Energise!

I did go to the London Screenwriters Festival and it was good. Very good. I almost didn't go, I'm very glad I did.

But that's not what this blog is about.

It's about something screenwriters talk about in relation to scripts but something I have never seen defined: "Script energy".

This came to mind because of John August and Craig Mazin's podcast this week. You can listen here, the relevant bit is around 33 minutes - but why not listen to it all?

[Of course, it was a risk writing this before I finished listening to the podcast and, of course, they carried on and said much of what I wrote here, but less pedantically. But what the hell. I'll leave it, it was still my realisation, at the time.]

So "energy": Craig is talking about scenes ending with an energy that propels the viewer forward. But what is this energy? Just saying "your script lacks energy" or "this scene lacks energy" is unhelpful. Am I supposed to fry it with 20,000 volts? Okay, disingenuous, but still. What. Is. It?

So I applied some of the old mind power. And this is what I came up with, you may feel differently.

When talking about this energy we're actually talking about the viewer's reaction. It's not actually energy in the script, it's the energy the script generates in the viewer. I got a grip on it by looking at a scene which lacks energy (a metaphorical scene, not a real one):

Let's say someone watches this metaphorical scene, and at the end of it they sigh and say "so what?" The scene engenders nothing in the viewer, or rather it engenders boredom, disinterest. An emotional state of nothing much really. That scene has no energy.

A scene that brings about any emotional state reaction is a scene that has energy. But that's not all of it.

A scene could of itself be complete, it could start somewhere, cause an emotion and then complete. It still wouldn't have the energy we're really talking about because at the end of it there is no impetus to continue. The viewer could just stop and be satisfied. And we don't want that. (Want to know a reason why you get out of a scene as early as possible - that.)

What we want is the viewer to cry out "What happens next???!!!" They want to know, they must know what happens next. They cannot stop watching they have to know.

And, in my view, that is the energy, it's the desire to keep going, keep watching, keep listening, to stick with it because they have to know. (In horror it's a kind of negative: they have to know, but they really don't want to, but they have to...)

'Nuff said.

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What's on the turntable? "BWV 1004 Chaconne by Bach" by Steve Hackett from "Tribute to Bach"

Nobody wants to be a loser

What happens when you're identifying with a character in a story? You become that character, depending on the skill of the author.

You have to have some appreciation of what it's like to be that character. That's why deeper themes have more resonance, concepts like happy and sad are fundamental to human nature so if a character is happy or sad for an understandable reason you can identify, even if you've never been in a situation like theirs.

But that's only the start of it.

The character's dreams become your dreams (to a greater or lesser extent, it's all subjective, naturally), their aspirations become yours, their decisions are your decisions. You have to agree that what they're doing is logical - otherwise the story is lost to you.

(As a side note, although identifying with the protagonist is the main activity we also identify to some extent with all the others too. Any character behaving "out of character" is spotted immediately - how could you do that if you didn't identify with them too?)

So the protagonist must, within his realm, be successful. Nobody likes to be a loser, so you can't make your protagonist into an unredeemed loser - unless it's a comedy, but even then they have their little successes. Frasier Crane was a wonderful loser - but even he came out on top occasionally.

But people do like to be a hero, even if it's only a minor hero. They don't have to save the world but saving something is good. And it's better if it's not just themselves, because this world involves other people and (apart from a small minority) everybody wants to help if they can.

In a story where stupid people are getting systematically slaughtered by something very unpleasant, being given no other choice, the viewer will identify with the murderer - because at least that character is succeeding at something.

Nobody wants to be a loser.

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What's on the turntable? "Soil Festivities (Movement 4)" by Vangelis

Cutting scenes

I mentioned recently somewhere (might have been this blog, might have been an email to someone - it all becomes a blur) that I like cutting abruptly between scenes. I take the principle of "enter late-exit early" as far as I can. And like to contrast scenes where possible.

This relates to the idea of audience "contribution", which is to say that you have to let the viewer / reader / whatever, fill in the gaps. You make a point of not showing everything. That's what subtext is about - the audience interprets what they hear. Sometimes you leave out entire characters (like "She who must be obeyed" from the Rumpole stories - the main character's wife who never appears). The audience creates the character in their own heads.

By entering late and exiting early you make the audience construct what came before and after in their heads - and that pulls them in tighter to the story. They are no longer a spectator, they are a co-creator. Of course it is a balancing act, and different people can create to different degrees of ability which is why people appreciate different things and different types of storytelling.

Although I've always done the scene-cutting thing fairly naturally, it was this article that showed I was on the right track. I tend to be analytical and try to reduce principles to their fundamentals. So if someone says "subtext" and someone else says "enter late-exit early", I do some thinking and ask questions like "are these things related?" and "what's actually going on here?" and then you get something interesting like the commonalities between those principles.

Thenyou test your theory by applying it to other aspects of screenwriting and say "well, does this principle of leaving stuff out so the audience puts it in apply to any other part?" And you might arbitrarily choose "Sound", are there any examples where sound is deliberately left out and the audience puts it in? Certainly. I've certainly seen one film where the sound of someone screaming was deliberately omitted (cinematically justified by having them behind glass). And I know I put that scream in.

And so on.

Anyway I was reading a posting on the Artful Writer - interesting forums though very firmly Hollywood oriented - where someone was discussing montages and someone else pops explaining that Sergei Eisenstein (Director, Battleship Potemkin) had analysed and categorised montages in the 20s.

One of his fundamental principles was that the cutting between images could be used to create conflict and that, of course, is the essence of drama. And you only need to watch Battleship Potemkin to see that theory in practice. He wasn't wrong. And it's another aspect to how as a writer we should consider how our scenes are cut, individually and one to the next.

One of the posters on Artful Writer didn't think that understanding how to edit sequences for the best emotional response was relevant to a writer - that's the editor's job isn't it?

It's relevant because our scripts have to make an impact on the reader (and ultimately the viewer). If we can achieve an Eisenstienian (as opposed to Einsteinium which is a radioactive transuranic element) quality in our writing then we will have a more powerful emotional effect on the reader, and hence stand a far better chance of going further and doing better.

Which has to be a good thing.

In other news

The Boy will be on Bamzooki! Excellent. Apparently they were very impressed with him. (Most people are.) The new series has a new style which requires them to be better in front of the camera, depending on what happens he could be there for just a day or possibly five days. Filming in September.

The Daughter received her Cosplay that she ordered from Hong Kong. Everyone heaves a sigh of relief. They required detailed measurements and it's really well-made. Of course, HK is where you can get a proper tailored suit in 24 hours so we shouldn't be too surprised but considering we ordered it less than two weeks ago, we're impressed. It looks like this.

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What's on the turntable? "I could give you (a mirror)" by the Eurythmics from "Sweet Dreams"

Narrativitus Interruptus

I'm on the train. Virgin Trains have finally got their act together with wireless internet - over a year behind National Express.

I have been writing but I just realised something.

You have to make stories interesting. Mustn't bore the reader. Raymond Chandler said "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

The way I keep things interesting is that when I feel a piece of narrative is on the verge of going on too long, I have something happen to redirect the narrative. It might be a change of scene, it might be something in the scene. But I just make sure it changes.

On the advice that "Come in late, leave early" on scenes, I always, always, always cut a scene back to before it can even logically end, just a tiny bit. The reader/viewer can fill in the rest and, per the other wisdom that "script momentum is what you don't write", that seems good technique.

Back to the script...

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What's on the turntable? None, I'm in the Quiet Carriage.

Stress bunny

It's been over a week since my last confession ... oh, no, sorry, I'm not Catholic.

I've been busy both with writing and day job.

How can I describe my day job? Easy, programming, I'm part of a team that's on a Government project that's probably worth a few million pounds (not Defence, I don't think I'd do defence work unless I had no other choice ... and then I'd just starve instead). And on said project there is one part of it which is utterly fundamental to the proper functioning of the entire website.

Guess who's doing the bit that absolutely must work first time? That would be me. Millions of pounds, the jobs of a hundred people or more, the future of every schoolchild in the country (sort of). And me.

Hence a bit of stress. I have been rather under the weather for the last two weeks but I'm feeling better now so I thought I'd bring you up to speed on the writing.

The Blockbuster project is dead. I decide to kill it. I may come back to it if I start making something of this screenwriting career.

The Bohemian project is due on Saturday. I spent some time plotting out, as I partially covered a couple of blogs ago. I'm not doing the Jeff Kitchen follow-up yet because I really need to have his book beside me to get it right.

However I used his technique called "Sequence Proposition Plot" to ensure that my story had a solid spine, and so wrote a treatment for it. Then I used the same technique (which is totally scalable from an entire TV series [or bigger] down to an individual scene) to ensure that the scene that I have to write as a sample is also solid with a good beginning, middle and end.

I'm pretty pleased with both.

Living here in Reading, apart from giving me TV-free evenings in which I can write a lot, gives me half an hour each morning and evening as I walk to and from work, in which I can plot and plan.

Which means that the next thing on the agenda, the BBC's Sharps competition, is at the "thinking about while walking" stage. So far I have nailed the setting which has to be based on "The Nation's Health" in some way (not necessarily a doctor thing -- mine isn't), and I've got some characters but I haven't got a plot.

Sharps is only 30 minutes, and it's not comedy. So we have that weird thing: a half hour drama. I have trouble thinking that short, my ideas tend to be very big. I've got 2 weeks and it has to be sent as hardcopy.

So that's where I stand at the moment. Next time I might tell you about my involvement in the movie Hotel Caledonia, looks like it's finally going to happen. Development hell is aptly named.

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What's on the turntable? "All Neon Like" by Bjork from "Homogenic" (a little while ago it was 'Joga' which is an utterly beautiful track, I could play it repeatedly, forever)

How to write a feature

Or, more accurately, how I write a feature. Specifically the Bohemian Project which I now have two weeks to write a treatment. If you're not sure what a treatment is sexy Blogette Lucy has explained over here.

To write a script you start with an idea. The idea might your own, or it might be something you're told to write about (as in the Bohemian project). Either way, it's the spark, the starting point.

What then? Plot or Character? Which is most important? What do you work out first?

That depends mostly on what your idea is. Ideas are usually ideas for a character or ideas for a plot. For "Une Nuit a Paris" I had a setting and concepts suggested by a song. So I thought about a plot, and characters that would fit that plot: What if a man is on his stag night in Paris and falls in love with a prostitute? Which led me to the character of the man, and the prostitute, thence the wife, the brother, the brothel madam, her son, the other prositutes and the antagonist.

For the Bohemian Project I had to use certain fictional characters, and the request was for a "character piece" not CGI action, something that will achieve critical acclaim. Plus it had to be written for specific actors.

But these characters require a certain type of plot. I researched, got some ideas, and started building a plot that would create the necessary interactions to make this a character piece while still representing the fictional characters.

But there's only just so far that this can take you, somewhere you have to start getting into the nitty gritty of the plot structure, scenes and so on. At this point you would have a good idea of the characters you're using, not necessarily all the details but a decent concept. You'll also have a pretty good idea of how the plot's going to work.

So when I reached this point with the Bohemian Project (this afternoon) I used a trick that paid dividends on the Blockbuster Project (although I didn't use it for Une Nuit a Paris) and it looks like this:

Name of character:
External conflict:
Internal conflict:
Fatal flaw:
Key scenes: (a) (b) (c)

You don't need any kind of fancy form, you can just write them down on a sheet of paper, 7 lines for each character. I'm not sure where I got all this from, certainly not one source, it works for me.

Drama is based around conflict, no conflict = no drama. The "External conflict" is the obvious thing that a character is trying to achieve which is being prevented by something/someone else. The "Internal conflict"and "Fatal flaw" go together, for example a character might have a fatal flaw of being unwilling to work with anyone else, but must work with someone else to solve their problem so, to overcome their internal conflict, they must overcome their fatal flaw. Ideally the fatal flaw/internal conflict should also relate to the external conflict. Bring them together.

A secret agent who always works alone, who cannot work with another because of their fear of bringing harm and because they've been betrayed in the past, is in a situation where they must depend on someone else in order to succeed and save world.

So what about key scenes? Think of three key scenes which exemplify the start condition, the point where things change internally, and where the character has reached their final emotional destination.

You do this for the protagonist, the protagonist's friends, the antagonist and the antagonist's cohorts. Of course possibly either the protagonist or the antagonist might not reach their end point because of the plot, just fill in what you can.

How many main characters have you got? For the Bohemian project I have four. Three key scenes each (oh yes, I make sure there is no overlap of key scenes, that's cheating) = 12 scenes, each of which is, say, 4 minutes long = 48 minutes. I've already written half the movie. (It might be suggested that 4 minutes is too long for a scene nowadays, but these are key scenes, with emotion and action.)

So that's my first step, in the next blog on this I'll go into how I use Jeff Kitchen's "Proposition, Sequence, Plot" to build action.

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What's on the turntable? "Under the Ivy" by Kate Bush from "Hounds of Love" (extended CD)