Chasing Chickens Around the Yard

Brainstorming is one of the most rewarding processes for a screenwriter. There's something really exhilarating about free-associating, finding connections, and building drama out of a rough idea. You remember that your brilliant idea is connected to a whole world -- and that world brings life to your story.

Brainstorming is also a chaotic process. It can be very threatening to a writer. You follow a character's traits and the main action to its logical conclusion... and it doesn't work. Or the message changes. Or you start drifting into delicate territory. Or it starts sounding like that movie you really, really hate. Or the big one: suddenly you realize that all your work so far is for naught.

It's one thing to comfort yourself with the knowledge that you've merely written yourself up to the next stage of understanding around a story idea. You find your happy Zen place, and destroy the Mandala you've been working on for weeks.

Or, like the rest of us, you get that horrible feeling that you're spinning your wheels in mud. There's no traction in any of your plot points. You're stuck. And it's all crap.

It's way too easy to find yourself in that dark place where nothing really makes sense, or matters, or will even remotely appeal to Spielberg. That's when I like to throw my hands up and chase chickens in the yard.

Have you ever done this? You catch very few chickens. But there are two or three things you can do that will turn the task from an ordeal into an enjoyable experience.

1. Have a plan. If you run around randomly, you can be sure the chickens will too. You ARE spinning your wheels if you don't do some basic work to structure your process. I like to work with a rough set of guidelines around the three-act stucture. But what's more important is that you have a structure that gives you discipline.

2. Have a friend. It's much easier to catch chickens if you're not the only one in the yard. And if you're both working with the same strategy, you're gonna catch lots of chickens.

Having the basic beats of the three-act structure as a common language is very helpful indeed. Even when you reject a solution that the three-act structure points to, you're learning a lot about the script, and developing a better shared sense of the script with your collaborator.

3. Have fun. Be a kid. Follow your bliss. Play. An adult will wear themselves out chasing after chickens. A kid will have a blast, and be energized by the task. Brainstorming is the same way. You get more strong, organic solutions if you're losing yourself in the task. You get more entertaining plot points when you're entertaining yourself.

There's a reason we tell stories. The more connected you are to that, the more grounded you feel in your material.

Loglining

I'm still learning to blog. It's a hard format. Just about the only thing that works consistently is a concrete example. So here goes.

I've blogged before about the script that is presently kicking my ass. The main character is more or less me as a teenager. I've found a very strong mediation and genre choice so I'm sufficiently distanced from the material to actually let me subconscious get involved. I'm not going to describe it too directly, but the basic set up is a shy 15-year-old in a stand off with the U.S. Army.

For a fresh reader, what's appealing about this set up is the apparent mismatch. What's intriguing to a fresh reader is how I might make that mismatch work. What's not appealing is that I've set my main character against the U.S. Army in a script targeted at a mass market. The army is supposed to be the good guys.

How do I think about this issue? Logline.

For a long time I tried finessing small details, trying to show how the kid defending his fantasy world is in the right, and the army is in the wrong (but it's still okay for the guy buying the popcorn). I thought about changing the market, but that would require making it a much lower budget film. Couldn't make that work.

Meanwhile, the main issue for me as a writer was that the main character, who's supposed to be a screwed up, closeted, crypto-Christian adolescent who spends his days drawing pictures, was actually turning all Spielberg on me. Boring. Standard. Too easy.

Loglining (did I just create a verb?) helped me figure out the sympathy issue. The U.S. Army can open up the big guns, even on a 15-year-old, if they're defending us. All I have to do to make this set up work: the kid's playing offense, not defense. How do I keep him sympathetic? I don't want to describe my script online. It's enough to say that no one actually controls their fantasy world.

Maybe loglining is just as important as the logline itself. I've written at least fifty loglines for this script. I'll write fifty more before I'm done. I have no doubt it will teach me something about the script every time.

Revisiting a script.

I have a couple scripts slowly winding their way toward production. It's a lesson. I was hired for a rewrite on a gay love story. They wanted a psychological drama instead. And it's to be set in the U.S., and not Brazil. Then it got moved to Brazil for tax reasons. Then it got moved again. Then there was supposed to be a happy ending for the straight couple. And the whole gay love issue, which got pushed into the subtext, well, it was okay to use a bit more of that to turn up the tension. There's still another rewrite coming before it gets shot.

Sound awful? It isn't. If you're thinking about your settings and characters, you'll find more there than you ever will slogging through dialogue. And each of those changes, as drastic as they sound, is an opportunity to explore your characters, learn more about the set ups, and find more dramatic ways to bring your story to the screen. While writers naturally have a lot of "ownership" of their work, a screenwriter doesn't have the luxury of it the same way a novelist does. We're just the first step. And a good storyteller needs to be able to use the tools he has available.

I talked about one of those tools -- synopsis -- at length a few weeks back. Once you have that technique down, it's AMAZING how simply reworking the sentences to bring forward one aspect or another, or to brainstorm uses of new locations, can tell you more about the story than you knew existed before.

I'm adding a character to a different script for the same director now. He's got an exciting actress to play a part. She's good for investors in the first script, and adding her to the second is a smart strategy. I've learned enough at this stage that I'm thrilled at the opportunity to go back to my old work, find what needs work, and use the new tool I have wherever possible to make it better. I can't talk about the specifics too directly, but suffice it to say that she's a comic character, and everything the main bad guy envies. She'll be in a few scenes, tell a few jokes, and drive the bad guy to distraction. And it'll add exactly the kind of depth that the main character needs.

It's moments like this that make me glad to be a screenwriter...