I feel like scripts with multiple storylines (3+ stories) like Pulp Fiction or Crash can rely on simple loglines that get across the overall theme of the story. But what about scripts with two distinct storylines that parallel one another…do you pack both storylines into the logline? Or do you pick one and focus the on it?

– Mac
Los Angeles

Some movies are really difficult to logline. Go is one. When forced to give a short description, I try to chart the three main threads: “It’s about a really tiny drug deal, a wild night in Vegas and two soap opera actors — all of which cross paths at LA’s underground rave scene.”

Again, not great. But it gets the job done.

For something like Big Fish, I make the parallel structure clear: “It’s the story of a man’s life, told the way he remembers it: full of wild, impossible exaggerations. At the same time, his grown son is trying to separate the truth from the fantasy before his dad dies.”

Julie and Julia has dual storylines, yet summarizes easily: “It’s the story of a young woman determined to cook her way through Julia Child’s famous cookbook, intercut with the adventures of Julia Child’s life.”

If both plotlines are key to your story, you need to make that clear in the logline. Otherwise, you risk future readers feeling like you bait-and-switched them.

I’ve changed the name of the character, but I want her to be a comedienne, as this fits really well with the story. Most of the other aspects of the story are completely made-up, and I’ll probably only include a few situations based on real events.

Can I get in trouble for creating a character with the same personality and the same profession as the real person? How much can I get away with? Can I include things that this person has said in real life? This character is fascinating and needs to have her story told!

– Lex
Calgary, Alberta

Yes, you can get in trouble. She could sue you for libel, defamation — or the equivalent under Canadian law. By your description, she probably would sue, so you’ve really answered your own question.

Don’t poke bears.

As a writer, you’re naturally going to be drawn towards real-life people who are fascinating. That’s a good thing. Observe behavior. Figure out motivations and pathology. Then forget the real person.

Unless you’re writing a bio-pic, don’t base characters on anyone who actually exists. Not only are you exposing yourself to legal trouble, you’re ultimately shortchanging yourself as a writer. Real people are good in the real world, but you need characters that feel real in the universe of your story.

So stop thinking about this character as being the comedienne. Rip a photo out of a magazine and decide your character looks like this woman instead. What does her voice sound like? Where does she live? Is one of her neighbors stealing her mail? Is she trying to avoid her Bible-quoting brother?

Make her situation specific, and specifically different than the comedienne. It’s okay to admit to yourself that she inspired your character — inspiration is free to the universe. But every detail should be something you created, discovered, or wove in from the hundreds of other people you have studied. Your story will be better for it.

1. Keep it short. Maximum seven words per card.

2. A card represents a story point, be it a scene or a sequence. You don’t need a card for every little thing.

3. Keep cards general enough that they can be rearranged. (“Battle in swamp” rather than “Final showdown”)

4. Horizontal (a table or counter) often works better than a vertical (a corkboard).

5. Post-It notes make good alternative index cards.

6. Consider a letter code for which characters are featured in the sequence. Helpful for figuring out who’s missing.

7. Most movies can be summarized in less than 50 cards.

8. Cards are cheap. Don’t hesitate to rework them.

9. Consider a second color for action sequences. Helps show the pacing.

10. Write big. You want to be able to read them from a distance.

In fiction, it’s crucial.

As the writer, you need to burn down houses. You need to push characters out of their safe places into the big scary world — and make sure they can never get back. Sure, their stated quest might be to get home, but your job is to make sure that wherever they end up is a new and different place.

Writers tend towards benevolence. We love our characters, and want to see them thrive. So it can be hard to accept that what our hero actually needs is to have everything taken away, be it by fire, flood, divorce or zombie uprising. No matter the story, no matter the genre, we need to find ways to strip characters of their insulating bubbles of normalcy.

The Fire (or other catastrophe) often occurs as an inciting incident, setting the wheels of plot in motion. In The House Bunny, Anna Faris’s character is kicked out of the Playboy Mansion by page 10. In Gladiator, Russell Crowe’s family is killed.

Just as often, The Fire signals the end of the first act. In Star Wars, Luke returns home to find his aunt and uncle dead. In 9 to 5, the trio of secretaries has inadvertently kidnapped their boss. There’s no going back to the way things were.

But The Fire can work just as well later in the story, effectively burning bridges characters have just crossed. Three of my upcoming projects feature second-act or third-act Fires that not only keep the momentum going, but also remind the audience of the scale and stakes. ¹ Late fires ward off complacency in everything from The Dark Knight to Revenge of the Nerds.

It’s easy to think of dozens of great movies that never really burn the house down. But the better exercise is to look at your own scripts and ask, (a) what could burn, and (b) why haven’t I lit it on fire?

1. There’s something uniquely cinematic about destroying a giant set. A TV show, no matter its ambitions, generally has to protect its standing sets until at least the end of a season.

• Alan Rickman’s character from Die Hard likely sees himself as George Clooney’s character from Ocean’s 11.

• In Michael Clayton, Tilda Swinton is struggling to protect herself and her company. She sees it as a survival story, with herself cast as the heroic victim.

• Even monsters, like the shark in Jaws or the velociraptors of Jurassic Park, can be heroes of their own story. In Aliens, the Queen is defending her brood. Once we understand that, the conflict is even stronger.

Whether you’re writing a thriller, a comedy or an action movie, always look at the story from the villain’s point of view. What is he trying to do? Besides the hero, what other obstacles are in the way?

Too often, we come up with the villain’s motivation (revenge, greed) and stop. Rather, look for what the journey is. We might only see a small part of it from the hero’s perspective, but knowing the whole arc gives us more to push against.

Have a little sympathy. Let your villain win a few times, but make him work for it.

Yes, the emotional reason is clear: he’s a selfish asshole, and needs to learn to be less of one. But the actual supernatural mechanism is never part of the movie. There’s not a magic clock, or a nuclear wristwatch. Punxsutawney Phil isn’t secretly a wizard.

Rather, weatherman Phil Connors is stuck in a time loop because, well, he is. We buy it, and we don’t demand further explanation.¹

Most movies would make a point of singling out some physical object or act that brought about the situation. The hero would find something, break something or do something (an accidental birthday wish, pissing off a witch) as an inciting incident. It wouldn’t just happen.

But maybe it should.

You can often get rid of magic items and explicit wishes/curses, even in stories that seem to require them.

• Dorothy doesn’t do anything to summon the tornado that takes her from Kansas.

• Clark Kent doesn’t wish he could fly; he can fly because the story says he can.²

• The Connor family is marked for death not because of something they did or said, but because evil computers from the future worry about a threat. (Ditto for Neo in the Matrix.)

As the audience, we don’t demand proof. We accept the magic as part of the premise, and don’t require a prop to ground it.

To be clear: I’m not arguing to ban all magic props. Let Frodo have his ring. The Pevensie children can climb through a wardrobe into Narnia. And once in Oz, Dorothy should feel free to grab some dead woman’s shoes.

But when developing a story with a supernatural premise, fight the temptation to embody it in a thing. These MacGuffins³ get added with the aim of keeping things simple, but too often distract from the character’s real journey.

In your romantic comedy, Misfire, does your hero need to break up two ill-suited lovers, or get Cupid’s bow and arrow back? The former is funnier. The latter has more props and rules.

Always explore doing it the way Groundhog Day did: by letting magic questions go unasked and unanswered.

1. According to Wikipedia, at least one draft of Groundhog Day did include an explicit reason for the time loop — a voodoo spell cast by a coworker. Not only did the movie not need it; I’d argue that being so specific would have hurt the premise by focusing attention on her rather than him.
2. Or more broadly, the universe put baby Kal-El on a world with a certain color of sun.
3. A MacGuffin is a thing or idea that serves as a focal point to the plot, but is not what the movie is really about, and could easily be substituted with something else. TV Tropes has a long list of MacGuffins, which it considers “plot coupons.”

Take it, Matt.

The Writers Guild Foundation hosted and coordinated the ticketed event, which was ably moderated by Paul Attanasio.

Working first as assistants for Sam Raimi on his Xena and Hercules series, the then twenty-three year old Orci and Kurtzman broke in early but struggled to get past the stigma of the fantasy genre until they met J.J. Abrams. Abrams appreciated their ability to give “A treatment to B material” and brought them onto Alias. The success of that relationship lead to work on Abrams’s Mission Impossible 3, Fringe (which they co-created), and Star Trek.

Collaborations with Michael Bay include The Island, Transformers and its upcoming sequel. They produced Eagle Eye (with Steven Spielberg) and the Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds comedy The Proposal.

The ninety-minute talk to a theater nearly full of writers and a sprinkling of suits, notably Stacey Snider and her posse from Dreamworks, covered collaboration, craft and the creative process.

The partners also defined a new-to-me screenwriting term: the structurefuck.

But most in attendance were there to ask (and gush) about the duo’s latest hit, which elicited some story lessons worth sharing.

Nero

Nero’s storyline in Star Trek was much longer in both the script and the shoot. Much was left on the edit room floor. Nero was tortured by Klingons, had to wait out twenty-five years somewhere and spit out bitter monologues, etc. All but one shot was cut from the final version. They found in post that anytime they took the story away from the heroes it sagged. Nero served only as a force to bring everyone together. The more screentime spent away from Kirk and Spock, the more defocused the movie became so they reeled him in significantly in post.

Lesson: Sequels are for villains; origin stories are for heroes. Heroes determine structure. In further support, Alex Kurtzman offered the example of Iron Man, which he said was all about Robert Downey Jr. and the suit he forges. As for what Jeff Bridges was up to? No idea. Didn’t matter. Good as he may be on screen, we’re really just waiting to see Downey in the suit again. (Not much Vader in Star Wars Episode IV compared to The Empire Strikes Back come to think of it.)

Kirk n’ Spock

Kurtzman and Orci researched heavily, studying partnerships – Lennon and McCartney, Billy Wilder and I.A. Diamond, for example — to explore why the core relationship of Kirk and Spock worked so well creatively for the series. Like Lennon and McCartney, both Spock and Kirk lose a parent. It’s something fundamental and shared that allows for a connection even with the contention and heated power struggle. Halfway through writing the first draft, Kurtzman and Orci discovered their own relationship as friends and writing partners had infused itself into the Kirk and Spock dynamic.

Destroying Vulcan

The writers felt they had to tie in the current climate and break from the past in a visually and emotionally dramatic way. Destroying Vulcan felt to Orci like seeing 9/11 and the Holocaust all at once. While that was said in jest, I think, the sentiment and desire to break this movie out from the era of the series was genuine. Something radical needed to happen.

Why does Spock get the girl?

It was a visual way to show Spock’s choice: his human/mother’s side had won out over his Vulcan side. It compressed Spock’s arc and made the writers love Uhura more for making the unexpected choice while messing with audience expectations.

Finally, for those interested in process, it took five months to break the story and two-and-a-half more for them to write it.

Advice for the aspiring

Mop floors, do anything you can to get inside and “reveal a surprise.” At age 23, the partners fetched coffee for the producers of Xena and Hercules. They wrote a spec episode and had it ready when the time was right. Wasn’t quite good enough but they were given an episode to play with and when the showrunner left, they were given the helm. They were twenty-four.

Kurtzman noted that P.T. Anderson was a PA smoking outside a set and started chatting with Philip Baker Hall. They hit it off, which lead to Hard Eight. In short, move to Hollywood, look for your moment and be ready when luck strikes.

Once you’re working, see studios as clients not villains out to ruin your art. Learn to love the process of rewriting. Be married to the sprit of words but not the words themselves. Often the studios have forced them to get beyond the “kernel” of the story in the first draft to explore new avenues and ultimately improve the story. (Notably, there were no horror exec stories typical of writers’ panels.)

How does their partnership work?

They’d met in high school but it wasn’t until after college when they began editing each other’s love letters that their partnership began. Neither had any idea how to write, but they were able to expose embarrassing parts of themselves without worrying about being judged or “thrown in a locker.” Each has their strength – Kurtzman at creating moments and Orci on the macro story elements.

They’ve been writing partners for 17 years. They credit that success to treating their relationship with the care of a marriage and applying some of the same addages: Don’t go to bed angry. Make sure one side doesn’t feel like they’re doing all the heavy lifting. Respect strengths and weaknesses.

UPDATE

To structurefuck is to disrupt a linear narrative by playing a scene twice in order to achieve a surprise reveal upon second viewing of that scene. The idea being to plant information in the audience’s heads early, when they’re likely to accept it as truth. When the scene plays again later, you alter (or “fuck with”) the perception of fact and force the audience to reevaluate the story by ripping off a mask or showing that the gun shot a blank or that the heroine actually dodged the bullet and didn’t fall to her death but was hanging naked by a bed sheet caught on a piece of glass.

I’m largely on board with most of their recommendations, particularly the idea that there are no paradoxes. I’m not talking scientifically here — I honestly have no idea how to crunch the numbers to prove this point. But in terms of fiction, and screenwriting in particular, I’d argue you need to actively crush any talk of paradoxes or impossible conundrums. They will grind your story to a halt.

I did a little work on Minority Report, a Scott Frank adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story which is enjoyable for its combined Frank-Dickness. Minority Report doesn’t deal with time travel, but rather its pushy cousin called precognition — knowledge of the future. In the story, police use precognition to stop murders before they happen.

But! But! How do you know the murders were going to happen? You changed things. So for every crime, you would need to prove that the soon-to-be-killers were absolutely, unquestionably going to do it. Which seems impossible.

I argued that you couldn’t just answer those questions when they came up. You had to take away that whole class of questions, early and forcefully.

Here’s the scene I wrote:

(In the final movie, it’s Tom Cruise’s character (Anderton) rather than Jad who provides the explanation. And that’s an understandable change: you want your hero to feel in command of the facts.)

In any script, look for scenes in which characters answer questions, and try to find ways to take the questions away. Often, that means backing up five or ten pages, well before the audience has started to formulate their concerns, and finding a way to visualize (or better yet, physicalize) the problem.

The first Jurassic Park does this well, with the animated science lesson setting the ground rules and chopping down poles upon which red flags might fly. Likewise, the first acts of most horror movies are largely devoted to creating situations in which the characters can’t simply escape or call for help. The more artfully it’s done, the less you notice the setup.

Nor can comedies waste time addressing audience concerns. Groundhog Day churns through a number of possible solutions to Bill Murray’s dilemma in a montage that makes you feel certain that he’s tried everything, whether you’ve thought of it or not.

Don’t answer questions. Get rid of them before they’re asked.

UPDATE: The weird thing about running this blog for 5+ years is that I sometimes forget which questions I’ve answered, and which anecdotes I’ve given. I wrote this post an hour ago, but it covers a lot of the same ground as last year’s longer and better essay on How to Explain Quantum Mechanics. Credit for consistency, I guess.

I know you say to make these obstacles physical and simple but this is the complete opposite. Any help would be appreciated.

– Dallas
Staten Island, NY

Write a book. Or a song. Or a poem.

Sure, many great movies feature characters struggling against their demons, or attempting to find themselves. But it’s invariably played as subtext against a more external conflict — the one that actually drives the plot. You need to be able to point the camera at something.

There’s nothing wrong with internal struggle. Just pick a medium that can handle it.

I particularly liked his discussion about the challenge of writing a thriller:

Gilroy believes that the writer and the moviegoing public are engaged in a cognitive arms race. As the audience grows savvier, the screenwriter has to invent new reversals—madder music and stronger wine. [...]

“How do you write a reversal that uses the audience’s expectations in a new way? You have to write to their accumulated knowledge.”

Definitely worth a read.

While I wouldn’t recommend buying the book just for my contribution, I’m happy to report the rest of Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball’s little book is terrific, full of observations and advice for gamers and game designers. Having worked with several of the latter, I’m struck by how nascent and unformed that field is. The fundamental questions are still being asked, and answered different ways: How do you make story playable? How explicitly do you set the rules? How much “work” is a player willing to do?

Whether MMORPG or paper-and-dice, alien-zapping or world-building, games have an active social component unlike anything you find in film or television, which makes them a uniquely challenging art form. Yes: you can watch a slasher movie with your friends, shouting back at the screen. But the film itself is unchanged by your participation. Not so with a good game, which demands involvement far beyond passive entertainment.

So if you find yourself thinking about games, I’d encourage to think along with this book.