What a Mother Knows

Leslie’s Lehr’s What A Mother Knows 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.

What A Mother Knows 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.

Any piece of fiction is the product of literally hundreds of structural decisions that will make or break the final novel. In What A Mother Knows, 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.

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.”

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.

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.

The third genre in the story blend in What A Mother Knows 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 What A Mother Knows, romance is part of Michelle’s rejuvenation, the true endpoint of her search.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hope you will read What A Mother Knows, 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.

Starbuck and The Bachelor

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 The Bachelor, followed by the French Canadian film Starbuck. The Bachelor 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.” Starbuck is a fiction film about a 42-year-old man who discovers that he has fathered over 500 children through a sperm bank.
The obvious similarity between Starbuck and The Bachelor 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. Starbuck 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 Comedy Class). The Bachelor relies on the love story and one of the major forms of television, the reality show. 
Starbuck 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.

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. 
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 Intouchables, a very successful traveling angel film from France. Other examples include Amelie, Chocolat, and Mary Poppins. 
Starbuck 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. 
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. 
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.) 
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. 
Starbuck uses comedy to strip the man’s role in the mating game down to its lowest biological denominator, then builds to love. The Bachelor 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. 
Again, to understand how The Bachelor 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. 
The Bachelor, like many reality shows, is designed to produce as much conflict and humiliation as possible. This is one reason why The Bachelor is a more dramatic – and sadistic – show than The Bachelorette, 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? 
There is another medium besides television The Bachelor love story plays through, and that is the game. The Bachelor 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. 
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. 
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. 
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, The Bachelor, and even more so The Bachelorette, 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. 
Like any reality show, especially one based on competition, The Bachelor 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. 
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. 
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. 
This pre-programmed, mating game quality is even more apparent on The Bachelor than on The Bachelorette. On The Bachelor 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 The Bachelor 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.

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.

Girls

The same night it won the Golden Globes for Best Sitcom, Girls 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.

The biggest strength of Girls 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.

TV is all about the characters we return to every week. So to see how Girls really works, and how it transcends the sitcom form, we have to begin by looking at the character web of the show. Girls sets up the character web using the technique I call “4-point opposition” (see the Sitcom Audio Class 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.

Where Girls 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 2 Broke Girls 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.

Even a transcendent sitcom like Sex and the City, on which much of Girls 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).

In contrast, the four main women on Girls 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.

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 Girls made it jarringly obvious to me that all other depictions of young women in sitcoms have been simplistic fakes.

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.

Notice Hannah’s approach to sex is in sharp contrast to the lead character in Sex and the City. 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.

Another way that Girls 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.

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.

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.

In this vein, it’s instructive that the name of the show is Girls, not Women. 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.

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.

For one thing, these women can be deeply annoying. I actually prefer “unlikable” characters. Seinfeld 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.

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.

In contrast, the girls in Girls 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.

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.

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.

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.

2012 Scripts Nominated for Oscars

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. Adapted Silver Linings Playbook 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. If you can’t accept this cheat you may have trouble enjoying Silver Linings Playbook. 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.

Silver Linings Playbook 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 Silver Linings Playbook to overcome the predictability of the romantic comedy form, an almost impossible feat for a writer to accomplish in this day and age. 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. Argo My other favorite for wining Best Adaptation is Argo. I’ve written a review 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. 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 inArgo. But it does keep the film from hitting the pinnacle of artistic success. So where does the quality of this script come from, if not from transcending the form? It comes from the seamless way Argo 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. Life of Pi I came to the film, Life of Pi, 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). 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 Life of Pi, 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. Lincoln I’ve said in my more in-depth review that I believe Lincoln 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). Original Moonrise Kingdom 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 Moonrise Kingdom a second time, I was able to see the incredible craftsmanship in this script. 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 Meet Me in St. Louis, You Can’t Take It with You and Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story. Moonrise Kingdom 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. 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 Argo), the writers twist every romantic comedy beat in a fresh and endearing way and converge on a literal cliffhanger. 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. 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. Flight Flight’s 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. But Flight’s 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. 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. Django Unchained Django Unchained 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. 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, Inglorious Basterds. Part of the reason Django 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. 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.” 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. Zero Dark Thirty The hit against Zero Dark Thirty 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 The Hurt Locker 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. In Zero, 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. 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.

Hit 2012 Movies Show Why It's All About Learning Genres

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 – Hunger Games, The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises – 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.

Hunger Games 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.

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.

The Avengers 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.

The first film in the Batman trilogy written by the Nolan brothers, Batman Begins, hits and twists every beat of the Myth genre perfectly. But the second film, The Dark Knight, with its showdown between Batman and The Joker, is really a Fantasy Crime story, with the original Myth elements sitting underneath. The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero film ever made, and that put tremendous pressure on the Nolans to top it with The Dark Knight Rises. 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.

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 Argo. Argo uses the strategy of mixing genres that rarely go together, in this case True Story with Political Thriller and Action.

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.

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.

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.

SKYFALL Story Quiz

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 Truby's Writers Studio Facebook page.  John will weigh in on those comments and post his full breakdown of the movie soon.
   
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?    
   
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? 
   
3. Did we see Bond grow as a character, go through self-revelations and learn something about himself? 
   
4. Did we see enough facets/complexity in the opponent (Bardem as Silva)?  
   
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? 
   
6. What did you think of the dialogue?  Did it drive the plot, or just entertain? 

Argo

Argo 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.

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.

But that’s not the case in Argo. 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.

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.
Again, that’s not the case with Argo. 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.

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.

In Argo, 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.

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.

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.

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.

In Argo, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Breaking Bad

I had no interest in watching Breaking Bad 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.

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.

This challenge would become even harder when Gilligan decided to use an average guy to drive the story. This wasn’t going to be Miami Vice on the border of Mexico. So what’s the story?

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.

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.”

That’s a brilliant premise, and one that included in its single line how this story idea could support a long-running series. Notice Breaking Bad is the mirror opposite of The Sopranos. The Sopranos is about a mob king who kills by day but sees a psychiatrist and has trouble with his family at night. Breaking Bad 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.)

The premier movie artists of transcendent Crime are the Coen brothers, in films like Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This escalating moral sequence is hung on the premise line of the show: from Mr. Chips to Scarface, 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, “Breaking Bad 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.”

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.

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.

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.

The Dark Knight Rises

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

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 The Dark Knight, they succeed. The Dark Knight is a truly great film. But the pressure to build on that success for The Dark Knight Rises 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.

To see why this happens structurally, we need to begin by identifying the story challenges these writers faced in writing The Dark Knight Rises, and then look at the solutions they came up with. No doubt they began by asking themselves: how do we take The Dark Knight, 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?

In executing their vision, the writers of The Dark Knight Rises 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.

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 Batman Returns, 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.

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 Batman Begins, 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.

In The Dark Knight, 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.

Here we see the fundamental technique that made The Dark Knight a great film but which is missing from The Dark Knight Rises. The plot of The Dark Knight 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.

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.

None of this is present in The Dark Knight Rises. The writers try to kick the film up to a higher philosophical level by returning to the fundamental theme of Batman Begins, 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.

But what is Bane attacking? Crime is actually way down in the eight years since the days of The Dark Knight. 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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The writers of The Dark Knight 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 The Dark Knight Rises 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.

The Comic Journey

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 Madagascar, Ice Age, Toy Story and Shrek, as well as individual animation hits like Up, The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.


Comedy 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.


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.



Why is this so valuable? Because dialogue is specific; structure is universal. Structure travels; dialogue stays at home.


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.


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.


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.


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. 


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.

The Avengers

The Avengers 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.

But the characters in your bank can’t just be distinctive and memorable. Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire 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.

Marvel has made a number of hugely popular films focusing on a single superhero, like Thor, Spider-Man and Iron Man. But The Avengers takes this genre to a whole new level, because it’s all about the lure of the All-stars, the Dream Team.

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 (Ocean’s Eleven) and the suicide mission story (The Dirty Dozen), the pleasure comes from watching a bunch of highly talented individuals come together as a team to accomplish an apparently impossible goal.

Few writers get an assignment like The Avengers, 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 The Avengers as our guide, let’s explore some of the challenges of the all-star story.

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.

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.

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 Watchmen 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Avengers 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.

The Avengers 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.