TRANSCRIPT

Sometimes we get really enthusiastic when we embark on a new project and we should, but I think it's really important to take a step back and to get the whole picture, right? So many people come up to me and they say “Oh my gosh, I've got this amazing idea, it’ll make a great movie” and the reality is that that idea is what I like to call a “story seed.” It's what you plant in the ground and now you have to fertilize it and water it and tend for it and it needs sunshine and it needs to grow and it has to overcome the elements in order to actually turn into a story. Now what does that mean? Am I telling you to not be enthusiastic? No! Be enthusiastic! You have to be super enthusiastic to make this work. It's hard work! What I am telling you at the same time is to not allow your enthusiasm to be dwarfed or suffocated by reality, and by taking stock of the actual landscape of what it takes to make a story that works, we prevent that suffocation process from happening. So I like to take a step back and I like to ask myself, “Why does my story matter? Why do I want to tell it? Why am I willing to devote months, maybe years of my life to writing and rewriting this process? And why am I willing to not skip the steps?” I mean, this is key. Creative people, myself included, we like to think that, okay, these are the rules and I don't need them, or this is one way of doing it and I don't need anything else. That's not what story design is about.

My top three tips for getting into the right mindset to begin this course: be willing to try. And by that I mean confront what's inside of you that might be resistant to following what looks like “rules” and understand that story design is actually about empowering you to be free to be as creative as you want. Story design is about creating a blueprint, like an architect would create a blueprint so that the builders can go and run wild afterwards, and you get to be the builder once that blueprint is in place. Why is that advantageous to you? It's advantageous because story design will free you up to know that you can focus on the elements about your characters and your story and the impact that you want to create, while having the reassurance that your story will be marketable.

Tip number two: have fun. Story design is not about constraining you to a paint-by-numbers system. Story design is about making you have this bird’s eye perspective about what makes your story important, and it's about setting you up for success by doing the groundwork up front. It's like plowing the field before you plant the story seed, and then the writing process is going to be about making that seed grow into a plant from which you can harvest fruit.

Step number three: don't get discouraged. I'm a big fan of Ira Glass and the way he says that our taste is what gets us into this game. I'll talk about that more later, but also our taste is what disappoints us, because we tend to think that we can just sit down because we have this great idea, and we can translate it into a screenplay that works, like for actors and for a director and for audiences, but it's going to take a little bit more of a process than overnight. I want you to remember why you feel so enthusiastic about telling this story, and I want you to ask yourself: is this story worth enough to jump through the hoops and to go through a process so that you can be the best writer to do the story justice? If the answer is yes, you're ready to begin the course.

I think the biggest lesson I've learned in researching stories and in writing them myself is that the story is going to do whatever it wants to, at the end of the day. That might sound counterintuitive, right? I’m asking you to put all of this work into designing and preparing and laying the groundwork and building the blueprint, but at the end of the day, if you do that work correctly, the story's going to go completely rogue. It's just if you don't do the work you're never going to tap in to the story. So story design is not about telling the story what it needs to do, it’s about giving the story the confidence to tell you what it wants to do. It's a little bit of a crazy, inspirational process. It's kind of a way of inviting inspiration in. The way I experience it when I write is very much like what Faulkner says about characters: you know that you finally got into the story when the character gets up and goes and does something that you never anticipated. Like it does whatever the character wants to do, and you as a writer find yourself in the position of grabbing your pen and having your notepad and running around behind the character and writing it down. This is not going to happen if you don't court your character first, if you don't get to know what's going on in the story beats, if you don't do due diligence up front, if you don't plow your field. So at the end of the day, I'm asking you to put the work in up front so that you can set your story free, and so that you can serve the story that has chosen you.

One of my favorite moments in movie history is when Spider-Man's uncle tells him, “with great power comes great responsibility.” I think that writers have great power and as such in our society, they have great responsibility. Part of that responsibility looks like knowing how to do the preparation work that you need in order to set your story free, and that's what's story design is. So I'm not asking you to be imprisoned by rules in this course. I'm asking you to be like a professional athlete who's willing to go and bench press and do the dumbbell curves even though at the end of the day they want to get in the pool and swim. Most professional athletes, when they know that they want to compete in the Olympic Games, they don't resist the process of going to the gym, and too often creatives just want to create. So this is the gym regimen that's going to get you ready, or if you want to think about it and compare it to the life of an artist, before you begin drawing your sketch to paint your painting, you need to sharpen your pencil. In this course we're going to not only learn how to sharpen the pencil, we’re not only going to learn how to sketch the sketch, we're going to encourage you through each step of the process so that in twenty days, not necessarily consecutive days, but twenty days, you know everything it takes to move your project from Fade In to Fade Out.

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