Write With Jane - 29 - Scuff it up

Another of Jane Espenson's really useful crafty-biz posts is about the difference between on-the-nose dialogue and not.

There are many things that make me wonder whether my brain was designed for screenwriting, and this is kind of one of them: I spent a lot of time this year moving my characters around literally - that is, "saying exactly what they feel, or conveying precisely the pertinent piece of information."

In my defense, I think this is one of the difficulties of writing outline instead of script. When I write dialogue, I do tend to make it more natural and less literal. But in planning what my characters would do or say in the outline, I was often wholly distracted by a literal interpretation of the character I'd designed for the bible - not a living one, but one who was entirely self-aware and could not act as though they didn't know the ending to their own story.

For example, I have a character who's resisting retirement. She's at retirement age, and everyone around her wants her to retire - it's the right thing to do, but she doesn't want to. However, for the longest time, I couldn't imagine that she didn't know it was ridiculous for her to resist. My awareness as her omniscient god was all I could see.

What I needed to see was her view from the ground - and for many of us, that view is not cleanly laid out as I'd done in the bible, but skewed by our basic fears and desires and drive to just make things go our way. I needed to, as Jane says, "scuff it up." When I began to play her response to retirement with her own un-self-aware impulse to avoid the inevitable, the character became more real - and her interactions with everyone else became more interesting.

So I think that Jane's post applies to character and plotting as well as dialogue. You may be the god, knowing what they're really feeling and wanting, but they are mere mortals, and they'll be and do things in more roundabout ways.

Write With Jane - 28 - Caps and Transitions

Today's dose of wisdom from Jane is her response to a writer's question about script formatting - when to use the CUT TO transition, and when to use all caps. In her following entry, she explains good uses of ANGLE ON.

The Steps Go All The Way Up

Brandon Laraby climbed the CN Tower stairs last weekend - a great story for writers who get overwhelmed by their projects. Thank you for the inspiration, Brandon! Amazing.

Check out Speedy McSpeederson over here!

Word.

This year, as I repeatedly missed deadlines - some by days, others by weeks or months - I decided that writing fast was a thing only aliens and Denis McGrath could do. Speed was entirely unattainable to regular people.

Story Editor would say to me, "Just sit down for an hour and bang out Matt's story." And I'd be like, "You crazy. It takes me months to 'bang out' a story." Story Editor, I began to believe, was some sort of script writer robot sent to torture me with his lies.

Then, it changed. In the past two weeks I've met three deadlines. I'm on my way to the forth tonight. This weekend, I did indeed bang out Matt's story in an hour. (Sorry about the robot crack, Story Editor.) Today, I wrote about fifteen scenes for the outline - and they're not perfect, by any means, but they're scene-y. And they're there.

The secret, best as I can figure, is to write what you got. Don't wait for the best, just write the best for now.

See? No problem! Go on, now. Go bang it out.

Getting It

I had a eureka moment yesterday and I want to tell you about it, but I'm also kind of embarrassed to, because now that I've got it...d'uh!

The project I'm working on is a family drama, which means it has four main characters and each episode has its A, B, and C plots, and what with those four and their friends and lovers and enemies and annoying mothers...it's a lot of people to move around!

Plus, my main-main character (the guy my hook is hanging on) had something going on with his girlfriend, his soon-to-be-ex best friend and his new best friend, his coach, his sport, and his parents. And all this time I've been looking at that as if this guy had five sub-subplots of his own.

And I repeatedly got the note: "Make it about Matt."

I agreed with the note. I wanted to do the note. But I struggled. Symptoms of my struggle included (but were not limited to): secondary characters hijacking Matt's scenes; his story lacking focus; his scenes failing to follow one to the next; and crying. Mine, not Matt's.

He was my most important character, but often I felt he was the one I knew least.

Yesterday, I sat down with a lump in my stomach, knowing that I had to - once again - tackle the problem with his story. It went off in five different directions, without one strong thread to pull it through. I'd been here before, rarely with success. For the fiftieth time, I listed Matt's "subplots":

- girlfriend

- coach

- friends

- parents

- game

I was staring at the list with frustration, as usual, when - the eureka moment. No, I told myself - he doesn't have five plots. He has only one. It's about him, and each of those five things is about him. One story.

D'uh.

After that, it took me about two sessions on the old Pomodoro to reframe each of Matt's disconnected scenes into the one story. I made a list of the scenes with a line for each, and there it was. After all this time, trying and failing to do just that, it felt like magic.

Now, the point of this story is not that your character has one story instead of five. Everybody else has already told you that. Everybody had already told me. Every book or blog I've ever read, every reader who'd read my outline. I invented nothing.

I just suddenly got it.

I'm mystified it took me so long to get it - and I guess maybe that's the point of my story. Why did I see it now, instead of six months ago? Because my outlook has become positive and open where before it was all fear and insecurity? That helps immensely.

Maybe also because no matter how much I read about writing or thought about writing, I just had to learn by doing. There's a wealth of advice out there about the many, many things that have to go right to make a screenplay good. We newbies want to cram all that information into our heads as fast as possible, so we can get on with the business.

But maybe these things can only be learned one at a time. And it was just Matt's turn to get got.

Gather Ye Momentum While Ye May

A home blog recently tipped, for those having trouble doing their chores, to start with something easy, like making the bed, and let the momentum propel you into the stuff you're more likely to avoid.

Having just developed a good amount of momentum with my outline, I think there's real, practical value in this kind of thing. Some writers say they just type page walla until it turns into the work, to get going and stay going. In Save The Cat, Blake Snyder recommended starting with the scenes you know for sure are going to be there - I guess these are like the make-the-bed scenes. I find it works to really honestly be willing to write stuff I know I'm going to want to fix later.

I've always had a rule in my head that everything I wrote had to be original - and that often gets me stuck. If I'd seen something done that way before, I couldn't write it. When I let go of that rule, it became much easier cut through the immobility.

I also spent way too much time on this project thinking about what I wanted to write instead of writing it. I filled notebooks. Beware of intention without purposeful action. There's nothing for really getting to know my characters and what they're going to do like making them do it. In my actual working document. On my next project, I think I'll try a one-page/day, one-notebook limit. If you've got something to say - say it. Don't just think about what you're going to do - do it.

If you're stuck in the mud, find a way to get moving - any way will do. Take action - and don't judge the action as good or bad - just by doing it, and continuing to do it, it's already good. The movement will take you where you want to go.

Write With Jane - 27 - Voice

In today's post from Jane's archives, she talks about the atypical structure of Gilmore Girls. Instead of ending on a typical "act out" moment, for example, Gilmore Girls would be divided up roughly according to the number of scenes per act, often leaving big moments in the middle of an act, rather than at the end, where they would fall in other shows.

Read her post to find out the answer to the question - in the case of writing a spec, do you follow the standard rule or the show rule in cases like this?

Jane, who wrote for Gilmore Girls, attributes the show's atypical structure to the strong voice of its creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino. Voice is still a bit of a mystery to me - and by "mystery," I mean intimidating, because I don't know if I have a good one or where to get it if I don't.

Knowing my own writing "voice" seems like trying to get a good view of my own ass in these jeans: I'm never going to be able to see it clearly. And also voice seems like a skinny ass: if I don't have one now, I never will.

Of course, we all know that's not true! I can get a skinny ass if I really try! Oprah says so!

So I checked my current favorite screenwriting book for guidance on this topic. In The Way of the Screenwriter, Amnon Buchbinder doesn't talk about voice as much as he does about style. And he's quite convincing both about the need for style, and how to go about getting some.

"Screenplay style is like decorating a very small one-room apartment. You have to make do with a very limited space, yet also make it your own....While format is ironclad, style is the matter of how the writer negotiates with format."

Buchbinder goes on to talk about style in terms of its practical applications for screenwriters - using the imposed brevity of the form; character and setting descriptions; and the one minute per page rule - things that I can practice and learn. I would quote him more here, but if this really interests you, I kind of want you to go out and find the book for yourself. Yeah, that's how I proselytize. Be thankful I'm not coming to your door.