Monday, February 27, 2006

Specs: Part Three: Breaking the Story

This is the third post in a series. For Part Two, go here. Part One is here.

A few weeks ago I went up to shoot the shit with a film school class here in Toronto. I do that sometimes, as well as periodically teaching a writing course here and there at a local University.

But by the end of the session a few weeks back, I was surprised to learn that most of the people in the class had never really been told a formal method for breaking a story.

Story breaking is, to borrow a phrase from the worst U.S. president in modern memory -- "hard work." It's why, when you're on a writing staff, generally the stories are broken as part of a group.

So there you go...as a spec writer, you're already at a disadvantage. You've got to be brilliant all on your own, and wrestle a notion into a fully-fleshed out outline from which you can write your script. Yup. That's hard. And it's also the price of admission, so quit whining about it. Sorry about that. A little harsh. One of those Judge shows was on in the background. You know what unforgivable hardasses those judges on those judge shows are -- it seeps through. Anyway...

I put all this forth with a caveat... you can use these methods to break both half-hour and hour shows. They're not revolutionary. They're not particularly original. But they work.

But...

What I'm talking about here applies to the standard North American style of network television. Network TV hours will run about 42 minutes or so with commercials, and will be made up of four, five, or six acts. There may be a teaser. There may or may not be a tag. Half -hours will have two or three acts. Again, maybe a Teaser. Maybe a Tag. About 22 mins of screentime. By now you'll know what show you're going to spec, and you will have determined what the structure of your show is by logging and analyzing, right? So you know what you're up against.

In the UK, or on Cable, an hour show isn't 42 minutes. Shows for the BBC where there are no commercial breaks in the body of the show might run 59 minutes -- which is about 1/3 longer than American shows. Cable shows like The Sopranos are the same way - except there may or may not be more variation in length. By not being beholden to commercial breaks, the internal structure may or may not easy to discern. Again, researching and deconstructing multiple episodes is the only way to figure this out. But it's a harder task: you don't have a commercial to tell you where the act break is.

I've never written a Sopranos, and I've never written a British TV spec, so you're on your own for that. I've recently been watching back the 3rd Season DVD's for Spooks/MI-5 -- and there's an extra there where they profile the writers and they speak to the difference between writing in the UK and writing for American shows.

Okay. As one of my first bosses would say, "let's get back to talking about what we were talking about."

Step One: Blue Sky's smilin at me, nothing but blue sky do I see...

Blue-skying is the natural first step of breaking story. In the room, you'll toss out ideas, no matter how stupid, put em on cards, and put em up on the board.

You need to not self-edit in this phase. Say an idea, slap it down, keep going.

After you do that for a while, hopefully a few ideas that you like will start to coalesce.

Maybe there's a bit of an A-Plot there. Maybe there's a runner or two. Whatever you've got, before you go on to the next step, take a stroll to the dark side.

Step Two: The Death of Hope

I'm pretty hard on fanfic writers. One, because a lot of them (tho' not all) are such bad, bad writers. Two, because they never, ever fail to go for the most obvious or strange obsession. Or they go in the other direction, and just go to places that...uh...nobody should go.

The point is, before you go too far down the road -- you should seek out some show fanfic -- if it exists. You are absolutely, positively, completely looking for what not to do.

Inevitably, fanfic writers will want to do the thing, or 'fix' the thing that needs fixing. I'm sure out there there are lots of Grey's Anatomy fanfics where Meredith finally wises up, dumps McDreamy and realizes her true destiny by sleeping with George. (And yes, I know...I know...I'll get to that.)

Back in the days of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I heard that they had a board where they put the most common pitches...of which there were several. The one that I heard they got pitched most often was a sequel to "Yesterday's Enterprise," the one where Tasha Yar comes back from the dead in an alternate reality because of the Enterprise-C. Anyway, they got a lot of pitches for sequels to that show.

In E.R., maybe it's the episode where Laura Innes' character gets together with the hot straight girl that's on E.R. now. (Whoever that is...I don't watch E.R. anymore. Is Dr. Kerry Weaver still on it? She didn't get over being a lesbian, did she? That would suck.)

In the new Battlestar Galactica, it's the episode where they find Earth. Or where Starbuck wakes up and has been turned into a man again. Or...um...where Adama is revealed to be a Cylon.

In Cheers, it's the episode where you meet Norm's wife Vera. In Frasier, it's the episode where you meet Niles' first wife, Maris. In Seinfeld, it's the episode where you learn Kramer's first name.

Do you see what I'm getting at, here?

Don't fuck with the show. Leave that to the fanfic.

The thing that a producer is looking for with a spec script is someone with a voice and a good sense of story. That means someone who comes up with interesting and fresh takes on the characters -- not an episode that either violates one of the major tenets of the show (ie: you never see Maris or Vera) or blows something so big, or changes the game so much, that even if you were on staff, the chance that you would get to write that major episode is nil. (Ie: the episode of Grey's where George and Meredith knock boots.) They have a whole staff for those episodes. And just as Star Trek:TNG eventually did a sequel of sorts to Yesterday's Enterprise, so too will the show you're looking to spec get around eventually to introducing the brother or the parents, or whatever. If the story seems obvious to you, it will have been obvious to them too. And if they haven't done it yet, there's a reason for that.

In fact, let's get as many of these out of the way right now as possible, m'kay?
  • Characters who have never slept together sleep together
  • Characters who have been on the show die
  • Characters who were on the show but died or left suddenly come back - either for real, or in a dream sequence.
  • We meet the parents, brother, sister, ex-wife, or ex-husband of a Character where we have not previously met the parents, brother, sister, ex-wife, or ex-husband.
You just crossed out nine of your ideas, didn't you? That's okay. That's how it goes. Now in there, is there any story, any little fragment that seems like the show, but isn't so obvious? Two characters who just haven't been together in a plotline, but would be great together in a plotline? An idea just a bit off kilter, but that doesn't violate the template or the spirit of the show?

That one. That's your idea.

Step Three: Two Pages

This is the part that I learned from two great Showrunners: Bill Laurin and Glenn Davis (Missing) When I went to the Canadian Film Centre five years ago, they, and another great writer named Larry Lalonde, were my mentors there. I went in thinking that I already knew how to break story -- but they added this step, and I think it really helps.

On the LEFT page, write down all the things that have to happen in order for your protagonist to achieve their goal for the episode.

On the RIGHT page, write down all the things that would be really cool/funny/interesting to see. Things that excite you about the possibilities raised by your stories. If your characters make a road trip to Vegas, what would be fun to see? If they're at an amusement park, knowing what you do about your characters, what would it be fun to see them do?

This is a physical representation of the whole left brain, right brain thing. The left represents process -- how you're going to go from A to B to C. Looking at it, you may be able to discern where you can come in late for your plot. Do you really need all those steps? Can some be truncated? Collapsed together? Eliminated entirely?

The right page is key though. Because the right page is where you're going to have fun. As you figure out beats for the story, the key is to figure out how to seed in some of that fun stuff from the right hand page while serving the story needs of the left hand page.

Step Four: The End

Where do you want your story to end up? That's the thing you figure out first. That way you know what you're writing to. I don't know a single successful writer who does not work this way -- especially in TV. Starting to write a story before you know where it's going to end up -- well, if you'll forgive my French -- that's just retarded. And I don't mean in the fun, Black Eyed Peas kind of way.

Step Five: The Start

How does your script begin? What's the kickoff? Big scene, draw people in fast. Make it funny or shocking or surprising. Set the table for conflict right off the bat.

Step Six: The bottom-of-the-clock break

The most important act break in the show is the one that happens at the half-hour mark in a broadcast hour. That may be the Act Two out, or it may be the Act Three out, depending on the structure of the show you're breaking. This is the "holy shit" moment. All act breaks have to be major-out scenes, but this bottom-of-the-clock break is the one that spins your story off in a new direction. The problem we thought we were facing isn't really the problem...the solution we were pursuing earlier was the wrong solution and won't work and now everything's way worse and more hopeless-seeming...you know...like that.

This is literally the most important moment in your script. Not because it's the thing that keeps the audience from switching to another channel. (Remember, as a spec writer, you're creating a reading document...this isn't going to be produced.) It's the most important moment because it's here, if you've kept the reader reading up to this point, where the reader is going to start to decide whether you're any good or not.

A predictable act out here, one that you see coming, will blow you out of the water. A surprise, a moment where the reader says, "Oh man, I can't believe he/she did that/went there" will probably guarantee that they'll read your script right to the end.

Traditionally, you don't go out on an Act without one of two things: Jeopardy (emotional or physical) or New Information (that changes the way that we think about what we've seen before.)

Like I said...this one's a doozy.

(In a half hour, it's a bit different. If it's a two-act-plus structure, your Act One out is the big one. If it's Three Acts, it's probably your Act Two out.)

Step 7: Fill in the Other Act Breaks

Once you've done this, you have what we call the "tentpoles" for your story. You should be able to put these on cards and put them on a cork board and see your story take shape.

Step 8: The Weave

Go back and do steps 1 to 7 for all your other plots -- B, C, D, etc. They may not be the act out, but each plot has X number of turning points, and you need to figure out how those plots will progress, too. Think of them separately, as if they were A plots, all.

Now...you're going to weave everything together.

Start slapping up those B/C/D plot beats. Are they all their own scenes? Can some of them happen at the top or the tail of A plot scenes. When you need to jump forward in time, you can use a cutaway to another plot to ease that time passage, or manage audience suspense.

But there's more to the weave than just marrying the plots together. Remember those two pages? Well, the Left page should be up there now, all the tissue that forms the story. Now it's time to weave in all that cool stuff that you wanted to see -- the character, the funny, the heartwarming, the cool -- whatever it is. Make that right page serve the left and your script won't be boring, and it won't be predictable.

Now step back and look at your story. Does it seem well paced? Does it seem rushed in places? Does one act seem too packed while one of the early acts seems sparse? Is it too dense in places. Go back and adjust.

Once you've got it to a place where you feel right, you're looking at a beat sheet. Congratulations. You've just broken a story.

Now. Go write it.

NB: There's another method, conceptually, that I've heard some people use when breaking a story. I generally don't use it unless I'm having trouble with the story. But it's an interesting approach.

It involves expressing each plot as a function of the character conflicts within it. Ie: the A Plot is Meredith Vs. George, the B Plot is Izzie vs. Alex, etc... Then figure out the beats from there. (Hint: the last beat is always the resolution.) The trick to this method is that it's grounded in character, so you can chart how the plot goes forward by who has the upper hand, action, followed by reaction, followed by consequences...etc. If you find yourself getting criticized for being "plotty" -- this may be a way to get away from that and ground your writing more in character.

Part Four will be "Reading Your Spec Back." But it might be a while in coming. I want to tackle my other favorite subject, the Objective Correlative, first.

7 comments:

Callaghan said...

Definitely the most helpful spec post yet. Keep it up!

If your blog had been around when I was in University, I wouldn't have wasted 10 grand on years 2-4, taking tv writing courses and being taught nothing.

Alex Epstein said...

Huh! Very helpful. Wish I'd read it before I, uh, ran the Charlie Jade writing room.

Lee said...

Great advice. I'm off to try that left page/ right page thing right now.

DMc said...

Feh. We got through Charlie Jade just fine. When Plan A is "Flee! Run Away! Burn! Burn!" Plan B looks pretty effing good.

Eleanor said...

Thank you so much for posting the story breaking info.

Why the heck did no one tell me about this before?

You've shone light in the darkness. :-)

Danny Stack said...

Amen!

Have bookmarked these pages so I don't lose them.

Great, great stuff.

There's a part four?

Holey moley.

Unknown said...

Er . . . I can't find part four. Can I have more please?