Finishing with Symmetry

For me, good screenwriting is largely a question of modeling complexity effectively. Good characters are complex. They have a depth and a resonance to them. But they arise out of two simple traits -- a misbehavior or flaw, and a goal or desire. It's not that those two completely define the character. It's that those two give the audience access to the rest of the character.

Take a good conceit, also known as a strategy for unity. It's what gives a script its 'thingness', its identity. How do you know you're watching Wall-E or Jaws? There's a key concept that permeates every good script that gives it uniqueness. It's present at virtually any moment in the story, but it's not the story. It gives the audience access to the story. For that matter, it gives the WRITER access to the story. It helps you find the tale. It tells you where it is, or what it might be, rather that what's right or wrong. You find association and affinity with a story through a well-derived conceit. You go beyond the fact of the matter and find a dynamic with your conceit.

Plot is no different. Screenwriters plot and plot (or plod and plod) through synopses and loglines and treatments before actually tackling a script. There's a reason for it. For one, it's actually less work in the long run, because you work out most of your problems on a single page rather than in 120. Second, it lets you know what's important. It helps you find the unity.

But then, sooner or later, you actually start to write. Now, if you've worked out most of what's happening, it's relatively smooth. But small problems and shifts inevitably occur. There is no science here. It's like ironing a shirt or laying down a piece of carpet. You roll out one small wrinkle, but it never quite makes it all the way out. As soon as you think it's gone, it's popped up on the other side. You attack and attack, but that wrinkle just moves around to wherever you aren't paying attention.

I'm drafting a story now with this problem. In my synopsis, I let a little girl eavesdrop on an adult conversation. When I got to the scene, she ended up on the wrong side of a car door. No big deal, you think. But of course, she doesn't know what happens inside the car anymore. Which affects the next beat, which affects the beat beyond that, and so on.

You might try solving the problem by putting the little girl in the car. No big deal, right? You've papered over the crack, and saved yourself an awful lot of work. You go onto the next beat. Everything seems fine. You aren't quite as sold on how the whole thing fits together as you might be. But it works. And you write another beat. And you wonder if maybe you need to rethink the misbehaviors a bit. This, of course, means you stare at the ceiling for at least an afternoon. And then your thirty pages down, and the little girl and the old man have to steal a car. And there's absolutely no way to make it work. They just wouldn't do it. They wouldn't think about it. They aren't that crafty or resourceful. They don't fight that way. And strangely, somehow, that's all because you let the little girl in the car to hear the conversation.

Huh?

What happened when you let the little girl into the car. First, you probably sidestepped some necessary conflict. You were choosing your own needs over those of the main character, who really had no desire to have the little girl in the car. You lost a chance to express their misbehaviors. You muddled the whole question of what the characters ultimately want. You didn't let them fight for it.

And thirty pages later, it comes back to bite you.

How do you find your way out of the wilderness?

The blanket answer is you go back to your tools. There's plenty you could do here with character, but just for today, let's talk about symmetry.

If you've read anything about screenwriting, you know something about the three-act structure. If you've read this blog before, you'll probably know that virtually all the gurus and schools of screenwriting essentially rehash Aristotle.

Aristotle was big on UNITY. Why can't you start a rom-com halfway through Jaws? Because you're breaking unity. You're working against expectations. You're deflating your own drama. The audience wants to see dramatic distance covered -- real developments. And those changes, those developments, are all contextual. They are relevant to the story. If Sleepless in Seattle ended with Tom Hanks becoming president of the United States or defeating a gigantic shark, he'd be a good guy. But the story wouldn't make sense.

Symmetry is the activation of that unity within the plot. The inciting event has symmetry with the climax. The opening has symmetry with the resolution. The first plot point has symmetry with the second, and so on. What does this mean? It means that SOME things are the same, and some things are different. You can gauge the differences -- and therefore the dramatic distance -- by measuring them against the elements that are the same.

There's something incredibly key here for a writer. Say you're struggling with your climax. Where do you find a cue? In your inciting event. Or the reverse. Say your little girl character is outside of a car you thought she'd be in. Look at the symmetric beat. And, voila, you find the bigger picture. In this case, the older male protagonist is pushing the little girl away and damaging himself. In the symmetric beat, he more or less rights that wrong -- by having another secret conversation, and learning from his mistake.

Say you find yourself at a loss when your characters just won't steal the car they need to steal for the plot to move forward. Take a look at the corresponding beat earlier in the script (i.e. equidistant from the midpoint). Guess what. They're actually taking a car that doesn't really belong to them.

Surprise! We have unity in our heads. We aim for symmetry, even when we don't realize it. Look at any story -- your own or someone else's. Find the structure, and I'll bet you'll be able to locate symmetries you hadn't noticed before.

Suddenly you're master of your universe again. You look to the beat, what's same and what's different. And soon you've deepened BOTH beats, and found a lot more story.

How does this affect the reader/viewer? Listening to a story is more or less recognizing a pattern. When you see a character in a parallel situation, but acting differently, you can gauge where you are in the story. And you settle in, relax, and wait for that pattern to unfold.

Symmetry and Contrast, Unity and Conflict

Ask a prose writer what they think about screenwriters, and they're liable to respond with a harumph, a scoff, or a snort. Perhaps even a chortle. Whence this skepticism?

Many prose writers have dabbled in screenwriting, and it left them cold. There's very little room for their internal monologues. They're suddenly constrained by things like budget and audience and feasibility. Many prose writers, myself included, are infatuated with a stream of words, and how it can build up references and resonances and unique meaning. What starts out as something linear can spontaneously arrange itself into a cathedral of meaning somehow independent of time or space. There's just a beautiful new structure slowly turning in the mind of the reader. But you can't do that in a script, at least in the same way. You can't derive all from a stream of words. Naturally that bugs the shit out of prose writers.

Jeanette Winterson is the latest in that vein, upsetting British screenwriters with a recent comment about In the Valley of Elah: “Script?! There IS no script! It’s just more of that dreadful VISUAL WRITING which is gradually taking over from real writing.”

"Real" writing is, of course, prose. "That dreadful visual writing" is, well, drama. It's hard to underline just how different these two spheres are. Back in ancient Greece we each had our own god. No longer. Now we have Ms. Winterson, a very emphatically smart person, confusing the two, and finding screenwriting coming up short.

So today I want to talk about some aesthetic principles that go back to the Greeks -- some basics of visual aesthetics that are too often overlooked by ALL writers.

SYMMETRY is the quality of balance in an artwork. It's the relationship of an object to itself. Something is symmetrical if you can fold it down a line that passes through its middle, and have both sides line up with each other.

It's an essential element of unity. It tells a viewer if a piece is whole and complete. It allows a viewer to make judgments about the work. And, of course, it lets them know where they are in it.

How does this intersect with the plot structure of a script. At the center of the work we find, of course, the midpoint. Usually this is where the main character finds him or herself thrown from the frying pan into the fire. This is where a whole new level of danger and risk comes into the plot.

On the far ends of the script, we have the introduction and the resolution. In a very standard view of script structure, you'll find just inside those book ends, the inciting event and the battle scene, respectively.

What does symmetry tell us here? There can and should be parallels drawn between these stages of the script. Take the opening and the resolution: they are both equilibriums. They are relatively static states. They correspond. A writer can *build up* those correspondences as a way of underlining the contrasts between them. This is why a character breaks down in a shitty car all alone on a pre-dawn stretch of freeway in the opening, and ends up driving into the sunset with the mechanic/love object in the same car, now souped up and running smooooth.

Similarly, you've can look for symmetries between your battle scene and your inciting incident to enhance your dreadful visual writing. Often we know what the battle scene looks like better than how we get our character out of balance and into the plot. A battle scene can tell you how the inciting incident might look. Some elements will be parallel, while others will mark the dramatic distance by contrasting each other.

To make this useful, break your scenes down. Know what's actually there, on screen. If your battle scene takes place on the city square, then your inciting incident may well take place there too. Or maybe it takes place in the opposite of the city square -- say, just outside the city walls, with the other freaks. If your battle scene is all about singing until the girl falls in love with you, then maybe your inciting incident has to do with singing your way out of the heart of the same girl, or singing yourself into meeting her. Or whatever. If your battle scene is an actual battle as intricate as a chess game, then maybe your inciting incident is a chess game.

There's no science here. This is a heuristic -- something to try out to see if it's productive. There's no right answer -- just a good place to look.