It Takes an Outside Voice

It often takes an outside voice to help you get where you want to be. 

In my painting class, I was struggling to paint a Paris subway platform. You could barely see the electrical cables and dark rails at the bottom, several people waiting in front of two huge posters, a guy walking by on the right, and, on the sides, the station name in blue and white tile. It was going pretty well and I’d painted some good parts, but the overall was not working. 

I wasn’t depressed about my ability. I just didn’t like the painting and could not figure out how to solve a problem, that, no matter how long I stared at the painting, I couldn’t see.

A friend came over to dinner, a painter, and he took one look at it and said, “well, here’re your problems. First of all cut the bottom two and a half inches off the panel. Your composition is bottom heavy. That’ll bring your horizon down, away from the middle.”

Horizon in the middle?! That’s not only boring, it’s the biggest boneheaded beginner mistake on the artistic planet. I knew not to do that, knew it was wrong and yet, I couldn’t see it. The second he said it, I thought, “duhh…”

But I hadn’t seen it. He did. I listened.

Next, he said, “that guy on the right side…”

“The blurry guy?” 

“Yeah. He pulls our eye away from the interesting part of the composition.”

He was 1,000% correct. The blurry guy was the best part of whole painting. He was walking along the subway platform and was blurred. I’d nailed it. Everyone in class loved the blurry guy. Me too.

I held up my hand and blotted him out. The whole painting fell into place. Without the blurry guy and imagining the bottom part gone, it worked. It wasn’t done, but it wasn’t wrong anymore.

One New Year’s resolution I’ve kept, that I highly recommend, “If you ask for advice… take it.”

I killed the blurry guy, my darling. Best thing in the painting. When I painted over him, it felt so good because without him, the painting was better!

Just like writing! 

I was lucky enough to have someone look at my work who knew what they were talking about. They brought something to the table I was not capable of. The instant he said what the problem was, I saw it too. But without his voice, I couldn’t see it.

Because I’m used to getting criticism on my work, I didn’t argue. I just agreed, smiled, and thanked him profusely.

What?! The Main Character in AIR doesn’t change?!

In Screenwriting 100, the first thing you learn is that the main character changes. They end the story in a far different place, personality-wise and character-wise from where they started. “Your character’s gotta have an arc.” is what the teachers say. I say it too.

Except for AIR.

At the beginning, the main character always has an interior character problem that they solve by the end.

Except for AIR

In A FEW GOOD MEN, Tom Cruise worships his dead father, who was Attorney General of the United States… compared to his father, Tom feels he’s a mediocre attorney. At the end, after he grows up, he faces Jack Nicholson in court, the most terrifying nemesis ever… (who his father would not dare put on the stand). Only because Tom changed is he able to defeat his antagonist in the climactic battle.

Unlike the Matt Damon character in AIR.

In CASABLANCA, Humphrey Bogart starts as selfish — he only wants his old girlfriend back. Once he gets her back, he changes into a do-gooder and gives her up to her husband to help win the war.

In TOY STORY, Woody wants to be Andy’s favorite and tries to destroy Buzz all the way until the end when he’s on the back bumper of Andy’s van and they’re driving away… about to leave Buzz — stuck in a fence, rocket strapped to his back — behind forever… and, oh my, Woody gives up what he’s always wanted and jumps off the bumper to save his friend. Woody changes!

Not Matt Damon in AIR!

I also teach that a character needs a work life and a personal life. Matt Damon has zero personal life. It wasn’t until I saw a still from the film (after watching the movie), that I noticed he was wearing a wedding ring. That’s the only evidence he had a wife. As I recall, she’s never mentioned. We never even go inside his house.

All that character does is 1.) come up with an idea and 2.) spend the rest of the movie fighting everyone around him to bring his grand plan to fruition. Matt Damon’s in conflict with everybody. Everybody! Except, maybe Michael Jordan’s father… and Michael Jordan, because he’s not in the movie.

Matt Damon is who he is at the beginning and that’s who he stays until the end. A fighter. A man with a revolutionary idea, willing to take gigantic risks to prove he’s right.

He learns nothing new about himself. He doesn’t have a ghost. He doesn’t have a flaw. No wound. He just has guts and determination and lots and lots of opponents.

And it works!!

However… and this is a GIANT however…

AIR is not Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s first rodeo.

AIR is not the first movie Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have been in. It’s not the first movie they’ve produced. By making a movie with no character change, they broke a MASSIVE rule of storytelling. As of this writing, Matt Damon has 97 acting, 32 producing, and 4 writing (their first script won them Academy Awards) credits. Ben Affleck has 127 credits. Two Oscars.

When you’ve done a lot of work and been recognized for it and people knock on your door in the middle of the night to ask you to work for them, then, and only then, can you break massive rules.

Until that day, and I hope it comes, make damn sure your main character changes.

Do NOTHING that might confuse your reader!

Like, f’rinstance: character names! Bob and Todd. Sally and Sarah. Virginia and Veronica. Sauron and Saruman!!

Here’s an image that’s intensely confusing — a map showing the three Superstates in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia. (two of which are hella difficult to tell apart, but that’s another conversation). It’s just a map. How difficult could that be to get right? A map. Simple enough: a color for each Superstate. Hard to mess up? 

Think again.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Nineteen_Eighty-Four_World_Map.png

Oceania and Eurasia are almost the EXACT SAME COLOR. And, Eastasia is almost the EXACT SAME COLOR as the ocean!

At first glance, this map is incomprehensible. 

And, gentle writer, a first glance is ALL you get. 

F for Spell Check – Parents Night

When I first started writing, I used a typewriter. If you made a mistake, you could correct it while the page was still in the typewriter. If you pulled it out and then found a mistake, you had to retype the page. Which took a couple of minutes. A pain in the neck. Out of self-defense, my proofreading got killer good.

By the time I started teaching, spellcheck had been invented. How lovely! It wasn’t perfect, still isn’t, but what an improvement! Take 30 seconds, spellcheck a document, and off you go.

Except students, bless their little hearts, often couldn’t be bothered to take that time. Facebooking and Instagramming and drinking beer took precedence. Though understanding, I could not condone such deleterious behavior.

I instituted an F For Failure to Run Spellcheck rule. Basically, kiddies, if you don’t have the wherewithal to take 30 seconds to spellcheck a ten page document, to hell with you.

When I taught at Vanderbilt, the Dean called and said a parent complained about my policy. I explained that, in Hollywood, if they found a typo in your work, they would stop reading it and go onto the next hopeful contestant. That calmed him right down.

True story: one of my clients wrote a query letter good enough to get an agent to read his screenplay. A stunning success. He sent it in. Time passed. Finally, he got an email, “Sorry. Typos.”

One Christmas, my children gave me an “F SPELLCHECK” rubber stamp. Soooo satisfying because when I slam it on a homework, it makes a loud noise. It also means I can stop reading the homework. The student gets the grade they asked for and I go on to the next hopeful contestant.

Did I mention I’m not good at remembering names? It becomes important later. That’s called Pay Off. At the beginning of every semester, I’d tell my students that, by the end of the semester, I probably wouldn’t know their name. Embarrassing, but true. One year, at graduation, a senior came up, parents in tow, and greeted me with, “What’s my name?!” I remembered! He nearly fainted.

To at last get to the point, Once Upon A Time, I gave a lecture on Parents Weekend. It went well. Nobody threw fruit.When it was over, I was packing my stuff and spotted a father steaming toward me like an out of sorts torpedo. Great.

The guy was ready to explode all over the room. His opening salvo was, “My name is Edward Snickelfritz and I am an educator.” I thought, “I’m just a teacher, dude.” He went on, “and I take grave exception to your F for spellcheck policy. My child had one spelling error and you gave her homework an F.” 

Because, thank you Sweet Jesus, he had an unusual last name, I remembered his daughter.

Savoring the moment, knowing I’d never get another one like it, I stared at the guy, waited longer than I should have, and said, “Did she tell you she got three F’s in a row?” Which meant she could not learn. The educator shrank to the size of a Lilliputian and, in a voice not quite so homicidal, said “Oh… that’s an excellent policy.” He slimed away, no doubt to speak in an unpleasant tone to his child for lying.

When parents swoop in on a teacher — guns blazing — like the helicopter attack scene in APOCALYPSE NOW, the child has usually shaded the truth to favor them over the teacher.

Anyway.

That’s my F for Spellcheck story.

In case you couldn’t tell, I like telling it.

The Cat In The Hat teaches You Story Structure!

Story structure is story structure. What works has worked for a long, long time. Even children’s books have a hero with a problem, an Inciting Incident, Act breaks, a Midpoint, and an All is Lost moment, just like what’s playing at the OmniPlex or computer screen near you!

The Cat In The Hat is 61 pages. Double that and pretend it’s a feature script. Remember it was written in 1957 when scripts were 120 pages…

Page 1. The hero and his sister, Sally, are at home and already have a problem. It’s raining and they can’t go out to play. There’s no backstory. They WANT something. They want ONE THING and they want it badly. On page 1, they’re sitting at the window, bored out of their skulls, wishing someone would hurry up and invent video games.

Guess what?! There’s an Inciting Incident…! On page 5, something goes BUMP! and the Cat In The Hat steps in on the mat. He’s wildly different from Sally and her brother. He says, that zany goofball, “We can have lots of good fun that is funny!” The children (conflicted!) don’t know what to say, but they sure know their mother is out of the house for the day.

Fish knows what to say! On page 7, Fish ramps up the conflict and says, “No no!… “He should not be here when your mother is out!” A splash of cold water that slows Cat down… not at all!

The Cat In The Hat then has fun hopping up and down on a ball while balancing Fish and more and more and more and more household items and showing how much fun all this is… until… page 21 (a tad late, but never mind), at the Act I break… everything he’s done in Act I comes crashing down. Just like in a Hollywood movie!

For the first part of Act II, Fish continues to scold the children and warn them and generally harass them for the bonehead mistake they made letting this dude into their house. The children try to convince Cat to leave. He won’t leave. No lack of conflict here! Just before we get bored, Cat decides to take us in a new direction. When, pray tell, does he do that?

Page 29! Right in the very middly middle! A Midpoint! Just like a movie!

Cat blasts in the front door with a big red wood box. What’s this?! He yanks it open! Out race Thing 1 and Thing 2! Everything changes! This is Act II, so things get worse! Now three people are causing trouble for the home team! Thing 1 and Thing 2 do terrible things like fly kites indoors! They knock things over! They tear pictures off the wall! They have so much fun ripping up the children’s home!

Then, the Worst Possible Thing happens! Thing 1 and Thing 2 wreak their brand of havoc in… not the basement… not the laundry room, but… the mother’s bedroom! The stakes are now so high, the consequences are cataclysmic.

Terrified, the hero asks what would their mother say if she saw all this…

The very next page (46, right on schedule) is the end of Act II. We see, OMG, Mom walk up the sidewalk! She’s baaaaack!! Fish shakes with fear and worries what she’ll do!

Making a daring move, the hero catches Thing 1 and Thing 2 in his net. The Cat, who only wanted to have fun, feels terrible about what they’ve done and says, “What a shame!”

On page 54, The Cat shuts the Things in the box and leaves.

Hero and Sally and Fish stare at the wreckage of their home, shattered. No matter how hard they might try, they will never be able to clean up this mess. Depressed, they face utter destruction. This children’s book has a dark, dark All Is Lost moment!

Then, the Cat In The Hat zooms back in to show them another trick!! Driving a crazy cleaning-up machine, he completely tidies up the entire house! Everything he and his henchmen messed up is put back in place. And, with a tip of his hat, Cat scoots out the door — just before Mom comes in. Whewwwwweee!

The last page is a rhyming image of the second page, with the children looking out the window, Fish in his bowl at their side. Opening Image vs. Closing Image! As Mom steps in, all is right with the world — but the children have survived a harrowing journey, weren’t bored for a second, and their world is different.

The Hero asks if you would tell your mother what had happened… The End.

Dr. Seuss uses three act structure! So can you!

Bury That Set Up!

I’m enjoying Carry On, Jeeves, a collection of Bertie Wooster short stories by P.G. Wodehouse. “Without The Option” is one of the best. At the end, when Jeeves explains the sublime way he vanquished the opponent, his victory depends on a gigantic coincidence.

To bring you up to speed, Bertie tries to help his friend Oliver (beholden to his Aunt Vera for 100% of his financial support) out of a romantic jam by suggesting he steal a policeman’s hat. A reasonable solution to most problems! Naturally, Oliver is thrown into jail for thirty days. If hair-trigger Aunt Vera finds out, she’ll cut him off forever. Disastrously high stakes! Bertie’s plan goes pear shaped and, at the worst possible time for it to happen, the worst possible thing happens — he finds himself in the same room with the dreaded Aunt Vera. There’s nothing to do but confess the truth…

Keep in mind that she’s a conservative, wealthy, frightening, ancient battleaxe and Bertie is terrified of the scorched-earth destruction she’ll wreak on his chum.

And now, the climax!

How does Jeeves save Bertie’s bacon? A cousin who’s a copper.

“There’s no way,” I mused, “this providential piece of good-luck-lightning could accidentally strike in a story written by someone as careful as Mr. Wodehouse.” I went back, looked, and there it was: an artfully placed, oh-so-useful set up, neatly tucked where we wouldn’t notice it, under a stack of socks.

Enjoy Wodehouse’s subtle set up! Know that Bertie has a crushing hangover…

As far as Jeeves’ eventual ability to solve Bertie’s problem, the fact that Jeeves has a cousin in the town where the opponent lives is the story’s most important piece of information. That set up is buried under the business of Bertie’s hangover pushing him to tell Jeeves not to interrupt. Jeeves interrupts anyway and Bertie chastises him. The instant the “cousin set up” appears, it is obscured by a scolding. The set up is, like a cat sleeping in a dark doorway for you to trip over at 2:00 a.m…. present, but invisible.

You can’t just willy nilly lob a cousin in at the finale and that cousin be the machinery that saves Bertie from Aunt Vera’s Doom. Deus ex machina works when you’re in fifth grade, but not in the summer following fifth grade or ever after.

Don’t give your character a magic sword at the moment they need it. Tuck it away it much, much earlier, hidden from view, in their underwear drawer.

Are You a Professional?

Do you have an amateur’s point of view or a professional’s? One way to tell: “How do you react to notes?”

A TV producer-director friend, who’s directed hundreds and hundreds of hours of television, comes across a lot of writers. A lot of beginning writers. A lot of intermediate writers. A lot of professionals. He recently told me he no longer reads scripts by non-pros. “If they’re not professional, all they want is praise.” He stopped wasting his time.

There’s always that straw that knocks the camel into the dung heap. For my buddy, this was it…

“I read the script by this guy. It was terrible. But it had a good idea. So when I met with him, I told him he had to throw the whole thing out and start over, but the core idea was worth the effort. He said, ‘Yeah, I know that. But would you show it to your agent?’ I told him again that it was not good, needed total rewriting, and wasn’t ready. He said, ‘I know, I know. But would you show it to your agent?’ I told him a third time and he asked me to show it to my agent.”

As the British would say, that tore it. End of that particular wannabe’s relationship with someone who could help him.

If all you want is praise, go hang out with your grandparents. If you want to get into the movie and television business, get ready for notes. All you’re ever going to get is notes. Criticism piled on more criticism with spicy criticism sauce poured on top. Plus… the lack of praise makes you feel bad. Get over it. I did.

All I ever want anyone to say about my writing is, “I weep at your genius.” I’m still waiting.

John Lloyd Miller, who’s a helluva filmmaker, says this and I agree, “Every note is an opportunity for you to improve your work.” You need to buy into that mantra, wholeheartedly. When someone takes time to give you notes, take the time to actually listen, nod attentively and appreciatively, write down every single painful thing they say, and pay for the lunch.

If you don’t want notes, can’t welcome notes, can’t smile when you get punched in the gut, find something other than writing to occupy your time because you don’t want to be a writer.

Not a better one anyway. Certainly not a professional.

When To Start Your Story

Until you know your story’s precise timeframe, it’s a horrible idea to start writing.

When does it begin? When does it end? As short an overall story-length as possible! Do not start when the problem starts. Begin only when you have to. You don’t have to start the story now, if you can FADE IN: later.

MICHAEL CLAYTON takes place over four or five days. Tony Gilroy wrote several complete screenplays, entire movies (!), that he cut, before he finally realized when to begin his movie… because he was trying to tell too much story. He tried to cram it ALL in and discovered he had to cut reams, figure out precisely what story he was telling, and lose all the useless chaff.

Decide exactly what your story is and tell that story. Don’t tell any other story, just that one. That’s the only one you need to tell, that one story.

Go find a pencil and a piece of paper. I’ll wait.

Got it? Do you really have it? Because this won’t work if you don’t have a pencil in your hand. Or a pen. Or a crayon.

Draw a horizontal line. All the way across your page. Be generous with your line. Pencils’re cheap. Use it up, you can buy another one anytime. Draw a long line.

It represents your character’s life. Not, hopefully, when they’re born and when they die, but the area of time their Big Problem encompasses — from well before the problem’s birth until way past forgetting she ever had a problem. The line covers everything your story could possibly be about.

Your job is to draw a vertical hash on that line and another one further to the right. Your story begins and your story ends at those two moments. Endeavor to keep those marks as close together as possible, so you’re telling as little of the main character’s life as you can. As long as you’re telling juuuuusst enough!

Find the two inches or half an inch or three inches on that line that’s “a movie”. Don’t tell us anything other than the part that’s a “movie”, that works as a complete story with as little effort on your part as possible. If you can find this sweet spot quickly, you’re the luckiest person in the world. When you start the story, your main character’s already deep in trouble. They have a problem. They’re not happy. Nothing’s working out.

When the inciting incident slams her, her life gets MUCH worse and you’re off to the races! Pick the right place to begin and a host of your problems will vanish. Then, how close to that beginning can you stick your finale? [See my May 7 2020 “Unity of Place” blog post. It touches on the M-80 Theory of Drama, something you must understand.]

Cut that “teaching us who they are and how they got here” crud and your wonderful setup of their tedious, mostly ho-hum lives. Start with her already grappling with a problem. All that explanation you had in those piles of early drafts can go and no one will notice. The instant you figure out the main pulse of your story, you’ll forget you ever wrote all that nonsense you just cut.

Pick the wrong places to start and stop and you could write for decades until you figure out that exact perfect spot to put FADE IN:

The excellent Robert Redford / Sydney Pollack movie, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, was based on a book. Six Days of the Condor.

Isolate Character Scenes

Try anything! Guess what?! It may help. A useful tool is isolating character relationships.

“Why isolate character relationships and what the hey is it, anyway?” you ask.

“Happy I dropped by.” I say.

Look at only the scenes with Oswego and Rosalie. Constance will be in some of those scenes, too. Without the clutter of everybody else’s stories and plot threads screeching like a million seagulls, study just the Oswego and Rosalie relationship. When you only have one relationship to consider, you can calmly reflect on its imperfections.

Do it like this…

Save the draft as Oswego & Rosalie Sept 11 22 and cut every scene they’re not in, inserting ##### between their scenes so you know when one ends and one begins. Make sure you keep slug lines and scene numbers. Next to ####, write the number of pages between the last scene and this one.

I print everything, but it’s not mandated by federal law. Check state and local statutes to see if you are required to print to rewrite.

With the entire relationship spread across a few pages, problems nearly impossible to see while staring at the pile-of-horror that is your entire screenplay will stick out like a s’more in campfire coals, such as the mournful woe that, from pages 32 – 56, Oswego is nowhere to be found! How could he have vanished for 24 pages?! No way it could have been, egads, pilot error. Could it?

Studying characters’ scenes makes their relationship crystal clear. What’s missing leaps out. Are the progressions as smooth as silk? Do Oswego and Rosalie make a giant leap in their relationship that calls for three added scenes halfway through? You can see what’s moving too fast and what’s dragging. If you’ve written (more or less) the same story point three times, pick the best one and cut two.

The more you look, the more you’ll see. Soon you’ll wonder how you wrote without isolating characters’ scene.

When you’ve scribbled all over the “Oswego / Rosalie” pages, print Oswego and Constance’s scenes for the same repair lookyloo. Then print Rosalie and Constance’s! You’ll be amazed what you discover. By solving small, simple-to-find puzzles in your story, the entire tale will be strengthened… without the paralyzing depression of “I have to fix this GIGANTIC 110 page snarl of mess?! Shonda Rhimes couldn’t solve these problems!!”

Isolating character scenes is simple and delightfully effective.

Remember, try anything. What if it helps?

The Lego Sandwich: Everything Is Specific

When, for your dining enjoyment, a child hands you a sandwich made of Legos, it’s a superb idea to ask her what every single Lego block is. You’d better remember which is the patty, the Volcano Sauce, the Sea Horseradish, the multiple mustards, and the Jellyfish Jelly. Woe unto you if you assume any one of those Legos isn’t important. Or is not there for a specific and incredibly useful reason. Each Lego in that foot tall sandwich has a function or it absolutely would not be there.

The same is true for a small child’s drawing. What looks like aimlessly scribbled scrawls of pencil lines and infinitesimal dots… to you… has essential and well-thought-out meaning for the artist. Nothing is there without an objective. Their creator can damn well tell you the reason for every hen scratch. Just ’cause it looks like gobbledygook gooey goo to you doesn’t mean it is. All has meaning. Each line adds to the work’s overall goal.

With writing, the opposite is true. Material often clouds the page solely because the writer can type fast.

If we wrote with quill pens we repeatedly dipped in ink, this pernicious word-vomitorium would be less of a thing. As the quill has gone the way of the Dodo, we tend to make our readers suffer.

When constructing a sentence, writers are WAY less diligent than children making art. Grownups are sloppy. When someone writes with next to no deliberation, sentences can have heaps of greasy fat, settling hard on the tum-tum unwanted and unappreciated. A paragraph can contain wasted words, useless phrases, or (gasp!) entire sentences that have no cause for existence.

If you don’t have one caroming around the house, either rent a kid to proofread your work and tear out every single word you don’t need… like getting rid of extra lettuce in a Lego sandwich… OR make the perhaps unfamiliar effort to proofread and rewrite exactingly all by yourself.

When it’s over, be certain nothing is on your page without a raison d’être. Just ’cause it’s there doesn’t mean you gotta keep it, unlike the six Lego mustards.