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.
Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts
Monday, September 3, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Random Thoughts
It's been in my mind recently just how reliable classical ideas of structure, drama, and beauty are. We still write drama with Aristotle in mind. When we think of the perfect human form, we often think of Greek sculpture. No matter how post-modern a building gets, its architect still probably worships at the temple of some basic rules about simplicity, proportion and symmetry that somebody worked out 3000 years ago.
What we often forget is that these beautiful sculptures and buildings were once painted gaudy colors. They were dramatic and, to our eyes, probably pretty tacky. It would be blasphemous to color in the robes and skin on an ancient Greek sculpture nowadays. But Greek sculptures as we know them would look unfinished to the very Greeks who made them.
Greek society embraced that riotous joy, that ecstatic worship, that mixture of pleasure, pain and truth, that makes art feel real. Bakhtin called this element the "carnivalic". It's basically the variable element -- the uncontrollable -- that has to be there to make a piece of art resonate with a viewer.
It's easy to see that kind of chaos as directly opposed to the clean lines and graceful economies of classical structure. By the time of Michelangelo, the paint had long since fallen off the sculptures, and the aesthetic itself had changed to one that highlighted the simpler grace of the stone. He didn't paint his sculpture of David.
But what if he had? Maybe we'd still be painting our statues. Our solemn, Greek-columned halls of government and industry might come in a variety of colors. And maybe we'd understand that those rules of aesthetics aren't the whole story. They're just HOW you tell the story. They're gorgeous, simple, and communicative -- no matter what you're communicating.
From a screenwriter's perspective, the filmmaker is painting the statue. Their artistic process is creation born of chaos -- or multiple chaoses. The actor's joy translates to meaning on screen. The DP's eye shapes the story, and makes it resonant. The editor finds a way to unify all the performances (the writer's, the director's, the actors') or to at least make them work together.
A screenplay is an unfinished work of art. Yes -- you have to 'finish' it. But we're just the first step in a long, collaborative process. Finishing means inspiring the next step. It means building a structure both stable and flexible enough to stand up to the chaos and joy and beauty that a whole team of filmmakers will bring to it. That's not an easy task. But we have some good teachers.
What we often forget is that these beautiful sculptures and buildings were once painted gaudy colors. They were dramatic and, to our eyes, probably pretty tacky. It would be blasphemous to color in the robes and skin on an ancient Greek sculpture nowadays. But Greek sculptures as we know them would look unfinished to the very Greeks who made them.
Greek society embraced that riotous joy, that ecstatic worship, that mixture of pleasure, pain and truth, that makes art feel real. Bakhtin called this element the "carnivalic". It's basically the variable element -- the uncontrollable -- that has to be there to make a piece of art resonate with a viewer.
It's easy to see that kind of chaos as directly opposed to the clean lines and graceful economies of classical structure. By the time of Michelangelo, the paint had long since fallen off the sculptures, and the aesthetic itself had changed to one that highlighted the simpler grace of the stone. He didn't paint his sculpture of David.
But what if he had? Maybe we'd still be painting our statues. Our solemn, Greek-columned halls of government and industry might come in a variety of colors. And maybe we'd understand that those rules of aesthetics aren't the whole story. They're just HOW you tell the story. They're gorgeous, simple, and communicative -- no matter what you're communicating.
From a screenwriter's perspective, the filmmaker is painting the statue. Their artistic process is creation born of chaos -- or multiple chaoses. The actor's joy translates to meaning on screen. The DP's eye shapes the story, and makes it resonant. The editor finds a way to unify all the performances (the writer's, the director's, the actors') or to at least make them work together.
A screenplay is an unfinished work of art. Yes -- you have to 'finish' it. But we're just the first step in a long, collaborative process. Finishing means inspiring the next step. It means building a structure both stable and flexible enough to stand up to the chaos and joy and beauty that a whole team of filmmakers will bring to it. That's not an easy task. But we have some good teachers.
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