriend pregnant and clearly is in no position to be a true father. He then discovers he has biologically fathered over 500 children, and 142 of them are suing to find out his identity. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Now the traveling angel element kicks in. The hero clandestinely meets a number of his offspring, all of whom have problems. And this man who is incapable of being a father in his own life tries to help, and care for, the children he created in a test tube twenty years before. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Notice this is comedy of contrast and structure, not comedy of dialogue. Comedy based primarily on funny dialogue doesn’t travel well, because it’s based on language and cultural references unique to a particular country or region. Comedy based on big structural contrasts is the only type of comedy that works for a worldwide audience, because the laughs come from character and action. (Sure enough, remake rights to the film have been sold in France and India, and a Hollywood version, called “The Delivery Man,” starring Vince Vaughn, is coming out in October.) <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
By hanging the jokes on the traveling angel story structure, Starbuck can move from the low base of animal humor to the heights of community and true fatherhood. Instead of packing as many petty jokes and gags as the writers can fit into 109 minutes, the script has a foundation of heart and character change that makes the humor icing on a very tasty cake. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<i>Starbuck</i> uses comedy to strip the man’s role in the mating game down to its lowest biological denominator, then builds to love. <i>The Bachelor</i> uses the love story to dress up the man’s role with romance, but the reality show competition makes it really about the biological survival of the fittest. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Again, to understand how <i>The Bachelor</i> story actually works, you have to look at how the genre plays through the medium, in this case the love story through reality television. Of course, reality shows are not “real,” they are written, in that producers create conflict situations for the contestants to resolve. Which is why they should be called “surreality” shows, because they take real people and put them in a highly constructed and dramatic world. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<i>The Bachelor</i>, like many reality shows, is designed to produce as much conflict and humiliation as possible. This is one reason why <i>The Bachelor</i> is a more dramatic – and sadistic – show than <i>The Bachelorette</i>, because when the women are sent home they almost invariably cry. Rejection and humiliation in love in front of a national audience, what could be better than that? <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
There is another medium besides television <i>The Bachelor</i> love story plays through, and that is the game. <i>The Bachelor</i> is a tournament of love. When love is turned into a game, emotions are forced into bite-sized slots. The participants know it’s a game played for an audience, but they can’t help feeling the emotion. Of course, this is fast food emotion, freeze dried emotion. When the game is over and the cameras shut down, the two winners find out that love in the every day is a very different animal. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Part of the severe contrast of love and game comes from the compressed time of the love story. The couple on a date never gets a chance to experience one another, because they are so conscious they are on a filmed date, and they are dating on deadline. So they are always meta-dating, talking about how well the date is going, about how right they are for each other, even though they’ve barely said word one. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Probably the central problem contestants have on the show is reconciling these dual and conflicting requirements of love and game. They want true love but they are also competing to win the game. Indeed, the worst thing one player can say about another is “she’s here for the wrong reasons” – ie, to win this game, or win the larger game of becoming a reality TV star, which means she doesn’t really care about love. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
But this conflict between love and game is ultimately false. Far from being a highly unrealistic love story played out in compressed time in front of cameras and a national audience, <i>The Bachelor</i>, and even more so <i>The Bachelorette</i>, mimic what is really happening in the mating game. In real life men compete to see whose seed gets to impregnate the highly prized egg. Women compete to see whose egg gets to benefit from the male with the best resources. Love is the feeling human parents create to try to extend a single moment of mating to the years it takes to successfully raise a child. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
Like any reality show, especially one based on competition, <i>The Bachelor</i> has certain story beats that the producers (read writers) create. You know they’re coming, but the women fall for them anyway. I love to count the story tricks the producers come up with while they are actually happening. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
And the women’s responses to these story beats are totally predictable, at every stage of the plot, all the way down to repeating the same lines of dialogue. The show appears to be about romance, and the game is all about choosing a life partner, about free will of the heart. But these real people, who are not reading from a script, are mouthing the same lines and experiencing the same jealousy and heartache. They are programmed to do and say this stuff. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
The producers don’t have to write the lines down in a script. All they have to do is create the competitive, survival-of-the-fittest situation, with at least one death each week, and the women are guaranteed to say the lines anyway. <table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
<br /><table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"></table>
This pre-programmed, mating game quality is even more apparent on <i>The Bachelor</i> than on <i>The Bachelorette</i>. On <i>The Bachelor</i> I can often tell who the guy is going to pick by how he looks at a woman when she gets out of the limo the first night. It’s remarkably obvious, at least for the final 2 or 3. That’s men. And while it gives <i>The Bachelor</i> a slight detective quality - as I try to figure out if I’m right about who killed the bachelor with a lightning bolt – it also makes the entire season one long stall. When a woman is choosing from 25 men, it’s not so easy. A woman needs to hear what the guy has to say, even if he’s only saying a pre- programmed line just a little bit better than the next guy.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size: 12px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-size: 12px;">Success as a popular storyteller in the worldwide markets of film and television comes down to how you play out your genre in your medium. Doing something unique is never easy. But if you know your forms well enough to twit them, you can come up with something that will stand out from the crowd.</span></span><br />
John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-70725116851727989822013-02-25T21:50:00.003-08:002013-02-25T21:50:28.324-08:00Girls
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">The same night it won the Golden Globes for Best Sitcom, <i>Girls</i> premiered the first episode of its second season on HBO. That episode perfectly encapsulated the strengths of this unique television comedy, but also the costs.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">The biggest strength of <i>Girls</i> is that it purposely breaks the sitcom form. Transcending the genre is one of the main strategies in present-day screenwriting. It is also a great strategy for sitcoms, because you can give the audience the pleasures of the form while also standing out from the crowd.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">TV is all about the characters we return to every week. So to see how <i>Girls</i> really works, and how it transcends the sitcom form, we have to begin by looking at the character web of the show. <i>Girls</i> sets up the character web using the technique I call “4-point opposition” (see the <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_sitcom.html" target="_blank">Sitcom Audio Class</a> for details), which is the structural foundation of the classic sitcom. With 4-point opposition, you have a minimum of four central characters, each distinctly different from the others. All stories and comedy come from the various interactions of these four characters.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">Where <i>Girls</i> twists the normal 4-point opposition is in how it differentiates the characters, and most especially in how it defines their character flaws. Traditional sitcom characters have one trait by which they can quickly be labeled comically, such as the innocent, or the raunchy one. They also have one weakness, which is relatively mild and almost always strictly psychological. A popular sitcom like <i>2 Broke Girls</i> isn’t about exploring complex characters. It’s about placing two characters with an easily recognized comic shtick in some kind of trouble every week and watching the unique way they get out.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">Even a transcendent sitcom like <i>Sex and the City</i>, on which much of <i>Girls</i> is modeled, used a fairly simplistic 4-point opposition and character definition. Miranda was the smart professional, Samantha the sex kitten, Charlotte the pretty innocent. Only Carrie was a complete, complex character, and even she had no moral flaws, with the possible exception of her addiction to shoes (just think how many starving people all that money could have fed).</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">In contrast, the four main women on <i>Girls</i> have serious character flaws, both psychological and moral. These women are very self-centered, they make lots of mistakes, and they sleep with the wrong people. Sex for these women is very in-your-face, and often painfully pathetic.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">The most obvious benefit to a more complex character definition/opposition is that it gives the audience a strong sense that this is probably what women in their early 20s are really doing. That’s followed immediately by the sense that we haven’t seen anywhere close to this kind of reality before. Sure I’ve always known intellectually that the traditional singles sitcom is a fantasy confection. But one episode of watching <i>Girls</i> made it jarringly obvious to me that all other depictions of young women in sitcoms have been simplistic fakes.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">This greater “reality” does have its costs. The lead character of Hannah, played by the creator-writer-director of the show, Lena Dunham, seems to have an inordinate desire to shove her naked body in our faces. I for one feel that a little of that goes a long way. In fact, it has already gone way too far. I get that this is a stockier woman who is saying, “I have every right to be proud and honest about my body and my sexuality too.” And she’s more comfortable exposing her body than the classically beautiful Marnie is in showing hers. But it’s just not pleasant. Lena, darling, trust me. Tone it waaaay down.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">Notice Hannah’s approach to sex is in sharp contrast to the lead character in<i> Sex and the City</i>. In the entire history of that show, Carrie never had a sex scene where she wasn’t wearing a bra, the whole time! I realize this may have been written into the actress’s contract. But the effect was still a 20s-30s woman, very forward in her thinking, who was extremely embarrassed about her body. To the point of making us doubt that the show was ever about sex and the city.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">Another way that <i>Girls</i> structurally flips the normal sitcom form is in the way it handles the characters’ self-revelations, in other words, what they learn from their trials and tribulations. The normal sitcom character has few if any self-revelations. The conventional wisdom has always been: we can’t have the characters undergo any real change or growth, because that would destroy the setup and chemistry of the show.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">These girls, especially Hannah, have self-revelations all the time. But their insights have the life of a flea. These girls are constantly analyzing themselves, as if they can make themselves grow up and have happy lives just by thinking about it. They make mistakes and are immediately aware of those mistakes, so they have this strange mix of being highly intelligent and clueless at the same time. Often the contrast is so extreme that it stretches credulity.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">But it’s also a big advantage, because this mix not only defines their characters, it is the source of much of the comedy on the show. Notice the constant alternation between self-revelations and blunders is built into the characters from the beginning, in the way the show was originally constructed. And the original construction of a show determines everything that is possible as the show plays out its run.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">In this vein, it’s instructive that the name of the show is <i>Girls</i>, not <i>Women</i>. That not only tells you the maturity level of these characters, it is a very conscious reference to the classic feminist line: “We are women, not girls.” These women are well past the feminist struggle of who they can be in a male-dominated society. They don’t even think about it. But they are still girls in how much they screw things up. They have little clue of how to be a woman.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">A show with this kind of set-up gives the writers tremendous freedom to explore character and break out of the sitcom straightjacket. But it also creates some serious problems.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">For one thing, these women can be deeply annoying. I actually prefer “unlikable” characters. <i>Seinfeld</i> showed us long ago that unlikable characters are more intriguing, especially over the long haul of a series, and are much funnier. But these women are so self-centered no one could stand to be with them for longer than 10 minutes.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">But there’s a bigger problem that comes with such complex, self-aware characters: thin plot. The reason it’s called situation comedy is you put the heroes in a predicament and watch them struggle to get free. This predicament structure gives you maximum plot, not just for one episode but for a hundred episodes over many seasons.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">In contrast, the girls in <i>Girls</i> are so self-conscious, navel gazing to the point of stupidity, that they don’t tell much of a story. They don’t do anything. For this show to not only last but also to grow, the writers have to create comedy from the contradictions of the characters and from the surprises of the plot.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">The people who like this show may not care for “more” plot. They and the show’s creator might argue that they are not interested in the big, predicament plots of most sitcoms. These are plots of living everyday, of becoming adult women with the help, and sometimes the hindrance, of your best friends. And that feels real and satisfying.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">But I’m not arguing for that kind of traditional sitcom plot. I think the future path for this show, which the writers have already begun to explore, lies in the moral flaws of the characters. One of the best scenes of last season was a blowout argument between Hannah and Marnie over who was more selfish and who was the better friend.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Geneva;">If the writers can find the right blend between psychological flaws and moral dilemmas, so surprising plot comes from complex characters, this show will be winning awards for a long time to come.</span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-66813785838572118452013-01-29T21:32:00.000-08:002013-02-25T21:37:54.990-08:002012 Scripts Nominated for Oscars<table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="color: black; font-size: 9pt;" valign="center"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">Here are some of my thoughts on this year’s Best Screenplay Oscar nominees. I’d love to hear your thoughts too. So please add your comments at the end of the article and let’s get a great discussion going.<br /><br /><b>Adapted</b><br /><br /><u>Silver Linings Playbook</u><br /><br />All stories concerning mental illness require some kind of cheat. If the hero is truly mentally ill, he is compelled to act a certain way. Hopefully his doctor can find a drug that can control it, because with a lot of mental illness we are not in the realm of choice and will power. But that’s not dramatic, and it’s not funny.<br /><br />If you can’t accept this cheat you may have trouble enjoying <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i>. The lead character, Pat, clearly has a mental illness at the beginning of the story. But through the love of a good (but also troubled) woman, he not only overcomes his illness, he matures at the end. Putting aside the reality of this change, the way Pat gets there is beautifully written, and is one of my two favorites for winning Best Adaptation.</span></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" style="color: black; font-size: 9pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;"><i>Silver Linings Playbook</i> is a rare example of a transcendent romantic comedy. Yes, it hits all the story beats of this highly choreographed form, as it must. But what really sets it apart is that it also twists every beat in a unique way. This allows <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i> to overcome the predictability of the romantic comedy form, an almost impossible feat for a writer to accomplish in this day and age.<br /><br />I also have to mention the wonderful scene work and dialogue in this film. The scene where Tiffany makes the case to Pat’s father that she is in fact good luck for all of them is an instant classic, and worth careful study for anyone trying to master the screenwriter’s craft.<br /><br /><u>Argo</u><br /><br />My other favorite for wining Best Adaptation is <i>Argo</i>. I’ve written a <a href="http://www.truby.com/argo.php">review</a> of this film already. But let me say here that writer Chris Terrio has pulled off the difficult task of combining the True Story genre with Thriller and Action to produce a real knockout punch of a film.<br /><br />Let me be clear. The craft in this script does not come from transcending the main genre. As a couple of readers of my in-depth review accurately pointed out, the hero has no moral flaw and only the barest psychological weakness. Because of this unique story, I don’t believe that the lack of a serous character weakness is a big story problem in<i>Argo</i>. But it does keep the film from hitting the pinnacle of artistic success.<br /><br />So where does the quality of this script come from, if not from transcending the form? It comes from the seamless way <i>Argo</i> combines genres that don’t normally go together. And it is a classic example of the screenwriter’s craft, of using the power of the cut in cinema to create an inexorable vortex hurtling the viewer forward at a faster and faster rate. This script is a crowd pleaser in the best sense of that term, and that feat should not be underestimated.<br /><br /><u>Life of Pi</u><br /><br />I came to the film, <i>Life of Pi</i>, having already read the book, and though I liked it I was not a big fan. I loved the basic premise of the boy and the tiger together on a lifeboat, and found many of the incidents enjoyable. But the overall story for me was flat and episodic. Also, it did not make its thematic case for a God, in whatever form one wants to believe, nor did it make the case for the healing power of storytelling itself (something I fervently believe).<br /><br />Given that, I was impressed that the screenwriter, David Magee, did as well as he did in translating this Personal Myth-Fantasy Memoir to the screen. Unfortunately, what I saw as the flaws in the original book remain. And I think Magee made a serious mistake in the way he handled the storyteller frame. In my Masterpiece class, I talk extensively about this powerful but difficult story tool. In <i>Life of Pi</i>, the storyteller frame does not lead to a new dramatic conclusion, and the constant return to the storyteller throughout the film makes the story seem even more episodic than it already is.<br /><br /><u>Lincoln</u><br /><br />I’ve said in my more in-depth <a href="http://www.truby.com/lincoln.php">review</a> that I believe <i>Lincoln</i> will win Best Adaptation, but I will be sad if it does. This film is rife with Oscar Disease, wherein the patient is horribly bloated, boring and believes he is doing God’s work among the Great Unlearned. Starting with the laughably phony and absurd opening scene, every scene in this film is at least twice as long as it should be. Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, if you are going to make me take my medicine for 2 1/2 hours, at least wrap it up in some sugar (that is, plot, artistic craft and subtle, non-preachy dialogue).<br /><br /><b>Original</b><br /><br /><u>Moonrise Kingdom</u><br /><br />While I enjoyed this film the first time I saw it, I wasn’t blown away. Mostly that’s because the film is small, and I feel that children entering those unpleasant teenage years should be hidden in a closet until they have a coming out party at the age of 21. But when I saw <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> a second time, I was able to see the incredible craftsmanship in this script.<br /><br />This is a transcendent romantic comedy, which is tough enough to pull off (and now two in one year!). But the writers also add in terrific work on story world, namely the kind of Americana utopia found in such classics as <i>Meet Me in St. Louis, You Can’t Take It with You</i> and Jean Shepherd’s <i>A Christmas Story. Moonrise Kingdom</i> opens in the mini-utopia known as the “buzzing household.” But the flip is that this is an apparent utopia, because the wife is having an affair and the teenage daughter, the pretty princess I like to call “Perfume Girl,” is miserable.<br /><br />We then jump to another mini-utopia, the perfectly organized, perfectly geometrical scout camp, home of “Nerd Scout.” But this too is an apparent utopia, because Nerd Scout is an outsider and wants to run away with Perfume Girl. With an approaching storm giving us a vortex (the same technique found in <i>Argo</i>), the writers twist every romantic comedy beat in a fresh and endearing way and converge on a literal cliffhanger.<br /><br />We end with a new home and scout utopia, and the memory of the perfect moment and the only true utopia in the story, when the boy and girl created their Moonrise Kingdom by the bay.<br /><br />If you don’t like your lead characters to be 12, this movie may not do much for you. But this script is sensational, and while it has no chance of winning in the Original category, it should.<br /><br /><u>Flight</u><br /><br /><i>Flight’s</i> strength is that it’s an actor’s film, written with a big juicy starring role. A lead character that can attract a movie star is a big advantage in the Hollywood sweepstakes.<br /><br />But <i>Flight’s</i> strength is also its first great weakness. The lead character is so dominant that the film is essentially one long monologue where Denzel Washington gets to strut his stuff. Now Denzel struts very well, but that doesn’t make for a good story.<br /><br />When you wed the lead character’s dominance to a story about alcoholism, you end up with a predictable plot, a one-note character and a painfully obvious and false climax. You can probably tell I don’t think this script can or should win.<br /><br /><u>Django Unchained</u><br /><br /><i>Django Unchained</i> is a genre mash up that is quite enjoyable for about 2/3 of its very long running time. Writer Quentin Tarantino combines the spaghetti Western with Comedy, and adds in his usual funny and sometimes bizarre dialogue. The scene where the Klansmen complain that they can’t see though the eyeholes is hilarious.<br /><br />But to see what’s really going on here, it’s important to look at Tarantino’s underlying story strategy in both this film and his previous film, <i>Inglorious Basterds</i>. Part of the reason <i>Django</i> became less enjoyable to me as it went on is that the fundamental sadism of the writer-director became overwhelming. Simply put, Tarantino seems to take extreme pleasure in finding creative new ways to maim, torture and kill people.<br /><br />As his career has progressed, Tarantino has found the need to justify this sadism. So for him the question naturally arises: how do I create a story world where this extreme level of violence is not only acceptable, it’s necessary? Answer: create stories where the heroes fight two of the worst crimes against humanity in history, the Nazis and slavery. It’s win-win-win: Tarantino gets free reign to torture and kill to his heart’s content, the audience gets to feel good about taking revenge against all those evil people, and critics get to applaud Tarantino for his masterful take on the “big themes.”<br /><br />Note to Quentin: please, please stop acting in your own movies. The moment you show up in this movie is the moment it officially ends.<br /><br /><u>Zero Dark Thirty</u><br /><br />The hit against <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> is not that the writer, Mark Boal, showed the CIA torturing victims. And if this script doesn’t win Best Original Screenplay, it won’t be because three U.S. Senators criticized it. It will be because the script’s not that good. I admit, I don’t get why critics love Boal’s scripts. I thought <i>The Hurt Locker</i> was one of the most over-rated films of that year, primarily because of the script. The writer is supposedly a fanatic about authenticity, but every person I know with military experience has said that film was so full of absurdities it was hard for them to watch it.<br /><br />In <i>Zero</i>, Boal has set a bigger task for himself, bringing down Osama Bin Laden. In reality, this was a ten-year project that involved hundreds if not thousands of people. And that creates a story nightmare for the writer. His solution: structure the story on the desire line of one woman. Notice this gives a potentially sprawling story real focus and narrative drive. But the costs are high. This decision limits plot to the somewhat predictable actions of one person. It completely removes the possibility of character change, and even the importance of character itself; our hero is a cold, determined woman whose only change, or sign of humanity, is that she sheds a tear of relief when the whole thing is over. Oh, and did I mention, making this a one-woman job is absurd.<br /><br />Whether you agree or disagree with my views and my choices, I hope this article gets you to look under the surface, to see the structural decisions these writers made in creating their scripts. Remember, it’s all about studying the pros so you can learn techniques that may result in one of your scripts being nominated for Best Screenplay.</span></td></tr>
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John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-31984554843124225772012-11-23T14:04:00.001-08:002013-02-25T21:39:13.442-08:00Hit 2012 Movies Show Why It's All About Learning Genres<span style="color: #cccccc;">For years I’ve been making the case that the key to becoming a professional screenwriter is to follow the first rule of Hollywood: it buys and sells genres. If you don’t know what Hollywood is buying you have no chance of selling them your script. <br /><br />Genres are different kinds of stories, like comedy, detective and fantasy. These stories have proven their appeal to worldwide audiences for decades, centuries and sometimes over thousands of years. Each genre has anywhere from 8-15 story beats (story events) that must be present in your story if the script is to have any chance of success. <br /><br />It would be nice if all you had to do to write a sellable genre script is to learn the story beats of your form and execute them properly. Unfortunately that’s what every other writer is doing. You need to do more. <br /><br />In the past I’ve emphasized the first strategy for writing a genre script that stands above the crowd, which is to transcend the genre. This means that you not only hit every beat of your form, you twist them in a unique way that no one’s ever seen before. <br /><br />This year we’ve seen many more films that use the second key strategy for writing a unique genre script: mixing genres. Hollywood here is using the age-old marketing technique of “give ‘em two for the price of one.” Except that now it’s more like three or four for the price of one. Almost all of the hit films of the year are a mix of multiple genres. And they, like 99% of the films that come out of Hollywood year in and year out, choose from these 11 story forms: Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Fantasy, Horror, Love, Memoir-True Story, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller. <br /><br />The question is: how do you do it? It’s not as easy as it appears. When you combine genres you run the risk of story chaos, because each genre comes with a unique hero, desire, opponent, theme and story beats. <br /><br />Let’s look at the biggest hits of the year and see which genres the writers combined and how. One strategy for mixing genres used by three of the year’s biggest blockbusters – <i>Hunger Games</i>, <i>The Avengers</i> and <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> – is to combine one or two genres with the Myth form. Myth is the most popular genre in the world, which is why it is the foundation for more hit films than any other form. Myth travels the world better than the other forms because it deals with big archetypal characters and life situations, so it transcends cultural boundaries. But Myth is almost always combined with other genres that both update and unify the often-episodic Myth. <br /><br /><i>Hunger Games</i> combines Myth with Science Fiction. Book author and co-screenwriter, Suzanne Collins, understood the power of this combination right from the premise, which is based on the classic Greek myth, 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. Collins’ main character, Katniss, is based on one of the major Greek goddesses, Artemis (aka Diana), the huntress. The best beat of the story, when Katniss shoots an arrow through an apple in the mouth of a pig, is right out of the Swiss legend of William Tell. <br /><br />Collins then uses Science Fiction to create a futuristic world that takes the capitalist foundation of American society to its logical extreme. In this world, competition for show and money has taken on life and death stakes. This mash-up of ancient past with possible future gives the audience the sense that this story isn’t specific to a particular time and place. It is universal; it is today. <br /><br /><i>The Avengers</i> combines Myth with Action and elements of Fantasy. All superheroes are Myth characters (especially the Norse god Thor), and bringing them together to form a Dream Team is as old as both Greek and Norse mythology. But the structure of this story is taken from Action, in particular a sub-form of Action known as the Suicide Mission story. Suicide Mission, like its cousin, the Heist story in the Crime genre, shows us a collection of all-stars who reluctantly form a team to accomplish an almost impossible goal. Using some excellent techniques from TV Drama, writer Joss Whedon takes these mythical heroes through all the action beats, ending with the definitive beat in the Action story, the final bloody battle. <br /><br />The first film in the Batman trilogy written by the Nolan brothers, <i>Batman Begins</i>, hits and twists every beat of the Myth genre perfectly. But the second film, <i>The Dark Knight</i>, with its showdown between Batman and The Joker, is really a Fantasy Crime story, with the original Myth elements sitting underneath. <i>The Dark Knight</i> is the greatest superhero film ever made, and that put tremendous pressure on the Nolans to top it with <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>. Their approach? A Crime Epic, a story of worldwide injustice with story beats right out of the French Revolution. That was probably a bridge too far, because even terrific writers like the Nolans could not inflate the Crime beats to that level. But you have to love their ambition. <br /><br />This is the time of year when the Oscar contenders show up. The hottest picture right now, with a major shot at actually winning Best Picture, is <i>Argo</i>. Argo uses the strategy of mixing genres that rarely go together, in this case True Story with Political Thriller and Action. <br /><br />True Stories typically have a gritty reality but lack dramatic shape. Political Thrillers are extremely choreographed and intensely dramatic. But at least when done in film, they usually pit a single hero against a vast organized conspiracy. So they often end badly. Because of the unique facts of this true story, these virtually opposite genres fit perfectly together and each genre’s strength solves the other genre’s weakness. <br /><br />But the usual beats of the True Story form did require writer Chris Terrio to make a big change in the traditional Thriller beats. In the classic Thriller, the opponent is hidden and plot comes from reveals. Not here. The Iranian security force is the clear opponent from the beginning. So Terrio had to pull from the Action genre to create his plot. He sets up a huge vortex, a crosscut between the hero trying to get the hostages out and the opponents closing in for the kill. Everything will converge at the airport, and the combination of Action and Thriller beats gives the film a knockout ending. <br /><br />Mixing genres is a dynamite strategy if you want the best chance to write a script that Hollywood might actually buy. But it’s not easy. You have to be able to execute. And that means you have to learn the genre beats of every form you’re mixing, and learn them so well that you can make some major adjustments to handle the unique qualities of your particular story. Each genre is a complex story system. But the good news is you can learn them. You just have to willing to put in the effort and the time. </span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-59599819069557633232012-11-20T13:24:00.000-08:002012-11-23T13:24:50.431-08:00SKYFALL Story Quiz<span style="color: #cccccc;">There have been many reviews of the new Bond film, SKYFALL. John thought it would be a fun exercise for you to think about what was effective (or not) in the script before he weighs in with his breakdown. So, here is a Story Quiz on SKYFALL for you to apply Truby's story structure beats to "get under the hood" and see how it works. We'd love to hear your answers to these questions on the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TrubyWritersStudio?ref=ts&fref=ts" target="_blank">Truby's Writers Studio Facebook</a> page. John will weigh in on those comments and post his full breakdown of the movie soon.<br /> <br />1. The hero and opponent are very clear, but what are they fighting over -- loyalty to country vs. personal gain, man vs. machine (technology), something else? <br /> <br />2. The writers bring in Bond's ghost (childhood). Was that effective in adding layers to his character, or did it feel like it was thrown in as window dressing? <br /> <br />3. Did we see Bond grow as a character, go through self-revelations and learn something about himself? <br /> <br />4. Did we see enough facets/complexity in the opponent (Bardem as Silva)? <br /> <br />5. Like in any Bond film, the story stretches believability in many places. Is this a problem with the writing, or something we should expect in one of these action films? <br /> <br />6. What did you think of the dialogue? Did it drive the plot, or just entertain? </span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-82826013333989569702012-10-30T13:17:00.000-07:002012-11-23T13:17:25.893-08:00Argo<span style="color: #cccccc;"><i>Argo</i> is a terrific political thriller that will probably get some Oscar nominations. I hope that includes one for writer Chris Terrio whose ability to tell an epic true story using the thriller genre allows him to transcend both true story and thriller.<br /><br />The political thriller is a popular sub-genre in novels, but much less so in film. That’s because the typical opposition in political thrillers – some form of government agency – is so big and so hidden that it’s not a fair fight. Which means political thrillers in film often end badly.<br /><br />But that’s not the case in <i>Argo</i>. This film is based on real events whose outcome we know, or at least suspect, going in. Besides giving us an upbeat ending, these real events give the highly choreographed thriller beats a raw, gritty believability and tremendous emotional impact.<br /><br />Still, the true story foundation creates some real problems for the writer. The biggest difficulty you face in writing a true story is that real events don’t tend to have dramatic shape. They often don’t build to a final decisive battle and they often have long stretches of time where no story beats occur.<br />Again, that’s not the case with <i>Argo</i>. The final battle is extremely dramatic and the short time period in which the key events unfold means there is no down time. But the true story foundation does require Terrio to structure his thriller in a much different way than normal.<br /><br />In the typical thriller, the hero investigates an apparent opponent who may, or may not, be guilty of a crime. The opponent’s true power, and the final truth of that character’s guilt, is parceled out over the course of the story. Notice that plot in this form of thriller is based on revelations, and we save the biggest revelation for last.<br /><br />In <i>Argo</i>, the opponent is not a suspicious, hidden character but rather a known, extremely powerful Iranian security force that will capture and possibly kill the heroes. So plot will not come from a succession of reveals. There is nothing about the enemy we don’t know from the very beginning.<br /><br />Instead plot must come from the hero’s plan and, even more so, from a succession of building attacks against the hostges. So the writer sets up a huge vortex, a crosscut between the hero trying to get the hostages out and the opponents closing in for the kill.<br /><br />Terrio creates the vortex by beginning with the endpoint in space and time, the airport, where heroes and opponents finally decide the issue. He then works backward to the beginning of the two prongs: the hero creating his plan and the opponents trying to find who is missing.<br /><br />One of the key techniques for setting up the vortex properly has to do with the desire line of the story. The desire line in thrillers is especially tricky because it always involves some version of investigating while under attack. Notice there is a push-pull effect on the desire line that is difficult for the writer to calibrate. When the hero is investigating he is active and moving forward. But over the course of the story the hero comes under increasingly aggressive assault by the opposition, which makes him reactive and knocks him back.<br /><br />In <i>Argo</i>, Terrio replaces the investigation line of most thrillers with an even clearer goal: get the captives out. The opponents have an equally clear goal: keep the captives in. The endpoint of both those goals is the same place, the airport. So now the vortex story structure is simply a matter of speeding up the crosscut as the heroes and opponents approach the convergent point.<br /><br />This crosscutting vortex structure goes to the heart of the film medium itself. It’s as fundamental as the crosscut between the cowboy racing to save the damsel tied to the tracks and the oncoming train that’s going to run her over. In this simplest form of crosscut, the point is to set up the pressure cooker effect. The faster you crosscut as you approach the end, the greater the pressure builds on the audience. If the hero wins, the result is total elation.<br /><br />The writer adds a number of other story and dialogue techniques that make this script really sing, especially some very funny inside Hollywood jokes as the hero is concocting his plan. I saw the film at the Writer’s Guild theater and one joke in particular about directors had the audience in stitches. In a story this intense, comedy plays the same role as the fake attack does in horror. It releases the pressure on the audience only to allow the writer to kick the pressure up to an even higher level.<br /><br />But the key to the success of this script and film is the writer’s ability to infuse an already dramatic true story with powerful thriller beats. Thriller tends to be a very narrow form. In the Detective, Crime Story and Thriller Class I talk about transcending the form by combining it with its genre opposite, the epic. By accomplishing this difficult feat, Chris Terrio has written one of the best films of the year. </span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-23491554964553824622012-09-25T13:12:00.000-07:002012-11-23T13:13:09.287-08:00Breaking Bad<span style="color: #cccccc;">I had no interest in watching <i>Breaking Bad</i> when it first began its run. Yet another story about the drug trade sounded boring and unpleasant to me. But after AMC ran a Breaking Bad marathon this summer, I finally gave it a shot. I found I’d been missing one of the best dramas in the history of television.<br /><br />To understand why a TV show or movie works, you have to start by identifying the story challenges the author faced at the beginning of the writing process. First, show creator Vince Gilligan had to overcome the same audience expectation I had, which is that this was going to be another boring, predictable story about druggies. A second challenge was one all TV writers must solve: extendability. Instead of a two-hour movie plot, Gilligan would have to come up with a huge number of plot beats, over multiple seasons, derived from the business of selling drugs.<br /><br />This challenge would become even harder when Gilligan decided to use an average guy to drive the story. This wasn’t going to be <i>Miami Vice</i> on the border of Mexico. So what’s the story?<br /><br />Gilligan’s grand solution to these challenges came when he realized how to do a crime story that uses the unique power of TV. The crime genre, unlike the detective form, is often told from the POV of the criminal. Gilligan’s great insight was that, with TV, he now had an entire season to show what it means and feels like to be a criminal.<br /><br />American television, like Hollywood film, puts tremendous emphasis on a high concept premise to set the story apart from everything else on the market. Gilligan has said, “What was interesting to me was a straight arrow character (Walt) who decides to make a radical change in his life and goes from being a protagonist to an antagonist.” His initial pitch to Sony was, “I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface over the life of the series.”<br /><br />That’s a brilliant premise, and one that included in its single line how this story idea could support a long-running series. Notice <i>Breaking Bad</i> is the mirror opposite of <i>The Sopranos</i>. <i>The Sopranos</i> is about a mob king who kills by day but sees a psychiatrist and has trouble with his family at night. <i>Breaking Bad</i> is a high school teacher by day who becomes a drug lord at night. Both play with the contrast of sensational crime vs. the common everyday to generate a skewed but fascinating reality.<br /><br />The choice of which genre to use for your story idea is just as important in TV as it is in film. The Detective story is by far the most popular genre in TV, not just in America but worldwide. Crime, with a few notable exceptions, is not nearly so hot. But notice how the Crime form in TV allows writers to do things they could not do with Detective. Because Crime is from the point of view of the criminal, we feel what it’s like for this average man to see and do progressively more terrible things, to watch while a man is beaten to death, to face certain death at the hands of a drug boss, even to kill a man in cold blood. As they say on the show: “The cost of doing business.”<br /><br />And with TV Crime you can show how becoming a criminal affects that person’s most intimate relationships. Over the course of Breaking Bad we see in minutely calibrated detail how Walt’s lies and criminal actions drive his wife away and destroy the family he is trying to save.<br /><br />In all of my genre classes I talk about the importance of not simply hitting the basic story beats of your form, but of transcending them, so that the story is original. This is just as essential for success in TV as it is in film. And this is one of the key strategies Gilligan uses on his show.<br /><br />All transcendent Crime stories deal with moral accounting over a lifetime. The focus is not on a single crime, but rather on how the criminal’s actions tally up on a lifetime board where some final settlement must be made. Transcendent crime storylines detail the playing out of karma. (For all the story beats of Crime, as well as how to transcend the form, take a look at the Detective, Crime and Thriller Class.)<br /><br />The premier movie artists of transcendent Crime are the Coen brothers, in films like <i>Blood Simple</i>, <i>Miller’s Crossing</i>, <i>Fargo</i>, <i>No Country for Old Men</i> and <i>True Grit</i>. What’s unique about Gilligan is his ability to adapt transcendent crime to the TV medium, by having the crime come out of the hero’s sickness and buried hubris, and by showing that the nastiest war of the show is within the family.<br /><br />Like the Coen brothers, Gilligan also plays with the black comedy elements that so often come with transcendent Crime. This was especially true in the early episodes of the first season when Walt and his partner, Jesse, are comically incompetent at this new business of crime. But we also saw it in the opening episode of season 5, essentially a comedy caper where the guys rig up some high-powered batteries to knock out an incriminating computer in the police station.<br /><br />Of course the linchpin in Gilligan’s story strategy is his extremely complex and contradictory hero, Walt. Walt begins as a brilliant but nebbishy normal guy, a character grounded in a reality that every viewer recognizes. He is an everyman, pushed around his whole life and trapped in a job that is beneath his talents. Then he learns he has cancer. This bombshell makes him take stock and take control of his life.<br /><br />For a transcendent Crime show, this is a brilliant stroke. Notice that by starting Walt as a normal and moral person, Gilligan prevents the viewer from mentally shoving the hero into the crime or gangster ghetto. Crime isn’t something those “other” people do. Crime is the crucible where everyman Walt must face a series of moral tests. And the decisions he makes, the methods he uses, lead him down a path to hell.<br /><br />It’s a path filled with contradictions. Walt starts to become hooked on the intellectual game of it all. On the plus side, he starts to become assertive, his own man, even as he faces death by cancer or by murder. But then Walt comes to feel that he is an artist, a master chef. The hubris that was buried deep inside him long ago starts to bubble to the surface, until finally in season 5, Walt is a full-blown Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.<br /><br />As so often happens with a well-drawn character, the seed for Walt’s flowering as a complex and contradictory character lies in his ghost, the event from the past still haunting him in the present. In the first few episodes of season 1, Walt hints at the fact that he was screwed out of a wildly successful chemical business. Now he teaches chemistry to high school students. But deep down he believes he is a genius and deserves to be a rich businessman, too. When all the original rational reasons for making and selling drugs are long gone, it is this pride and resentment that will guarantee Walt’s eventual death.<br /><br />The single biggest challenge for any show runner and writing staff is how to sequence the episodes. In other words, how do you segment and sequence the plot over an entire season? By watching all the episodes of this show in such a short period of time, I had a clear window into how exceptional the story build is in Breaking Bad.<br /><br />Again, much of the credit for this has to go to Gilligan’s original conception and structure of the show. By starting Walt as a moral everyman, Gilligan is able to sequence the plot based on the hero’s moral challenges. Each episode tracks both an escalation of trouble for Walt and a moral decision that is more complicated than the one that came before.<br /><br />This escalating moral sequence is hung on the premise line of the show: from Mr. Chips to <i>Scarface</i>, from protagonist to antagonist. Notice this gives a natural endpoint for the series. As Walt goes to greater extremes to reach his obsession, his rationales become emptier, and he finally runs out of options. As Gilligan says, “<i>Breaking Bad</i> is not engineered to last indefinitely. It is engineered to end at a certain time and place. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure what that time and place is.”<br /><br />This focus has been a tremendous benefit to the show, allowing it to build not just within each season but from first season to last. But the cost is starting to be felt. Breaking Bad has shown us the making of a master criminal, but now that he's here, he’s not as much fun to watch. It’s not just that he’s become extremely unlikable, especially to his wife, Skylar. He’s not as compelling. With so much hubris, it’s obvious what is going to happen to him. So the plot has suffered as the final season moves toward its inexorable end. The only question for me is: who will kill him. My bet was on Jesse. But as Walt has become more monstrous to his wife, I now believe that Skylar will have the opportunity to prevent his death, but won’t.<br /><br />If you’re interested in writing for television, you must study this show. In my TV Drama Class, I go into great detail about all the elements that go into a great TV script, from tight structural weave to lean, powerful dialogue. You’ll find those same elements in any episode of Breaking Bad.<br /><br />If you’re a screenwriter or novelist, study this show for mastery of story. Because no matter what medium you work in, it’s all about being the best storyteller you can be.<br /></span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-82704234539974744332012-08-28T13:04:00.000-07:002012-11-23T13:06:22.576-08:00The Dark Knight Rises<span style="color: #cccccc;">Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot.<br /><br />The three Batman films from Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer are incredibly ambitious super-hero movies. These writers aspire to high art, and in the case of <i>The Dark Knight</i>, they succeed. <i>The Dark Knight</i> is a truly great film. But the pressure to build on that success for <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> was immense. And while the ambition for this final film of the trilogy is nothing less than a critique of modern worldwide capitalism, the writers fail to create a bridge that can carry that massive weight. It’s a bridge too far. So it all comes tumbling down.<br /><br />To see why this happens structurally, we need to begin by identifying the story challenges these writers faced in writing <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>, and then look at the solutions they came up with. No doubt they began by asking themselves: how do we take <i>The Dark Knigh</i>t, the best super-hero movie ever made, to a new level? How do we explore the mythology of Batman in greater depth and scope so that it can stand not just for a city in decay, but a worldwide system where injustice is embedded in its very fabric?</span><br />
<span style="color: #cccccc;"><br />In executing their vision, the writers of <i>The Dark Knight Rises </i>have always had a tremendous advantage, which is that Bob Kane’s original Batman story has the most advanced and complex of all super-hero mythologies. Embedded in the concept is the dark side of the super-hero itself, the self-destructiveness that comes from relying on a savior to fight the criminal among us.Other super-heroes like Spiderman and the Hulk have their ghosts and weaknesses. But Bruce Wayne/Batman is Hades himself, a man of the darkest demons who will use almost any method, both illegal and immoral, to fight crime.<br /><br />But this advantage is not absolute. We saw what Tim Burton and the original writers did with the concept in the first Batman films. Other than Michelle Pfeiffer’s fabulous performance as Catwoman in <i>Batman Returns</i>, these films were pretty forgettable. What the Nolans and Goyer were able to do was to see the dramatic and epic potential of the concept so that Batman became a modern savior, and was loathed because of it.<br /><br />Besides expanding the basic concept, the key technique the writers used to kick the Batman stories above all other super-hero franchises and into the realm of dramatic art was to build the stories with various moral philosophies. For <i>Batman Begins</i>, the origin story of the trilogy, it was elements of eastern philosophy and Old Testament justice that provided the opponent’s justification for using total force to fight crime and moral decay.<br /><br />In <i>The Dark Knight</i>, the writers went with Nietzsche and the Existentialists for Batman’s bout with the terrifying Joker. The Joker, in a common misunderstanding of the Nietzschian Overman (aka Superman), thinks he can break any law because he is superior to the herd. The Existentialists provided the classic “dirty hands” argument that says you can never stay morally clean when you fight dirty people.<br /><br />Here we see the fundamental technique that made <i>The Dark Knight </i>a great film but which is missing from <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>. The plot of <i>The Dark Knight</i> is a series of increasingly difficult moral challenges the Joker gives Batman to prove his worldview that man is nothing more than a brutal animal.<br /><br />Notice this brilliant plotting technique has three great advantages. First, it grounds the philosophical questions in specific moral choices the hero must make. Second, it builds the scope of the philosophy through a sequence of increasingly difficult and deadly options. Third, it hangs the larger philosophical issues on a strong narrative line, the hero’s desire.<br /><br />None of this is present in <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>. The writers try to kick the film up to a higher philosophical level by returning to the fundamental theme of <i>Batman Begins</i>, where Ra's Al Ghul first introduced the idea of wiping out a society when it has become corrupt beyond repair. Batman’s main opponent in this film, Bane, is Ra's Al Ghul’s new executor of this moral philosophy, which is a form of fascism.<br /><br />But what is Bane attacking? Crime is actually way down in the eight years since the days of <i>The Dark Knight</i>. The writers introduce Catwoman as a Robin Hood figure, but she seems solely out for herself, and not a model for egalitarianism. A couple of traders on the stock exchange are a little haughty, but that does not constitute an attack of the 1%.<br /><br />To put this in story terms, there’s no set up. If the writers want this third film in the trilogy to expand to a critique of worldwide systemic injustice, they have to show specific examples of how the little guy is being destroyed. And they have to show that these individuals are all connected within a system of slavery.<br /><br />For a while we don’t notice the lack of a larger thematic set up, because we are too busy keeping track of all the plot lines. The Nolan brothers are the only screenwriters in mainstream Hollywood that suffer from too much plot. We would all like to have their ability to string reveals and surprises, but here it gets way out of hand. Besides straining and at times breaking all believability, these plot lines start to slow the narrative drive, which is determined primarily by the hero’s goal.<br /><br />That’s when the writers spring the fatal plot beat. Batman foolishly walks into Bane’s lair and is promptly tossed into some obscure prison. For the next hour of the film, with no set up and Batman out of commission, the writers try to pay off their critique of world capitalism. After turning Gotham into an armed camp, Bane “gives” the city back to “the people.” How exactly does that work when the people are the ones being enslaved? Then we go through the major beats of the French Revolution, complete with storming the Bastille, or Batgate as it’s called here. And we get the citizen tribunals, whereby the rich 1% are sentenced to the guillotine. In wintry Gotham that means walking out onto the ice until you break through.<br /><br />If this modern revolution had been set up in the beginning, maybe, just maybe, it would have worked. But with Batman stuck in a hole, the desire line of the hero has effectively stopped. So there is no spine, no suspension bridge, to support all this philosophical baggage. Narrative drive grinds to a halt. And we get one hour of stall.<br /><br />Knowing how to weave a powerful theme into a storyline is one of the marks of the finest practitioners of the dramatic art. It is even more difficult to do in the lean story form of the screenplay. Most writers are so afraid of preaching to the audience that they avoid theme altogether. That’s a big mistake.<br /><br />The writers of <i>The Dark Knight</i> wove theme into the plot so well that it may have been the single biggest reason for that film’s greatness. The failure of those same writers to weave theme through story structure in <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> is just as instructive. Because this aspect of the craft is so important I spend a great deal of time in my Anatomy of Story Masterclass explaining in detail how it’s done. But I will tell you this: it all starts with constructing a strong story spine, the hero’s desire, that can carry the weight. </span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-89730182107909074392012-06-26T12:15:00.001-07:002012-07-05T15:49:14.819-07:00The Comic Journey<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;">Family films, especially animation, make up a large chunk of summer blockbusters. And the one technique these films use to produce their massive worldwide audience is the Comic Journey. We see this in the big tent-pole animation films like </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>Madagascar</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>Ice Age</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>Toy Story</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>Shrek</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;">, as well as individual animation hits like </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>Up</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>The Incredibles</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;"><i>Finding Nemo</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee;">.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_comedy.html" target="_blank">Comedy</a> poses a unique problem for anyone wanting to write a blockbuster. The studio has to be able to sell it outside the United States. Action stories and myth stories travel very well, because they are two genres based on a universal language. But comedy is notoriously stuck in its home of origin. What is funny in the U.S. may not cause a laugh in Germany, Italy and Japan.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Comic Journey gives you a number of advantages when trying to sell a comedy to the worldwide market. First, it lets you create the comedy out of the structure, not the dialogue. That’s because it’s using the storytelling strategy known as irony. Irony says that life is filled with failing to reach our goal or reaching a different goal than we intended. That goal is the spine of the story.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> Why is this so valuable? Because dialogue is specific; structure is universal. Structure travels; dialogue stays at home.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A second advantage of the Comic Journey is that it gives you the benefits of the journey - such as story movement, heroic action, and character change - and adds the benefits of comedy - such as irony and laughter. This is a powerful and popular combination.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A third advantage of the Comic Journey is that it’s an excellent way to make social commentary, since your hero encounters many different people from many strata of society on the route. That tends to give your comedy a stronger theme, which is always a good idea, and lets you people your story with a wealth of fun, quirky characters. That appeals to the parents, so they actually enjoy taking their kids out for those summer family films.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">So how do you set up a comic journey? Begin by focusing on your hero. You have probably heard how important it is for comedy to come from character. In the Comic Journey, one of the ways you do that is to create a pompous person who encounters a harsh reality or a normal person who encounters pompous or insane people. Notice either way you get a comic contrast that allows you to drop the characters, to deflate them, throughout the script. This is crucial. Many movie comedies die after the first fifteen minutes because the essential comic contrast disappears.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Next, give the hero a goal that forces him/her to travel. This is the spine of the story and is the line on which you hang the comic encounters. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Because the Comic Journey is inherently episodic, it’s also a good idea to give this goal some urgency. The more intense the hero's desire line, the more comic encounters you can hang on the line without the line collapsing.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One of the best tricks for a great Comic Journey is to come up with a reason for the hero to take the family along for the ride. Again the episodic nature of the journey is your biggest problem. In the Comic Journey story, this quality comes from the succession of opponents your hero encounters along the way. Every time your hero meets and overcomes an opponent, that’s a mini-story. Hence the episodic feel.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But if you bring the family along for the ride, the hero has an ongoing opposition that never goes away. You get a through line to the journey as well as characters other than the hero that the audience can get to know and invest in.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Above all, when writing the Comic Journey, make sure the hero’s encounters create comedy, not just conflict. Laughs only happen when an inflated person is punctured. Structurally, there are only two ways for that to happen. A pompous person keeps running up against a harsh reality or a sane person keeps meeting and exposing a bunch of pompous or phony people. In every encounter, someone must be deflated or you are wasting the scene.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #eeeeee; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Comic Journey is just one of hundreds of story techniques that you can use to be successful. The most important thing is to realize that success comes from mastering the craft. It takes a lot of work and a lot of study, but the rewards are tremendous.</span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-62402731336650599352012-05-29T15:53:00.001-07:002012-05-29T15:53:43.783-07:00The Avengers<div style="color: #eeeeee;">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The Avengers</span></i><span style="font-family: Geneva;"> is why Disney bought Marvel and paid them so much money. It’s all
about the character bank. In a worldwide market, companies put a premium on
branding, which is selling an already recognizable product, and transmedia,
which is telling the same story through many media forms. If you own a large
bank of appealing, recognizable and repeatable characters, you rule the
storytelling world. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">But the characters in your
bank can’t just be distinctive and memorable. Stanley Kowalski from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Streetcar Named Desire</i> won’t help you
here. They have to be characters who can go on many adventures, which is why
they almost always come from the myth and action genres, and they are heroes,
superheroes and gods.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Marvel has made a number of
hugely popular films focusing on a single superhero, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thor</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spider-Man</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iron Man</i>. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Avengers</i> takes this genre to a whole new level, because it’s
all about the lure of the All-stars, the Dream Team.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">The all-star story is as
old as myth itself. The Greek gods on Mt. Olympus and the Norse gods in Asgard
are each communities of the best in their field. In more recent story forms
like the caper film (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ocean’s Eleven</i>)
and the suicide mission story (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dirty
Dozen</i>), the pleasure comes from watching a bunch of highly talented
individuals come together as a team to accomplish an apparently impossible
goal. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Few writers get an
assignment like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Avengers</i>, but you
can create your own all-star story, and start a wildly successful character
bank of your own. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as writer-director Joss
Whedon makes it appear. Using <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Avengers</i> as our guide, let’s explore some of the challenges of the all-star
story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Just because these are
superheroes or gods doesn’t mean you don’t have to establish a strong
weakness-need for them at the beginning of the story. One of the strengths of
the Marvel characters has always been that they run counter to the old
conventional wisdom that superheroes are all good. In a great story, regardless
of genre, the plot always plays out the character’s internal flaw. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Marvel characters have
loads of flaws. For example, the Hulk has a real problem with rage, Thor is
arrogant, and Iron Man’s Tony Stark is a raving narcissist. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">All well and good. But with
all-star stories you face an additional challenge in this area. You have to
establish the weakness-need for a lot of major characters, and you have to do
so in a relatively short period of time, without delaying the plot. This
challenge is what hurt the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>
film. It took so long to establish the ghost and weakness-need of each of the
major characters that the story died before it ever got going.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Whedon’s smart solution to
this character challenge is to use two story techniques at once. The first
technique, which Whedon brought over from his experience as a television
writer, is to generate the primary conflict among the heroes. In the middle of
the film, the heroes have gathered together but are not yet a team. Some of the
Avengers imprison the main opponent, Loki, in their huge mothership. Loki
doesn’t seem to put up much of a fuss about this, and that’s because he is
planning to defeat the Avengers by getting them to fight amongst themselves. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Conflict among the heroes
is more dramatic because we care more about our heroes than some super-villain.
In TV you always want to generate most of your conflict among the leads, not
between the leads and an outside opponent new to that episode. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">This internal conflict also
delays the unification of the heroes into a Dream Team. That’s another huge
advantage because, when they do unite, during the final battle, it is under the
greatest possible jeopardy. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">And how do our heroes fight
each other? They attack each other’s ghost and weakness, ultimately destroying
their own ship in the process. So we get a plot beat – attack by the opponent –
along with quick character sketch of each hero’s flaw. It’s all interesting to
the audience because it’s expressed through conflict, not as boring exposition.
</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Notice the dissension also
sets up the basic character change in the story, which is from troubled
individuals to a perfect team. That moment of character change, when the heroes
form a ring to fight as one against the alien forces, is the sweetest emotional
moment of the film. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Here’s another tough story
challenge. If you are going to have a team of all-star heroes, you have to come
up with an equally strong opposition to match them. That’s hard, given that
your heroes together must surely be the most powerful force in the universe. So
your tendency is to create a team of all-star opponents, the Nightmare Team.
But now you face story chaos, because you have to service so many heroes and
opponents.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Again Whedon’s solution is
instructive. The Dream Team element meant he wouldn’t try to come up with a
single opponent, like The Joker, who would attack the heroes morally,
questioning the very concept of the savior, or superhero. But he also didn’t go
for the single opponent who would try to match the heroes’ physical abilities.
Other than his apparent imperviousness to pain, Loki has no special superpower.
Instead, he is the master schemer, a god whose distinguishing quality is his
brain. He is potentially stronger than all the all-stars combined, because he
can outsmart them. He can use his knowledge of the special weakness of each
superhero to defeat the entire team.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The Avengers</span></i><span style="font-family: Geneva;"> is an action-myth story, so we need a big physical battle. To take on
the opponent’s role of physical action and fighting, Whedon brings in alien
forces that not only have super powers, they attack by the thousands. Loki and
the aliens form a nice combination of brains and brawn that can seriously
challenge the Dream Team. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The Avengers</span></i><span style="font-family: Geneva;"> shows us once again that the all-star story is one of the most popular
in storytelling history. But it’s harder than it looks. If you remember to
start by identifying the form’s unique story challenges, you will be halfway
home.</span></div>
<div style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-79158533849352122872012-04-23T23:41:00.001-07:002012-04-23T23:41:44.900-07:00The Hunger Games<div style="color: #eeeeee;">
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<b><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Spoiler alert: this
breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the movie. </span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;">In spite of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i>’ 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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Geneva;"><i>The Hunger Games</i> 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Like J. K. Rowling in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harry Potter</i> 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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i>, 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Besides the myth genre, the
other key to the huge success of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Hunger Games</i> 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">But, driven by the
phenomenal success of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harry Potter</i>
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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jurassic Park</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i> 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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<sup>th</sup> District, is also her greatest strength.
She practices survival every day of her life, and she is a master of the bow
and arrow. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i> 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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #eeeeee;">
<span style="font-family: Geneva;">Some critics have pointed
out that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i> is a
breakthrough for Young Adult fiction, especially for girls. Maybe so. But the
big lesson of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunger Games</i> 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. </span></div>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-29562363710151178372012-03-29T11:56:00.001-07:002012-04-06T12:01:49.866-07:00Mad Men<div style="color: #f3f3f3;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the episode. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But one of the main reasons <i>Mad Men</i> 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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, <i>Mad Men</i> could make every episode totally new, its own work of art, through a complex story weave of multiple characters with ever-changing goals. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This is great for story and character complexity. But it wreaks havoc on narrative drive. Instead of a single, propulsive force, a <i>Mad Men</i> 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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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 <i>Mad Men</i> 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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">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 <i>Mad Men</i> takes on 1966. But for writers who love the craft, this episode points up lesson #1 in television: it all starts with desire.</span></div>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-75403118230378370362012-02-28T11:00:00.001-08:002012-04-06T12:02:24.975-07:00Downton Abbey<div style="color: #cccccc;"><style>
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</style> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">The latest example of the coming of age of the television medium is <i>Downton Abbey</i>. 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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">Set in an English country house (more exactly a castle), beginning in 1912, <i>Downton Abbey</i> 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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. <i>Downton Abbey</i> 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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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 (<i>Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire</i>). 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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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, <i>The Godfather</i>, depicts a family that is part of a mafia system, <i>Downton Abbey</i>’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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">But that’s not how the upper class is defined in <i>Downton Abbey</i>. 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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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 <i>Gone with the Wind</i>. 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?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Geneva; font-size: small;">Fellowes depiction of the system as essentially beneficial is the greatest flaw in the construction of <i>Downton Abbey</i>, 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.</span></div>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-5624712091180190402012-01-27T13:42:00.000-08:002012-02-27T13:46:42.097-08:00Best Original Screenplay 2011<table columns="2" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="color: black; font-size: 9pt;" valign="center"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;">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.<br />
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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 <i>50/50, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, Win Win,</i> and <i>Young Adult</i>.<br />
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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,<i>Bridesmaids</i>, 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.</span></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2" style="color: black; font-size: 9pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #f3f3f3;">I liked all of these scripts, but the real surprise for me was the sleeper film, <i>Win Win</i>. 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, <i>Moneyball</i>, 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.<br />
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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 <i>par excellence</i>, 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 <i>Win Win</i> does.<br />
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The first key to <i>Win Win’s</i> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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I will admit that part of the pleasure this viewer took from <i>Win Win</i> 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.<br />
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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 <i>Win Win</i> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<i>Win Win</i>, 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. </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-57914448802630627942011-12-26T10:08:00.000-08:002011-12-26T10:08:13.840-08:00The Tree of Life<span style="font-size: small;"></span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Want to solve the mystery of <i>Tree of Life</i>? 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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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 <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_advanced.html">Masterpiece</a> form with the <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_memoir.html">Memoir-True Story</a>. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">To really see how and why Malick creates this bizarre hybrid, you really need to go back to his 1978 masterpiece, <i>Days of Heaven</i>. 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.<span> </span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Notice that Malick’s basic technique in <i>Days of Heaven</i> 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<sup>th</sup> 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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">This background from <i>Days of Heaven</i> points up the key story technique Malick uses to combine Masterpiece with Memoir-True-Story in <i>Tree of Life</i>: he sets up an extreme contrast between vast story frames and incredibly short scenes. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. <i>Tree of Life</i> 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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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, <i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>, 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.”<span> </span></span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">As in <i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>, 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 <i>Tree of Life</i>, along with his family, within a powerful slavery. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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 <i>Tree of Life</i>. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.<span> </span>And of course there’s the communal ending. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.” </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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 <i>Citizen Kane</i>: everyone respects it as one of the great films of all time, but I don’t know a single soul who loves it. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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. </span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">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.</span></span></div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"> </span>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-12826497426580720422011-11-26T10:03:00.000-08:002011-12-26T10:04:09.966-08:00John Truby Interview Part 2<table style="color: #f3f3f3;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="font-size: 9pt;" valign="center"><b><u>Question:</u></b> How do you know a story you want to turn into a screenplay or novel can carry an entire movie or book? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> Does character come from plot, or plot from character? </td> </tr>
<tr> <td colspan="2" style="font-size: 9pt;">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. <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> What defines a good story? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> 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? <br />
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Story world has become one of the three or four most important elements in a good script. Much of the incredible success of the <i>Harry Potter</i> 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. <br />
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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 <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, plants and water represent the forces of love and life while mountains and metal represent the forces of absolute power and death. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> 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? <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> What is the biggest misconception about learning and understanding story structure? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> Could you name 3 non-screenwriting sources writers should be learning from to sharpen their craft? <br />
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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. <br />
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1. <i>The Poetics of Space</i>, by Gaston Bachelard, the best book ever written on story world <br />
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2. <i>Anatomy of Criticism</i>, by Northrup Frye, especially the first essay on the theory of the hero <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> 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? <br />
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The key to the best reboots of the past ten years - <i>Casino Royale</i> (The Bond series), <i>The Bourne Identity, Batman Begins, Star Trek</i> and most recently, <i>Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i> - 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. <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> 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? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-26831790576013595082011-10-26T09:59:00.000-07:002011-12-26T10:02:27.808-08:00John Truby Interview Part 1<table style="background-color: black; color: #f3f3f3;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="font-size: 9pt;" valign="center"><b><u>Question:</u></b> What’s the best advice you can give writers to help them develop their own unique voice and style? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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</td> </tr>
<tr> <td colspan="2" style="font-size: 9pt;"><b><u>Question:</u></b> Could you describe the conventions of the key genres in Hollywood? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> What are common myths about being a successful screenwriter in Hollywood? <br />
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1. It’s all about who you know. <br />
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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. <br />
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2. If I could just pitch my idea to the right person, I could get a script deal and be on my way. <br />
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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 <u>always</u> 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.” <br />
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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. <br />
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3. Every screenplay has three acts and 2-3 plot points. <br />
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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. <br />
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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? <br />
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Three-act writing is for beginners only. You’ve got to learn the techniques the professionals use to be successful. <br />
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<b><u>Question:</u></b> When a writer has an idea for a screenplay, what questions should they be asking themselves before writing? <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-89396723121359603912011-09-30T10:19:00.000-07:002011-10-07T10:20:13.691-07:00Story in TelevisionThe best writing coming out of the American entertainment industry is in TV drama. The competition from film isn’t even close. For decades, TV has been film’s little brother, patronized by the “real” talent as the place where you go when you can’t make it in the big leagues. <br />
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But in the last ten to fifteen years, TV has shot past film and become the home of the best and the brightest. While the big studios have competed over which new superhero will give them the next tent pole, the cable channels, and to a lesser extent the networks, have nurtured writers who have given the world an extraordinary number of original, deep, and compelling stories whose high quality extends, in many cases, over many years. <br />
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There are many reasons for this phenomenon. First and foremost, writers, not directors, control the TV medium.<br />
The auteur theory, one of the worst ideas to come out of the 20th century, put the director in charge of American, and world, cinema. What the auteur theory misunderstood is that the quality of film and television is not based on them being visual mediums as being incredible <i>story</i> mediums. Because writers control TV, they make story, not spectacle, the key element in the production, and audiences have shown again and again that story is what they crave. <br />
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The multiple episodes that constitute a TV season, and the fact that these episodes must be written by writers on staff, means that TV writers go through a training regimen experienced by no other writer in the world. To get onto a writing staff you have to be highly skilled. But your training has only just begun. Until a writer has worked on a TV staff, he or she has no clue how intense the pressure is to produce great writing in a fraction of the time. With the non-stop deadlines of a TV season, it is not uncommon for a staffer to write a high-quality, shootable script – approximately one half of a feature film – in one week! <br />
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The result of this crucible of storytelling is that TV writers learn the craft fast and they practice that craft week after week, on the run. Plus, unlike their screenwriting brethren, TV writers get to see what they write up on screen, often within weeks of writing it. This feedback is invaluable, and found in no other story form. <br />
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All of this leads to a key point: if you want to be a working writer, and the very best writer you can be, turn your sights to television. TV, like film, is tough to break into, even more so since the Great Recession of 2008. But the fact that TV is run by writers means that if you learn the craft of story, especially as it is practiced in TV, you have a much better chance of being hired by people who ply, and appreciate, the same craft. <br />
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The crucial element here is: story as practiced in TV. TV has surpassed film in American entertainment not just because writers control the medium, but also because only in the last ten years have writers learned to take advantage of the unique powers of the TV medium itself. For years each episode in a TV season was a complete story, known as a “stand alone.” The episode problem was introduced in the opening scene – a crime, a law case, a disease – and it was solved at the end of the hour. Notice this limits the TV medium to being a mini- movie, repeated 24 times a season. <br />
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But once TV writers, and cable and network executives, realized that the true canvas of the TV medium is the season, not the episode, TV finally came into its own as a story medium that could dwarf the power of film. (The pioneer here was Steven Bochco with <i>Hill Street Blues</i>, but this process really kicked into high gear with <i>The Sopranos</i>.) The 90-120 minute unit of length in film suddenly jumped ten to fifteen times. And the storytelling model shifted from the two-hour commercial film to the 19th century novels of Dickens, Balzac and Stendahl, where complexity of plot hit its apex in the history of storytelling. <br />
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Instead of a single hero completing a single plotline in a two-hour film, you had a huge cast of characters working through multiple storylines, known as a serial, over a 13-24 episode season. You also had the possibility of creating a story world that had so much detail the show could believably stand for an entire society. The result was masterpieces like <i>The Sopranos</i>, <i>The Wire</i>, <i>Lost</i> and <i>Mad Men</i>. <br />
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To master story as it is practiced in television, and have the best chance of breaking into this medium, you have to study the top TV dramas and tease out the story problems that writers of these shows solve day in and day out. Ability to solve story problems quickly, and with originality, is the single most important quality of a professional television writer. Let’s take a look at some of today’s best dramas. <br />
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AMC’s <i>The Killing</i> is a Crime-Detective story, and Crime-Detective is the most popular genre, not only in American television but throughout the world. When you are trying to break down the story beats in a particular show, it is always a good idea to start with the show’s genre. The unique story beats of a particular show are usually an outgrowth of the inner workings, and the inherent restrictions, of its genre. <br />
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<i>The Killing</i> is based on the Danish series, <i>Forbrydelsen</i>, and the tag line for its first season was, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” That tag line, and the show’s setting in the gray and rainy Northwest, recalls the one-season wonder, <i>Twin Peaks</i>, whose tag line was, “Who shot Laura Palmer?” The tag line tells you the primary desire line of the show, what the hero(es) want, and desire is one of the three or four most important story elements of a show. In 99% of all crime stories, “Who killed X” is the desire in a particular episode. In <i>The Killing</i> (and in <i>Twin Peaks</i>), this is the desire of the entire season. In other words, <i>The Killing</i> is a serial, not a stand-alone crime show, and that makes all the difference. <br />
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This means the writers must create, and service, a huge web of characters, many of whom had the motive, and opportunity, to kill Rosie. Since the killer will not be caught at the end of each episode, the show will necessarily have a slower pace and will deprive the audience of a satisfying solution at the end of each hour. This episode-ending solution is the primary draw of the stand-alone show. So the writers have a huge story challenge: how do we work through the vast array of suspects in a way that both gives some shape to each episode while also sequencing us to the real killer at the end of the season? <br />
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Some of the solutions the writers use include cross-cutting among many story lines, not just the main investigation line, greatly increasing the number of false clues (also known as red herrings), and focusing suspicion on a new wrong suspect every one or two episodes. <br />
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The failure of the writers to definitively name the killer at the end of the first season raised howls of protest, since the show’s story structure makes the final revelation of “who done it” even more important than usual. Of all the explanations I’ve heard for this “mistake,” the one that makes the most sense to me has to do with the biggest story flaw of a serial detective show whose desire line extends over the entire season. Once you tell the audience who killed the lone victim, what makes them tune in at the beginning of season 2? This is precisely what killed <i>Twin Peaks</i>. <br />
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<i>Boardwalk Empire</i>, an historical epic combined with the Gangster genre, is designed to take advantage of the big-canvas story complexity of the TV medium, as seen in <i>The Sopranos</i> and <i>The Wire</i>. An epic is a story in which the fate of a nation is determined, or illustrated, by the actions of a single person. And there’s the main story problem: how do you connect the huge cast and multiple story strands of an entire society to the desires of a single man? <br />
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By choosing gangster Nucky Thompson, head of the Boardwalk Empire at the beginning of Prohibition in 1920, to be the fulcrum character, creator and show runner Terence Winter has a natural hub for the story wheel. Nucky is a king in a democracy, and his desire to sell illegal booze to a thirsty nation unifies all the smaller desire lines in each episode and over the course of the season. <br />
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With <i>Mad Men</i> taking the year off, <i>The Good Wife</i> is the best-written show on television. This accomplishment is remarkable given that it is a network show, which typically means more interference from executives and the need to please a broader audience base. <i>The Good Wife</i>, a legal drama, uses the primary story strategy found in most American dramas today: combine the crowd-pleasing simplicity of the stand-alone with the critic-pleasing complexity of the serial. Alicia Florrick, the lead character, tries (and usually wins) a case each week. But she must also navigate the political and personal currents that come with being in a cutthroat law firm and having a husband who cheated on her and recently won the race for District Attorney. <br />
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This means that <i>The Good Wife</i> is really about situational ethics, about whether a good person can balance conflicting moral challenges and remain clean in the real world. The story challenge for the writers then is two-fold: come up with an ingenious way Alicia can win the weekly legal case for her firm while also slowly tightening the vice of her moral jeopardy as the season progresses. <br />
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Over the first two seasons, the writers have met these challenges with flying colors, primarily by weaving multiple conflicts from opponents both within and outside the firm. But it’s the emphasis on moral conundrums that really sets the storytelling of this show apart. <br />
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<i>Mad Men</i> has been the best-written show on television since its debut (with four straight Emmy wins for Best Drama). Like <i>Boardwalk Empire</i>, <i>Mad Men</i> is an epic historical drama, with multiple characters and story lines, all focused around an emblematic main character, in this case ad man Don Draper. Once again the central story challenge for the writers turns on the desire line of the show, or lack thereof. The reason the vast majority of shows in the history of television involve cops, lawyers and doctors is that these characters all have a clean, quantifiable desire line – solve the crime, win the case, save the patient. But <i>Mad Men </i>is set in a business. So what’s the desire for the episode, or, for that matter, the season? The goals in the ad business are ever changing, and all the major characters have their own personal, often hidden, agendas. <br />
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Without a unifying desire line, the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, has created a totally new TV story structure, one based on the contrast between American ideals and reality. Don and his fellow mad men (and they are almost all men) are in the business of creating and selling the American Dream. But when they go home to their suburban families, we see an actual life not filled with freedom and promise but defined by limits and lies. <br />
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The story challenge for the writers is, first, to set recognizable frames for each season, based not a clean desire line but on how each of the major characters moves between slavery and freedom in modern America. Within each episode, the trick is to come up with a story sequence that highlights the contrast between the Dream these characters sell and the harsh reality they live. <br />
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These are just a few of the myriad story challenges writers must solve when working on a writing staff today. Make no mistake: for show runners, it’s all about the story. TV drama is the most exciting game in entertainment right now because the medium has finally found itself as an art form. If you want to play in this high-speed, high-stakes game, you have to show that you have mastered the craft of the TV story. Then everyone will be begging you to play for their team.John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-9092525689878103732011-08-30T09:52:00.000-07:002011-08-30T09:52:13.849-07:00Rise of the Planet of the Apes <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains information about the plot of the film.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</span></i><span style="font-family: Geneva;"> is one of the best reboots of a franchise in the last ten years, and it’s mostly because of the fine work by the screenwriters, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. Their story strategy is similar to that used by the writers of some of the other top reboots, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Casino Royale</i> (The Bond series), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bourne Identity</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman Begins</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Trek</i>. In each case the writers went with the origin story, and they placed primary emphasis on character. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The origin story is almost always the most popular in a franchise, first because it allows the audience to share in the creation of the mythology, and second because it has a shape that later sequels often lack. Origin stories also give the author the chance to execute what may be the single most important element of good storytelling, to make plot come from character. This gives the audience a double pleasure. They get to see the hero succeed in the plot. And they get to see the hero undergo character change, to grow as a human being. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">There are many ways that you make plot come from character. Perhaps the most important, and the main technique used in the successful reboots listed above, is to give the hero a weakness and need. To those of you who are familiar with my <a href="http://www.trubywriting.com/">Anatomy of StoryMasterclass</a>, this may seem obvious, since weakness-need is the first of the seven major story structure steps that are present in every great story. But until the last ten years, you simply didn’t give the main character of an action or myth movie a weakness-need of his own. Conventional wisdom said that for maximum box office the hero had to be completely heroic, without flaws of any kind. Of course, conventional wisdom was wrong. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">It is precisely because Batman is the most seriously flawed of all superheroes that he is the best and most popular character. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i>, the initial hero, scientific researcher Will Rodman, has a unique weakness, in that it comes from a strength. Because he cannot kill the baby ape, he brings the genetically altered animal home with him, and from that good intention he takes all of humanity with him on the road to hell. This good-heartedness, combined with an arrogance that is common in the master scientist, is a weakness-need the audience can easily relate to, and is the wellspring from which the entire plot flows. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Another key to the success of the script for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i> comes from how the writers played with their genre. Unlike the original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Planet of the Apes</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i> is not a science fiction story, though it has some important science fiction beats. It is a horror story, and it relies on techniques used in the first and greatest horror story of all time, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankenstein</i>. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">In the <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_horror.html">Horror, Fantasy andScience Fiction Class</a>, I talk a lot about how you transcend your genre form, since this is the single biggest factor in making your script stand above the crowd. One of these techniques in horror is to flip the hero and the opponent. Put another way, at some point in the story the monster becomes the hero. The ape, Caesar, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i> is not the typical monster we see in the average horror story. But he is the Other, and horror stories are really about the inhuman, or non-human, entering the human world. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Frankenstein</span></i><span style="font-family: Geneva;"> is a misunderstood masterpiece, primarily because of the powerful but highly simplified 1931 film version. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankenstein</i> is not about creating life. It is about creating a human being. Mary Shelley was writing “natural philosophy” in fictional form, and that meant among other things tracking in great detail the steps of a living but clean slate body becoming a fully feeling and thinking human being. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">This is precisely what writers Jaffa and Silver do in the best section of the film. When Caesar is incarcerated in the ape refuge (prison), we watch as he moves up the ladder of understanding and uses his human-like knowledge and insight to become the ape leader and free himself and his fellow apes from human captivity. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">The second major story element of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankenstein</i> is the betrayal by and rebellion against the father. This too is a key step in Caesar’s development. For a boy to become a man, and a unique individual, he must rebel against his father. Will pays the owner of the refuge so that Caesar can come home. But Caesar refuses; he already is home. This is not only the key step in the hero’s character change, it is the first step in the apes’ rebellion against humans. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">One last technique that is crucial to the success of this script is a technique that James Cameron used in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titanic</i>. The loss of over fifteen hundred people meant that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titanic</i> would likely be a disaster film, a sub-form of the action genre. But disaster films are notorious for lack of character definition. Characters are simply fuel for the fire. And that means the audience doesn’t feel for the characters when they die. So Cameron made the first two thirds of the film a love story, the most intimate of all genres. Then when the disaster hit, the loss of the characters, and the love between them, was truly painful. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Similarly, most of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i> is an intimate story of fathers and sons. Will uses the drug to save his father from the terrible decay of Alzheimer’s. He loves Caesar as a son, and will do anything to protect him. With these powerful personal bonds as a foundation, the final action sequence on the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t just one of a number of set pieces but the emotional climax of the story. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Geneva;">Few writers get to reboot a major Hollywood franchise. But everyone must face the daunting challenge of turning a winning premise into a well-executed script. If you focus on the seven major structure steps and master your genre form so well that you transcend it, you have the best chance of writing a script that has popular and critical success.</span> </div>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-35831943859917399682011-07-26T13:52:00.000-07:002011-07-26T13:53:37.354-07:0010 Story Techniques You Must Use to Sell Your Script<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The key question that all screenwriters should ask themselves is: how do I write a script that Hollywood wants to buy? Most writers mistakenly think that success is all about connections and star power. Not so. The real trick to writing a script that will sell is to know and use Hollywood’s central marketing strategy. And that can be summed up in one word: genres.</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoHeader" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Over approximately the last ten years, Hollywood has been undergoing a revolutionary change from selling movie stars to selling genres. According to former Universal Pictures chairman Marc Shmuger, “There’s a significant shift [from] star power to the premium that is being put on concept and genre.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Shmuger is telling any screenwriter who is smart enough to listen the first rule of the entertainment business worldwide: it buys and sells genres. Genres are story forms and each has from 8-15 special story beats (story events) that make up the form. The reason Hollywood marketing is based on genre is that executives are selling to a worldwide audience. And people the world over love particular types of stories that speak to their deepest desires. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">I’d like to tell you 10 story techniques that <u>must</u> be in your script if you want the best chance of selling it in a genre-dominated business. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>1. Know the 11 most popular genres.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Step 1 in writing a script Hollywood wants to buy is knowing the 11 most popular story forms. If you write a script that is not based on one or more of these genres, your chances of a sale plummet. They are Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Horror, Fantasy, Love, Memoir-True Story, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>2. Combine 2 or 3 genres.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoHeader" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In the genre-focused entertainment business, the most important story strategy today is to mix genres. 99% of films made, not just in Hollywood but worldwide, are some combination of the 11 most popular genres. Why? It all goes back to that old rule of selling: give the customer 2 or 3 for the price of 1. This, in a nutshell, is how Hollywood works. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoHeader" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoHeader" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Let me give you some examples. The<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Hangover </i>films are<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>comedy + detective. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inception</i> is action + caper (crime) + science fiction. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titanic</i>, the most popular movie of all time, is love + disaster film (action) + myth. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dark Knight</i> is crime + myth + fantasy. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harry Potter</i> stories, the most popular books of all time, are fantasy + myth + horror + coming of age drama. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twilight</i> films are horror + fantasy. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pirates of the Caribbean</i> movies are fantasy + action + horror + myth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>3. Find the right genre for the story idea. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The single biggest decision you make in the entire writing process occurs right at the beginning, when you are developing your premise, or story idea. The decision is: which genres should I use for this idea? Here’s a shocking but eye-opening fact: 99% of scripts fail at the premise. And why? It’s not because their original story ideas weren’t good. They fail because the writers didn’t know the best genres to use to go from a 1-line idea to 2-hour, 120-page script.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Each genre will take a story idea in radically different directions. So when writers choose the wrong genres to develop their idea, the result is not only a lot of bad scripts but also the waste of thousands of great story ideas. Given that you can use many genres to develop the same idea, the key question is: what are the <u>right</u> ones?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The secret to choosing the right genres is buried in the story idea itself. You need to dig into the premise and find the genres inherent to that idea. Instead of trying to copy a popular movie from the past, you need to find what is original, what is organic to your story. One of the powers of genre is that the right genres highlight the inherent strengths of the idea and hide the inherent weaknesses.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In my genre classes, I talk a lot about techniques for digging into your premise and finding the best genres for you. One of them is to focus on the desire line, one of the seven major story structure steps. It turns out that each genre has a unique, pre-determined desire line. For example, the Crime desire is to catch a criminal. Detective is to find the truth. Horror is to defeat a monster. For Love, it’s to find love. Myth is to go on a journey, ultimately leading to oneself. Figure out the goal of your hero and see if it matches the desire of any of the main genres.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>4. Use myth as one of your genres.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Because<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>Hollywood only wants scripts with blockbuster potential, your story must be popular in over 100 different cultures and nationalities. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">That’s a lot of communication barriers to cross. Unfortunately, most writers don’t know which genres travel well and which don’t. For example, comedies based mostly on funny dialogue DON’T travel. Myth, on the other hand, loves to travel. That’s why myth is found in more blockbusters by far than any other form. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Myth is the oldest of the 11 most popular film genres, and is surprisingly complex, with 15 special story beats. But boy is it popular. Try adding up the box office of these myth-based films: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avatar</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Shrek </i>and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Star Wars</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoHeader" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>5. Combine myth with one or two other genres.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">While myth is the foundation of more blockbusters than any other genre, it almost never stands alone. That’s not just because Hollywood wants to give people 2 or 3 genres for the price of one. It has to do with the deep weaknesses found in the form itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The myth form is thousands of years old. And it has a very episodic structure, so it can grow tiresome and decline in power through the middle of the story. Top professional screenwriters know this, which is why they always add 1 or 2 other genres to modernize the myth form and overcome its episodic quality. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>6. Make one genre primary.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Screenwriters who are smart enough to study Hollywood as a business know that it’s all about combining genres. Where they sometimes go wrong is in execution. It’s one thing to say, “Take 2 or 3 story forms and put them together into a seamless whole.” It’s another thing to do it well. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Combining genres is more difficult than it looks, because of what it does to the story structure under the surface. Each genre has a pre-determined hero, opponent, desire line, thematic focus, and so on. Which is why most writers combining genres end up with a structural mess. They have too many heroes, desire lines, opponents, themes and story beats. Any one of these structural mistakes will kill a script, so imagine what happens if you make them all. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">When mixing genres, the key is to make one form the primary one. This will give you your hero, a single desire line, a single story line and the most important unique story beats. Then put in other genre elements where they fit, so they amplify the primary form.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>7. If you’re writing a screenplay for an indie film, write horror, thriller, or love. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">One of the best ways to break in and separate yourself from the thousands of other screenwriters in the world is to write and make your own film. Of course, that requires keeping costs to a bare minimum. And the cheapest genres to shoot are horror, thriller and love. These genres require the fewest actors, sets and special effects. Of these, horror is the most popular worldwide. But the most important determinants of which genres you use for your indie film are which genres are best for your story idea and which genres are you best at writing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>8. Hit all the genre beats.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Writers of blockbuster movies always know their genres so well that they hit every one of the story beats unique to their form. In genre writing, this is known as “paying the dues.” And it’s absolutely essential or the audience feels cheated. Remember, they are there to see the story forms they love, so you have to know your genres better than anyone else and give the audience what they crave. And that means, knowing how your genres work under the surface, in the structure, where the real story work is done. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>9. Be original, transcend the genre.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It may surprise you that the biggest reason a reader turns down a script is because it’s “derivative.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the writer hit all the beats of the genre, but nothing more. Readers have read scripts from every genre hundreds of times. So you can’t stand out from the crowd just by “paying the dues.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">That’s why professional screenwriters not only hit all the genre beats, they do the beats in an original way. This is known as transcending the genre. And you simply cannot succeed if you fail to transcend the genres you’re working in. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Unfortunately, there are no simple rules for how to do this for all genres. Transcending genre is different for each form. In the 1-day class I teach in each genre, I spend a great deal of time on exactly how to do this. Transcending depends on the story beats that are unique to your form. It also requires that you study the best films in your form so you know what has already been done. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText3" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><b>10. Be honest with yourself, and specialize in the forms that are right for you. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Genres are extremely powerful structural tools for a screenwriter, and they are the key to your success in the entertainment business. But they are complex story systems. I don’t know a single professional screenwriter who has mastered more than 2 or 3 of them. That’s why it’s so important that you look honestly at yourself and assess your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Determine which genres highlight your strengths and express the themes you believe in. Then apply yourself with laser-like focus to mastering those forms. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">When you let genres do the hard story work, and concentrate on writing them in an original way, you will be amazed at how good, and how successful, your scripts will be.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cccccc; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">For structure breakdowns of films in all the major genres, go to <a href="http://www.truby.com/reviewarc.html">www.truby.com/reviewarc.html</a>.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div></div>John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-41028031796370406202011-06-29T20:50:00.000-07:002011-07-12T20:51:01.127-07:005 Keys to Summer BlockbustersIt used to be that summer was the season for blockbuster movies. Now it's a year-round phenomenon. Hollywood is in the business of selling films to a worldwide audience, which means they are always looking for a script with blockbuster potential. <br />
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Most screenwriters think a blockbuster is simply a film that does really well at the box office. Technically speaking, that's true. But the reality is that a script with blockbuster potential is a very special kind of script, with a number of story elements that studio executives are looking for. <br />
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I'd like to point out five of the most important blockbuster script elements, out of about forty that we consistently see in the top money-making films. <br />
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Technique 1: The Myth Genre<br />
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The first blockbuster story element has to do with the genre you use to tell your story. A genre is a particular kind of story, like detective, action or comedy. When Hollywood was selling primarily to an American audience, executives thought that movie stars were the key to a hit film. But in the last ten to fifteen years, the vast majority of blockbuster films have had no movie stars. <br />
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Instead the emphasis has changed to genre films with great stories. For a film to reach a worldwide audience, it must be popular in over 100 different cultures and nationalities. Story forms are instantly recognizable anywhere in the world. <br />
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But you can't just choose any genre if you want to write a script with blockbuster potential. Most writers don't know that some genres travel well while others don't. For example, comedies based mostly on funny dialogue don't travel. <br />
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Ironically, the story that travels best is the oldest genre of all, the myth form. Myth is found in more blockbusters than any other genre by far. Add up the box office for the following myth-based movies: <i>Batman Begins</i> and <i>The Dark Knight</i>, <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, <i>Shrek</i>, <i>Star Wars</i> and <i>Avatar</i>.<br />
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The reason myth transcends national and cultural boundaries so well is that the form tracks archetypal characters and archetypal life situations. These are fundamental character types that everyone knows, and life experiences everyone passes through from birth to death.<br />
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Like any genre, myth has a number of unique story beats you must learn, and include, if you want to tell the form well. And remember: in blockbusters, myth is almost always combined with one or two other genres, such as action, fantasy and science fiction, that serve to update and unify the myth story for a young audience. <br />
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Technique 2: The Hero's Goal<br />
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The single most important element in an international blockbuster is narrative drive, the ability of the story to propel forward at an increasing rate. Narrative drive comes primarily from the hero's desire line. Desire is one of the seven major story structure steps, and provides you with the all-important spine on which you hang all characters, plot, symbol, theme and dialogue.<br />
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Average writers tend to make at least one of the following mistakes when coming up with the desire line: their hero has no clear goal, he/she accomplishes the goal too quickly, or the hero reaches the goal by taking only a few action steps.<br />
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There are three keys to a good desire line. First, make it specific; the more specific the better. Second, extend the goal as close to the end as possible. Third, make sure the hero is obsessed with it. Above all, intensify the desire.<br />
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Technique 3: The Opponent<br />
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As screenwriters, we are taught to focus on the hero, since this character drives the story. That's sound advice. But in blockbuster films, the opponent may be even more important. One of the great principles in all storytelling is that the hero is only as good as the person he fights. Also, the opponent is the key to plot. And in the last ten years, blockbusters have become more plot heavy. <br />
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When writing your script, first make sure you have one main opponent to focus and build the conflict. Then look for ways to intensify the central opposition. Make your main opponent bigger, smarter, more aggressive, more passionate. In writing <i>Batman Begins</i>, Christopher Nolan said, "What was important to me in creating an incredible frightening villain is that everything he says is true and at some level reasonable and also makes sense." Nolan then used this same approach in <i>The Dark Knight</i> when he created The Joker, one of the all-time great opponents and probably the key element in that film's huge success.<br />
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Once you're clear about the main opponent, try to come up with one or two secondary opponents, with at least one of them hidden from the hero and the audience.<br />
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Technique 4: The Scam<br />
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The emphasis blockbuster films place on plot leads to another story technique. And it's designed to solve a problem that plagues almost all screenwriters: how do you create maximum plot in the middle, where 90% of scripts fail? In blockbuster movies, the hero's plan is often a scam, or a plan that involves deception.<br />
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The trick here is to make the plan more deceptive for both hero and main opponent. When the hero scams, he becomes a trickster character, which audiences love. When the opponent scams, it gives you more plot and makes him/her a more challenging foe.<br />
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Technique 5: The Story World<br />
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The rise of the videogame along with the ability of special effects artists to realize wholly imaginary worlds has made the story world one of the three or four crucial elements in a blockbuster film. As little as a decade ago, Hollywood didn't care about story world, because it slows down narrative drive. Special effects were designed primarily to heighten heroic action. <br />
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But videogames showed Hollywood the power that comes from having viewers immerse themselves and explore a world in all its facets. And there's no medium that can do that better than the big screen film medium. <br />
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Many screenwriters believe that this aspect of the film is the responsibility of the director and the special effects artists. Wrong. A good story world is written into the script, and it is intimately organic to the story. That's why you must make sure that every visual element contributes to the story. In other words every element should have story meaning embedded within it. <br />
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How you do that is a major story skill right up there with character, plot, dialogue and rewrite. All of the major techniques for creating a rich story world are found in my <a href="http://www.truby.com/trubyscreenwritingsoftware.html" shape="rect" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">Blockbuster</a> story development software. The first step is to define a distinct and recognizable arena. Then create a map of the world, with as much detail as you can provide, especially when depicting the central community within which the story takes place. <i>Lord of the Rings</i>, <i>Harry Potter</i> and <i>Avatar</i> were all written by masters of the story world.<br />
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If you are serious about succeeding as a professional screenwriter, start with these five techniques and you will be well on the path to writing a script that Hollywood is eager to buy.John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-84268239761951356282011-05-31T20:46:00.000-07:002011-07-12T20:46:29.393-07:00Midnight in ParisSpoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the film. <br />
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With <i>Midnight in Paris</i>, Woody Allen has returned to writing from strength. The film is founded on one of the great cinematic story techniques, the utopian world. Here the moment is 1920s' Paris, where some of the best writers and artists of the 20th century lived in close quarters. The film is also based on the concept of The Golden Age. Every society has some version of the belief that an earlier time was not only better than the present, but nearly perfect. <br />
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This idea of a golden age isn't just intellectually appealing. It has personal impact on the audience as well. An older audience especially understands the feeling that there was a time in their life that was best, but it's long over now. For many, the desire to get back to that age is intense. Some experience it every Christmas when they remember how magical that morning was for them when they were young. But no more. <br />
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Let's put ourselves in Woody Allen's position to see how he might have solved this story problem. He might ask: how do you structure this utopia so that it gains the added impact of a story? <br />
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<i>Midnight in Paris</i> looks like a <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_love.html" shape="rect" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">fairy tale romantic comedy</a>. But Allen isn't very good at the love story form. Yes, he wrote one of the great romantic comedies in <i>Annie Hall</i>. But when you look at that film in light of all the films he has made since, you realize that <i>Annie Hall</i> was a one-time home run based primarily on his creation of the amazing title character, Annie. <br />
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The love interest in <i>Midnight in Paris</i> has nowhere near the character definition or quirky uniqueness of Annie Hall. She is simply a gentle, beautiful Frenchwoman who wants to live in an earlier time, just like the hero. As a result, there is little chance for the romance of these characters to build in a way that is satisfying to the audience. <br />
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The love story structure is really just an excuse for Allen to provide a storyline on which to hang the real gold of the idea, the fantasy comedy elements. With the woman as a desire line, the hero can take a number of trips into the utopian moment. And there he can meet a succession of famous artists the audience knows. <br />
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In the <a href="http://www.trubywriting.com/" shape="rect" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank">Anatomy of Story Masterclass</a>, I talk about the crucial technique of digging out the gold in your premise - finding what is original to you - and then presenting that gold again and again to the audience over the course of the story. The gold here is Allen's comical take on each of the famous writers and artists of the time. Once he was clear about that, the question for Allen, the writer, then became: how do I create a storyline that can allow me to play as many of these comic bits as possible without the story becoming episodic and collapsing? <br />
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The solution Allen chose is the same one used in <i>Crocodile Dundee</i>. In that film the romantic line between Dundee and the reporter allowed for the maximum number of encounters between animal man Dundee and the denizens of New York. Here the hero's encounter with Hemingway is the equivalent of Dundee saying to the mugger, "That's not a knife. <span style="text-decoration: underline;">This</span> is a knife."<br />
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This structure also allowed Allen to write to his strength, rather than what he has been doing for the last twenty years, which is writing from his weakness. Allen has never been very good at the craft of story. In spite of the complexity of some of his story structures over the years (<i>Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters</i>), Allen has usually been unable to create a complex plot where the opposing characters play out their differences through building conflict. <br />
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The normal Woody Allen movie consists of a story gag that should take about thirty minutes to play out. He stretches it to ninety minutes and finally has the lead character directly explain his self-revelation, which is exactly what Allen wants his audience to learn from the film. <br />
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What Woody Allen is great at is writing comic bits and gags. And he is probably the second greatest American writer of intellectual comedy, behind Mark Twain. Unfortunately, Allen is not satisfied with that gift as a writer, and indeed he has looked down on it since at least the early 70s. <br />
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In this film Allen has found a story structure that allows him to feel he is a writer's writer, but also gives him permission to enjoy his guilty pleasure of writing brilliant intellectual comedy. The first time the hero meets Hemingway we hear drop dead perfect Hemingway prose coming out of his mouth. The scene is hilarious, especially if you know your American literature. <br />
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And that's another pleasure of the film. Allen's relatively small audience is composed of the educated and the sophisticated. So when they get the literary and visual jokes, they also get to feel how smart they are. <br />
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The story is really just an intellectual candy store, with the love story bringing us back to the store again and again. Of course while we are enjoying the pleasures of a utopian moment in this film, we also learn, in a great visual gag, the opposite lesson that you can't live in the past. <br />
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I don't know if this film signals a possible return to good Woody Allen, as some have suggested. I do know it provides a clear lesson to the screenwriter in how to find the right structure and genre embedded in your story idea.John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-48220664058827608962011-04-26T11:40:00.000-07:002011-04-26T11:40:05.778-07:00African CatsI had the pleasure of co-writing a wonderful film that’s just come out, called <i>African Cats</i>. This is Disney Nature’s third release, after <i>Earth</i> and <i>Oceans</i>. These films were all made by the highly talented nature documentarians at the BBC, who work together not unlike the writers and directors of Pixar. <i>African Cats</i> was led by Keith Scholey, co-writer and co-director, and the world’s premiere expert in filming big cat behavior. So this was a really fun project for me.<br />
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Ironically, one of the reasons I loved it was for the unique story challenges it posed. You have to identify these challenges right at the beginning of the writing process, or your script will have severe problems. First, we had to make this an epic event, worthy of a feature length film. That meant we had to avoid the typical nature documentary, which is predictable and familiar, and way too informational and dry. <br />
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We also had to write a story that was dictated by the animals. Obviously, you can’t script animals; you have to find the best story in what they actually do. That can be very difficult, especially when you want to avoid anthropomorphizing them. So the main challenge of the plot was how to overcome the episodic quality inherent in all nature films, especially when the animal depicted must go on an annual migration. <br />
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Animal stories are also constrained by the main characters. The more the animal is limited by what he can learn, the more the story is guided by predictable instinct. One solution, but also a problem, was to have two main characters, a lion and a cheetah. This makes the film feel like <u>the</u> story about the world’s big cats. But it also breaks the single narrative story line into two tracks, and the tracks may never cross. <br />
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So what did we do? I always say in my genre classes that the main trick is to transcend the genre. How you do that is different for every form. Nature films are a sub-genre of the <a href="http://www.truby.com/lci_memoir.html">True Story </a>(which also includes memoir). True stories are at their best when they are deeply personal, when they focus on the family. For us, that meant focusing on the two mothers. <br />
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Motherhood is the greatest challenge in the animal world, both emotionally and strategically. These mothers, whether lion or cheetah, are ferocious fighters for their cubs. They despair at losing one. They rejoice when a cub comes home. When you see the intense feelings of the two mothers, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have no need, or even possibility, of anthropomorphizing these animals. Call them what you will, these animals love. <br />
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Unlike all other animal activities, which are single bursts in the present, motherhood requires a strategic campaign that can cover years. So we knew that tracking the cub-raising process would give us most of our plot. <br />
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Motherhood also unifies our story line. It gives the audience a sense that, below the surface, these two main characters are really one. Ironically we united them further by using extreme contrast. Luckily for us storytellers, these two feline mothers are complete opposites: the lioness raises her cubs within the strong society of the pride while the cheetah raises her cubs alone. Each way of living and mothering produces different terrors, mothering techniques and plot beats. <br />
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While the two moms should give us enough plot (we wouldn’t know for sure until all the footage came back!), it wouldn’t necessarily overcome the story’s episodic nature. We began to solve that problem by first admitting that this story will always have episodic qualities. That’s life. That’s a journey. And to this day, it’s a major form of plot.<br />
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But we also knew a great technique in writing, which is to turn a negative into a positive. Make your weakness a strength. If we’ve got two major characters and a journey, let’s get all the benefits of the crosscut we can. <br />
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The crosscut was one of the keys to this plot, because it allowed us to cut on the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger has been used in storytelling forever. But this technique was refined for the film medium in recent years through television, in shows like <i>ER</i>. Multi-strand stories on film allow you to sequence scenes based on the most dramatic moments of each story. <br />
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The crosscut in turn affected how we wrote the narration. Most narrations in nature films are too wordy and informational. They often step on big reveals and smother drama. The crosscut allowed us to convey lots of information through juxtaposition of scenes rather than by voiceover. For every step of the cub-raising process, we could show, by quick comparison, how the two mothers must use opposite techniques, with opposite costs. <br />
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That in turn allowed us to keep the narration lean and emphasize the dramatic. Our discipline was to give only enough information to tell the big cats apart and highlight the underlying strategies the cats use for each challenge they face. We let the “greatest hit” drama beats tell themselves, and that brought the audience <u>into</u> the action, instead of dryly backing them away. <br />
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You cannot transcend a film’s genre unless you also transcend the form’s basic theme. Animal films are about survival. About life. It goes on, but the process is brutal. It’s a war out there. One of the ways we punched the epic quality of the film was to frame it as a fight for the entire lion kingdom, which arguably is the most dangerous place on earth. So we were playing that theme hard (and yes, it really happened).<br />
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But to transcend our theme, we knew we would have to show that within this world of brutal survival, where there is no justice, there are moments of courage, sacrifice and love. Once again the mothers were the answer. Because when you see what these mothers do for their cubs, these big, beautiful cats become the Shakespearean characters of the animal world. Rest assured, if you see this movie the tears will come. Don’t fight it. Your secret is safe with me.John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6468912261497899074.post-75362104235711849772011-03-30T09:56:00.000-07:002011-03-30T09:56:00.485-07:00John Truby answers your story questions<!--StartFragment--> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: What questions should a writer ask him or herself prior to crafting their story?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Most writers can't tell at the premise stage whether they've got a good story because they don't have the training to see the deep structural problems in the idea before writing it as a script. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The extraordinary fact is 99% of writers fail at the premise. This is the great unknown gatekeeper that keeps most writers from being successful. If you screw up the premise, nothing you do later in the writing process will make any difference. The game's already over.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The biggest mistakes writers make at the premise:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The idea is not original.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The idea doesn't have a clear desire line for the hero that extends throughout the story.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The idea doesn't have a strong main opponent.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: How much time and effort should a writer put into outlining their script and fleshing out their characters before actually writing the script?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Much more time and effort than most writers think.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">For every hour you put into prep work on your story, you save ten when it comes to writing, and rewriting, it. Don't make the mistake so many writers make of thinking, "I'll fix it in the rewrite." They never do.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">A good story is linked under the surface so it builds steadily from beginning to end. But amateurs don't know that, so when they get an idea, they immediately start writing script pages, and they inevitably write themselves into a dead-end 20-30 pages in. Also, writer's block is almost always caused by not knowing where the story is going. That's why, before writing script pages, you always want to start by figuring out the seven steps of your story. The seven steps are in your story right now. It's your job to find them, dig them out and make them say what you want them to say.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: You've consulted on over 1,000 movie and TV scripts. What are the typical weaknesses you find in scripts?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">I'll give you five.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The story idea the writer comes up with is not original. Biggest mistake writers make.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Writers often use the wrong genre to develop the idea, or they impose a bunch of pre-determined genre beats onto the idea instead of finding the story events that are original to the idea.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">They think a script is all about finding the "high concept" premise, but they don't realize that high concept only gives you two or three big scenes. So they don't know how to extend the high concept into a 100-page script.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">They don't know how to build the story on the seven major story structure steps, so the plot fails to come out of character and the main character doesn't change.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">They think of the hero as a separate individual with a list of superficial character traits. Instead they should think of the hero as part of a web of characters, all connected in some way but with each character being structurally different from the others.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: Why is it so important to master genres?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">It goes back to the 1st rule of the entertainment business: it doesn't buy stars, directors or writers. It buys and sells genres. If you don't know what Hollywood is really buying, you have no chance of selling them your script.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Genres are different kinds of stories. More importantly, genres are really good stories. They are the all-stars of the story world. That's why Hollywood buys and sells them. That's why you have to know these genres cold. The game is won by mastering story structure and genres. And mastering genres comes from specializing in 2 or 3 forms that highlight your strengths as a writer and express your philosophy of life.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: How do you determine what genre or genres your story is?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">This can be very tricky, and most writers end up choosing the wrong genre for their story idea. Each genre takes the basic steps of story structure and twists them in unique ways. Also, each genre has its own set of unique story beats - anywhere from 8-15 - that must be included in your script if you are to tell the story right.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Because genre is the single most important decision you make in developing a story idea, I spend a great deal of time in my Masterclass talking about how you tell which are the right genres for your unique idea. Some of the elements that determine the right genres for your story are the hero, the opponent, the key thematic question, the hero's goal in the story, and the unique story strategy inherent to each form.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: You've said writers often underestimate the importance of plot. Why is it so important to learn, and how do you approach teaching it?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Plot is the most underestimated of the major writing skills. Most writers know the value of a strong main character and lean, hard-hitting dialogue. But when it comes to plot, they think they'll just figure it out as they go, which never happens.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The bad news: Plot has more techniques you need to know than all the other major skills combined.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The good news: Every one of them can be learned as long as you are willing to put in the work.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Plot is what makes the character's internal development pleasing to the audience. It's the artistry that sets you apart, that tells the audience you are a real storyteller. Plot is the sequence of events by which the hero tries to defeat the opponent and reach the goal. The two biggest mistakes writers make in plot is 1) Their story is episodic, meaning events stand on their own but don't connect and build under the surface and 2) They hit the same beat, which means the events are superficially different but really all the same.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: Why do some writers react negatively to the idea of structure?</span></b><span style="color: #e9271a; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">They wrongly believe that it hurts creativity. It goes all the way back to the old romantic notion that art comes from divine intervention. The fact is: art comes from craft. And the most important element of craft is structure. When you have the right story structure for your script then each scene you write is moving you along the right path for your particular main character. The results are not comparable. The first way you write yourself into a dead-end about 20-30 pages in. It is practically inevitable and is one of the marks of an amateur. The second way you figure out the story structure so your creative bursts are linked to the right path.<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Ironically, structuring your story first is much more creative than just winging it, because you have a strong foundation on which to take creative chances. You know your structure is there to tell you if the creative jump you want to make is going to work.<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: You say character must drive the plot instead of being pushed around by the plot. But don't you think everyday life pushes us around most of the time? In order for the audience to recognize itself in the story, shouldn't the story talk about that too?</span></b><span style="color: #e9271a; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">This phrase is often misunderstood. Driving the plot doesn't mean a hero who takes all the action steps to succeed. Only the most action-oriented character does that. And it makes for a poor story because it means the opposition is doing very little to knock the hero off course. Result: no conflict and bad drama.<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Making the hero drive the plot means that the plot comes out of the weakness and need of the hero. This way, the hero's surface actions while going after some kind of goal lead ultimately to character change within the hero. If the writer doesn't make this connection between character and plot, and come up with plot beats that will ultimately force that character change, the story has no personal meaning for the audience. In a good story the opponent will push the hero around a great deal, in fact, the more the better. This builds conflict and forces the hero to dig deeper to fix the great weakness that's ruining the hero's life.<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: You write that dialogue isn't real talk, rather it's highly selective language that could be real. Could you please explain that?</span></b><span style="color: #e9271a; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">If dialogue were real talk, all you would need to do is follow your friends around with a recording device and your dialogue would be guaranteed authentic. It would also be boring. Why? Because it lacks content.<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Just as a story is a highly selective sequence of events, dialogue is selective, heightened talk. It is packed content. And here's where it gets tricky. Dialogue with lots of content doesn't usually sound like real talk. It sounds written, and that will kill your story. So you need to learn the techniques for making highly selective language sound like it could be real.<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: How important is the process of rewriting?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">For most writers, the second draft is worse than the first.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">This is one of the dirty little secrets of screenwriting, and it's one of the biggest reasons many writers give up. Writers always think they are the only person to experience this, while in fact it's the norm. Part of the problem comes from writers following the conventional wisdom that "writing is rewriting." It's true you have to rewrite your script many times. But many writers think that they should write their first draft quickly - just get it down on paper - and they'll fix it in the rewrite. This is a disaster because once a script is written it's like cement. It hardens in your mind and it's much harder to fix the problems. That's why it's so important to figure out the story structure before you write the first draft.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The other big reason why the second draft is often worse than the first comes from the fact that most writers don't realize that rewriting is a set of skills, just like crafting character, plot and dialogue. You have to know how to rewrite. And that means, among other things, knowing the right order to rewrite. For example, the first thing most writers fix in the rewrite is the dialogue. That should be the last thing you fix. First are the structural problems, and even here there is a definite order for how to rewrite to make certain that every draft is an improvement over the one that came before.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: What is the most important thing to know when you are adapting a book into a screenplay?</span></b><span style="color: #e9271a; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Entire books have been written on the subject of adapting a book into a screenplay. Always the question arises: how do you remain true to the original material and still have the freedom to take advantage of the cinematic medium?<span style="color: #e9271a;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The trick to adaptation is: find the bones. First determine the deep structure of the novel. Mark every scene where a key structure step occurs. Those are the events that must be in the script. Study those beats and figure out if the novel's original structure needs to be fixed or changed in some way. Then go back to the novel and see if you want to include any of the non-structural events. These may be in the script, so long as they contribute to the script's basic structure.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: How do writers unearth stories that want to be told?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Stories that want to be told are not "out there." They're in you. In my class, I talk about a number of key writing exercises that help you find what is totally original to you. Incredibly, most writers don't know, and it's a fatal mistake. Then we go through the techniques you must know to turn that original seed into a professionally told story. An original idea professionally told is an unbeatable combination. It's not easy, but it can be done and it's the only recipe I know that works.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Question: Your 3-day masterclass on story is legendary. Can you give us a detailed rundown of what you cover and why people keep coming back over and over?</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The morning of the first day is where we set the foundation for a great script. We cover the 7 steps of deep structure and the story beats of the 3 major variations of deep structure. Once this foundation is set, the class covers all the professional techniques in the same order that you would write your script.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">In the afternoon, we start with the techniques for developing a winning premise, because 99% of scripts fail right there. Then we go through the five steps to creating powerful characters, the key to every good script.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">The morning of the second day is devoted to plot, where many writers have tremendous difficulty. This is where we learn the 22 steps of every great story, the single most powerful set of tools in all of storytelling. Afternoon of day two starts with a discussion of story shapes, which are one of the secrets to crafting a surprising and unique plot. Then we dive into the techniques for constructing scenes and writing sharp dialogue.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">In day three, we go through the 12 major genres on which 99% of movies are based. These include Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Fantasy, Horror, Love, Masterpiece, Memoir-True Story, Myth, Science Fiction, Thriller and Mixed Genre. Here we get into what each genre really means under the surface, some key structure techniques for writing each one, and how to transcend your genre so you stand above the crowd.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">When the three days are over, students have a precise set of tools that they can apply to any story they write. And I believe at the end of the class, they are substantially better writers than they were before the class, whether they started as a beginner or as a professional.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Why do people keep coming back? Because for many writers it's the only thing they've found that works. My class is all about being practical. It's about taking the most complex craft in the world - which shows people solving life problems - and breaking it down into specific techniques that affect an audience. Every time. Every script, no matter what genre.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.0pt;">Part of what makes the class so powerful and useful to writers is that the techniques don't produce cookie cutter scripts that no one wants to read. That's because the techniques are all focused on how your unique main character drives an intriguing plot. So each script is original and surprising at the same time.</span><o:p></o:p></div><!--EndFragment-->John Trubyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12190446466941369481noreply@blogger.com