The book opens with a whole lot on the history of the Offensive Left Tackle in the NFL, why it’s now so important and highly paid.  (Hint: it has something to do with Lawrence Taylor, explaining Sandra Bullock’s last line in the movie — which was a big “huh?” for me, since none of this material was present in the movie.)  The book talks a lot about Michael Oher’s physical freakishness, in that he has the incredibly rare (and thus valuable) combination of size and QUICKNESS that is most valued in the left tackle (who protects a right-handed quarterback’s “blind side”).  This also wasn’t even really mentioned in the movie.

Instead, they focused, I think quite effectively, on Sandra Bullock’s character, and made it her story.  It’s one of those movies with two central characters who might seem equal in emphasis (like many romantic comedies).  But ask yourself this question: “Is it more giving us the experience of being this woman who takes in this boy, or the experience of this boy who gets taken in by this woman?”  I think the answer is clear — she’s the main character.

Michael, in Dramatica terms, is the Impact Character.  This is a great illustration of the importance of this character (and relationship with the Main Character) at the center of compelling stories – including true ones.  The book presented a great Overall Story about Michael’s arc, but you wouldn’t have necessarily seen this way of telling the story from the book – with her as the MC and him as the IC.  And there are certainly other ways you could do it.  But for my money (and that of the huge audience that has supported this movie and got her such recognition), this choice really worked.

So if the Main and Impact character both influence each other, and one makes a big change at the end, and the other stays steadfast (regarding their key approach to life that the story is about), how did it work in this movie?  My answer is this: Michael, the impact character, changes – in that he finally fully trusts and relaxes into the sincere love of a family.  Sandra’s character, pressed to evaluate her own motives and goodness at the All is Lost moment, ultimately is seen to remain steadfast in her path, and the rightness of that path is affirmed.

Michael has great impact on her throughout, and she gains much from this relationship, but her basic motives and approach are only reaffirmed in the end.  It’s a lot like the Jerry Maguire-Rod Tidwell relationship I often talk about – it’s deeply moving when this character she has impacted makes some sort of change that she has caused, and helps her see that her initial approach that she has stuck with, through thick and thin and even necessity, has worked.

I was especially intrigued by the way this movie handled the climax.  When Michael was being courted by colleges and working with Kathy Bates, my attention waned a bit, because it didn’t feel like much of a “Bad Guys Close In” section (getting his grade point average up to qualify for a scholarship did not feel like a big or believable enough threat in the scheme of things)  Knowing the true story of his success, I began to worry that they weren’t going to have an “All is Lost” moment (like SAVE THE CAT talks about).  But boy, did they find one!

The issue of the NCAA questioning the family’s motives, and causing Michael to question them, is something I didn’t even remember from the book, and I’m guessing is something the movie GREATLY expanded upon in order to find an “All is Lost” moment.  And it was a great one, in my opinion, because it truly felt like the main question of this movie was now being answered with a resounding “No.”   (To me, that question was: “Will she make Michael a true and permanent part of this family in a way that changes his and everyone’s lives for the better?”  And because it really comes down to whether these two incomplete characters will end up “together,” or not, I’d classify it as what Blake Snyder would call a “Buddy Love” movie.)

This “All is Lost” sequence rocked both the Main and Impact Character to their core (but we feel it much more through the Main Character – we see things “through” her, but look “at” Michael).  And it led to a satisfying Act Three in which a new solution is found, so that the story problem is finally put to rest.

Finding a personal and emotionally compelling “take” on a true story is so important, in my opinion, to making it work for an audience.  I think “The Blind Side” is a great example of how to do that…

By main character, I don’t just mean “most important character” or even “protagonist” – the one who is the central player of the story’s action.  I mean that character whose eyes we see the story through.  And yes, we NEED such a character, in order to get emotionally invested, and only one of them.  Even in a two-hander, like a romantic comedy, where each of the two leads is very central, one of them should be the one we “ride in on” — who we see the other through the emotional perspective of.  In PRETTY WOMAN, for example, we’re experiencing what it’s like to be a hooker in a billionaire’s world, not so much what it’s like to be a billionaire with a hooker girlfriend.  There are  some moments of the latter (I’m thinking of the “dental floss” scene, for example, or when Edward watches Vivian laugh at I LOVE LUCY, or sing in the bathtub), but the person whose PROBLEM WE’RE INVESTED IN is Vivian, by far.

And that is our first job, in any piece of dramatic writing — to get the reader invested in someone’s life situation and growing problem.  I said in my last post that most ideas and projects fail at the level of concept.  Most pieces of writing fail at the level of making us really understand and care about someone in the first few pages — and then keep us caring.  That person who you want us to care about is the main character.  The more you cut away to other characters and start to tell things through their point-of-view, the more you’ll limit the reader’s emotional investment and connection.  There just isn’t room for two or more people who we experience the story’s events through.  (Comment or e-mail me if you want my thoughts on a couple of partial exceptions in two movies I love, JERRY MAGUIRE and THE BIG CHILL.)

I first learned of the distinction between “protagonist” and “main character” from Dramatica, a theory of story (and piece of software for developing and analyzing stories) that I’ve been working with since the beginning of my career.  I recently met its co-founder, Chris Huntley, at the Screenwriting Expo and agreed to do a testimonial for him, which I understand will appear (along with an article about my use of Dramatica) in their December 1 e-newsletter.  (I can send or post this article if anyone is interested.)

I find myself talking about Dramatica a lot these days with writer clients.  After using SAVE THE CAT to clarify concept, genre, and basic beats, the next step is often to get more clear on the main character — who it is, what their personal emotional story is that links with the overall story, and who their “impact character” might be.

“Impact character” is a Dramatica term.  The basic tenet to their theory is that a great story tends to have four throughlines: the “objective” story that all the characters care about, which I like to think of as having a central problem and question that won’t be answered until the end — which the writer must be clear about, and which must be developed constantly throughout the script or manuscript.  In the “objective” story, there is a “protagonist” and other characters with particular dramatic functions having to do with that story.

One of these characters (usually the protagonist, but not always) is also the “main character” – who we experience the story through the perspective of, as if it were happening to us.   So many scripts don’t feel like their events are happening “to us,” and we don’t care enough, because they don’t successfully choose, stick with, and develop this main character point-of-view.  Dramatica says that they should have their own “throughline,” a story about their personal arc that has its own beginning, middle and end, that interweaves with the objective story.

In addition, the theory presents two other “throughlines” to make a complete and satisfying story: one is about the “impact character,” and the other is about the relationship between the impact character and main character.  The presence of the impact character (who is not the same as the objective story “antagonist,” and is often the love interest) puts pressure on the main character to consider changing in some key way, and vice versa.  By the end of the story, one of them will change, and one will not.

Dramatica says that this relationship forces the main character to look past what they think is their problem and solution, to some deeper underlying issue, which gets confronted and resolved in the last act.  This doesn’t mean the main character is always the one who “changes” — but they do go through growth and development, as does the impact character (although we don’t experience this through their perspective: we look “at” the impact character, and “through” the main character, emotionally).  This relationship accounts for most of the heart and emotional  resonance of any story, for the reader, and/or audience.

If you’re interested in knowing more, click here to download a .pdf file of the Dramatica comic book which illustrates their basic theories in a fun way.  Or go to their website to read much more, or to order the software.

It’s not easy to achieve such a lofty goal.  It’s rare that anything does.  But it’s what the writing marketplace is entirely built on.  Those few projects that truly succeed finance all the countless others that don’t — and they (and their writers) are what everyone in the business is looking for, and paying for.

Of course, there are many elements that have to come together for a project to really work, and be a big success.  But the key element that we writers do well to pay more attention to is the concept:  the basic idea for the story that you could communicate in two sentences — which would hopefully make most people who hear it say something like, “Wow, that sounds like a story I’d want to see or read.  There’s something unique about it, but also very real, and it seems clearly entertaining and compelling.  I don’t have to ask a bunch of questions.  I get it, and I’m with you.”

And so we screenwriters work on this “logline.”  Blake Snyder’s book SAVE THE CAT emphasizes this.  But here’s the point that I think is key about the logline: it’s not about shaping the words of the logline to “sell” your concept.  The point is to shape your CONCEPT until it can be expressed clearly in a logline that just works for people, without you having to do any “selling.”  The logline is not the place to tease or hype or generalize — it’s a place to clearly and succinctly tell an idea that sells itself.

The logline should stand alone.  If more explaining is required, and more questions are necessary to truly get the idea, then that’s a sign that it’s not a concept that really works.  It might be so well-executed that it makes for a good script, but it’s far, far less likely to get sold or produced or help a writer build a career in a significant way.  Because the BUSINESS of writing is concept-driven.  And concept is what grabs the public.

I used to always hate when people told me to focus on the logline and the big commercial high-concept idea, because I thought it was so limiting.  I thought that most of my favorite movies couldn’t be expressed in a catchy logline.  And I will say that many great stories don’t necessarily have an enormous “wow” factor when you hear the two-sentence pitch.  But I do think their loglines would sound like something Compelling, Unique, Real, and Entertaining.  It sounds like there’s a story there, that is worthy of being told, that many many people could enjoy.  And that doesn’t require a lot more explanation to be able to evaluate it.

That said, the real thing I love about SAVE THE CAT (and especially its sequel, SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES) is not so much the stuff about loglines.  It’s the ten unique “genres” Blake Snyder came up with (and the five sub-genres of each, with numerous movie examples, that are in the second book).  This new way of organizing the basic types of successful stories, that have been repeated over and over again, is truly revolutionary to me.  Rather than focusing on setting or tone (”war movie” or “comedy”), he much more usefully focuses on basic CONTENT — what’s happening in the story.  And in doing so, he created a very helpful common language with which to discuss story concepts.

I’ve yet to read a script or manuscript where it wasn’t valuable to try to pin down which of these ten (really fifty) basic types of stories it’s trying to be — each of which has a few basic elements that are worth paying attention to.  And I think finding which one of these you’re really trying and wanting to write is incredibly helpful in honing your concept.  Of course, you want your idea to be fresh and different in some way, but there is a flexibility within these basic templates that allows limitless creativity — while providing a structure to create within.

The other central aspect of SAVE THE CAT is the Beat Sheet, which is helpful for structuring the key elements of a story. It’s great for coming up with a one-pager, where the key building blocks of the story are mapped out, and I highly recommend using it for that.  But unfortunately, nothing will really write or even outline the whole thing for us!

Not even my favorite software and theory of story can do that — although it  goes into far more useful detail on the elements of what make up great stories than anything else I’ve ever seen.  But I’ll save that for another post…

Here are the details...

If you’re not yet established and not yet represented, your spec pilot is primarily a WRITING SAMPLE.   Yes, of course you hope that the idea sells and gets produced and becomes a series, but that is such a million-to-one shot (even for those of us who do this for a living and sell pitches to networks on a regular basis), that it’s more realistic to focus on first things first — which is for this pilot script to get you noticed, advance your career, possibly get you representation and meetings.   Beyond that, who knows?   But the networks aren’t looking for spec pilots from unknown writers that they might produce, nor is the possibility of producing it independently as realistic as in features (although with web series, that is changing somewhat).

This is not to be discouraging at all — a spec pilot can be a very viable writing sample, and you never know what could happen beyond that.  Make it the best writing sample you can, that achieves what a good pilot script should achieve. Which is what?

Well, the script needs to stand on its own.   You will not be asked about what will happen in future episodes, or have the opportunity to illustrate that through a separate document.  Your job is to make sure that the pilot script suggests and implies that there are endless great future episodes in this SERIES CONCEPT, because what you’re presenting in the pilot illustrates an ENDLESSLY REPEATABLE “FRANCHISE” for what happens in an episode.

“What’s the franchise?” is a common thing you hear T.V. agents, producers, and executives asking.  Look at any successful series, and you can probably explain in a paragraph the template for what an episode always includes, in terms of story structure — hopefully a template that’s compelling, entertaining, believable, and somewhat fresh. Think of LAW AND ORDER, BUFFY, STAR TREK, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, etc. A typical episode’s story usually involves “X” kind of problematic situations that resolve through “Y” kinds of actions and “Z” kinds of conflicts for your characters.

Your pilot script should clearly illustrate what “XYZ” are for your concept.

Understand that no matter how serialized the overall series will be, and how much the pilot needs to set up the basic concept (and how these characters and situation come together), the pilot should also contain within it a sample of the kind of story we’ll see each week — the kind of case, or finite example of the conflicts and problems this series will showcase, with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Buyers don’t usually like what they call a “premise pilot,” where the entire pilot episode only focuses on setting up the series, but doesn’t include a “sample story” that shows them what future episodes will look like. Most pilots now set up the basic series premise stuff quickly in the first act, then get to a sample story that takes the rest of the pilot to play out. OR, they interweave “premise” elements within such a sample story.

I could go on, but these are the basic thoughts I wanted to put out there. Please feel free to comment or ask questions if you have any!

The first is, it has to be COMPELLING.  By that I mean that we have to CARE about the character(s) and situation — to be emotionally involved, and to stay involved.  We want to see what’s going to happen, and how it’s all going to play out.  I think this is my first job as a writer — to (fairly quickly) present something that makes the reader/audience care — and to keep them caring.  I don’t just mean make them interested or intrigued.  I mean hook them, with something they can relate to on a human, emotional level.

Having your main character “save the cat” at the beginning can certainly be part of this: doing something that makes us think positively of them.  But I’m not just talking about “rootability.”  I’m talking about a problem that sets the story in motion that seems important and makes us care.  It’s important to the character, and because we’re seeing things through their eyes, it’s becoming important to us.  It matters.  There is great conflict and we want to see how that’s going to resolve — and we are identifying with a specific person (or people) we feel a real emotional connection with.

How often do you read or watch something and put it down because you just “don’t care about these people and their situation”?  It’s not big enough, important enough, relatable enough, and you don’t buy into them — it doesn’t MATTER to you whether they resolve whatever it is.  Part of it could be you don’t like them (and they need to “save the cat”), but it’s often also about the nature of their situation.  It doesn’t grab you.  You’re not compelled to see what will happen.

Secondly, a really good story has to ENTERTAIN.  That should be obvious, right?  But plenty of situations that might meet these other criteria for compelling us emotionally don’t “entertain” us.  What I mean by that is that they don’t make us FEEL MORE ALIVE in some way that makes them enjoyable to watch or read.  Take THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS.  I totally care about that character, but I’m not entertained by his situation.  It’s a well-done movie, with good escalating conflict, and I’m somewhat moved at the couple of moments of victory that come, but they feel like too little, too late.   It’s not the kind of story that becomes a smash hit (or gets a writer’s career started), in my opinion, because it doesn’t make the audience feel more alive — more amused, scared, excited, and/or truly fascinated.  Compare this movie to I AM LEGEND or MEN IN BLACK, for example.  They may not be as emotionally compelling, but boy, do they entertain.

Then there’s BELIEVABILITY.  No matter how fantastic the premise might be, once we understand the “rules” (which should happen clearly and quickly), we must then feel that we’re watching recognizable human behavior.  Every character at all times should behave in ways that seem real, given the situation.  When they don’t, it seems like a contrivance the writer came up with to try to compel or entertain us — and it doesn’t work.  We can’t care about or be entertained by something we don’t believe would really happen.  This happens a lot in comedy — when characters do over-the-top things that may seem funny or silly, but in the context of a story, we don’t buy it, and so aren’t entertained by it.  I think the best comedy (and every other genre) comes from identifiable and relatable human behavior, from characters who really care about something — like in EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND or FRASIER.  No matter how exaggerated a character may be, once we accept their basic personality, everything they do has to be something we believe they’d do.  I can’t tell you how often something I’m reading stops working for me (or never starts) because I don’t understand why a character is doing or saying something, and don’t really believe they would.

Finally, a great concept is UNIQUE.  It’s fresh in some way.  It probably has its roots in something familiar that has worked in the past, but it has its own new twist or point-of-view that makes it seem like something we’ve never quite seen before.  Granted, there are plenty of things that get produced and published that don’t seem all that unique.  If they are compelling, entertaining, and believable, that can be enough.  But for something to really be great, to be hugely successful, to the point where it could get an unknown writer the beginnings of a career, for example, this freshness can be the final key ingredient.

Almost every aspect I’d ever critique about any story comes down to one (or more) of these four aspects.  I think it’s true for what people would critique about my work as well.

And it’s not just about story concepts: ideally, EVERY SCENE should also be compelling, entertaining, believable, and unique — in some way.  When the scenes, the story, and the basic concept all pass this high standard, then you really have something.

Comments?  Questions?

At least that’s the excuse I’ve used.

A few months back, a writer friend encouraged me to work on a side project that was outside of what I was focused on every day — in my case, a spec feature — and told me about a writing teacher of hers who advises “twenty minute writeaways.” I decided to take her advice, and began applying that easy-to-achieve time goal to this feature, KNOWING I could find twenty minutes every day somewhere.

What I’ve found since then has been pretty amazing. In twenty minutes I can outline a scene. In twenty minutes I can write the first draft of a scene from an outline. If I do these twenty minute blocks five days a week on a forty-scene feature, I can outline the movie in two months, and then have a first draft in another two months.

I’m a big believer in dividing work into short, achievable tasks — and to know the task exactly before you sit down to write. This helps me get into the right frame of mind where I’m not resisting the work to be done, or tempted to procrastinate. Usually, the actual carrying out of the task (once you know exactly what it is) is a relative piece of cake.

And a project you might never have gotten to (because the amount of work seemed overwhelming, and the amount of “free time” so scarce) begins to move forward — continuously, significantly, and with very little drama.

I’ll continue to appreciate all he has contributed to encouraging other writers in their craft!

http://writersconference.com/la/lasched.html#SESSIONS

http://www.writersconference.com/la/labios-all.html#Bork

http://www.writersconference.com/la/lamain.html