Back to Basics

Congratulations, you have an outline!

Not satisfied? Don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time to improve on the basic building blocks you articulated yesterday. While it might be tempting to move straight on to step outline (we’ll talk more about that in the coming days), I want us to pause and think of ways to elevate your story. There are countless ways your outline can be made better at this point in the game—and if you work on eliminating problems now, or making it stronger, you’ll save a great deal of time later. Remember the golden rule: All good writing is rewriting. And in this case, great story design is redesign, tweaking, and trying out other possibilities. (The team at Work & Co, a design company based in Brooklyn, once told me they went through close to two thousand iterations and tweaks before finalizing their famous redesign of the Virgin America website in 2014. I want you to think of your screenplay as a product, and I want you to give that product design as much attention as it deserves and requires to see the light of day and be marketable, so that it gets made into a movie, reaches the public, and achieves box office success.)                   

In order to be highly marketable, your story needs to be based on a big idea that is unique, appeals to a wide audience, and can be distilled down to a single logline that allows you to picture the whole movie.                  

Chances are, at this point, your story—and even your big idea—is too complex. Let’s work on refining them. Think about how to reduce your outline down to a simple, elegant structure. The more simple the backbone, the better the story. And the easier it will be for you to keep it on spine. If you’re dissatisfied with the building blocks you prepared yesterday, this is a great opportunity to rethink them before you get further invested. Keep in mind that it’s absolutely fine to throw them away and start with something new if a unique, appealing and simple idea emerges over the course of your work today. Too many people worry about troubleshooting when the script is completely drafted. By then, you’re so emotionally invested in the project after hours and hours of work—possibly spread over years—you cannot see the forest for the trees. Today, we’re going to play around with your concept and decide if you want to refine it, revise it, or throw it out in favor of something better.                  

First, let’s discuss how you go about constructing your logline. The logline is a brief summary of your movie. It should be evocative. After reading the logline, a reader or producer should be able to envision the plot of the whole movie. It should also be simple and focus on the protagonist. You’ll want to indicate what the protagonist is seeking to accomplish and the struggles she must face to get there. There’s no cookie-cutter format your logline needs to follow, as long as all the aforementioned elements are present—all of this in a single sentence (or two at the most). For example, a possible logline for FINDING NEMO might be: “When his son is kidnapped, Marlin, an anxious clownfish, struggles to overcome his fear of the unknown and braves the wide ocean and all its dangers to rescue him.”

[See Exercises 19-20 at the end of this chapter to create your logline.]       

You get the idea. There are as many combinations as you’re willing to explore. This is one of the truly fun things about writing. Andrew Stanton (FINDING NEMO) could have written a story about a human father who loses his son on the playground outside his apartment. Perhaps, even, that father lost his wife five years earlier in a tragic accident. Maybe his son gets abducted from the playground by the mafia as an act of retaliation because the father is an attorney who just sentenced a major crime boss to prison…the possibilities are endless. Instead, Stanton opted for a fish and opened up an opportunity to explore the marvels of life under the ocean. What if Marlin and Nemo had been chimps? What if they were starfish? See what I mean?

Now that you’ve settled on a logline draft, it’s always a good idea to return to some character basics, too.

When asked what convinces him to say yes to a project, Robert Duvall told a packed ballroom at South by Southwest Film in 2014: “The character.” It’s that simple. When it comes to great movies, he added, “The pickings get a little bit scarce.” And when it comes to great movies with insanely great characters, the options are even scarcer.

Michael Arndt told me something similar a few years earlier: There’s no market for a bad script, but great scripts are in high demand. That’s partly due to the fact that writing for television, film or novels is all about quality and mastering the craft. It takes time, dedication and a whole lot of patience and humility. You’re going to need great characters to create a strong emotional connection with your audience.

When I was four, my dad read Tolkien to me every night. It’s difficult to remember much about that time in my life. Aside from the theft of my bouncy toy from our apartment in Cholet, France, I mostly recall the stories. More specifically, I remember memorable character moments. One of the earliest of these is Tolkien’s Black Rider chasing Frodo and Sam as they leave the Shire. I remember exactly where I was—propped up in bed, tucked in beside my brother with my constant companion, a blanket named Picker. Jonathan held on to his teddy bear, Ben, who by now had an over-extended neck due to being clutched around the throat on a regular basis. The right side of the bed touched up against the wall and our father sat to our left.

I recall listening to the moment when Frodo and Sam hide beneath an outcrop at the side of the road. The Rider dismounts, breathes hoarsely…and sniffs. Bugs swarm all over the ground. I imagined Frodo and Sam’s hearts pounding in fear. And the Rider sniffs, trying to catch their scent. (I held my breath until the Ring Wraith got back on his horse and rode off.)

As my dad read to me, I was intrigued just as much by what Tolkien put into words as he left to my imagination. I had experienced what Roland Barthes refers to as a “writerly text” (texte scriptible)—one that invites the reader to participate, at least to some degree through an active act of imagination, in the writing of the story. In contrast, the “readerly text” (or texte lisible) washes over us, to be consumed as is. By inviting me to co-create with him, Tolkien had caught me up in the emotional core of the story. I understood that the quest to destroy the ring was dangerous; the very lives of Frodo and Sam were at risk. Without the Rider, without his cloak and hollowness, without his quirky, distinctive sniff, I may not have carried that experience with me for over thirty years. The ominous Black Rider precipitated my emotional connection to the story and made the protagonist’s jeopardy overwhelmingly real.

That, in a nutshell, is why character matters. Empower the reader’s imagination and your characters will take on a life of their own. That said, I’d like to offer a few words of caution. Bringing a character to life is a balancing act. On one hand, you’ll have to do a lot of invisible background work. Who is your protagonist? What does she do for a living? How is her family life? How did she grow up? How does she relate to other people? We’ve already considered these kinds of questions in previous chapters. That’s what we call backstory.

Before actually writing your script, you’ll need a keen sense of how your principle character and also the antagonist got to where they are when the story begins. As we say in Ireland, they didn’t just float up the Liffey in a bubble. Thus, they shouldn’t act as though they did. Prior to showing up in your story, all of the characters had lives, experiences, fears and motivations that made them who they are now. Something got them to this point…at this time…in this place. This brings us to the why.

More important than the physical description of your character and of her world is the why: Why is she the way she is? Why did she get to this place? Why does she relate as she does to others? Learn to think in terms of why rather than what and you’ll learn to reveal the nuances of your character through action instead of wordy dialogue and exposition. A great character never reveals too much about herself through dialogue. Nor should she encounter the people she sees on a regular basis as though she’s meeting them for the first time. As a writer, you have to balance what you know about the character with what you ought to reveal. Introducing a great character is like dating. You have to retain just enough mystery to keep the audience engaged.

If you’re doing your job right and spending lots of time with the character, you’ll eventually face the reality that she’s going to grow up, get a mind of her own, and start doing things you never for a moment anticipated. Just go with it. Once your character breathes and lives of her own accord, your job, as William Faulkner put it, is to run around behind her and write down what she does.

Creating great characters isn’t about control. It’s about groundwork, research, and allowing them room to breathe. If you do a good job in developing the characters in your movie, novel or stage play, there will come a point that they’ll surprise you.

© SJ Murray, 2018