John August

Story and Plot

What audiences know

Adaptation, Story and Plot

Discussing the very talky opening scene of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin makes a key point about how writers [dole out information](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/aaron-sorkins-writing-process-69586):

> We started at 100 miles an hour in the middle of a conversation, and that makes the audience have to run to catch up. […]The worst crime you can commit with an audience is telling them something they already know. We were always running ahead.

Figuring out what the audience needs to know — and when they need to know it — is one of the trickiest aspects of screenwriting. The novelist can suspend the action for paragraphs or pages to establish background information. Screenwriters can’t. We don’t have an authorial voice to fill in the missing details. Everything we want the audience to know has to be spoken by a character, or better yet visualized in a way that suits the big screen. ((As a trade-off for losing the authorial voice, movies get something good in return: the audience’s complete attention. You don’t skim a movie the way you might a 400-page novel. Tiny moments can have huge impact on the big screen.))

So we have to be clever. Sometimes, we use the form to our advantage: A lengthy sequence explaining dinosaur cloning techniques in Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park becomes an animated film strip in David Koepp’s movie adaptation. In most cases, we do more with less, distilling the information down to a minimum effective dose to get the audience through the scene, sequence and story.

The frustration for screenwriters is that many of the decision-makers — directors, producers, studio executives — will have different opinions about that minimum effective dose. Directors will try to cut all the dialogue. Producers will focus on strange details, having read the script so many times that they’ve lost fresh eyes. And studio executives, having faced confused audiences at low-scoring test screenings, will want things over-explained to painful degrees.

But that’s politics. In terms of craft, Sorkin’s point holds: you engage the audience by making them work. One of the best ways is by understanding and controlling what they know.

All of the other reindeer

Geek Alert, Psych 101, Story and Plot

A few months ago, I discussed how [Every Villain is a Hero](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/every-villain-is-a-hero) — very few bad guys perceive themselves as bad guys, so you need to think of their motivation in heroic terms.

I just finished playing the Descent into Darkness scenario for Battle for Wesnoth, ((Wesnoth is an old open-source game now available for iPad.)) which provides a surprisingly good example of this lesson.

The story follows Malin Keshar, a young mage trying to save his village from orcs. Desperate, he uses a little necromancy in a pinch, which gets him banished from his homeland. As the twelve chapters unfold, bad decisions snowball until the story reaches a satisfyingly bleak conclusion.

Reading up on the scenario afterwards, I came upon this description of Malin’s dilemma, a trope called [All of the Other Reindeer](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllOfTheOtherReindeer):

> A character is surrounded by people who constantly put him or her down, usually because of some trait that is integral to them being a hero or villain. It seems the only responses one can make to this are the extremes: “put up with it silently” or “let them die/kill them all.”

> If a hero, the character will constantly show their virtue by putting up with it and saving their tormentors’ lives again and again. Said tormentors will be grateful for about five seconds (that is, until the end of the episode), and then start it up again.

> If a villain, they’ll inevitably explode and slaughter their tormentors, to the barely disguised envy of the audience. Oh, the hero will stop them eventually, but not before most of those who wronged the villain are taken out.

That’s a great roadmap for one kind of villain backstory.

And if you haven’t spent an afternoon [clicking through TV Tropes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Tropes), it’s well worth the time suck.

Story is free

Indie, Story and Plot, Sundance

One of my frustrations with independent film — and in particular, micro-indies of the past few years — is a lack of narrative ambition.

Flip through the catalogs of any festival and you’ll see movies with fascinating characters and rich settings in which *nothing really happens,* as if the filmmakers took a Dogma vow to avoid plot.

My hunch is that it’s actually a consequence of thinking small. If you’re making a movie on a limited budget, it may put real constraints on your locations, schedule and cast size.

But that frugality doesn’t need to limit your story. Story is free.

Waiting around for things
——

I spent last week at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, working with writer-directors on their next projects. I don’t want to single out any one script — I’m eager to see all of these movies made. These filmmakers are very talented.

But I often found myself pausing at page 45 asking “What’s happened so far?” and “What am I curious about?” And too often, the answer was *not much.*

Some of my red flags:

* Are characters waiting around for something?
* Do they take half-steps, then retreat?
* Do major events (death, abortion, incest) happen off-screen, or before the movie begins?
* Do people talk about food?
* Could you swap a scene from page 10 and page 34 without changing much?

A few of these projects would fall within the loose borders of the mumblecore movement, stories that focus on the sputtering interactions of a few well-educated characters. This is no ding on the genre; I like my Humpday just fine.

But I wonder if filmmakers are looking to mumblecore movies as an excuse for underwriting and avoiding character conflict.

A lot of story can happen even when you’re constrained to a few locations. Hamlet takes place in a few rooms. So does The Usual Suspects. Both Go and The Nines pack a lot into each of their three-part sections. And while Sex, Lies and Videotape might seem low-plot, the story keeps forcing characters to make choices and face the consequences.

In meeting with the screenwriters at Sundance, I challenged them to look for scenes in which characters were talking about things and show them doing those things. Often, the omitted scenes weren’t more expensive than what they would replace — but they were more difficult to write. The beginning of an affair is trickier than showing it mid-course. A trapped child is uncomfortable to write, but compelling to watch.

The writing is always going to be the least expensive but most challenging part of the process. Making a low-budget movie is a study in compromises. Story shouldn’t be one of them.

On protagonists

Glossary, Story and Plot

In earlier posts, I’ve talked about [protagonists and heroes](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/whats-the-difference-between-hero-main-character-and-protagonist) at length. Yesterday [Michael Goldenberg](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0325533/) offered a a new description that I love:

**The protagonist is the character that suffers the most.**

In one sentence, both definition and practical advice. Perfect.