The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 601 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Now, in screenwriting we often talk about the hero’s journey, that one-time quest our main character undertakes which transforms them and the world around them. Today on the show, we’re going to think smaller. We’re going to talk about side quests, which in many cases are the lego blocks of our stories. Then we’ll talk about failure and why it’s so important.
Craig: So important.
John: In our bonus segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk about virtual reality, because we are recording this days before the announcement of Apple’s new headset, which feels like the perfect time to document our experience of the world before this new Apple headset debuted, or maybe we’ll look incredibly foolish as time passes.
Craig: We appear to be building a Matrix for ourselves. We’ve got AI. Now we’ve got things we can strap onto our eyeballs to send us into a different world. We’re inventing the Matrix on ourselves.
John: I think we need to next really work on some sort of pod of goo that we can slide into and be stored in racks, and then we’re all set.
Craig: Why wouldn’t we? By the way, that goo did look actually fairly comforting. It seems warm.
John: People aren’t talking enough about it wouldn’t be so bad to be in the Matrix.
Craig: Honestly, what is the problem? What’s the problem? It’s fine.
John: Why are we so scared to admit it? The goo is good.
Craig: We are obviously representatives of Machine City. It’s the weirdest beginning of a podcast we’ve ever had. You know what? You know what? I don’t care, because we’re into our 601, John.
John: 601. We’re into our sixth century of podcasting.
Craig: Yeah, so we can do whatever the goddamn sweet hell we want.
John: Let’s start with some follow-up. We were talking in Episode 599 about how screenwriters, TV writers, people who are pitching shows now often have to present pitch decks, which means that, man, do you have to be a graphic designer? We’ve got two follow-ups here. Drew, do you want to help us out?
Drew Marquardt: Sure. Felicia in Los Angeles writes, “A public library card from any of the LA Metro area public libraries and I’m sure many other cities includes a free premium membership to LinkedIn Learning. LinkedIn Learning has some of the most thorough sets of video lessons available for Adobe products and a vast array of other creative software, and they include downloadable work files. As a graphic designer turned writer myself, I highly suggest anyone even remotely interested to check it out. Plus, I mean, free.”
John: It feels like one of those things that I would try and not actually complete. I think it’s cool that that’s out there. There’s a lot of good video out there in the world talking about how to do these things. Templates are nice. Cool. Thank you for that suggestion. What else you got there for us?
Drew: We have another suggestion from Chris. He says, “I want to recommend a web-based design product called Canva. I have a graphic design background, but I will still sometimes use Canva when I’m feeling stuck. I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t know their way around Adobe Creative Suite. Canva provides tons of templates for various projects, including pitch decks, and its drag and drop interface means you only need to bring images and text. There are both free and paid versions. You can’t unlock the features you want most without paying, but it’s still a lot cheaper and faster than learning graphic design and paying for an Adobe subscription.”
John: Great. Another good suggestion there. I will say that for most of the decks I’ve been working, I’ve just been using Keynote, which is the Apple free presentation software stuff, which I know and is good and it works like I expect it to work. People should use whatever tool they like and maybe experiment a little bit.
Craig: I’ve never made a deck. I’m probably at this point never going to. I don’t think a deck is in my future. Basically, at this age, I feel like we can start talking about things we’re going to get away with. I’m going to get away with living my entire life and never making a deck. I’m going to get away with it. I’m getting away with this.
John: I think getting away with things would be another good bonus topic. Drew, let’s note that for our future bonus topic. What are we excited that now we can get away with never learning how to do?
Craig: I’ve got such a list.
John: My daughter, she wants to learn how to drive stick shift, but she could get away with never learning how to drive stick shift. It’s fine.
Craig: Good lord. Of course. There are things I feel like I’m going to get away with, I should’ve done at some point, and I’m just going to get away with it. There’s a movie I’m sure that everyone’s like, “Everyone’s seen that movie,” and I haven’t, and I’m going to get away with it.
John: It’s nice. I’ve faked my way through several meetings pretending that I’ve seen that movie, but I haven’t seen it. I’ve nodded along as people talk about these moments in movies that I’ve never seen.
Craig: The most useful phrase in Hollywood, I will teach it to everybody, is, “I’ve seen it. God, it’s been a long time though. It was so long ago that I don’t remember anything about it. I don’t know who’s in it. I don’t know what it’s about.”
John: Mine is, “I barely remember it, but [crosstalk 00:05:05].”
Craig: “I barely remember it, because you know what? I watch so many movies.” Oh, man. I’ve gotten away with that a lot. I’m getting away with stuff. It’s great.
John: We have more follow-up about spacing out TV episodes. Back in 599 we had our continued discussion about whether it’s best to release all the episodes all at once or space them out one at a time. Luke had some follow-up on this.
Drew: Luke writes about what he calls the spacing effect. He says, “Craig’s observation that TV series released in weekly installments versus all at once tend to feel more memorable is in line with one of the deepest findings in a study of memory, and by deepest I mean not just human memory. We’re talking chimps, bees, sea slugs. Basically, if an animal can remember something, it will remember it longer if it’s been exposed to it according to a spaced-out schedule rather than all at once. This is something that’s been observed in medical residents practicing surgery and also on species of roundworm that has, count them, 302 neurons. We humans have 86 to 100 billion neurons. The spacing effect seems to be emanating from something fundamental happening at the level of individual neurons and how they interact with one another.”
Craig: That’s cool.
John: Craig, you would believe this, because as a person who likes science and medicine, it does make sense that repeatedly training something on something increases the strength of something. It might increase the strength of memory, the ability to recognize a pattern. It makes sense.
Craig: What’s interesting about what Luke is citing here is that it sounds like it’s not even about repetition. It’s simply about spacing it out. If you are going to teach somebody a seven-digit number, what he’s suggesting is that studies say giving the seven digits at once and saying, “Memorize it,” versus giving the seven digits one digit every 30 minutes, that the latter will work better, which makes sense, because the way we convert things to long-term memory is by cycling them over and over in short-term.
There are short-term memories that we, without even realizing it, are processing for long-term memory. Then there are short-term memories that never make it into long-term memory. You can’t think of anything because you don’t know that they happen, which is really weird to think. I’m also completely obsessed with this roundworm with 302 neurons. What a gift to people studying how the brains work. Wow, that’s great.
John: That’s great. I want to bring up a recent example of my exposure to this kind of phenomenon. I watched Jury Duty on Amazon, which I thought was terrific. Everyone loves Jury Duty. If you haven’t seen it, essentially, it’s some of the folks behind The Office. It is supposedly a documentary series following a court case, a jury trial. Everyone else is actors, but one person, he believes he’s on a real jury. It’s just brilliantly done and very, very funny.
The release pattern for that show was there was four episodes at once and then next week they’ll release two more, and then they release the final two episodes, which I thought was a good mix of anticipation, upfront loading so everyone gets to see what the momentum of the show was. I thought it was a smart way to release that show.
Craig: Sometimes it depends on the way your season lays out, because you may think to yourself, “I know that when I get to Episode 4, the ending of Episode 4 is so awesome that people will come back,” but can’t get to that awesome ending without the stuff that happens in 1, 2, and 3, so we need to show everything to everybody. We did a mini version of that with The Last of Us, because we combined what was going to be Episode 1 and 2 into one. We did the, “Here’s two cookies. That second cookie is really good, right? Come back next week. We’ll give you another cookie.”
John: It’s also a luxury of shows that aren’t affixed to having the one-hour length or 30 minutes of length. You can just do what you need them to do. That’s a lovely thing.
Craig: We are a little more affixed at HBO though, because they do still have quite a bit of linear viewing, and so they want us-
John: That supersized first episode, how long was it?
Craig: We were given two allowances. The first one was obviously the main allowance. I think it was 86 minutes or something like that. Then Episode 3, which was the saga of Bill and Frank, we basically were like, “Look, we really love this thing, and it’s 72 minutes, and no one seems to notice.” They were like, “Okay, that’s fine.” Then everything else, 58 minutes 30 seconds maximum.
John: Wow. I didn’t realize you had such restrictions.
Craig: John Oliver probably gets pretty cranky every time his show starts late because some up-his-own-butt auteur like myself is like, “I need another three minutes.” I apologize, John Oliver. You deserve better.
John: Is John Oliver’s show live? It’s not live though.
Craig: No, it’s not live, but because of the linear television 30% of people that watch HBO still get it through cable channel or something, and so there’s a schedule.
John: Wild. This is my favorite bit of follow-up in this episode. This goes all the way back to Episode 536. Craig, I need to refresh your memory about-
Craig: Please.
John: … what happened in this. We had a listener who wrote in, who said she was an actor who was dating a machine learning engineer with a PhD in computer science, “Who fully supports my dream to break into the entertainment industry despite knowing very little about it. He supports me through active listening, making an effort to watch TV and movies together, and paying attention to the industry. He said when we started dating he did not want to watch any of my work until we were further in our relationship. His reasoning is that he didn’t want his opinions, spoken or unspoken, to influence my future career decisions.”
Craig: Yeah, that, I remember that.
John: Now you remember this. You said, “Oh, congratulations, you guys won therapy,” that this sounded amazing, that we were just very happy for her.
Craig: They sounded so well adjusted and thoughtful.
John: Sarah, who wrote in the initial question story here just sent through an update. Drew, can you read the update here?
Drew: Yeah. She says, “A quick update on the story I sent in over a year ago. I’m engaged! It happened on the evening of May 2nd, a familiar date, right? I’m a member of SAG-AFTRA and have followed the writers’ strike closely. When the strike was officially announced, I drove over to Amazon without a second thought and picketed for a few hours. The strike organizers handed out WGA T-shirts to wear while picketing, but I’m not a WGA member, so I didn’t feel comfortable wearing a shirt with the WGA logo on it. However, there was one random box of extra-extra-large We Stand with the WGA T-shirts, so I wore one of those. I’m using an extra-small, so I was essentially wearing a solidarity dress, and I loved it. I wore it all day, to the auto shop, to a friend’s short film premier, and then back home to my boyfriend’s house.
“I started getting ready for bed, but after a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t seen or even heard my boyfriend. I figured he was in his office, but he wasn’t, so I called out for him and started looking around frantically, until I heard a knock at the back window. He was outside in our backyard, and the backyard was lit up with candles and twinkling lights and flowers everywhere. He was smiling bigger than I’ve ever seen him smile. Then it hit me, he was going to propose. I went outside and immediately burst into tears. I mean, dang, he actually really surprised me, and dang, he was all dressed up and looking so handsome. Meanwhile, there I was in my giant solidarity dress and slippers, but I say this with absolute sincerity, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
John: Aw.
Craig: Aw!
John: Aw.
Craig: Aw! That’s lovely. Listen, I’m not surprised, because I remember this question. I remember how I feel like both of us were like, “Good lord, these people are really good, good.” You know when certain people tell you stories or pose a thorny problem, and you listen to them and you’re like, “My god, why aren’t you just good? Why doesn’t your brain work better?” These people, their brains work great. Listen. Two well-brained human beings, I beg the two of you, if you are able to have children together, I beg you to have as many as you can. I’m begging. I’m begging, because we need good. We need good. By the way, if this story happens in Texas, the second he starts knocking at that back window, she just starts shooting.
John: It ends in a tragedy.
Craig: No question. In fact, I’m sure there are at least seven almost-proposals that ended in somebody getting shot.
John: I’m waiting for the headline like, “Promposal ends in tragedy.”
Craig: Of course. When she says, “He actually really surprised me,” that’s what the person who shoots the boyfriend also says. See, this is why America’s terrible. We’re terrible. I’m laughing at something terrible, because I don’t want to cry.
John: Let’s bring it back to the joy of this letter, this moment, this photo she included of her in her strike dress.
Craig: It’s adorable.
John: Adorable.
Craig: It really is adorable.
John: So happy for her, for both of them.
Craig: Sarah, congratulations. We don’t know your boyfriend’s name, I don’t believe, but congratulations to him as well. He’s got a good one. Thank you, by the way, for walking the line and supporting the WGA.
John: That’s really nice.
Craig: Thank you.
John: Let’s get to our main topic today. Off and on the podcast we’re talking about a character’s main quest or a protagonist’s main quest. They go off on a journey. They have a want, but they also have a need. They have this existential and fundamental drive, this hope, this hope, this dream, this wish, this fear that is propelling them through the story. In the case of a feature film, it is a onetime journey they’re taking, which will transform them. It’ll transform the world around them.
We’re not going to talk about that right now. We’re going to talk about this character needs to do X in order to Y. We’re going to talk about side quests, which I think are the smaller building blocks of a lot of our stories.
This was brought home to me by the Dungeons and Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves, is chockfull of side quests. It’s silly and fun for that reason. If you haven’t seen that movie, it’s streaming on Paramount Plus. I loved it. There’s a main thing that they’re trying to do. In order to do that main thing, they have to achieve a bunch of little things, which feels so true to DnD, but also felt really right for this movie.
It made me recognize that in most movies, you’re going to see some side quests stacking up there, where there are things that the characters need to do in order to get that next thing done. We haven’t really talked that much about that on the podcast. I figured we would dive in on side quests rather than big main overarching thing.
Craig: It sounds to me like the things that you’re describing may be better called sub-quests, because they’re part of the main quest line, but you have these little mini jobs to do to advance yourself on the main quest line. We need to get the helmet of something. We can’t get the helmet of something until we get the blah blah blah. We need the da da da to get the blah blah blah.
John: We need to find someone in the graveyard who remembers where that thing was buried.
Craig: Exactly.
John: Then we’re going to do all these other things.
Craig: In gaming, traditionally side quests are separate things that are completely off the main quest. For instance, in Dungeons and Dragons the movie, Honor Among Thieves, which is excellent, the barbarian has her own love story that she needs to go conclude with her ex to find piece. That is completely separate and apart from the main quest line, which is to rob the thing. We have side quests and sub-quests. Those two things, they both show up, and they’re both useful. Maybe we can dig into both.
John: Absolutely. A lot of the characteristics apply to both of them. Let’s talk about either of these kind of things in just movies that we’ve worked on where you’ll see them.
In Go, Ronna’s trying to pull off this tiny drug deal, but then she has to sell allergy medicine. She’s thwarted in one area and so therefore has to do another thing to get her back onto the main quest line. We have Adam and Zack. They’ve completed their main thing, but now they’re going to look for Jimmy, this guy they’ve both been sleeping with. That is kind of a side quest, because it’s not crucial to the plot of the story, to their overall fundamental goals, but they need to find this guy. At the end, Claire and Ronna are looking for her keys. That’s the classic like, we need to do this thing in order to drive the car home. Those feel like that kind of thing.
I would say about The Last of Us, really you could argue in that first episode, him agreeing to escort the girl is introduced as a sub-quest or a side quest, because it’s not his main objective at all.
Craig: That would definitely be sub-quest. I don’t think we had any true side quests, like off the beaten path quests, unless you were talking about other characters, but they have their own certain main quests. There is this thing where you have some big goal. In The Last of Us, Joel’s big goal really doesn’t change until he gets to Jackson.
John: His brother, yeah.
Craig: Then it gets expanded. We really did try and stick I guess onto the main quest. Everything does get divided down to these things where you think, okay, this is about going to see my brother, which was an addition. It wasn’t in the game. It was actually one of the reasons… We needed a main quest, essentially.
Dividing it down to small things is incredibly helpful. Before we get into how those side things may look or feel, our capacity for understanding what people do is limited by our own capacity to do things. We have to divide stuff down into steps. There’s no other way to progress. The steps sometimes need to be incredibly mundane so that when you provide a twist and the next little chunk comes along, you can tell the difference. The more you can divide things down into … Because otherwise it’s just one thing over and over and over. Marlin wants to find Nemo, but he’s got to go through little moments.
John: He does. It’s figuring out what those moments are that feel meaningful and have stakes within their smaller context but can also be built back to the bigger thing. In terms of side quests and stakes or sub-quests, you want to call them that, my favorite movie of all time, Aliens, is just chockfull of these little smaller quests. An example is he has to get through the pipe to get to the drop ship to lower it so it can be there on time. That’s his whole separate little thing. He’s off and doing that. Nothing else can work together unless that sub-quest, that side quest succeeds.
Craig: Every piece is necessary, which is exciting, because then you realize, okay, we’re building a plot chain. The weakest link will break the whole thing. As a writer, you’re really forced to ask, do I need this link in the chain, what’s the best way to write it, etc.
John: I [inaudible 00:19:55] out some I think characteristics of the kind of quests that we’re talking about. I’ll start with saying they’re not the hero’s primary goal. They didn’t dream of this quest their entire life. It’s not fundamental to them. It’s more like finding the phone you left in a car, that is a side quest. Not a side quest would be winning an Olympic medal. They’re just completely different scales of things that are not fundamental to the character’s sense of who they are as a person.
Craig: Like I said, we have a certain, I don’t know, ability to think big. Once we establish the big thing, yeah, we need to limit the scope of what we’re doing. Otherwise, there’s just no other way to do it. These little, you can call them mini quests, they concretize the plan. They also reinforce the magic trick that we try and pull early on, which is to suggest to the main character this won’t be hard.
John: Yes, for sure.
Craig: It’s no big deal. Let’s all relax. All we have to do is get to this. In The Hangover it’s like, “Guys, don’t worry. We’ll figure it out. Let’s just get in the car and go.” Then a cop car pulls up. Now we have a real problem. Now we have to engage in an actual substantive quest to further this. You want to start with little, simple things like, let’s just get the car.
John: Absolutely. What you’re describing about let’s get the car is it’s specific and it’s well defined. It’s another characteristic of a side quest is that both the characters in the scene and the audience understand what they’re trying to do and what it will look like when it’s achieved. When you’ve done that little thing, you know it’s going to be done. A side quest might be to figure out who really owns that mysterious house. You can envision that’s an achievable thing. We’re going to know an answer to this thing.
What’s not a side quest would be a character coming to terms with their PTSD. That’s not concrete. You can’t define when that journey has ended, has progressed. There’s no end date to that. There’s no closure to it.
Craig: There’s another term that gamers use, and as you know, I am one.
John: You are a gamer.
Craig: I am a gamer. Which is fetch quest. Fetch quests are incredibly common, especially in radiant narrative games. They really boil down to somebody gives you some reason why they really need a thing. I’ll help you and I’ll give you a this, but there’s this one herb that grows in the forest, in the cave, and blah blah blah. Then you go to the forest and the cave. You’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to pick an herb.” You know very damn well there’s going to be something awful in that cave, and you have to kill it. You fetch, fetch fetch fetch.
John: Fetch fetch fetch.
Craig: What’s important about fetch quests is in their errant-like nature, they really do define what we’re talking about in terms of small and concrete and achievable. The most important thing about these little mini quests is that they appear to be incredibly doable, because eventually you realize that all of these things, when we do these sub-quests, they are working to lead the character astray. They are essentially in avoidance. When I say avoidance, I mean in a meta sense.
It’s not like Joel’s avoiding being a father again in the beginning, but he’s concentrating on a battery. That’s a little bit of a denial. At some point you realize you can only concentrate on the battery so much. They don’t even get a battery. By the time he gets to Jackson, his main quest is almost forgotten. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we got there, and Tommy’s fine. Now what do I do?” Now you have to face the real quest. Sometimes the side quests or sub-quests are helping to distract the character.
John: Sure, they’re keeping you busy. You made the point about achievable, and I think that’s incredibly important. They’re achievable in a limited amount of space and time. By time, I mean both real time and screen time, so it’s a beat or a couple beats, but it’s not the whole act.
A side quest would be getting to the convention in time for the speech. It’s whatever the process is that you have to get there and all the obstacles you’re facing, but you make it to the convention center on time. Not a side quest would be getting your college degree.
You can learn something in a side quest. I can totally imagine a side quest where the character has to learn how to canoe, because it’s an important thing for this next phase, but it has to be something you could learn in a limited amount of time or a change you can make in a limited amount of time. It can’t drag on forever, unless the nature of the story you’re telling is like, okay, we’re going to follow this person’s entire life. Then maybe you could have a side quest that takes years. That’s not most movies.
Craig: No. I like the term mini quest.
John: Yeah, mini quest, yeah.
Craig: The mini part is really important.
John: Yeah.
Craig: It just needs to be… Sometimes what you’re doing with these things is watching them actually cycle completely within one scene, where it becomes important for you to do… You’re in a bar, and someone goes, “Oh my god, that’s the person whose keys we need. Go over there and steal their keys.”
John: Perfect.
Craig: Now I’ve got a mini quest. I walk over, and when the guy’s not looking, swipe the keys, come back. I have completed the entire cycle of the mini quest within a scene. You could take a couple of scenes, but by the time you start making a meal of it, it’s more of a thick main quest.
John: It is. I would say that it can’t be trivial. It can’t be like, write your name on this piece of paper. That’s not a mini quest.
Craig: That’s not a quest.
John: It can’t be impossible either. We have to figure out which of these mimes is Albanian, that’s a mini quest. Building a fusion reactor that works, that’s not a mini quest. That’s some epic quest, which is not going to fit in this limited period of time.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Let’s talk about how we use mini quests and how we write them into our stories. To me it’s crucial that it feel necessary and not beamed in. It can’t feel like you’re in a video game. You’ve got to be really careful about that. It can’t feel like it’s just a fetch quest, that there’s a clear problem to solve, but it’s a problem that the characters want to solve.
If possible, try to have your hero state the objective rather than being told the objective or having someone else assign them a thing. If the hero says, “Okay, if I can do X, will you do Y?” then they are assigning themselves the quest, rather than someone else coming in there and telling them what to do.
Craig: In my example of the keys, I just instinctively had somebody say, “Oh my god, look. Go get those keys,” rather than somebody going, “Oh my god, look. I’m going to go get those keys.” You’re right. There is something strange. You need to receive the job. I never thought about that, but yeah, you need to receive the job.
John: Need to receive the job. If your hero can be the person assigning the job, it’s going to feel better in most cases, than having someone else tell them to do it. Obviously, there’s going to be genre conventions where 007 is being told by M what to do, but then of course along the way he’s making his own choices about how to proceed. That’s the genre convention.
Craig: I think it’s important that your hero receives assignments. Of course, once the flywheel begins to turn, then the hero, like you said, has an enormous amount of agency. At the very beginning of Mission Impossible or James Bond, the action hero receives a mission.
John: A mission could come from an ally. It could come from an enemy. It could come from somebody. It’s often, for many genres, a way things start. We’re talking about things that feel like action movies or feel like they are stakes-driven stories in that context, but what I want to stress is that these little mini quests really can apply to a lot of different genres.
Even in a relationship genre or a rom-com or other things, you’re going to find moments where you’re going to want to throw up obstacles in your character’s way, and your character getting around those obstacles is its own mini quest. Just always make sure you’re thinking about, in this block of 10 pages, is there a clear obstacle for my hero to face, and if not, what can I be doing here to give them some challenges? That can be its own little, small story, this own little, small victory or failure that will keep the story propelled forward.
Craig: Absolutely. You can also, as an exercise, contemplate doing the opposite of that, which is to say you know your hero has to do something really big. Maybe they don’t know it’s really big yet. Neither do we in the audience. Maybe what we think is it’s something small. Once they walk in, they’re like, “Oh, this is not at all what I expected.” You can disguise big things as mini quest until surprise.
John: Absolutely. The same filmmakers who made Dungeons and Dragons also made Game Night, which I think is built out of little mini quests that become giant, epic, big things. It’s a way to think of escalation as a fun corollary to this.
Craig: Can I ask, why does anybody pay to go to school when they can just listen to this podcast? Maybe that comes off as arrogant. I’m just saying, even if we’re only right 30% of the time, that’s still 200 episodes, 200 hours of correctness, for free, or whatever it costs, 5 bucks. I’m just saying.
John: I’m just saying. Craig, yesterday I was out at the picket line at Warner’s, and this guy introduced himself. He’s a little bit sheepish. He’s Canadian. He said, “Oh, I just wanted to say that I really love Scriptnotes. It’s taught me everything I know about stuff. I’ve listened to every episode.” He had ridden his motorcycle down from Canada just to join the picket lines and-
Craig: Whoa.
John: … meet some of the writers he’d always heard about. It was great. Colin, thank you for introducing yourself.
Craig: Aw.
John: It’s lovely.
Craig: I’ve had quite a few people, when I’m walking around in an oval in front of Paramount, come up to me and say they love the show, and they’re young.
John: They’re young.
Craig: They’re young. Sometimes I forget that I’m old as eff. I still feel like, oh, you’re 28 and I’m 28, and we’re just saying nice things to each other. Then I realize, oh, I’m like their dad. Nonetheless, it’s very nice. Also, I have to say, the energy on the picket line has been fantastic. I was in front of Universal the other day. I think it was Wednesday. They had a video game themed picket, and so I was up there with Merle Dandridge, who plays Marlene in the show, and Halley Gross, who co-wrote the second game at Naughty Dog. We had a great time. The spirits, everybody’s spirits are quite high, I have to say, because what are we in, four weeks now?
John: It’s the start of our fifth week as we record this now.
Craig: Fifth week, yeah. Positive energy on the picket line. I like to see it.
John: It really is nice. Next topic I wanted to get into was just the importance of failure.
Craig: That’s the worst thing right after we talk about the picket line. We’re like, “Speaking of the WGA strike-”
John: “Speaking of the WGA-”
Craig: “… failure.”
John: Basically, in the show notes I want to put a link to four articles that Chris Csont, who does the Inneresting newsletter, had pulled up in a recent newsletter. I really liked them, because it was different people talking about how important it was to try things that you know you might fail at, and to embrace that as part of the process, because I think so often, we are not willing to think about our work the same way that athletes think about their work or that scientists think about their work. It’s that failure teaches you something.
Part of that may be because the work we do takes so fricking long that it feels like, “Oh my god, I’ve wasted four months working on this script that doesn’t work.” Jesus, that’s terrible. Some of these articles also point to the importance of letting yourself fail faster and learning from that.
Craig: Unfortunately, sometimes our failures do take quite a long time. You could even look at the progress of your own life as decades of failure to get to maybe where you eventually were going to go.
We unfortunately have the burden of being entertainers. We are saying to people, “We deserve your attention,” which is the most obnoxious thing you could ever say. If you walk into a party, and you’re like, “Everyone, shut up. Turn around, face me, and listen to me talk now for 90 minutes,” that better be a good talk. When it’s not, people get really angry, and they’re mean. They write a thousand reviews and comments on Reddit and so on and so forth.
Our failures therefore are not only public but linked with shame. We are essentially being shamed by critics, the audience, for our failure. There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s not like people are going to stop. We do have to at least be aware that that’s part of it, so that when it happens, hopefully people take it better than I’ve taken it.
John: Going back to my athlete analogy, in most sports you are either going to win the game or you’re going to lose the game.
Craig: Find me one sport-
John: I guess soccer you play to a draw.
Craig: I guess that’s true. I guess that’s true.
John: Aha!
Craig: Hockey also has ties, so fair.
John: While you can be a little bit down at your losses, I think every athlete has to acknowledge that, oh, that’s right, I’m going to lose games, and that I should not feel tremendous shame for losing games. What you can feel shame is making mistakes that are playing poorly, not recognizing things you should have seen, and learning from those things. You’re not taking every one of those losses as an abject failure.
That’s a thing that is harder for writers to do, part because we don’t have such clear metrics for success and failure. When we do look for, like, oh, did that movie open or tank, we may apply that to ourselves, which is not really fair, because that’s not our work. It’s the end result of a thousand other decisions.
Craig: You’re right. We don’t have the benefit of, we talked about mini quests, mini work. Athletes in a sense do a lot of mini work because there are so many games. No one goes to a Yankee game, sees them lose one game, loses their mind. It’s not the end of the world. There’s 162 of them. They get to do this a lot. We don’t. We pop our heads up once every year or two or three or four. It’s just one game. We just get the one game. If we lose, we lose.
It’s rough, because this is actually a fascinating topic. We are not ever encouraged by the business to consider failure as part of the process. The business joins in with the shaming process. Failure is not accepted. It is simply a sign to someone else. When things fail, everyone starts pointing fingers. Certainly, everyone points fingers at the writer. They point fingers at each other. They try and disown it. There is no culture in Hollywood as embracing failure as part of learning. It just simply doesn’t exist.
John: I think it’s because of the public nature of it, because you think about development and everything else as being research and development, R and D. Other companies, tech companies, would do R and D. They’re going to try a bunch of things. They’re going to know that most of those things aren’t going to work, but they’re private. They don’t have to be presented to the world, whereas for us, a lot of our stuff is out there in the world. You can see whether it sinks or fails.
I guess our development projects, the things that don’t move forward, sometimes maybe we should be a little bit more sanguine about the fact, like, “Yep, that didn’t work. It didn’t shoot. It didn’t all come together,” and maybe be okay with that. I think especially some newer writers, they’ll go through one or two bad experiences with development and feel like, “Okay, I can’t do this. I’m a failure. I cannot make a thing happen,” whereas Craig or I, who’ve had, god, 20 projects that haven’t moved forward, recognize it’s just the batting average.
Craig: Some of my projects I wish hadn’t moved forward, because sometimes you’re like, “They’re not going to make this, right? There’s no way they’re going to make this.”
John: They do.
Craig: “What?” I completely agree. It can kneecap you when it comes along, because as I said, again, nobody is going to put their arm around you and say, “Listen, pal,” like a coach, “Hey, everybody’s been in a slump, kid. You’ll get out of it. It won’t last forever. It’s going to stink while it’s happening. You’re going to have to relax. Stop beating yourself up, because that’s just going to make it worse and extend it.” Nobody does that here. They don’t put their arm around you. They kick you with their boot. Everyone screams at you and then closes all the doors and windows. Of course you’re going to sit out there going, “This is terrible.”
Don’t let the judgment factor of the business, critics, audience, Twitter, don’t let the judgment factor eliminate the other thing that’s actually real. The real thing is you learned something. It may have been a tough lesson. Who knows? You’re better now than you were. Inevitably, if you fail, that means when you start your next thing, you are better than you were before the failure. We never think of it that way.
John: The crash and burn of my TV show, DC, I definitely learned a lot from. I would say recognizing all the things that I did wrong that contributed to it was painful for a time but also made me resolve to, if I ever decide I want to do television again, I want to know what the hell I’m doing before I ever start going in there. I’m going to set up systems to shore up my weaknesses and really figure out how to both make a great TV show and not destroy my life. I would not have had that insight if I hadn’t gone through the disastrous experience of making that show.
Craig: Sometimes I look back, and a little bit like when you look back at some of the dumb ass things you said to someone when you were a teenager, to try and get someone to kiss you or whatever. You ever just go on a date and blow it completely? Sometimes I think about those things now. They happened when I was 17. It’s weird. It’s these weird shame echoes. Then again, what I also know, as a number of movies have shown, if you can go back in town as yourself as a kid, you’re so much better with the people that you’re, you’re attracted to. You’re so much smoother. You know what to say, what to not say. You’ve learned. All your failures taught you, but they hurt. The lessons are painful.
John: Both of our daughters are graduating or have just graduated from high school. One of the commencement speakers at my daughter’s graduation was a student talking about when they had just started in junior high, they were obsessed with Corgis. Their whole personality was talking about Corgis and facts about Corgis, and everything was Corgis.
Craig: Oh, boy.
John: Interjecting Corgi facts into conversations.
Craig: Oh, no.
John: They think back about it, they just feel so cringe about it. They went through some other mental health crises and came out of it embracing that Corgi-loving 7th grader and recognizing that they needed to have a radical softness for who they were and who they are right now. It makes embracing the parts of your history that are not the happiest easier, just that sense then, like, oh, this is all part of the journey that got me to here, and I’m going to love all those people and not try to banish them to the dark recesses of history. It was a very smart, very good graduation speech.
Craig: That is fantastic and speaks to this weird phenomenon where we are … We both raised children. I’m going to guess that when your daughter was younger, and let’s say there was a party or something, and some kid did something wrong, you were like, “Okay, come on. You’re cool. Just don’t do that.” Your kid does something wrong, you’re like, “Get over here.” You’re harder on your kid than other children, because I don’t know.
Then the same thing is true for ourselves. We’re harder on ourselves. Somebody else does something I’ve done and then is like, “Oh my god, I’m so embarrassed.” I’m immediately like, “Listen, no. It’s over. Forget it. It’s gone. I’ve forgotten it. Nobody cares.”
John: I think that’s entirely true. Also, I think it’s tougher in this age of the internet being forever that the annoying thing you were 10 years ago is still searchable and Google-able, and that’s unfair.
Craig: If it’s a large-scale thing, absolutely. At any point, somebody can Google my life and go, “Ha ha, look, your movie here did blah.” There’s nothing to do about it. They still do it. They’re like, “Don’t feel good about yourself.” Literally, sometimes that’s what … These people are like, “Are you feeling good about yourself today?”
John: “Let me tell you why you shouldn’t.”
Craig: “Here’s some data.”
John: “Let me offer some.” Craig, let’s do our One Cool Things.
Craig: Uh-oh.
John: Uh-oh.
Craig: Go ahead.
John: I have two, so you’ll have some time to think of one.
Craig: Whew.
John: Whew. I have two very closely related ones. I wanted to read this book, For Profit: A History of Corporations, by William Magnuson, because people had talked about it, and it sounded great. It is great. It’s really looking at the history of corporations going all the way back to Ancient Rome and how they were fundamental, important building blocks for Western civilization overall. It’s how you form societies that can do things that one individual can’t do, both because of the ability to pull capital together, but also to go beyond the lifetime of any one person. Just a very smart book.
I wanted to read this book. This is the kind of book I would normally read on my Kindle, but I’m feeling a little bit eh about supporting the Amazon ecosystem, and so for this book, I wanted to read it some other way. I got myself the Kobo Libra 2, which is a different e-ink reader.
Craig: Nice.
John: It’s actually terrific. Click through the little link there, Craig, and see.
Craig: I’m looking at it.
John: It’s really smartly designed. It’s not symmetrical. One edge is a little bit wider. It has a little lip on it so you can hold it easier in one hand. It has physical buttons for flipping pages. The screen is super, super sharp. It’s good for taking notes and highlighting. I just really am enjoying this. It was also nice to be able to buy books outside of the Amazon ecosystem. You can load them in through anywhere. I’m enjoying it. If you are a person who is considering replacing a Kindle, if you like e-ink readers, but you’re thinking, “I want to get a new Kindle,” maybe look at this first and see if it might be a better fit for you.
Craig: It looks great. The product looks great. The website is really stupid. It starts with, here’s the product. It looks terrific. They have lots of images and information. Then as you scroll down, they just start showing people doing yoga and poking at it. These are the weirdest …
John: It’s not a great website. I bought this off the website. It showed up in perfect form. The box itself, all the packaging was flawless.
Craig: I would get this thing. I had one of the early Amazon versions. I ultimately never used it, because I don’t know, there was something about the iPad that just made it simpler, but now I’m wondering.
John: I had never liked reading books on an iPad. iPad for me is for playing Hearthstone and for web browsing, but for actually sitting down with a book … I also like, with a Kindle or e-ink reader, I never read in bed when I’m at home, but if I’m traveling, I will often read in bed and just tuck in there sideways and read a book. It’s nice.
Craig: Early on, you have to just read it like a regular book. You need it to be in light.
John: These are all back-lit now.
Craig: They’re back-lit.
John: They have very gentle back-lighting.
Craig: You can read it in the dark?
John: Oh, yeah.
Craig: You can read it in the dark. I’m going to get one of these things.
John: It’s really good.
Craig: Kobo Libra 2. I’m going to get it, and I’m going to do yoga and eat granola while I’m poking at it.
John: It’s the whole new Craig lifestyle that we’re excited to see.
Craig: My One Cool Thing is a movie. You rarely hear that from me, because most of the time, I’m going to movies that everybody else is going to. I’m not unearthing gems. There’s a movie I saw that I think most people haven’t seen and should. It’s beautiful. It’s called Nine Days. It is written and directed by a man named Edson Oda, fascinating guy who is Japanese but Brazilian, grew up in Brazil. I think Portuguese is his primary language.
It’s a somewhat surreal story. I won’t give away too much about what’s going, other than to say that Winston Duke, who everybody knows from Marvel movies and other things, fantastic actor, just holds down the center of this thing, but also Zazie Beetz just does incredible work. The cast is amazing. Bill Skarsgård is in there, and Tony Hale. Mostly, it’s just so creative and beautifully written and beautifully filmed. It is not too long. It’s entertaining and quite beautiful. Check it out, if you would. I have no idea. I’m sure it’s streaming on a thing. Yes, it’s streaming on a thing. Nine Days by Edson Oda.
John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson. Outro this week-
Craig: Lamberson.
John: … comes from Daniel Green.
Craig: Wait, hold on. I got to stop you there, John, in mid boilerplate, because Halley Lamberson is here with us. When I heard that her name was Halley Lamberson, what did I need to do?
John: Anagram.
Craig: Anagram. I had to anagram it. There’s so many anagrams to choose from. I’m going to go real quickly with the anagram that is only two words, which I think is wonderful, which is amenably hollers.
John: Sure. I like amenably hollers, because they’re calling you over.
Craig: In a nice, welcoming way. Amenably hollers.
John: Come on in. That’s Halley Lamberson.
Craig: It’s better than menorah syllable.
John: No, I don’t like that at all.
Craig: Back to boilerplate.
John: Back to boilerplate. Our outro is by Daniel Green, who, Craig, you remember Daniel Green. He accompanied you as-
Craig: Of course.
John: … you were singing on Broadway.
Craig: Daniel is a wonderfully talented man.
John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on VR. Craig, thank you for a fun show.
Craig: Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, we’re recording this on a Friday. On Monday, Apple is supposed to be announcing their new headset. We know not that much about it, but it’ll be a headset. It’ll be from Apple. People will be curious about it. I’m curious what your experience has been so far with VR, with goggles, with all this world. How much have you done?
Craig: I’ve done a small but focused amount. I learned things about it and myself, at least in its current implementation. I think I have the Quest 2.
John: Quest 2 is the Facebook product, right?
Craig: Unfortunately, yeah, it is the Facebook product.
John: Meta.
Craig: I’m excited to have a not-Facebook product.
John: What do you use it to do? How often are you actually putting it on your face?
Craig: I haven’t put it on my head in probably two years. When I first got it, I was really interested in playing. They had a Room VR game from the folks that make the Room games. It was wonderful. It was just magical. I love those kinds of games. They implemented it beautifully. The movement system is really smart. Instead of moving and your head bobbing, which as you move through space, notoriously makes people sick, in this version there were some hotspots you can aim at and go, “I want to go there,” and then it would just pop you over. You were always essentially standing and then turning and looking around, but not moving. That was great. There was another game I played. Some of it really was beautiful. Then I didn’t care and stopped using it.
John: Similar experience for me. I don’t own any of the headsets. Ryan Nelson, who used to work for me, and then went on to work for a company that mostly does VR, he’s been over to the office a couple times, and he would set up in the garage, with the proper sensors for blocking out the space, and would demo some of the things that he loved. They are incredibly impressive demos. Things like a Google Earth that you can fly into any place and then fly back out, other games that were Portal-like things. Really smartly done, and yet at the end of the sessions, I didn’t feel like I really want one of these for myself, because I felt like I’m not going to end up using it. It never brought me through to this moment.
I’ve also done some VR things that have been specific to a location or to an exhibit. I did this Banksy VR thing, which was pretty well done. For that one, you’re on stools, but then you have the headsets on. You’re going through this space that is showing Banksy things in situ, really where they would be in the world. That was cool. It was good use of that technology.
I don’t think those are the things that are going to be the future of VR. I’m really curious what Monday’s announcement will be, because it feels like there’s some more practical day-to-day use of this tool that could be what we’re seeing next.
Craig: I’m really curious about the form factor, because one of the things about VR is that any external stimulus that counteracts or disrupts the nature of your experience in this virtual space ultimately diminishes the verisimilitude of it. You get constant feedback from your head. There is this big, chunky thing on your head, and you know it. It has weight. It’s sort of squeezey. It moves around or shifts a little bit. It takes you out of things. Now, if there’s a form factor where you’re wearing it but it disappears on you, in terms of sensation, that will be a game-changer. It seems like not a big deal. I think it is a big deal. I haven’t seen anybody talking about it. I’m sure I’m not the first person to mention it though.
John: I’m curious to what degree this is a you sit in your chair with this on thing versus you move through a space, because I think some of the problems and frustrations and my motion sickness from VR has been I am moving through space now, doing this thing. If I am sitting in a chair, and this is filling in my visual field, and it’s a mega-sized monitor that I can do things on, I can see that being really useful for certain things and there being tasks for which that is especially well suited. I don’t know if that’s going to be the focus of this thing. I’m curious.
Craig: I think there will always be motion sickness issues if your body is not moving but your brain is moving and your eyes are moving.
John: Exactly.
Craig: That’s it. That’s why. That’s where the barfing happens. I don’t know how they’re going to get around that, unless they just tailor the experience to not moving like that. Of course, some people do want to experience the visual and audio sensation of being in a wingsuit. I’m not going to barf all over my floor to be in a wingsuit. Some people I think probably don’t. Some people just naturally can do it. God bless them if they can. VR is going to have to bet over the puke gap, which is a real thing.
John: One thing I do think is fascinating is Apple products and other electronics as well have done a much better job integrating with each other. If you have your iPad set up next to your Mac, you can just move your cursor over onto the iPad and back, which seems like witchcraft. Even last night, my husband, Mike, had his French group over. Everyone was there in person, except for the instructor, who’s on the Mac on Zoom. The sound wasn’t good. He’s looking for, “Oh, should I add an external mic?” It turned out you could actually just use your iPhone as the mic and just put that out there, and so it could be the separate audio device for things, which just worked great. It’s only because these devices know each other.
Craig: They talk to each other. Have you done the thing where you copy something from your iPad and then paste it?
John: Totally.
Craig: I don’t know how that works. That’s great.
John: All behind the scenes. It’s really, really smart and nice.
Craig: Thanks, Apple.
John: That’s my hope is that whatever these goggles are, they’re not trying to be a closed system that doesn’t fit in with the other stuff, because that’s death.
Craig: It will be the opposite. It will be the most integrated thing ever. No question. That’s what Apple does.
John: We’ll hope. Craig, thanks for the chat.
Craig: Thank you, John.
John: Bye.
Links:
- Do Your Worst, Or You Might Never Do Your Best by Bridget Webber
- Why You Need to Fail TED Talk by Derek Sivers
- Artists must be allowed to make bad work by Austin Kleon
- The Museum of Failure
- For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson
- Kobo Libra 2
- Nine Days on IMDb
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Daniel Green (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Chris Csont and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.