Truby Breakdowns
Watchmen
Revolutionary Road
Frost/Nixon
Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Four Christmases
Watchmen
Revolutionary Road
Frost/Nixon
Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Four Christmases
Can you tell us a little about your new book, The Anatomy of Story, how it came about and what sets it apart from other screenwriting books?
My main goal with the book was to revolutionize how storytelling is learned. For the last 30 years storytelling in film has been taught using techniques that don't work. So that's the first big difference: "Anatomy of Story" is not based on these old techniques, referred to generally as 3-act structure. In my opinion, 3-act is mechanical storytelling, and it's for beginners only. It does not work at the professional level.
My book and screenwriting class are based on the idea that professionals use fundamentally different techniques than everyone else. Anatomy of Story has over 300 professional techniques, the most important being the 22 building blocks of every great story, on which the entire plot chapter is based.
You say character must drive the plot instead of being pushed around by the plot. But don't you think everyday life pushes us around most of the time? In order for the audience to recognize itself in the story, shouldn't the story talk about that too?
This phrase is often misunderstood. Driving the plot doesn't mean a hero who takes all the action steps to succeed. Only the most action-oriented character does that. And it makes for a poor story because it means the opposition is doing very little to knock the hero off course. Result: no conflict and bad drama.
Making the hero drive the plot means that the plot comes out of the weakness and need of the hero. This way, the hero's surface actions while going after some kind of goal lead ultimately to character change within the hero. If the writer doesn't make this connection between character and plot, and come up with plot beats that will ultimately force that character change, the story has no personal meaning for the audience.
In a good story the opponent will push the hero around a great deal, in fact, the more the better. This builds conflict and forces the hero to dig deeper to fix the great weakness that's ruining the hero's life.
There seem to be many writers who believe you can write a good first draft by diving into the screenplay and creating the story as you go. Others suggest laying out the entire story and structure before starting on the first draft. If the result is comparable, what is the difference?
The results are not comparable. The first way you write yourself into a dead end about 20-30 pages in. It is practically inevitable and is one of the marks of an amateur. The second way you figure out the story structure and then each scene you write is moving you along the right structural path to where you want the story to go.
Ironically, the second way is also a lot more creative than the first, because you have a scaffold on which you can take creative chances because you know your structure is there to tell you if the creative jump isn't going to work.
In your script doctoring experience, what are the most common mistakes writers make?
Let me give you ten.
1. The story idea they come up with is not original.
2. Writers often use the wrong genre to develop the idea, or they impose a lot of pre-determined genre beats onto the idea instead of finding events that are original to the idea.
3. They think a blockbuster movie script is all about finding the high concept premise. But they don't know how to extend the premise, from the two or three scenes the high concept suggests to them to a 100-page script.
4. They don't know how to hang the story on the 7 major story structure steps, so the plot doesn't come from the character and the main character doesn't change.
5. They think of the hero as a separate individual with a list of superficial character traits. Instead they should think of the hero as part of a web of characters, each character structurally different from the others.
6. They try to create their plot using 3-act structure, which doesn't work and causes a weak middle, instead of using the 22 building blocks of every great story that builds the plot steadily from beginning to end.
7. They fail to give their hero a moral as well as an emotional weakness at the beginning of the story.
8. They don't know how to create the story world or how to connect it to the hero.
9. They think the story is carried in the dialogue, or they force the dialogue to do the work that structure should do.
Finally: They don't know that rewriting is a set of skills, just like plot and character. So they rewrite in the wrong order, and their second draft is invariably worse than their first.
None of these is a simple mistake that can be fixed easily. To overcome them you have to master story structure and you have to use a detailed professional writing process. That's why I wrote the Anatomy of Story and why I teach my class.
During the writing process itself, it's difficult to keep the entire script in mind while working on one isolated section. How can you stay in control of such a vast and complicated document when you can really only see one page of your computer screen at a time?
That's another place where the 7 key steps is so helpful. The 7 key story structure steps are one of the first things I teach in my class. These 7 steps are your story in miniature and they allow you to keep huge amounts of material organized in your head while you write. It's an amazing tool.
So for example, when I teach dialogue and scene construction in the class, I explain that the first step in writing a scene is to find its place on the character arc, which is the 7 steps. That way you're writing each scene with the ultimate endpoint of the story in mind.
In your experience, what are the most important story or script considerations to getting a script sold to, or produced by, a major studio?
Very simple. Every major studio is looking for only one thing: a script with blockbuster potential. They need to be able to sell to the biggest market possible, which is worldwide. And that leads to a key point: a script with blockbuster potential does not come from a movie star or special effects, which is what most people think. These blockbuster elements are in the script, in the story structure. For example, in blockbuster films the hero has a clear desire line, which gives the story the strong narrative drive that audiences love.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you see in the producer-writer relationship?
The biggest mistake is that the producer doesn't understand story structure so they give the writer vague or surface comments. For example, they'll say "this character seems flat," or "make the script funnier." As a result, the writer has to guess at what's really wrong and they can't make the deep structure fixes that really improve the script.
That's why I argue that it is so important for producers as well as writers to take my class. The producer and the writer need to be talking the same structural language to produce a great script.
When it takes so long to produce a film, is there any use in trying to predict the market when starting out on a new script?
You never want to predict the market. Never. You will always fail.
Instead what you have to do first of all is write a story idea that you love and that's original. And second you have to use a genre that you have mastered to develop the idea.
That's why I put so much emphasis on genre in my classes. Because the genre you use and whether you execute it in an original way is the single biggest determinant of the success of your script.
With continuous development of new medias - Internet, videogames, mobile phones, etc. - how do you see the future for storytellers? Do they have to change the way they conceive of stories?
Absolutely. One of the big mistakes that entertainment companies have made is to take film stories and "re-purpose" them for video games, internet and so on. This doesn't work because these are not just different forms of distribution. They are entirely different story mediums.
That means that storytellers have to come up with new stories that are right for each new medium. My goal is not to tell writers how to write great stories simply for film or television. My goal is to help writers become master storytellers so they can write well for any medium they choose, including the new ones that they will help to invent.
You tell screenwriters to forget the so-called 3-act structure, that it's a myth. Why? 100 % of books about writing I read talk about the 3-act structure as a fundamental principle. This seems like an incredible assertion to a lot of people.
In the early 80s, a script analyst - not a writer - tried to come up with a theory of scriptwriting. Unfortunately it was a disaster. Yet everyone called it a magic bullet, because it promised that anyone could write a hit movie without any pain.
It was called the "3-act structure", and it said that every script has 3 acts, with a plot point on page 27 and a plot point on page 87. Everyone thought, "That's easy. I can do that."
What most people don't realize is that 3-act structure doesn't really exist. It's totally arbitrary. There is no act break in your story. It has been imposed from the outside, and it comes from theater where we have to open and close a curtain. Movies are far more fluid than that, so it makes no sense to hold them back with a rigid, mechanical form.
Sure, you can divide anything into three parts (or four or five or eight parts). But this simplistic division gives your script a very clumsy, one-size-fits-all quality. That's especially dangerous in professional screenwriting where the biggest reason scripts are turned down is because they are derivative.
The result of 3-act structure is that thousands of people have been trained to write generic, superficial scripts that are guaranteed to fail. And the writers, who blame themselves, rather than the bad method they are using, eventually give up in frustration. The bottom line is, 3-act structure is for beginners, not professionals.
I believe writers who want to work professionally need a new way of looking at story, based on what I call deep structure. Deep structure involves a whole set of tools that let writers track how a character develops emotionally and morally by taking actions to defeat an opponent. And the most important of these tools is the 22 Building Blocks of every great story.
Notice 3-act uses terms like "act" and "plot point" that seem to be more precise and more technical than the old, classical terms like climax, resolution and progressive complications. In fact, these terms are just as esoteric, phony and useless as before.
