Years ago, when I was still using a dumb phone, I stopped wearing my watch. It was a decision to use the clock on my phone and not have two things on my person for the same task.
The watch was left on my desk. Then a series of drawers. By the time I moved to Boston, it hadn’t seen the light of day for over a year. Being a watch with a solar battery, that lead to it having some issues. But it didn’t matter to me. I’ve gone through three cell phones since I stopped wearing the watch, and the upgrade to an iPhone hadn’t changed the belief that if I have something in my pocket that can tell the time, why do I need something on my wrist that only tells the time?
My wife sent my watch to be repaired for my birthday this year. I had almost forgotten about it. She told me that it was a nice watch and we should see if it could be fixed.
The thing that I hadn’t counted on was how different things had become since I first made the decision to stop wearing a watch. Now, my phone isn’t just a clock, phone, and source of text messages. It’s a portal to Twitter, Facebook, Tiny Wings, Instapaper, and the entire flipping internet. Checking the time easily becomes checking seven other things.
But you’ve probably heard that before. It’s trendy to give up on smart phones, or to nerf some of their features so that you don’t distract yourself. But that doesn’t say why I’m changing my mind about wearing my watch.
When I check the time on my phone, it’s a static digital readout of the hours and minutes of the day. It tells me that I am at one particular moment in time, and this is how I should orient my thinking.
When I look at the watch, I get the same information about what time it is, but I also see the second hand. I see motion. I see time moving forward, and I remember that I should be moving with it.
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly,” he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility.
Much like the study cited in the above quote, showing how much you’ve retained from your SAT prep work will not impress the reader of your script. It’s not about prose writing vs. screenwriting, or cluttering the page with unnecessary description, or slowing down the speed of the read.
It’s about showing that you are confident as a writer.
This isn’t an argument for writing simplistically. A screenplay should read well above a first grade level. Sometimes there is no better word for what you are trying to say than the complex, specific one. It’s important to be able to make the distinction and be able to know when to bring in those words out of necessity.
Writing plainly shows that you’re confident that your story is interesting and dynamic without having to pretty up the page with purple prose, that you are efficient and clear in your thoughts, and that you’re aware of how to best communicate what’s in your mind. You believe that your story, not your vocabulary, will convince the reader to take you seriously as a writer.
Picture your first draft as the Earth. Deep below the surface, there’s liquid magma, hidden from view. In editing your script, you drill down beneath the surface, looking to break through all the layers of character, plot, and visual imagery to get to that core.
That’s where the unifying ideas are. Once you’ve broken down into the core, you’re allowing that magma to rush up to the surface, passing through all the other layers. A strong core idea is already buried inside even the first draft of a script, and only by searching inside what’s already there can you find it.
Unlike the digging in this analogy, the actual act of searching for the core is about making new connections. Looking at ways that character, plot points, dialogue, etc. can connect to each other, and what lies behind those connections.
In this scene, Merida acts on her plan to win the archery competition, defeating her suitors and avoiding an arranged marriage.
This is not a movie about a princess who doesn’t want to get married, as many of the trailers made it appear to be. This is a movie whose core idea is about repairing a damaged relationship between a mother and daughter, and this idea comes across in all aspects of the scene.
First, there’s the content of the scene’s conflict. Yes, the archery contest decides who (or if) Merida will marry, but the tension of the scene is not based on if she is skilled enough to succeed. We have seen in previous scenes that she has a Gladwell-worthy amount of practice with her bow, and that it is a prized possession. We see that she has chosen this competition with the intent of winning it, and her confidence further suggests that the tension is not about if she can win, but if she will choose to win. Pushing the idea that this is about her choice to the fore front is where the tension in the scene actually comes from: Merida continuing to fire arrows as Elinor rushes toward her, telling her to stop.
There’s also the visual elements at play in the scene. In order to get the freedom of movement she needs to fire the arrows, Merida tears apart the seams of her dress. This is a dress that was put on her by her mother in a previous scene (in which Elinor ignored Merida’s complaints about how it was too tight). Not only is this dress a physical representation of Elinor’s control over Merida, but its tearing also represents Merida’s desires to escape from that control, even by careless, violent means.
This tearing of fabric to represent a damaged relationship is further strengthened in the next scene, where Merida slices through a tapestry of her family, cutting through the portion of the image where her and her mother are shown holding hands. This echo of the ripping fabric connects it to the core of the story about mending the relationship between Merida and Elinor.
There’s more that can be teased out of this scene. Consider how Merida and Elinor are together on the dais, but on opposite ends, separated by Fergus. When Merida chooses to transgress against the spirit of the competition and against her mother’s will, she disappears from the dais and moves away from her mother. As her mother tries to get her to stop, she moves closer to Merida, attempting to close the distance. Fergus himself is used as a battleground for the conflict between mother and daughter, as Elinor tries to keep Fergus from laughing at Merida’s jokes about the suitors.
This scene is one example of when a story’s core bubbles up through all the other aspects of the writing. There are strong connections between individual actions and details, all relating to a central idea. At the same time, these connections don’t all immediately draw attention to each other, as they’re grounded in character relationships and natural logistics. The core idea is there for the audience to discover, but not at the expense of leading them to stop paying attention to the dramatic action.
Keep those things in mind when looking for how to bring out the core of your own writing. Don’t just look for what best represents a theme, look for elements that are logistically and dramatically necessary to the plot, or that already exist as an aspect of the characters that can be focused on. Look for existing elements that have some kind of connection to each other or echo one another and find ways to make that stronger. Look for the foundation that already exists and build from there.
This is a play on the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha, making some alterations to suggest a way of looking at character and storytelling.
1. All protagonists suffer.
We don’t watch movies about people who are content unless those people are about to have their world shattered. The key here is content. A character can be happy or cheerful and still be suffering.
Content people don’t have inner drives leading them to action. They don’t have unfulfilled dreams that nag at them, searching for a form of expression. Content people eat breakfast, go to work, run errands, and maybe watch a little television.
Content people are boring. We will not pay $11 to sit in a theater and watch a person start watching American Idol, only to doze off because they had a big, satisfying dinner. We don’t set the DVR to record the full season of Jack Enjoys Reading In His Peaceful Backyard.
A protagonist shouldn’t be content. Something should be bothering them, large or small. But what, and why?
2. A protagonist’s suffering is caused by their desire.
They want something. Something specific. It could be to go on a date with their secret crush, land a big promotion, or get revenge by finding and murdering the person who killed their family. The status quo of their lives is different from what they wish it was.
But there is a limitation to what kind of desire a protagonist should have.
3. There is an end to the protagonist’s suffering.
There needs to be an end game. Under what conditions does the protagonist get the win? What does it look like for them to no longer suffer from their desire?
There are clear cut situations like winning a tournament or catching a criminal. There are less clear cut end game conditions that are no less real, like a character getting over a loss who learns to find happiness or love again. The key here is that there is either a definitive point where the character wins or loses, or the character at least believes there is a point where they will achieve their desire.
4. There is a way for the protagonist to end their suffering.
If the protagonist’s goal isn’t something concrete that they can achieve through their own effort, it’s not a story. Sure, they may have something that they want, and they may be suffering because of it, but you still need to fill 90+ minutes of screen time. There must be something that they can do to determine whether or not they succeed in achieving their desire.
Say your character wants to win the World Series. They can’t just wish it to be true. They have to train. They have to make sure their team works well together. They have to win games during the regular season. And let’s get specific. Say your protagonist is getting old. Their career should have been over last season. They’re also fighting their own body in order to achieve this goal.
This way of looking at storytelling taps in to something about how we, as humans, relate to stories. We all have desires. We all have things we wish were different. Tapping into that aspect of human nature can not only work to create more believable characters, but can make sure those characters have something to do.
I recently read a post from Mike Cane’s xBlog that re-posted an essay from 1922 titled “Why I Quit Being So Accomodating.” The essay included the following section:
“Surely, if life means anything at all, it means that each of us is entrusted with a certain irreplaceable fund of hours and weeks and years. To let anybody and everybody fritter that fund away is as if the trustee of an estate were to deposit the estate’s funds in a bank and issue check books to whoever applied.”
The tl;dr version of the article: Your time is precious and you should be selective to whom you offer it to, as you will never get this time back. Those who freely give away their time at the expense of their work do not respect their time and thus do not have their time respected by others.
There’s some generally solid, applicable advice in this column from almost a century ago, but there’s a specific aspect of this that is worth looking at for anybody who wants to call themself a writer, and what it means to make that distinction.
At the basic level, a writer is not about the external validation of their work (sold screenplays, published novels, paycheck, awards, etc.), but about the consistent effort to produce work. Do you sit down and put words together regularly? Are you working toward improving the quality of what you write? Great! That’s being a writer.
Cultivating the practice of writing requires effort and intention. Like the line from The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, “If you want to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Writers make the time to write, they don’t just talk about it. They do the work.
And sometimes it’s frustrating. A factor that keeps people who work hard at their writing from willingly identifying as a writer is thinking that all they write is crap. There’s a quote from Brian Eno I keep up in my workspace: “The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.”
Take your time seriously. Put the words on the page, even if they suck. Keep doing it, and they’ll suck less. They might even become good. But you can’t make it better until you’ve made it, and you can’t make it until you make the time.
This Builds Character 