Random Question #32

If your partner decided s/he wanted to look up an old ex and restart a platonic friendship, how would you respond to your partner?

“Playing With the Pieces” or “Why It Takes Me So Long”

I don’t like to outline. I used to, I may again, but not right now.

In school I outlined - we all did. I wrote 3 features this way, with each outline getting better and more detailed than the last. I would refine the outline first and then write. If an idea came to mind while I was writing, I would stop writing, add the scene to the outline, and then tweak the outline again and again before resuming writing. By the third feature, my process was disciplined and precise.

And completely lifeless.

It was actually a chore to complete that third feature. Part of this was because I was writing the script on spec for a producer (based on his idea) who bailed halfway through, but the other part was because the writing was so lifeless - all the “fun stuff” had been explored and laid out before, at the outline stage, so the writing itself felt like dictation. The script turned out okay I guess, but the process was an exercise in drudgery, without life or spark or energy. Without discovery.

So with my fourth feature I decided to try an experiment: I would take the 4 structural chunks of the script and only look at 1 at a time. I could outline, use index cards, anything I wanted, but I could only work on 30 pages at a time - thinking about anything beyond that 30-page unit was off limits until it was done and polished. To challenge myself, I consciously tried to write myself into a corner every 30 pages. And each section would end with an ambitious climax or cliffhanger, one which I had no idea how to top or get out of. It was great.

The good news is that this fourth feature ended up being Aftershocks, still the script I am most proud of. The bad news is it took 7 years to write. I honestly had no idea how to end the thing as I would set it down and then pick it back up months or even years later, letting it breathe as I worked on other scripts and other ideas in between. False starts and dead ends on the second and third acts took years. But once I figured them out… well, as I said, I’m pretty proud of it.

Something changed when I started writing Aftershocks: I started writing an idea that

Random Question #27

Have you ever been totally clueless that someone was in love with you?

Non-Random Question

How would you describe the direct experience of falling in love? What does the “falling” really, truly feel like? The actual physical experience, the “hot flashes” and “weightlessness” below. From Dead Guy (page 29):

[Note: Hooker is Pete's best friend, NOT a prostitute.]

                              HOOKER  
                Look, I know you guys love each
                other, but…                   
                        (he shakes his head)
                Are you seriously telling me that
                you will NEVER fall in love again?
                For the rest of your life? Is that
                what you’re saying?

                             PETE
                Yes.

                             HOOKER
                You’ll NEVER get that feeling
                again? That newness and the hot
                flashes and the, you know, feeling
                weightless, being lifted up out of
                yourself, like bunny hills on a
                roller coaster? You’re never gonna
                feel that again? You can’t turn
                that off, that’s just not how it
                works. Why would you want to,
                anyway? That feeling, like when you
                discover your new favorite song,
                that’s what life is…

     As he speaks, Hooker reaches under his seat, pulls out a
     record store bag full of new CDs, and shakes it for effect.

                             HOOKER (CONT’D)
                …being totally surprised. Finding
                your new favorite song and loving
                the hell out of it before you get
                to find another one. That’s what 
                life is.

                              PETE
                Your life, maybe.

                              HOOKER
                Damn straight.

It’s still way too long and speechy, but I think I’m getting closer. Suggestions? How would you describe it?

Why I Didn’t Love Sweeney Todd

Last time I mentioned my opinion that Sweeney Todd was a good movie, but not a great one. It is probably Tim Burton’s most accomplished film. I liked it, respected it, admired it… but I didn’t love it.

Why not? Just like with Steely Dan, I didn’t find anything there to get attached to emotionally. I didn’t fall in love. And because of that, the ending, while inevitable and satisfying and ironic, pretty much failed. Why? Because it didn’t feel tragic - it didn’t emotionally devastate me, and I doubt it devastated anyone else in the theater either.

And this time I think I have some answers why. They don’t unlock the writing secrets to emotional involvement or anything, but they are helpful (at least for me).

Sweeney Todd is an obsessive protagonist. His all-encompassing obsession to exact revenge is

“People Love Puzzles” and/or “Why Do I Love ‘House’?”

Stay with me:

My 2-year-old son has discovered puzzles in a big way. The kid is obsessed. What does he want when he gets home from daycare? The TV? Nope, puzzles. The other night he never ate dinner he was so busy - so determined - to put together his puzzles. And when he’s completed all his age 1-4 puzzles and all his brother’s age 5-8 puzzles he will take you by the hand and lead you into his room and command you to sit down and do a 150+ piece puzzle so he can watch.

People love puzzles. I myself am addicted to Soduko. But the most popular and addictive puzzles mankind has ever created are these: stories. There are “puzzle stories” (like Memento or Aftershocks), but this is not what I’m getting at, at least not yet. What I’m getting at is this: All stories are puzzles. The author gives us small, specific pieces, one at a time, and we put them together. Only then can we see the entire picture. We could get into all kinds of lengthy discussions about narratology and the fabula and the syuzhet here, but let’s keep it simple and just remember this: all stories are puzzles. And we are all serious addicts.

Now, one of the themes I’ve been thinking about on this blog is the idea of falling in love, and a story having something in it that the reader/viewer can make an emotional attachment to, fall in love with. Previous posts on this have brought up many questions with few answers, and this won’t be an exception. But let me ask you this: Why do you watch “House”?

“House” is one of my favorite shows on TV right now, possibly my favorite show (last night’s climax featured some very lazy writing, but that’s a different post…). I am in love with it. I Tivo it but I nearly always want to watch it that same night. If there’s not a new episode on (like last week), I get very bummed. And I’m not alone - it is a hugely successful show. Which is hilarious, because according to the rules of TV, it shouldn’t be. The main character is an anti-social drug addict and a royal jerk, where the protagonist in movies and TV shows is supposed to be a sympathetic hero. According to the rules of TV executives, there is little for us to like in the character. Respect, sure. But like? Would you hang out with the guy? Or love? And yet… the show is huge.

I have a vague idea of a theory about this: we don’t exactly sympathize with House, but I think we do identify with him (aren’t we all grumpy geniuses who just barely tolerate the rest of the world?). Maybe this distinction between sympathy and identification is meaningless, I don’t know. Maybe it is automatic that if you identify with someone, you necessarily sympathize with him. I don’t know and I don’t care - the thing is that we love a show with an “unsympathetic” character. We love the show. Why?

Here we have to remember the puzzle angle. Puzzles are very powerful. Every episode of “House” is a hospital mystery, a puzzle to be solved. And mystery shows have always been successful - think about how long “Murder She Wrote” was on the air. Or how the recent era of procedural shows - the “CSI”s and all the others - are mystery shows at their roots.

But I would argue that “House” is different. Very different. And I’m not just talking about our relationship to the protagonist, I am talking about the puzzle itself, the mystery. In conventional mystery stories, we follow the sleuth and watch as the clues get collected. We understand what the clues are and what they mean. We try to solve the mystery ourselves. We are active participants - not unlike watching a game show, yelling “Jeopardy” answers at the screen - and when Angela Lansbury revealed the killer at the end of every episode, we sighed “of course! I should have known it was the fiancee’s mother!”. But with “House,” unless you have a medical degree, you don’t have all the clues or all the information - in fact, you don’t have any of the information or any understanding of what the clues mean, really. I mean, how many times has House revealed the diagnosis and you sighed “of course! I should have known it was fulminating osteomyelitis!”?

So why do I love “House”? It’s so well-written. Yes, but WHAT about it is so well written? What specifically do we make an emotional attachment to? It can’t be the joy of the puzzle alone, can it? After all, there are plenty of puzzle stories which are cold, lifeless intellectual exercises that don’t grab us emotionally - what can I do to prevent my current scripts from becoming more of these? We respect House - but is respect enough to create an emotional bond? I doubt it. So what is the secret ingredient, and how do I write it? Watching some jerk put together a puzzle you can’t possibly assemble yourself - WHY is that so much fun?

The next time my 2-year-old takes me by the hand and leads me into his room and commands me to do a 150+ piece puzzle so he can watch, I’ll ask him. Tonight, maybe.

Random Question #17

The last time someone broke your heart, how long did it take you to get over it?

Random Question #15

Have you ever broken someone’s heart?

Miss South Carolina, YouTube, and You (And Me)

By now most of you have seen (or at least heard about) that infamous Miss South Carolina Teen USA clip over on YouTube. (If not, brace yourself.) Maybe you took it as further evidence that our youth today is dumbed-down and American Idol-ized, filled up with undeserved feelings of entitlement. Or maybe you saw it as a train wreck or a particularly grisly car accident you just couldn’t look away from. But you saw something in it - it has several million views.

But I’m not really interested about Miss South Carolina or about today’s youth - what I’m interested in is us, and why we watch this stuff. Because if we viewers followed the conventional wisdom of Hollywood, if we actually did what the screenwriting rules say we are supposed to do, we would change the channel as quickly as we could. But we don’t. We look. We slow down at car accidents. We watch YouTube clips like this and forward them to our friends. We don’t “change the channel” - we watch this stuff over and over and over.

Why? This goes back to a post from a while back about emotional attachment. Conventional screenwriting rules say that the viewer has to be invested in the character, has to identify emotionally with him and his struggles. This has to be clear and clean and unambiguous, and scripts in which the viewer and the character have any other kind of relationship are doomed.

Quote of the day

I don’t know which way anything will go because it’s all about the ideas that come that you fall in love with. In between things, there are no ideas — and then suddenly there’s the idea. If you fall in love with it, you know exactly what to do. Sometimes it can be surprising.

- David Lynch 2007