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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/getting-to-page-one).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** Not bad. I’m a little tired. I’m bouncing back from my 20th college reunion which took place a few days ago.

**John:** And was it festivious? I mean, did you have a good time? Did you see people you haven’t seen for 20 years?

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. There was definitely… — The nice thing about a 20th reunion is there’s absolutely no embarrassment whatsoever about not recognizing somebody or somebody not recognizing you. It’s been 20 years. What are you gonna do, you know? We’ve had kids. Kids make you dumber. Time makes you dumber. So, it was fine.

I had no shame whatsoever to say, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know, I don’t remember you.”

**John:** Reunions are a little bit different in the era of Facebook because there’s people who I wouldn’t otherwise see but now I do see because I see them on Facebook sometimes. So, I’m looking forward to seeing everybody again at my 20th, but it’s not as pressing as it would otherwise be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today I thought we’d talk about three things. I want to talk a little bit about screenwriting software, sort of where we’re at and where things seem to be going.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** Second, I want to talk about how you know when you’re ready to start writing that script, sort of like how you get to page one. That’s something we haven’t talked about. And finally, based on listener requests, they want to know what we thought of the season finale of Game of Thrones. And so I thought we could talk a little bit about that.

**Craig:** Oh good. Yeah.

**John:** First, we have some follow up. In a previous podcast we talked about the challenge of Disney — Disney needed to find a new chairman. It was fairly hard to figure out who the right person was for that job.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they went out and they found somebody, like a brand new person I’ve never heard of. His name is Alan Horn.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s right, he’s actually… — He’s done this before.

**Craig:** He’s the former chairman of Warner Bros. And I’ve got to say, I met Alan once at a test screening for Hangover 2. I had no professional relationship with him and generally speaking screenwriters don’t have professional relationships with the people that operate on that level. But from a purely outsiders point of view, kind of a brilliant choice I think on the part of Disney because even though they are not quite a full-fledged studio the way that Warner Bros or Universal is, because they get their Marvel product and Pixar movies and then they kind of just are going to do maybe six movies a year or something like that.

At least with Alan I go, okay, what they’re saying to everybody is we still are in the movie business. “See, we got a movie guy; we didn’t take the TV guy and put him in charge, or the cable TV guy and put him in charge. We actually went with the most traditional movie choice we could think of.” I have to feel encouraged by that. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s a great choice. I knew Alan Horn from a couple times during Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and some Corpse Bride stuff. He was great.

But mostly why I think he’s a good choice is really the reasons why we talked about in the podcast, why it was such a difficult job is you had to maintain these relationships with some really big, powerful, important people who are going to want their own things. So you have the DreamWorks deal. You have Stacey Snider. You have everybody there who they’re making movies for you. You have Marvel. You have Jerry Bruckheimer. You have these big producers who are creating a lot of your stuff and you need somebody who’s able to maintain those relationships, get what you need, make everyone feel like they’re being respected. And he has the experience to do that. So, it’s a good choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I was surprised. I mean, I guess I never even thought of it because he was retiring, you know? But why not? Sounds great to me.

**John:** Yeah. Second bit of follow up. Amazon Studios announced this week their first movie that they’re going to be making. It’s Zombies vs. Gladiators. Clive Barker directing it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. [laughs]

**John:** So what’s weird is I was looking through the news releases and they didn’t mention the writers at all. Well, who wrote this thing for it? And I kept looking through and I kept trying to find the original press release, and I still have not been able to find who wrote Zombies vs. Gladiators or if they announced it all.

**Craig:** [sighs] So, you know, Amazon, you guys frustrate me because you just come up with the dumbest program ever. John and I give you a big bunch of grief about it. You do the right thing, make a deal with the Writers Guild. You, more than anybody, were incredibly open about the fact that it all begins with a script. You finally make a movie and you don’t mention the writers. I mean, come on. Come on!

Now I’m angry. Hey, it’s gonna be a good podcast!

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, we’ve gotten Craig angry. I don’t know what to say to Amazon. It just feels like a really weird, dumb choice. Because if they’re going to trumpet their system and how they were able to get to this point based on their system of development then you should talk about the people who were involved in that system. And that feels like a frustrating choice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I can’t help but kind of wish Amazon well, because I want them to succeed, and I want them to be able to make movies and spend money in the industry because I think more people need to spend money in the industry. I’m just frustrated that they chose not to trumpet the right things in the press release.

**Craig:** I know. And just to be clear, this isn’t about ego. If it were just a matter of professional pride I would choke it down because I don’t really care about stuff like that. The issue here is when you don’t talk about the writer, and when you just go… — I mean, look, who’s directing? Clive…?

**John:** Clive Barker.

**Craig:** Okay, I mean, great. But it’s not like Clive Barker is Martin Scorsese.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I mean, he’s a pulp novelist, and a fine one at that. But, I mean, come on. You know, when you don’t mention the writer what you are doing is by extension perpetuating the culture that sort of says, “Well, you know, but the script, who cares. The most important this is that we got Clive Barker to direct Zombies vs. Gladiators.” It’s actually not the most important thing. You wouldn’t have gotten there without it.

Why don’t you extend some respect and actually make screenwriting something more people want to do, especially if you’re running a business that is trading on screenplays? Argh! Come on. Stupid.

**John:** Next bit of follow up: Last podcast we talked about we’re going to do a live version of Scriptnotes at the Austin Film Festival and we’re very excited about that. But we’d love to do some live episodes here in Los Angeles. And so we solicited some listener feedback on places where we could do it, and we’ve gotten like a lot of really good suggestions. So, thank you for that. If you have further suggestions for a venue we could use we’ll certainly add them to the list.

Ideally we’d want some place that we could control for the night, have some people in there. It doesn’t have to be too many people, but enough that we could actually solicit some feedback. Drinks would be fantastic, but not required. So, if you have more thoughts, you’re always welcome to send them in.

**Craig:** And, of course, proximity to the Pasadena is always appreciated. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, Craig doesn’t want to drive to the west side. And really I don’t either. [laughs]

**Craig:** And you don’t either. Yeah, I think, I would say sort of east of La Brea, north of Downtown would be spectacular.

**John:** I went to a really good video game little summit meeting thing that was done at Bergamot Station which is in Santa Monica. And so I was like, wow, Bergamot Station is fantastic. But I’d never want to come back to Santa Monica at night; I never want to fight traffic to get there.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I was working for Bruckheimer for awhile. And those guys, I love those guys, but man every time they would do this to me. They were like, “Look,” they would always apologize, like it mattered. Like apologizing to me was going to fix what was about to come and then say, “We need you to come in tomorrow and the only time we have is 4 o’clock.”

So, you know, getting to Santa Monica from Pasadena by 4 isn’t the end of the world. But then you have an hour and a half meeting and it was always lengthy. And by the time you’re out it’s 5:45, or 6, and I would just make dinner plans ahead of time. I would just stay because you simply couldn’t get back from there.

**John:** Listeners who don’t live in Los Angeles can’t possibly understand the east/west divide, it’s not about territory or anything else, it’s just so hard to move east/west in this city that if you get stuck at the wrong place at the wrong time you’re in for a really hellish amount of sitting around.

**Craig:** And I should also mention it’s just as hard to move north and south. [laughs] Yeah, and there’s a diagonal that’s also brutal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The 101 is sort of diagonal. And I don’t know if you guys have seen the sketch, the recurring sketch The Californians on Saturday Night Live; the running joke is that everybody in the midst of high drama is constantly advising each other what routes to take to avoid traffic. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s horribly accurate. What I will say about the north/south split is that most of the business of Hollywood sort of takes place on an east/west axis, and so you don’t have to go north or south that often. Unless you’re like shooting something down in Long Beach and then just god help you. Just god help you.

**Craig:** Well, the worst of it is, I remember talking to, there’s a… — Mark Vahradian, he works with Lorenzo di Bonaventura I think; they have a deal at Paramount, producers. But Mark was a Disney executive and the very first thing I did for Bruckheimer was way back in like 2000 or something like that. And Mark was the executive and he would have to go from Disney to — and Bruckheimer is like Olympic and 10th, or some horrifying Santa Monica location — and he’s like, “This is the worst possible… — because now I have to go west and south, and then I have to go north and east.” And we could only have meetings basically at 1 o’clock. It was the only time that would sort of save us all the grief.

It’s awful. Awful.

**John:** Yeah. Skype. Skype is really what you need. And the Bruckheimer people, if they’re going to have like hour and a half meetings, just get good at Skype. I have not seen Craig Mazin in person in months.

**Craig:** Right!

**John:** And I’m better for it and we’re able to make this podcast.

**Craig:** Right. If we can do this, I mean, can’t we just have a discussion via Skype? But it’s gotten to the point now where honestly I don’t, and this isn’t going to come as any — no despair will result at Sony by me saying this, but I don’t want to really work there. It’s too far away. [laughs] Not that they’re pounding on my door, but it’s far away! And then Bruckheimer is even more far away. Forget it.

**John:** Yeah. Nothing to do. Let’s move on to our big topics, our three things. First off I want to talk about screenwriting software and sort of where we’re at because, I don’t know if you can tell, I’m actually kind of floating a little bit today because I finished a script. I finished a script this afternoon.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you. And as we talked about on an earlier podcast, you don’t do anything special to celebrate. And I don’t usually do anything special to celebrate, but this was like a long time coming. You know what this project was. To actually be done with it is just a huge weight off my back. I can’t sort of talk about the project itself, but I can about what was different about this one — it’s the first thing I ever wrote in Scrivener rather than writing it in Final Draft or Movie Magic. I wrote it in Scrivener.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what that experience was like. Have you downloaded it? Have you ever played around with it?

**Craig:** I have. And I didn’t… — It was a little, um, because it’s not simply for screenwriting, it’s for outlining and idea collecting, whatever, it just…

It was too much.

**John:** It seems like too much. And they have really good tutorials that can sort of walk you through it, but still like that first window opens and you’re like, oh my god, there’s just too much on the screen. I can’t.

**Craig:** Too much. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so you can get rid of a lot of that stuff. And, some of that stuff is really ingenious, but the short version of this review, if people want to fast-forward, is that Scrivener is an amazing application if you’re writing a novel because it can organize things in ways that are just spectacular. And you can do several little things for your character stuff. And it’s really smart about that, and keeps chapters separately, and I ended up keep scenes separately.

So, I’ll talk you through sort of my workflow on it, and the things I liked about it.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, as I’ve discussed before, when I start to write a project I usually go off and barricade myself someplace and I just write scenes by hand. And I send them through and Stuart, or whoever my assistant is at that time, types them up and puts them in a folder. And then at some point in the process I will gather together all those little typed up things and make the full script. But I usually won’t do that until I’m like 50 or 60 pages into it so that I’ve broken the back of it.

What Scrivener is very good about is how it will let you keep those files separate. And they gather in sort of like a notebook and then at any point you can sort of combine them or split them apart and they’re still there.

So, you can work on this one little scene, or the next little scene, and not see everything else that’s around it. When you’re working on a long and real full screenplay in Final Draft there’s that constant temptation to scroll up and scroll down, and scroll up and scroll down. And you’re just working on this little piece in the middle, but then you want to kind of look back at that thing there. This kept me really focused on this is the scene I’m writing. Each little scene is like a little slug line over the left hand side and I’m only working on that. And it’s all I’m seeing; I’m not seeing above it and I’m not seeing below it, unless I choose to go see something above it or below it.

And it was very good for helping me focus. It has a really good full-screen mode, which I’ve come to appreciate.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, the sides go dark and you’re just seeing your main text. You can zoom in and get your text nice and big. And it does a pretty good job with the screenplay formatting. It does some of the same matting things that Final Draft does where you put the wrong name… — God help you if you type someone’s character name wrong. And it provides that 1,000 times and you have to go through and clear the smart type list.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It does a bit of that. A few times grabbing the wrong element. But on the whole it was fine. And so if someone has Scrivener and they say, “Could I write a screenplay in it?” Yeah, you could. That said, when I was done today, one of the first things I did is I exported to Final Draft and sort of — I made my clean up in Final Draft.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just to be clear: Scrivener’s composition area for screenplays, does it have essentially the same kind of function that Movie Magic or Final Draft does where it organizes it by action, character, dialogue, parenthetical?

**John:** Exactly. So, your basic elements that you’re selecting work largely the same way, little selectors at the bottom of the screen. It does a reasonably good job of guessing what the next element should be most times. A few times I got a little frustrated, but a couple is fine.

**Craig:** And it’s a tab-enter?

**John:** Tab-enter, that whole kind of thing.

**Craig:** All right, well, that’s a pretty good review. I mean, but then again, you went running back to the comforting bosom of… — Well, I don’t know how comforting that bosom is.

**John:** It’s not comforting.

**Craig:** The rocky, unsightly bosom of Final Draft.

**John:** I wanted to go out to Final Draft because I knew I would need to ultimately be there to do some stuff. I mean, down the road I’m going to have revisions, it’s going to be there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there wasn’t so much that was so amazingly better about Scrivener that I was going to want to stay there rather than be in Final Draft for the real stuff.

Oh, but I will say that the most illuminating thing about being in Scrivener for this whole script is Fountain, which is the other project I’ve been working on here, which is that plain text screenwriting format that we’ve been developing, I’m definitely going to write my next script just in Fountain.

So, Fountain is just text. There’s no formatting. It’s just character names are uppercase, dialogue is the line below a character’s name. That’s what we’ve been working on here and we have Highland which is the utility for it. And it wasn’t quite ready for me to start working when I was starting this draft, but I totally from now on would write a first draft in that.

**Craig:** That’s your plan?

**John:** That’s my plan. Because I feel like we focus so much on getting, like, the margins right and getting everything to look like a screenplay a little too early in the process. It’s like we’re picking out fonts for the book we’re going to publish back when we’re still typing it. And you can really type it without getting all of those margins stuff ready.

**Craig:** That’s right. I have become comfortable, I suppose, with my OCD in that regard. And I think I don’t have it any better or worse than the average screenwriter, you know. I do have a concern about how the page looks. I don’t like important revelations to be split up by a “more,” “continued,” and page break. You know, stuff like that.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But, yeah, I mean some of it is just sort of fussy delay tactics to provide the illusion of control over something that you are hanging onto for dear life.

**John:** I would say that I’m actually OCD about all those same things, but I’m pushing back that OCD to the point that I’m really compiling the whole script together.

**Craig:** Right. When it matters.

**John:** When it matters. Because I shouldn’t be focusing on any of that stuff when I’m just pushing the words around on the page. And so a lot of my frustration with, like, “Oh it thinks that element is this when it should be this,” well I shouldn’t be worrying about that at all. It should be perfectly clear — I know that’s my character’s name, and I know that’s dialogue; I don’t need the program to do anything for me right now.

**Craig:** It’s funny. Sometimes what I do is I will take a walk and think the scene in my head, write in my head essentially. And then when I get back I will just email to myself in nothing but text, and almost no description at all, really just the flow of the dialogue, because I know what’s supposed to go around it. And then when I sit down and write I am essentially compiling it myself instead of having — but even then what I’m writing is an even more bare bones version of what you’re doing.

**John:** But honestly, what that bare bones you’re doing, that is essentially Fountain. Fountain can take an email and make it into a script. So…

**Craig:** But I don’t even write character names. So it can’t do that.

**John:** No, it’s can’t. It’s not psychic.

**Craig:** It’s not magic, John.

**John:** It’s almost magic, but it’s not magic. It can’t quite do that, but it’s very close to that.

**Craig:** It’s close to wizardry. I’ve been a little behind. You know, my secret hope for the future is Fade In, which is this wonderful piece of independent screenwriting software that Kent Tessman has authored. And I’m a little behind because I got a version a couple months ago and I started working with it and discovered three or four things that I knew weren’t right that needed to change. And I spoke with Kent about it and he finally agreed.

And I liked why he did them, because he was sort of saying the way that things are isn’t sort of normal. And I had to sort of explain that screenwriting isn’t really normal and it needs to be.. — You know, things like when you delete things, normally you would want to pull stuff up, but in screenwriting you don’t. You actually want to leave everything where it is. Kind of. I mean, not pull up, but like you don’t want to move elements up. You want to leave them in their box.

So, I haven’t had a chance to see the latest version. But I would love to write my script on Fade In. So, that’s where I… — Because it is cleaner, and prettier, and full-screen beautiful. And I like it.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I don’t think I’m violating anything weird by saying I had a chance to see Final Draft’s iPad Writer. So, they’ve announced that they’re going to make a writing app for the iPad. And you know what? It’s actually pretty good. I was actually kind of impressed by it. So, it’s really Final Drafty, but it seems really functional. So, it’s another choice that screenwriters will have down the road.

**Craig:** I don’t like writing on an iPad. It’s very slow.

**John:** Well, with a proper keyboard I’m sure it’s much better.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess. But then at that point just give me my laptop. You know what I mean?

**John:** A case can be made for that.

Enough on screenwriting software. Let’s segue onto just the whole genesis of when do you know that you’re ready to start writing a script? This is a thing that came up in a discussion I had at the Outfest Screenwriters Lab yesterday, sort of how do you know that you have enough set and ready to start writing.

And it came up because there’s one guy who I was talking to who had a project that sounded really cool, incredibly ambitious, but he’d been sort of gathering his pieces and doing his outlines for more than a year. And I said, “No, no, no. You need to actually write because you are going to become one of those writers who never actually writes but is always planning for like the big thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s kind of the opposite of the more common problem which is the whole, “I find it as I go.” Yeah, that which I really don’t like.

**John:** There’s two reasons why writers, I think, often fail is that they started writing too soon, because they really knew how the story began, so they wrote that. And they were so excited and they had no idea what happened after that point.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So they lose their enthusiasm. They have ten interesting pages sitting there. Or the writers who just kind of never start because they’ve just been staring at it for so long and trying to figure out those little things that at a certain point they needed to just jump off the cliff and see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. And writers, of course every writer must be accountable to their own brain and what works best for them. You know, some writers require a kind of a scene-by-scene understanding. I have sort of over the years found myself basically using an index card system. I need to know what basically is happening in each scene and what the purpose of each scene is, all the way from beginning to end. And, you know, I don’t know; I’m looking at actually right in front of me are the index cards for ID Theft. And, you know, there’s about maybe 15, 16 cards in the first deck. There’s probably 20 cards in the second. And five cards in the third.

So it’s not a tremendous amount. But I know what all the scenes are. And more importantly, I know what the movie is. So everything is written with that purpose and unity. But once I have that I start.

**John:** Yeah. For me the issue is I don’t need to have all the cards, but I need to know what the movie is. And to me knowing what the movie is isn’t just knowing where the movie starts. I need to be able to picture several scenes in the middle of the movie that feel like, okay, I get what that movie is; I see what that thing is. I know how that’s… — I don’t necessarily need to know quite how I’m going to get to that thing, but I need to know what that thing is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I need to be able to picture those moments. And this script that I just finished today, it sort of sat in my head too long because it got pushed back because of other stuff that came up. But by the time I could sit down I could really see what all those big moments were along the way, and I could see what sort of the reversals were with some characters, and I knew what was going to be fun. And I also knew that all of those moments were going to feel like they were part of the same movie, even though they were different colors and different textures, and things were going to change over the course of the movie, I knew it felt like one thing that wanted to stay together.

And I’ve found that at a certain point, this happened with The Nines, too, where like the ideas will say, “Okay, you either have to write me or abandon me.” Because it’s taking up so many brain cycles to sort of keep it alive in your head that you have to, “Okay, I’m going to sit down, and buckle down, and actually get this on the page.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s funny. What you just described is sort of where I am right before I fill in all the other cards. And that’s a perfectly reasonable step to skip because I don’t start writing cards in sequence. The first thing I need to know is what is the idea, what is the premise, who is the hero, and how does it end because what is the theme? What is the argument of the movie on some level or another?

And then I come up with those big goal post moments that are in the very big, broad sweeps. You know, there’s probably only four of them in the movie, I think, you know. And then I start to fill in around them to connect them together. But I could also write from goal post to goal post. I don’t have to do index cards. It just makes me feel better. And, of course, as you start writing you realize, oh, my index cards are stupid now; I don’t need them.

But the other great thing about index cards I will say is that when I am done with the content that was indicated by the index card, then I draw a big red Sharpie across it. It feels so good.

**John:** Yeah. The satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done some part of it, that it’s finished. I don’t do a lot of that outlining stuff until I get pretty deep into writing the script, and then I can start to figure out, “Okay, what do I have left to write?” And then I make my list of like these are the scenes I have left to write, and then it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to scratch those through.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And for whatever reason I always end up at the right page length.

**Craig:** Always. I always do.

**John:** My friend Rawson who I love dearly but is like, “Oh, I got the first draft done. It was like 170 pages.”

**Craig:** Come on, Rawson!

**John:** Something did not work right there, because you should not be writing a 170-page script.

**Craig:** And that to me is, and I love Rawson, too — he’s a great guy and he’s a very good writer. So, you know, obviously he has his process. I mean, my whole thing is I don’t want to write 170 pages. I feel like I’m wasting everybody’s time, including my own. I want to kind of figure out the right 60 pages to cut before I write the 170 pages.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, I actually start to do that. One of the great things about outlining and index carding out your movie is that you can really just see where it suddenly starts to get sodden and limp. And then you compress and typically… — I actually don’t get scared when I see like, “Oh god, there’s like five scenes here, there should be one.” I just think, “Or there could be one really good scene that layers in a whole bunch of these things so it’s not so linear.”

And I routinely land between 107 and 119, like every time.

**John:** Yeah. I was 114 pages when I printed.

**Craig:** Look at that. I believe that’s right in the middle of my thing.

**John:** And so here’s the thing, because I was doing it in Scrivener I didn’t compile it until I was really all done. So, literally until this afternoon I had no idea how long it was.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s like, “What will our baby be? Oh, it’s a boy!”

**John:** Yeah. There were two choices. But, well, you hope there’s two choices.

**Craig:** Right. “Oh, it’s intersex!”

**John:** Yeah, the life became challenging, but potentially rewarding and maybe there’s a great narrative to be found there.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s a Rawson!

**John:** Oh, come now.

**Craig:** [laughs] I hope Rawson listens to this.

**John:** Yeah. Rawson’s busy. Rawson is going off to direct a movie. But he does listen to the podcast sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right. We’re the Millers, right?

**John:** Yeah. Here’s how Rawson will find out about this podcast. I’m sure Rawson has a Google News Alert setup. And so when the transcript of this podcast is posted he will get a Google News Alert, and then he will know that we talked about him.

**Craig:** Right. So in that Google News Alert will it mention that Rawson is, and now we can fill in anything we want.

**John:** Absolutely. Because that will become part of his little Google profile.

**Craig:** Will it mention that Rawson is a synthetic life from?

**John:** [laughs] Yes. That’s already well established.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, before we go to our third point, there’s something I meant to bring up earlier, because an amazing thing happened this last weekend. For the first time I got a script that they wanted me to read over the weekend, it was kind of a high priority project for these people, and I’m the company that makes Bronson Watermarker. So, I do understand people want to watermark their scripts so they don’t get circulated beyond places.

And I’ve dealt with, like Marvel, who’s really notorious for super watermarking all of their stuff. So, I’m pretty used to watermarking. This time what they sent over was not the script. They sent over an iPad with the script as a PDF in iBooks. And it’s a big old, well that’s not very secure. But, what they’ve done is they’ve turned on parental lock controls for the whole thing.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** And they have taken out all of the web accessibility and stuff. So, I’m sure there probably was a way that a person could get it off, but it would be really, really hard to get that script off the iPad. So in the end I was kind of impressed by it. That’s not a bad way, if you need to give a script to somebody and make sure they read it but don’t do anything else to it.

**Craig:** That is pretty smart. I did not, yeah, I’ll have to see. I mean, I’m sure within four minutes on Google we can figure out how to foil that. But, still, not a bad idea.

**John:** Pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, plus, it’s fun. If somebody sends me a script by email or messenger or something, then it’s on my pile of things to read. But if somebody sends me a script on an iPad, I just want to read it. [laughs] I want to read it right away.

**John:** So, Craig, I’m going to send you over this script on an iPad so that you’ll actually read it.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, because I did read 30 pages of your script and just…[laughs]

**John:** Yeah, the one that I sent you before. You were like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll get to it.” Yeah, that was very helpful.

**Craig:** By the way, I, um…

**John:** Yeah, Craig is a little behind on reading something. But you know what, Craig? You can stop reading that for reasons that I’ll talk to you about offline.

**Craig:** Well you see then I really saved us both time. [laughs] But the truth is until you just said that I forgot. I totally forgot it! I feel terrible. Because I knew I had read 30 pages and was like, “I got to finish that,” and then it left my mind. And you, honestly, are either incredibly patient or you were just really setting a trap for me because you never mentioned it again. And so then I forgot. I’m sorry.

**John:** Yeah. It’s okay.

**Craig:** It was a good first 30 pages, though.

**John:** You know, a script that might circulate on an iPad because they certainly don’t want people to know spoilers is Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Segue into our last topic of the day. How about that season finale?

**Craig:** I liked it a lot.

**John:** Yeah, so again, spoiler alert here, because there’s sort of no way to not talk about spoilers for the season finale of Game of Thrones. But we had talked in an earlier podcast about how amazing the season was and my only one frustration was I felt like the Qarth plotline was sort of tap dancing around a bit because they clearly had a big reveal and they weren’t ready for it, so they were just sort of stalling to save that for the season finale.

But the stuff in the season finale was really good.

**Craig:** It was. Although I will still say, okay, so I mean I guess we should put the spoiler alert on for anyone who hasn’t caught up yet, bizarrely. The zombie army at the end was awesome. And everything, as always, with Dinklage was awesome. And Brienne had a great moment. That was sick. Loved that.

I mean, there was just a lot of great, great stuff in it. And, oh, a really funny moment, I mean a sad but funny moment with Theon and his guys clocking him and, like, “I thought he would never shut up.” That was great. I did not see that coming, so, well done as always with those guys.

The Qarth thing for me ultimately, I was like I just, I’m not sure if any of that was really worth it in the end because, you know, remember the first season ends with this amazing moment where this girl who had been kidnapped and sort of subjugated by her mean brother and then her rapist husband, sort of blossoms into this incredibly self-possessed woman who then at the very end survives fire and hatches dragons which — that’s quite an arc.

And this season she went to a town and then the dragons sort of lit a guy on fire.

**John:** Yes. What I will say is that if you take out what I thought were the placeholder moments that happened in a couple previous episodes, and you just took a look at what she did in this episode, yes, she goes into that tower, but then she also goes through that temptation sequence where she ends up at the Wall, she ends up back with her husband. She sees the throne, but like everything has changed around it. She has her temptation sequence. I thought it was very, very cool. It felt like it sets her up as a truly kind of mythical creature.

I like that she defended herself as like, “Well what about my magic?” And that defining kind of stuff. And the warlock saying, “You know what? It’s because the dragons are here that the magic is increasing in the world,” which is cool.

**Craig:** Right. I like that. I mean, it certainly made sense of why they were doing what they were doing, because for the life of me I couldn’t understand why until that moment, and that was good. And, in fact, because I always read the… — There’s a guy who does reviews for Wired and he reviews Game of Thrones, and he reviews it entirely from the point of view of somebody that has really obsessively read the books. And so he tends almost always to bemoan any deviation from the source material.

But, I actually don’t think that was in the source material. I think that’s something that Dan and David came up with. And even he begrudgingly was like, “I guess that’s pretty good.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You know, I mean, he’s the grouchiest guy. I mostly read it because I just find it kind of ridiculous. It’s like the point is not to simply film every word you’ve read, sir.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that aside, I mean, that’s a minor quibble. And she’s great. All the performances were great. But it’s hard to do a final episodes that is, and it’s the same thing they did last season. Remember, the penultimate episode was the huge one, where they chop off Ned’s head and they have the battle this season, and then this ultimate episode kind of just to tease you off for the madness to come.

**John:** What I thought was smart about the episode, just to praise it a little bit more, is even though they had to skip around to so many different plotlines, it all felt like they were part of one universe. And I felt like it was one bigger message, and that all these things were going to be coming back together. Because the two young princes have to flee the burned city. It’s like, we’re going to head north to the Wall for safety.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** And like the zombie army is coming!

**Craig:** The zombie army is heading south towards the Wall. Right.

**John:** And establishing the small new things in the world, like, oh, the assassin, well he’s actually magical. Like he’s some sort of changeling kind of creature. That was…

**Craig:** That was cool.

**John:** Those are all important things.

**Craig:** That was cool. And got to give credit to the director. I don’t know if it was Nutter who did this last one. But, I mean, all the episodes have been extraordinarily well directed. It’s hard to direct television like that because I would imagine they’re producing these things in huge chunks. They don’t do them episode by episode. They’ve got to do all the stuff in Iceland. They’ve got to do all the stuff in Ireland.

And, so, they managed quite beautifully over many directors and many different locations and completely out of sequence to maintain these wonderful transitions and hold everything together. The show is very well written and very well acted. And you talked about the cast, but the direction is also excellent.

**John:** Hooray for Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Tech credits were astounding.

**John:** Yes. Craig, do you have cool stuff this week, like One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I don’t. You know, you always do this to me. I don’t…

**John:** I would say that most of our listeners have an expectation that often there’s a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I don’t — nothing’s cool.

**John:** Nothing’s cool.

**Craig:** [laughs] My One Cool Thing is being bored. Bored. What do you have? Tell me something cool.

**John:** I’ll tell you something cool. I don’t know if you’ve… — You play games like Ski Racer, that thing I got you hooked on.

**Craig:** Ski Safari. That was cool.

**John:** Ski Safari. That was good. So, I was looking around and I wanted to see both for sort of my daughter who is starting to learn some basic kind of programming kind of stuff…

**Craig:** Nerd!

**John:** Nerd! Super nerd. Super geek dad. And so I wanted to see are there simple little game tools because I really basically want her to have HyperCard, but HyperCard doesn’t exist anymore. And the things that are like HyperCard are really far too complicated and big and huge.

And so I was like, well, is there a way to make little Flash games? And I found this thing called Stencyl that’s genius. And so what it essentially is is a development environment for creating little flash games or little iOS games, but it’s all little blocks of code that click together. So you’re not typing statements and functions. You’re just setting parameters on things that can move in the world. And it’s incredibly smartly done. I don’t have any real sense of how big the company is that’s making it, whether it’s one incredibly maniacal person behind it or a bigger team.

But the things that you’re able to do are really, really impressive. And they’ve very smartly leveraged, there’s a beginning programming system called Scratch that MIT had made that I had seen years ago. And it was a good idea that never sort of fully developed. And Stencyl has sort of taken that idea and run with it.

So, I would recommend Stencyl to anybody who’s interested in making little Flash games, or anyone who wants to teach their kids about moving stuff on the screen.

**Craig:** It sounds like something my son would love. Is it web-based?

**John:** Yeah, because your son does little animation stuff. It’s downloadable. It’s on the Mac.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s on Mac.

**John:** It’s on the Mac and PC. So it’s an actual application and so it doesn’t have all that sluggishness that web-based stuff tends to have.

**Craig:** Oh great. It sounds like something he would absolutely flip for because, yeah, I know my boy.

**John:** You know your boy.

**Craig:** I know my boy, and that sounds like…

**John:** And so it comes with a bunch of little demo games that you can play right there and then you can just open them up and change all the parameters and see how stuff works. And it’s smartly done.

**Craig:** Ah, all right. Stencyl.

**John:** Stencyl. And it’s spelled S-t-e-n-c-y-l.

**Craig:** C-y-l, so it’s like the stripper version of Stencil.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. Stencyl-Lynn would be the stripper name.

**Craig:** I do have One Cool Thing. I have One Cool Thing. The trailer for our friend John Gatins’ Flight.

**John:** I’m happy to link to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Flight is a script that John Gatins wrote ten years ago, I think, maybe longer. And it’s a very interesting story and in part sort of inspired by his own life, not the part with the plain. But I’ve been listening to John talk about this script for a long, long time. And then it all sort of came together. Robert Zemeckis returned to live action directing, and Denzel Washington, and all that stuff sounds great. But I was always sort of nervous about it just because they’re making a movie, I think the budget is like $30 million or something like that, or $35 million. Very low budget considering what they had to do and who’s in the movie, I mean, Denzel, and Robert Zemeckis. Everybody is obviously working for the love of the movie.

And I just get tense when I see trailers and things for friends’ movies because sometimes they just don’t look good, and then what do you do? And it doesn’t mean the movie is not good, it just means that I start worrying for them because the marketing is off.

And then I see this trailer for Flight and I’m like, it’s just — it does everything right. And I would love to find out — if any of you out there know what trailer house and specifically what editor cut the trailer for Flight, I’d love to know. Because it does everything right. I mean, it’s so smartly done. This is a trailer where you start off with a pilot and he’s on a plane and there’s a plane crash in the movie, okay; I’m not giving anything away there.

And every other trailer would have just shown the plane crash and then said, “And then…” You know? And this thing, he’s just flying a plane, and the next shot is he’s waking up in a hospital. And you don’t see the plane crash at all. And then over the course of the trailer they give you drips and drabs of his plane crash. And then there’s one final shot.

**John:** That shot, I get goose bumps just thinking about that final shot.

**Craig:** Okay? Just thinking about it. And my deal is, and I wrote something for, you can dig it up for the links if you want, for WordPress [*sic.*] many years ago about marketing and how screenwriters can help marketers in one little tiny way. And that is for all of the goo-goo bananas silliness of trailers, if there’s one image or line moment in a trailer that is really astonishing, or surprising, or fresh in some say, sometimes it’s even just a little joke that grabs people, it will work. You will drive people to the theaters.

I think in that essay I wrote I refer to the moment in, you know, I saw the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean, I’m like, okay, yeah, it’s pirates and guns and stuff. And then they turned into skeletons and I was like, “Okie dokie, that was cool.” [laughs] You know? Like I did not see that one coming. “You better start believing in ghost stories, you’re in one,” you know?

And in this there’s this shot at the end where you go, “Oh?! OH?!” And then you really want to see this movie. So, awesome trailer. I’m sure the movie’s gonna be fantastic. Very happy for John. And you should all go watch that trailer.

**John:** Yeah, I praised John for it and also said I’m really hoping that it becomes the continuing gift of The Nines that we could have our fourth Oscar nominee from The Nines. Because John Gatins has a small role in The Nines. Octavia Spencer is in The Nines. Melissa McCarthy is in The Nines.

**Craig:** Melissa McCarthy.

**John:** Jim Rash is in The Nines.

**Craig:** Jim Rash. How do I get myself retroactively inserted into The Nines?

**John:** That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** In the director’s cut?

**John:** In the premise of the next…yeah, that’s right.

**Craig:** Yeah, get me into the director’s cut as somebody. Anything.

**John:** [laughs] Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll film new scenes and then delete them and they will be deleted scenes from The Nines.

**Craig:** Hey, that’s a great idea.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, now my odds of an Oscar have doubled from zero to zero. Yay!

**John:** Yay! Craig, thank you again for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** John, my pleasure. See you next time.

**John:** Take care. Bye-bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/littlest-plot-shop).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this weekend I encountered something new for the first time; something kind of amazing and transformative.

**Craig:** Oh, I want to guess, but I’m not gonna.

**John:** Okay. First of all, there were actually two transformative things that happened in the same location.

A TV writer was throwing a Memorial Day party at his house, and he had one of those pools that had like the current in it.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Have you seen these yet?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** Kind of like wave pools.

**John:** It made a normal pool seem impossibly lame.

**Craig:** So the idea is that you swim for exercise and it just keeps pushing you back.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. Or, if you have a bunch of kids there, they will basically get into the current and get thrown all the way back to the back of the pool, which they love. Who would not love that? It’s like sky diving but in a pool.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s pretty awesome.

**John:** But the more relevant thing for our podcast, which is not about swimming-related technology…

So I was talking to a mom and she had a fifth grader, and so I was making sort of the standard parent chit chat that you do, like, “Oh, so what is your fifth grade daughter into?” And she said, “Oh, she’s really into filmmaking.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. So what kind of stuff does she do? Does she have a camera?”

“Oh, she’s mostly into LPS.” I’m like I have no idea what LPS is. So I ask, I’m a curious person, so I ask what LPS is. LPS stands for Littlest Pet Shop.

**Craig:** Okay?

**John:** Littlest Pet Shop is a serious of collectible figurines, sort of like tiny little bobble-head figurines, little animals, adorable little animals. And so the culture has formed, so you take these little animals and you stage scenes with them, and you film them and you post them on YouTube.

And so I’m thinking okay, but no-no, they are elaborate staging things of like ongoing series or often sort of like verbatim reenactments of TV shows which I was like, “Well this is really fascinating for you to tell me this. I’m going to leave now so I can Google this immediately and discover what this whole phenomenon is.”

So I’ve been looking them up and they are actually kind of amazing and fascinating because it’s this whole subculture of you take these little figurines and you’re making these movies, and it’s not like the Lego — you’ve seen like the stop-motion Lego stuff which is impressive —

**Craig:** Yeah. My son makes those.

**John:** Which is impressive in its own right. But here the culture is not just that… — You’re not doing frame-by-frame; you’re moving the little pieces, the little guys, at the time and your painting your fingernails so they’re really beautiful while you’re manipulating the little bobble-heads for these characters.

**Craig:** What the hell? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. You’re doing very girlie things like, you know, Popular. So, anyway, I was enraptured and amazed that this was happening. And it’s stuff that’s being done mostly on iPhone cameras. What a good time that we live in.

**Craig:** And is it mostly kids doing these things or are there —

**John:** Hopefully it’s mostly kids doing these things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** But I remember taking a class in college about post-modernism. And we spent the whole semester talking about what is post-modernism. And there in 30 seconds is a definition of this is what post-modernism is. This is taking two culturally not related things and squishing them together in a way that is creating something new in an impossibly weird but kind of fascinating way.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like the whole Brony phenomenon.

**John:** Totally. Bronies.

**Craig:** Right. Which just puzzles me to no end.

**John:** Yeah. Well someone thought of a cool word and it became a meme that expanded beyond that.

**Craig:** It’s so, so weird. It’s so weird.

**John:** Anyway, so I’ll post to the show notes links to some LPS videos. But just YouTube “LPS.” Anyone who’s listening to this not in driving time has probably stopped the podcast to go Google and YouTube some of these videos.

**Craig:** Eh, or they’ve just crashed. Not because they’re distracted, because they just want to die. [laughs] ‘Cause they don’t want to live in a world with this. I will not YouTube these things.

**John:** No. So, I was watching a Littlest Pet Shop CSI episode. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh man! [laughs]

**John:** And I’m reading the little synopsis for what happens in the episode, and so I thought this would actually be a good topic for our podcast today is plot. Because I was reading the little plot synopsis, and the plot synopsis was like what you read in a TV Guide for like a normal thing. But just reading the plot synopsis you really have no sense that this is being acted out with little tiny bobble-headed animals.

So I wanted to talk about the difference between plot and story, because a lot of times I think they’re used kind of interchangeably and the idea of like — the sense that I have an idea for a story, and here’s the plot of what would happen, well that’s really about maybe 5% of what the actual work of writing and creating an episode of a story is.

And so so much of what we assume is like that’s what happens in the story, well that’s the three-sentence description. That’s the synopsis of what happened in the story, but it’s not the actual work of what writers did.

And what occurred to me is there’s a person who wrote into the site who’s from some foreign country but had terrific English and was pitching this thing that he’d worked on. And it’s a website that’s called PlotWizard.com. And it’s inspired by this book called Plotto by William Wallace Cook. And I didn’t know anything about it until he sort of talked me through it. So, I Googled it more; God bless Google.

Plotto was this book that this guy put together, and there had been other things before it, which were sort of like universal plot bibles. And so it’s one of those ideas where you start a thread and then you can choose any number of options and then you go to Option 46 and then that could feed into these other options, and these other options; and so just by flipping through pages in this book you can create these really elaborate plots for things.

So like the hero discovers that his long-lost brother is still alive and takes a long journey to go find him and there’s these kind of complications. It’s a formula.

**Craig:** Yuck.

**John:** Yes. And so a mathematical reduction of sort of what story is. So this guy who wrote into the site had done sort of a digital version of it. And so I want to read you one of the plots that this computerized version came up with. You ready?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Okay. “While writing a con game, Gilbert meets Corrina, who astutely sees through his scheme. Corrina is also involved in a scam, and Gilbert becomes suspicious. Corrina learns that Gilbert is in serious trouble. In order to help Gilbert escape the law, Corrina seduces the arresting officer, Ronnie. Ronnie pretends to be in love with Corrina, but it’s actually part of his plan to capture both Gilbert and Corrina red-handed. Thinking he’s proposed to Corrina, Gilbert finds that he’s accidentally proposed to Corrina’s twin sister, Carly…”

**Craig:** Oh god!

**John:** “…who accepts. Now the twins both love Gilbert. Gilbert is about to marry Carly who has tricked him into believing that Corrina is unfaithful. Ronnie stops the wedding to arrest the bride and groom. Corrina pretends to be Carly and runs away with Gilbert, now a fugitive from the law.” [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Now what I should stress is that for some reason this little generator has a lot of twins and mistaken identities. And sort of like people pretending to be people that they’re not. But you read through that and it’s like, well, that could be a plot to something.

**Craig:** [laughs] No it can’t. No, I mean, that really is the definition of a dead thing. You know? I mean, it could be the plot of a soap opera, I guess.

**John:** It could be the plot of soap opera. But here’s what it is: that could be the formulaic reduction of sort of what happened in it, but it doesn’t tell you sort of how it happens. And so I want to talk about the difference here because I think a lot of times people say, “Well I have a good idea for a story; like this happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens.”

But the actual work of screenwriting, of telling a story in fiction or in screenwriting, is figuring out how it happens. Not the what, but the how. And so all of those how questions are what you end up staring at the giant whiteboard and figuring out, well, who knows this piece of information and what would be the scene or the moment were they learn this thing, and how is this thing going to happen?

So, looking at this description, like: Corrina learns that Gilbert is in serious trouble. In order to escape the law, Corrina seduces the arresting officer Ronnie. Well, what does that mean? What is seducing the arresting officer Ronnie mean? Is that a scene? Is that an entire episode of an ongoing series? Is that the whole movie? That’s the difference in the work of what is plot, which to me is the distillation down of this is what happens in the story, and the actual work we’re doing.

**Craig:** Well, when you go through a plot like that you get a lot of “what” questions, like — what happens? This woman seduces a man to save a guy to do a thing. So, what happens next is what bad writers are constantly asking: what happens next? And I think good writers are always asking: why should this happen next? [laughs]

Because, when we tell stories, we are always telling them about human beings. Always. Even when we’re telling them about animated rabbits and fish. And what we care about, the whole point of plots existing in the first place, is to enthrall us in the lives of people who are interesting to us. Their problems are interesting to us. Therefore the things that happen to them must be interesting to us. So, the question that I think good writers should always be asking about plot is “why.” Otherwise you end up with what Aristotle astutely called, thousands of years ago, an episodic story which is, in his words, the worst story. [laughs] And it is.

There’s no purpose. There’s no unity. There’s no theme. There’s no character. So I always urge people to just think “why.” If you want her to seduce this guy — why? Why not just come up with an easier way that doesn’t involve that?

**John:** Well you need to ask why not from the perspective of the author, of what you need, but why from the perspective of the character who’s making the choice. And why is that the right choice for her to be making.

Now, ideally, the right choice for her to be making is also the most interesting choice for your audience to see. That become the weird balancing act of telling fiction is figuring out how to let your fictional characters make choices that are going to be the most rewarding for your audience to see.

Bad writing, it’s true, oftentimes you’ll have the episodic things where you also feel like you have plot robots who are just people who are being dragged through a plot. The other extreme, which can also be a very bad extreme, is you have characters who have so much control of the story that they’re just going to wander off and do whatever they’re going to do and it may not be very interesting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The challenge is corralling those two competing forces into finding what is the most interesting thing this character could do that is also very consistent with what the character would want to do in this moment.

**Craig:** That’s a great way of saying it.

**John:** Your struggle as a writer is to find, to create the situations that both of those things are going to be the same.

**Craig:** Yeah. The way of thinking about that dichotomy is you need to know what must happen. The characters can’t know what must happen. That’s where the fun happens, right? You know that these two people must go from where they are now in this particular circumstantial state to this next circumstantial state, but they can’t know.

You have to actually make it — you have to make them blind. It has to be surprising to them. You know, sometimes you’ll hear these terms, like “reversals.” They’re not really reversals because everything is on a straight line in its own way. The straight line is the one you’ve drawn. It’s just that the characters can’t see it. So send them off perpendicular to that straight line. Make it hard for them to get to A to B. Make B meaningful so that when they get there it suddenly changes or recontextualizes things for them which makes the next milestone even trickier to get to.

You need to know your plot, but your characters should never know it. And I think that’s what you’re touching on when you say that these characters are in control of the story.

**John:** When I was in journalism school we were taught pyramid structure and the journalistic questions, which are who, when, why, what, how. So, you’re trying to answer those questions in a news story. And so the what questions are really these plot questions, like, well what happens? Where it happens is setting. When it happens is also setting and weirdly it is sort of structure; structure is an answer to the question of when are characters going to find out this information and when are they going to choose to do these things. When in the course of this movie are you going to place things.

But it really comes down to the “who” questions and the “why” questions. Who are these characters and why are they doing what they’re doing. And ultimately this will hopefully answer why we as an audience should care about them.

When you see stories that tend to fall apart in their second act, which is basically after all the exciting stuff in the beginning has happened, it’s because you didn’t really know who those characters were and you really weren’t invested in whatever the specific journey of the story is that they were trying to set up.

**Craig:** That’s right. You don’t know where you’re going. It’s funny, I had a discussion with my 10-year-old son tonight because he has to write these little Cinderella stories for class. So, you can write any kind of story you want as long as it vaguely fits into a Cinderella paradigm. And he had written sort of two-thirds of a story. And then in the first part — it’s very my-son — in the first part a little girl lives with her dad in the woods and his robot wife, but he has grown tired of his robot wife and wants a real wife.

Okay. Act one is concluded upon his journey to town to find a real wife. Act two begins when he comes home with the real wife. He’s found a real wife, and she has two sons, and they’re terribly mean to our heroine and they beat her up and they give her abrasions, which is a word he learned yesterday so of course it must be employed in the story today. [laughs] “And they give her abrasions.”

And so he had gotten that far and I said, okay great, what happens next? And he said, “Uh…I don’t know yet. I haven’t written that part yet.” And I said, “You know, the thing is you kind of need to know where you’re going or just the ending is not going to relate to the beginning.” And he asked me to sort of give him an example which I think was partly his sneaky way of having me do it for him.

But, in the hopes that this would have some instructional value I said, okay, well, you have this interesting element of the robot wife that has seemingly been forgotten. So, you know, it’s a Cinderella story and in Cinderella stories there are fairy godmothers. Maybe the castoff robot wife is actually a fairy godmother or fairy god-robot. And she can help your hero girl somehow get one over on these terrible boys. And then maybe she can turn them into robots and maybe then the little girl, they ask for forgiveness, for mercy, and the little girl asks the fairy god-robot to turn them back into humans and then they show her mercy by being nice to her and they all live happily ever after.

And you see how in the stuff that you put there in the beginning, that’s there on purpose because that’s what the ending is all about. And he went, “Ah! Oh, that’s interesting.” And the funny thing is I read scripts from not-10-year-olds that make the same mistake.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’ve got this wonderful little concoction you’ve built for yourself because you really love your idea. And your idea is good enough to start writing. The problem is your idea has no relation to anything of value at the end. Beginnings are wonderful things. I love beginnings. I spend more time writing the first 20 pages than I do the rest of the movie. But they only exist because they are there — they are the ball being thrown up in the air and you have to know where you want it to land. And it has to land somewhere that matters, that has some kind of import for the audience.

So, to me, plot is a function of where you want to end. And I think so many people start with where they want to begin.

**John:** A few weeks ago I linked to Old Jews Telling Jokes, and part of the reason why I wanted to bring that up is what is so crucial about a joke, and if you hear a kid try to tell a joke you will realize why this skill is so important to master, is a joke is about where you’re going to end up. A joke is about that punch line. And if you haven’t carefully walked everyone through the process of the joke to get to that punch line, the punch line is not going to be funny.

And when you see a young kid try to tell a joke, they will say a bunch of stuff and then they’ll say like “poopy” at the end.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And every once and awhile it’s hilarious.

**Craig:** That’s a really good joke actually. [laughs]

**John:** But most of the time that’s going to be — or they’ll say, “On your eyeball,” or just something gross — and it’s like, well, that’s actually not what a joke is. And working on various movies that are weepy, I would say that the same thing happens with emotional things. You have to have an emotional journey that gets you to that point where you’re ready to feel that emotion. And being aware of the fact that each moment along that journey needs to be rewarding in its own right, but needs to be able to take you to that place.

Now that sounds very much like here’s the author forcing these moments to exist to be that way so he can get to that last payoff, but no, you actually have to be able to somehow do both. And that’s the judo of it is that you have to have your characters feel like they’re driving those moments so that they’re naturally arriving at those moments all the way along the way. And it’s going to take you to that final place that you want to get to. And that can be a huge challenge.

The thing I’m working on right now I had sort of that thing where you lie in bed and I was trying to loop the scene, and trying to figure out how I was going to get this… — It’s a really simple kind of transition. I need to get this character from one sort of fantastical world to another fantastical world and make it a natural sort of seeming thing. And I was really struggling to figure out what is the mechanism, how is it going to work, and it wasn’t until I really sat down with the script and sort of went through some other scenes and really figured out what was going to lead up to, it was like, oh, I was trying to write that moment as if it was a first act moment, but this is a very late second act moment.

I don’t want to spend the shoe leather to make this big magical journey between these two places. As an audience I don’t want to learn something great and new about this world. I just want to get to the next thing. And that’s another crucial part of storytelling that it’s going to be lost in sort of this plot bot, like it’s not telling you where the real heart and time and work of the movie is. Is one of the sentences a scene, or is one of these sentences just an off-hand comment that somebody makes to somebody? That’s the real work of writing.

**Craig:** You know, we can talk about all sorts of little rules and tricks and things, but ultimately 98% of this is your instinct for things. Some stories deserve to be told microscopically, others deserve to be told macroscopically. Just like when you’re on Google Maps you can see a street or you can see a country. And there are movies that will take people over the course of ten years. There are movies that take place over one night.

The movies that take place over one night contain these micro-moments. I mean, Go contains micro-moments that expand and are hugely important, and then the night is over and dawn happens. The Hangover movies, the same way; you’re compressing a lot of stuff into small things, small temporal things, so you make bigger deals out of little moves.

But then there are other movies, you could tell a road trip movie over the course of six months. You could tell an epic over the course of five years, people are aging. You need to have some sense of your scale before you start writing because your script will either be 12-pages or 1,000 if you don’t have that internal metronome.

**John:** You look at either of the two Hangover movies. If the storytelling purpose of those characters was “we’ve had a very long and difficult marriage but we’ve had a great marriage,” all of the events of The Hangover could basically be summarized in a jump cut, like you know, “we lost him and then we found him again.” All of that stuff would be sort of eclipsed if you’re telling the person’s larger life.

Like Big Fish is a story of huge ellipses being put in a person’s life. Impossible things happen, but you just past them. You look at a moment but you don’t look at the whole thing. Even Spectre, which is a larger section of Big Fish, where he goes to the fantastical town, there’s clearly a lot left out of there. It’s clearly here-are-the-highlights-of-what-happens. His growing up in Ashton is just the highlights, versus Go and Hangover which is like zooming in on a very tight focus on things.

And that’s what I was really facing in the script that I’m writing right now is that I was doing some of the really close-up detail work, and I was trying to do the close-up detail work, and I was like, oh, this is not a close-up detail moment; this is a cut-to-the-next-thing. This is in Indiana Jones, like the-plane-flies-over-the-map kind of moment. And I was trying to build out the whole scene. Well, the movie doesn’t want that scene right there. The movie wants to get to the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to know your scale. You have to know your scale. And by the way, scale in and of itself is a dramatic tool, because sweeping movies tend to play well into our sense of mortality because they cover ground — people age, they grow old, they die, there’s a sense of loss, there’s that kind of weird existential whatever it is that is transmitted to you by a movie in which time passes and lives change.

Because we all feel that in movies that sort of take that point of view, whether they work or not, are designed to make us confront our own mortality and our relationship with time as it slips past us. These movies when you do a small scale movie it’s about tension and panic and anxiety, and maybe more important than that, those moments where you make the wrong or right choice that will change everything afterwards.

And the funny thing is those movies, movies like Go and Hangover are movies in which you get the sense that at the end your life is fine after that. You had a night where you could have gone to hell, or you could have set it straight and liberated yourself, and you managed to liberate yourself, and everything’s going to be fine afterwards, until the sequel. [laughs]

But, the grand scale movies are more ethereal. There’s a wistful sense to those. You have to understand what you’re trying to achieve with the audience and let that feed back into the tone you’re selecting and the scale you’re selecting, because plot will impart tone.

**John:** So, let us take a bit of a digression, but let’s talk scale and tone and sort of pacing and timing. Are you caught up on Game of Thrones?

**Craig:** Yeah. What a great episode.

**John:** That was a great episode.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Small spoiler warning, but not really a huge spoiler warning. I think we can talk about this without ruining anything great about Game of Thrones. This last night’s episode was a very epic battle that took place at an important city. And unlike most episodes, most episodes of the show are following many plot lines, and especially in the second season they are following many, many plot lines. And this episode chose not to do that and was just focusing on this one battle, and so it really changed the scale of what you expect from Game of Thrones, because Game of Thrones things seem like they could be taking place over months and months and months, and this took place over one 12-hour period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it was terrific for that. And I just have no idea how they did it on the budget they did it; it was just remarkably well done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It addressed or sort of brought up a question I had about this season. Again, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything hugely for this, but if you really don’t want to know anything about Game of Thrones stick your fingers in your ears and go yeah-yeah-yeah for about 10 seconds.

The plot line in Qarth with the missing dragons was a weird thing that happened this season in that it was one of the few times in the show where I felt them sort of tap dancing and stalling for a bit, because the dragons are missing and we see they’re in this tower. We see the shot of the towers. Well, we know we need to get to that tower, but we can’t get to the tower right now because there’s clearly other stuff that has to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when you go back to revisit that plot line — I think in two different episodes they may have revisited she wants to find her dragons, she wants to find her dragons. Well, we want to find her dragons, too; like, don’t show us the scene of two people talking about wanting to find the dragons. Find the dragons.

**Craig:** It’s funny. I don’t even know why we want to find the dragons. [laughs] I have a whole big issue with the dragon plot line because I’m still waiting for sort of, like — okay, I understand the dragons will one day grow up and then they’ll lay waste to anything, or not. I mean, you’re in the middle of a desert.

That, you know it’s a funny thing…

**John:** Okay, so I need to preface this by saying I think the show is brilliant.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**John:** What David and D. B. have done is remarkable. And so of the few things that sort of blipped for me is — and Lost had similar problems, too — sometimes where things would get out of sync with each other — and True Blood has had it too, where the plot lines just aren’t syncing quite right. And this felt like one of those situations.

**Craig:** Well, I will say that I think that the material that they were drawing from for this season, it seemed to bottom out a little bit in the middle. And, look, they’re drawing off of… — The George Martin books are so intricately plotted; you can’t exactly just go, “Well you know, let’s vamp and do some other stuff now.” And it’s not like Lost where you’re writing a show and you can just sort of, “Okay, well what are we writing? It’s us.”

So, I think they did a very good job with what they had there. It seemed like this story had some circular motion to it. But boy did it pay off in spades. I mean, Sunday’s episode was one of those episodes where you go, “Okay, I’m glad I ate my broccoli, I got to here. It’s awesome. I wouldn’t have gotten here if I hadn’t eaten the broccoli.” It had so many great lines. It was one of those, you get to a line and you go, “Oh, that’s the line of the show.” And then five minutes later you go, “Oh, no, that’s the line of the show.” And they did it like four more times.

Can I also say something about, I mean not to derail us from plot, but Dan and David did something with the show that people don’t appreciate enough because it’s invisible, and that’s casting. And I know we’re talking about plot, but forgive me. Casting is something that the audience never notices because it’s inevitable to them. There’s only one cast. They never look at auditions. They never will nor should they.

And it’s not like drafts of a script, because drafts of a script are related and they are progressive, and it might be interesting to sort of dig through them like Troy and see how levels led to levels led to the final product. But casting is either it was going to be this guy or this guy. Great casting here.

**John:** And sometimes it was one guy and they recast.

**Craig:** Occasionally. And they did on the show. They recast a couple of key parts on the show after the pilot. But, there are… — I mean, how many characters are on the show that you keep track of? 40? I’m just guessing off-hand.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not only would I say are they all cast well. I would say the vast majority are cast great, where they just nailed the casting. And think about, if you blow casting on a successful TV show on one little character like that, you’re stuck with that person for the run. You can’t change Theon in the middle of the show. It ain’t gonna work.

They did such an amazing job of casting this show. My hats off to those guys. It’s just unreal.

**John:** So circle back around to plot, talking about casting. The actress who plays Daenerys, who is looking for her dragons, she wasn’t my favorite right out of the gate. I’ll be honest, she wasn’t. And then she ended up stepping up and she was terrific once they sort of found her second life in that.

I fell like this second season these last couple episodes might have been stronger if they just took her scenes out rather that sort of like reminding us 40 minutes into the show we’re going to have one scene with her looking for her dragons. Let’s just not see her this week, because I feel like the episodes where they don’t go to see any other castle at all, those could be fine, too. It’s really the struggle, and I feel like we’re in a new art form right now, and it’s not really clear what the best practices are sometimes because these elaborately multi-plot-lined epic dramas, there’s maybe 10 years worth of history on these, and it’s still not clear what the best way to do these are.

**Craig:** Right. And they are, I think, very respectable… — Sorry. They’re very respectful of the source material. And I think they want to do right by… — I mean, there’s a huge fan base for the books themselves. And, look, they’ve had success smartly not doing the Hollywood thing of kicking the book out the door and saying, “We know better.”

Sometimes, you know, you might end up with a few episodes where she’s wandering around Qarth and we at home are sort of thinking, “Oh no, more Qarth.” But I have a feeling something sick and awesome is coming there too.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m just saying whatever sick and awesome is coming in Qarth, I would have been just as delighted to see it if I hadn’t seen the other Qarth first. Or in just like the Previously On could have taken care of it. And I didn’t need a placeholder scene.

**Craig:** Well, you know, and it’s funny because the show has, again, because of the casting. Hold on, sorry. [sirens blaring] And I thought it was going to be okay because we’re doing this kind of late at night, and then I realized, oh no, it will probably be worse with the sirens.

There are certain characters in the show that are so good. [more sirens]. Are you kidding? [laughs]

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And they’re so good. And they’re so much fun. Like I would watch — obviously I would watch Tyrion just eat lunch.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would watch him and Bronn. Bronn, right? That’s his sellsword.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could just watch them talk about anything. I don’t care. I would take that over a Qarth scene. But I get it. It’s like, okay, you know. And then there were scenes where I thought, “Oh, I don’t know, is this that interesting with John Snow and that lady?” And then it got awesome, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I feel like…and you know what it is? I feel like Dan and Dave have done such a good job of taking care of me that even when I go, “Eh, another Qarth scene?” I think, they’re doing this for a reason. I gotta believe it’s going to be worth it, you know? I gotta believe it.

**John:** I have faith.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’ve taken really good care of the viewer. So, good for them.

**John:** And let us take good care of viewers and leave them with a shorter episode tonight, because it’s actually quite late as we’re recording this.

I do have a Cool Thing, and you have a Cool Thing, too. Do you want to do yours first? Or should I do mine first?

**Craig:** It’s entirely up to you. What do you think?

**John:** Do yours first.

**Craig:** Okay. Well my Cool Thing, boy, okay. So look. Listen up, people. If you are a listener who has been bemoaning the fact that you can’t get your script read, I’m about to give you the opportunity of a lifetime.

So, there’s this cool writer out there, and now I don’t have his name in front of me. [laughs] His name is Joe. You will have the appropriate link, won’t you John?

**John:** Of course I will, yes. Stuart will put it up.

**Craig:** He was the 2008, I think, Nicholl finalist. And he does this thing with a guy named Daniel Vang who works at Benderspink which is a pretty big management firm here in Hollywood, California, where they run a charity thing. This is the second time they’ve done it to raise money for the American Heart Association. And last year they raised over $8,000 to fight heart disease and stroke, and that’s great, but obviously now that we’re promoting this it’s going to be much, much, much, much more. And here’s why:

If you donate $25 through, and we’ll give you a link to their Kintera money-raising site. Daniel Vang of Benderspink will read the first ten pages of your feature film script or television pilot. If you donate $50, he guarantees he will read the first 50 pages of your work. And I’ve got to say, Daniel, you are awesome for that. Because 50 pages of bad screenplay is pretty rough to read.

If you donate $100 he guarantees he read the entire thing.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Guarantees he will read the entire thing. Now here’s what’s interesting about this: last year, and this wasn’t that big of a deal because last year, like I said, they raised $8,000, two writers who donated wound up gaining representation. That’s pretty impressive.

**John:** That is impressive.

**Craig:** So, the deal is if you donate between $25 and $100, you have a guy at a real management company that really represents real writers reading your script, either 10, 50, or all of it. If it were me, I’d go for the $100 personally.

So, we’re going to give you a link and basically you go, you make the donation, you get in contact with Joe. He will coordinate the submissions to Daniel, and your stuff will get read. Come on, people. And it’s just…save hearts.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the thing I’d come back to. The worst that’s going to happen is you’re going to donate some money to stop heart disease and stroke.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** That’s not such a bad thing.

**Craig:** Oh, no, this is to actually increase heart disease and stroke.

**John:** Oh, g’oh! I knew there was a catch.

**Craig:** I should have read this carefully. Well, you should still do it.

**John:** [laughs] Still do it. It might be good for your career, so you should still do it.

**Craig:** Now it’s incredibly selfish. No, I mean, it’s an awesome thing they’re doing and if you don’t take advantage of it, honestly you’re dumb. You’re just a dummy. What’s your Cool Thing this week?

**John:** My Cool Thing is much less for the good of the people, but more for the good of the individual. So, you know you have these club cards at grocery stores, or like Sam’s Club, or like Barnes & Noble — you have little card you’re supposed to carry around?

**Craig:** Right. The brand loyalty cards.

**John:** Brand loyalty cards. And so you can also give them your phone number, you can punch in your phone number or your email address, and it’s just such a hassle. And so I would have some of them in my wallet, but like you have an individual card for each. So my really incredibly smart husband figured out there’s place, a site called KeyRingThing.com.

What you do is you type in all of your code numbers for those things and it sends you a card with all of those barcodes on it. So you have one card that has all of your barcodes on it, and it’s labeled.

**Craig:** No way? Cool.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s actually kind of magic. So I use it all the time. I used it at Ralphs today. And every time I hand it to a cashier they’re like, “This actually works?” I’m like, yeah, it totally works. Scan it. And it totally works.

**Craig:** Wait, I just type in my phone number.

**John:** You can type in your phone number but your punching your phone number every time on those machines. This, you’re just handing them the card and it zips and the barcode scans.

**Craig:** You’re right. And you know what kills me? I go to CVS a lot to just buy sundries, and I don’t have a CVS card. And they say, “Do you want a CVS card?” And I think, no! And I honestly believe…

**John:** Yeah. It’s cost you hundreds of dollars.

**Craig:** Because when you go to Ralphs sometimes you punch in your number and it’s like, whatever, the $80 bill is now $0.14.

**John:** Yeah. If you’re at a grocery store you absolutely have to do it. When I was in New York for those four weeks I would walk by this grocery store every day and that became the place where I’d get my groceries every day. And so the first couple times I was like, “Oh, no, I don’t have a club card.” And I was like, “Yeah, I basically live in New York right now. Give me a club card.”

And so I took the two minutes to do it and everything was much, much cheaper.

**Craig:** Much cheaper.

**John:** So this is a good solution for just not having to carry those 8 cards in your wallet, or not having to punch in your phone number every time. You just have this one thing. It takes you five minutes, you get it done. There’s no kickbacks or anything; I just think it’s a good idea.

**Craig:** It’s the 1Password of brand loyalty bar scan.

**John:** It’s the 1Password of brand loyalty.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** See, I may be the person who brings information but you’re the one who codifies it in a way that people can carry it home with them.

**Craig:** I like to organize and categorize.

**John:** I like it. You are the librarian. The curator of this.

**Craig:** Hey.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** John, this was a good one, and blissfully short.

**John:** I like short. Enjoy. I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** You got it. Bye.

**John:** Bye.