Planning

Must be my week for epiphanies.

There are two types of epiphany (in my humble opinion) first there's the "OMG! Of course!" epiphany, then there's the "Oh." epiphany. The latter is when you realise you have been rather stupid.

I had an "Oh." epiphany on Friday.

It goes like this: I have written two quite good scripts (Monsters and Air) I have also, in the last year, written three not-so-good scripts (Unit X, Running and Tec). In the not-so-good ones the dialogue and action are still good (so I'm told by those that know), the premise was fine in each case but the structure just didn't quite work.

So one has to ask: why? Or more accurately: what changed between the first two and the last three? What did I do differently?

So I had a think and epiphanied.

There is a writer who goes by the name of Jeff Kitchen and I used to refer to his book "Writing a Great Movie" ad nauseum on this blog - because it is an excellent book. And don't be fooled by the title, it's not just for movies, it applies to TV, stageplays - pretty much any storytelling.

Even the book's introduction contains amazingly useful storytelling techniques.

The point about this book is it contains stuff that you can actually use, genuinely helpful ways to analyse your story and turn it into something even better. He starts off with Aristotle's analysis of drama, and goes on from there.

If you're the sort of person who objects when you think someone is dictating a screenwriting structure - well, so do I but I can see what works and what doesn't. Jeff Kitchen isn't a guru and doesn't dictate. He does describe what has been shown to be successful and effective story structure (Aristotle), but you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

But the proof of the pudding is always in the eating.

When I wrote Monsters and Air I used this book extensively (it's the only screenwriting book that I've ever kept with me, and kept re-reading). And those are good scripts. When I didn't use the book I ended up with not-so-good scripts.

It was arrogance, of course, I'd done two good scripts so I thought I knew what I was doing. Ha.

So yesterday I sat down with the planned web series, Winter, and started applying the various techniques from the book to it. One and a half hours later I had something that was essentially the same, but now had a much better structure and various ideas had been expanded.

Winter will be a 6 x 5min web series and requires that each episode ends on some sort of cliffhanger - just like the old cinema serials. And this needs to be integrated into the overall structure of the story - which still has to have (in Aristotlean terms) Dilemma, Crisis, Decision & Action and finally Resolution.

And using the techniques in the book I should be able to manage that without it looking contrived or "constructed".

And that's important.

---

What's on the turntable? "Phaedra" by Tangerine Dream from "Phaedra"

Patience, Prevarication and Planning

I originally entitled this blog "impatience, prevarication and planning" but I thought having three "P"s sounded cleverer.

I just got very excited because, stuck in Reading again this weekend as the launch of the website is only days away, I have been working on my next work.

This is not my "One Night in Paris" because I got some very poor feedback (the feedback was good, the opinions expressed were unpleasantly accurate) so it needs more time to ferment. Plus the fact my wife made a suggestion last week that suddenly turned the whole idea upside down and would make it super-cheap to produce. It needs fermentation or possibly extended composting.

So I'm working on Air. (snigger)

"Air" is the working title for my kids fantasy TV series -- as I'm still waiting for responses from all the agents and TV Companies that are reading Monsters.

Air is inspired by a 70s TV show called Sky (see what I did there, with the name) and while it has some similar concepts it's a very different tale. Sky was seriously scary but totally amazing, and had a profound effect on me.

But to the point of this blog (finally) I'm very impatient when it comes to writing because I really do just want to get in there and get some words down, let's face it I'm not going to write all 12 episodes, this is just a spec, so 30 pages is something I could just throw together. Right? Wrong. That would be fatal.

I sat down last week and got some ideas into a concrete form, tried to do some planning following the suggestions in Adrian Mead's little tome How to Make it as a Scriptwriter as I like to try things out. I also used the excellent Writing a Great Movie by Jeff Kitchen - don't be fooled, this book is excellent for all types of dramatic writing, and it's the only book on screenwriting that I come back to time and again and actually use as a reference.

All this meant I had to think about the protagonist's dilemma in detail, and then attempt to derive the theme from that. All good stuff, because getting a handle on theme can really provide a depth to what you're doing.

I did all this, wasn't really happy with what I'd produced and then the day job intervened for a week.

I got back to it this evening. Walking back from the day job allowed me some thinking time and I realised how I could structure the whole 12 episodes with overlapping 3-episode plotlines that would result in a sequence that would demand continued watching because so much would happen and keep on happening.

I probably didn't explain that very well, so here's a picture to paint a thousand words...

It's like writing 8 features, 2 x 60min and 2 x 30 min, except that obviously the A plots get more time than the B plots which get more than the C plots.

This might seem very formal but as I began to fill in what the storylines would actually be it all came together very nicely with each plot idea contributing to and complementing the others.

It's all very well saying that I'm going to only write a 30 minute episode but unless I know what's happening in the rest of the series in reasonable detail that episode will be shallow.

As I worked on the plot ideas another thing happened. The real reason I am very pleased with myself: The theme suddenly hit me. Something simple, easy for children (and adults) to identify with and something that has real emotional impact.

Oh yes, I'm a real smarty-pants.

---

What's on the turntable? "Live Bed Show" by Pulp from "Different Class". Jarvis Cocker is another great writer, his songs evoke real characters and tell definite stories.

Monsters outline

So I'm pretty much finished on Monsters for the Red Planet competition, there's one scene that needs a bit of modification because the technology doesn't match what happens in the scene after. No big.

My first 10 pages are honed to perfection and carefully edited to hit a cliffhangar at the bottom of page 10. What? Every trick in the book, I say. Bill Martell says you should try to get some sort of mystery or cliffhanger at the bottom of every page. Something to keep the reader reading.

What is big is the problem of the one page pitch. I am truly rubbish at this. My ideas are so big, there are so many interleaved plot-lines, there's so much background, that it's "impossible" to do a quick and easy outline.

So I went back to basics. Who's the protagonist and what is her story? I also recalled from somewhere that you should concentrate on the emotion and character, less on the actual events. So I wrote six episode titles, figured out that I could spare three lines per episode for the page and put together an outline. In addition I use Aristotle's Dilemma, Crisis, Decision/Action and Resolution principles in the outline so that it told the story. It worked pretty well.

I need to go back to it for some editing but it's not bad considering how bad I am at this. Just read David Bishop who also points out thrillers should be have thrilling pitch docs, comedies should have unny ones and so on. What does that mean if you have a Teen Sci-Fi Detective Action Thriller? Hm.

I also added a paragraph that mentioned that this was the journey of the protagonist and that there were major plotlines covering the other major characters.

---

What's on the turntable? "Magic Touch" by Mike Oldfield from "Islands", not his best work in my opinion but listenable.

A Writing Process #3: Making Drama out of Crisis

Last Friday I was on the train back home. I'd found a "standard" class seat that allowed me to use my computer (I usually have a problem where my portly form doesn't allow enough room) however, as it turned out I didn't use it. I was still at notebook level.

I'm working my way through some of the tools provided in Jeff Kitchen's screenwriting book "Writing a Great Movie", illustrating as I go. My new work-in-progress has the working title of "Running" and it may be set in Canada but the city is not too important at this stage.

In the last blog on this subject I looked at Aristotle's first principle of Dilemma. After that he observed that the situation becomes steadily worse until you reach Crisis where the Dilemma reaches breaking point, at roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through - the Second Turning Point of some gurus.

Looking at Back to the Future, the dilemma is that Marty must get back to the future (and now he's on a time limit) but he can't go back until he's fixed his parent's relationship. So where's the crisis? No idea, I'm making this up as I go along. Clearly it's at the "Enchantment under the Sea" dance. He kisses his mother ... that's not it ... Biff pulls her from the car ... his dad gets some backbone and floors Biff ... none of these things are Marty's Crisis. He must make them kiss, if they don't kiss he disappears in a puff of unsmoke. This is the Crisis, he's out of time and out of choices.

After Crisis, says Aristotle, comes Decision & Action. The protagonist has been squeezed by the dilemma and must make a decision and take action to deal with the crisis. Marty makes the band play by taking the place of their injured guitarist. They play and just as Marty is fading out his parents-to-be kiss.

At this point I have to mention a film that Jeff Kitchen mentions in passing on the subject of Crisis, Decision & Action: The Firm. The dilemma is that the protagonist is working for a firm of lawyers who work for the Mob. But the only way out is to betray client/lawyer confidence for which the protagonist would be disbarred (and the Mob would chase him down and kill him). Yet he can't stay. As you expect with a John Grisham story, the Decision and Action are tense and exciting while the final resolution is brilliant.

Finally there is Resolution. The Decision & Action don't completely solve the Crisis, they just handle the situation, the Resolution finishes off the Crisis for good.

So I went through my ideas for "Running" and applied these concepts to my protagonist, Rebecca. I had already analysed the dilemma so, using Jeff Kitchen's suggestions, I followed this through amplifying the dilemma, imagining ways that it could get worse and worse until it reached that Crisis point. Events that make the dilemma worse are the ways you fill up the second act while staying on track.

So I created a Crisis using these ideas, plus the earlier ideas I'd had, and from the Crisis comes Rebecca's Decision & Action and the final resolution of the whole situation.

The end result is that I now have a story, end to end. Some of my ideas have disappeared in the mix, while new ones have arisen. And there's a coherence to all the concepts which means that I won't be wandering off all over the place.

I have to say that I find a lot of this planning very tedious because I really want to get on with the writing, but all my experience tells me, and so does David Mamet, that the time and energy spent in re-writes is more usefully expended in planning. The more you prepare, the less rewriting you have to do.

---

What's on the turntable? "The Kids are Alright" by The Who from "The Ultimate Collection". It's all the fault of the CSI programmes, 40 Who tracks, lovely.

A Writing Process #2: Running with Aristotle

I have given my new work-in-progress the working title "Running", I always like to have a snappy title I can use to refer to things.

Although "Running" is intended to be a collaborative work I'm really liking the way it's shaping up and it'll be fine even if the company don't like the idea. (I'm all fired up and can't hang around for their response, the muse has grabbed me by the short and curlies and shoved me in front of the computer ... well, notepad in this case.)

Because of the way this story came about I'm working my way through Jeff Kitchen's writing tools from his "Writing a Great Movie" book. Yesterday I attacked with the 36 Dramatic Situations which began to give me a handle on character and relationships.

This evening I started reading through his introduction and came across his reference to Aristotle's "Unity of Action". This comes up in other guises when people talk about scenes, characters, dialogue, sequences and so on being irrelevant. The idea is that the work you create must have a "Unity of Action" every part of it must be part of the whole such that if you were to remove it it would damage the whole.

If something can be removed without affecting the whole then it's redundant and should be cut. (In "Une Nuit a Paris" I have a redundant character who's for the chop next draft.) But you can apply this rule right from the start, Jeff Kitchen expresses it as: "A Single Action; A Single Character; A Single Result".

But my conception of "Running" has two lead characters, I could break the rule but I've learned that my expertise is not yet sufficient. So I decide the protagonist will be Rebecca while her brother, John, can serve to express the next bit of plot construction.

Writing gurus often talk about things like "turning points" particularly in reference to the switch from Act 1 into Act 2. Aristotle doesn't. He has "Dilemma", the two lemmas. The best way to express it is the "damned if you do damned if you don't" situation.

Lots of screenwriting books use "Back to the Future" as a superb example of screenwriting craftsmanship. Jeff Kitchen doesn't, so I will to illustrate. If you take "turning point" as your move from Act 1 to Act 2 then most people would suggest that when Marty McFly goes back to 1955 that's the turning point, his world is upset. As Speilberg puts it his life's equilibrium is all messed up.

Of course he thinks that the Doc has been shot and he needs to get back to save him, but time is not an issue at this point, he has all the time in the world.

But that's not a dilemma. All he has to do is find the Doc and let him get the car running to send him back. Not easy, but not a huge challenge. But what happens shortly after? He screws up his own past such that though he must get back to the future, he can't until he fixes the relationship between his mother and father to be. Dilemma. Complicated by the fact that his mother wants (in the biblical sense) him.

A dilemma is also measured by its stakes: and in BttF the stakes couldn't be higher: If he fails then he ceases to exist.

So, I read through the use of Dilemma as a tool (which can be applied to an existing script as well as used when creating a new one) and applied it to Running. It's another brainstorming exercise identifying the dilemma and then working out all its ramifications.

As a result I've got a really good idea about the main character, Rebecca, and her dilemma (John will dramatise one side while she can express the other). And more plot ideas have been falling out into my lap. This is good stuff.

---

What's on the turntable? "Incantations Part Two" by Mike Oldfield from "Incantations". Part Two (and Part Four) feature Maddy Prior, the singer from the folk-rock band Steeleye Span (who also recently reformed - along with Pentangle - for their 40th anniversary tour).

I may have mentioned my fondness for 70s Prog Rock. This isn't really Prog Rock, it's something else. Mike Oldfield wanted to create "classical music" in a rock mode (a bit like the 70s/80s band Renaissance, only less "pop"). It's not "easy" music; he loves strange rhythmic patterns, and so do I.