John August

Writer Emergency Pack

Austin Live Show 2017 (AKA Too Many Scotts)

Episode - 323

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Directors, Film Industry, Producers, Scriptnotes, Story and Plot, Television, Transcribed, Travel, Writer Emergency Pack, Writing Process

John and Craig talk with uber-screenwriter Scott Frank (Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Minority Report, Logan) about how his feature script Godless ended up as a miniseries at Netflix.

We then invite more guests up to discuss what movies can learn from the success of TV:

  • Guinevere Turner (American Psycho, Go Fish)
  • Scott Alexander (Ed Wood, The People v. O.J. Simpson,)
  • Tess Morris (Man Up, “You Had Us At Hello” podcast)
  • Lindsay Doran (producer of Stranger Than Fiction, Sense and Sensibility)

In our final segment, we’re joined by a new batch of writers to play “The Studio Has Notes.”

  • Dana Fox (How to Be Single, Ben and Kate)
  • Megan Amram (The Good Place, The Simpsons)
  • Oren Uziel (22 Jump Street, Shimmer Lake)
  • Jason Fuchs (Wonder Woman, Ice Age: Continental Drift)
  • Scott Rosenberg (High Fidelity, Beautiful Girls)

Can our lucky audience member pick out the one fake note among the five real ones? Can you?

Recorded live from the Driskill Ballroom at the 2017 Austin Film Festival.

Thanks to the Austin Film Festival for hosting us, and to a great audience. It’s one of our highlights each year.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 11-6-17: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Writer Emergency Pack now on Amazon UK

International, Writer Emergency Pack

We’ve been selling Writer Emergency Pack on Amazon for over a year — but only the US version of Amazon. There are 10 marketplaces in all, covering different areas of the world.

North America Europe Asia
Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk Amazon.co.jp
Amazon.ca Amazon.de Amazon.cn
Amazon.fr Amazon.in
Amazon.it
Amazon.es

As of this afternoon, we’ve added our second marketplace: the United Kingom. We’re officially in stock!

We picked the UK because it was the second-biggest market for us after the US. It also serves as a gateway to Europe. When purchasing through Amazon.com, European buyers have to pay customs, making it significantly more expensive. Plus orders need to be shipped overseas, adding time to delivery. When buying through Amazon.co.uk, orders are shipped from London, and customs fees are already paid (by us).

This saves customers time, money and hassle.

At some point, I’ll write up a post explaining the process of setting up Amazon FBA for the UK. It was much more complicated than I expected, mostly because of dealing with importers and logistics. We had our shipment held at Heathrow for lack of an EORI number, which you can only get through a finicky online form. For ten days, we had no idea where the decks actually were, until they suddenly showed up for sale this afternoon.

But we’re happy to finally be available. You can find us on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

They’re also available directly through the Writer Emergency store.

What went right and what could have gone better with Writer Emergency Pack

Follow Up, Writer Emergency Pack

This week is the one year anniversary of Writer Emergency Pack. I wrote about it at our newly-redesigned site:

It was a test deck, full of typos and formatting errors, but it felt like something worth pursuing.

I showed the prototype to screenwriter friends, soliciting their feedback. I took several decks to the Austin Film Festival, passing them around during the live Scriptnotes session.

On November 3rd, we launched our Kickstarter campaign for Writer Emergency Pack. Within an hour, we were fully funded. Within days, it was clear we were onto something big.

We ended up with 5,714 backers, making us the most-backed card project in Kickstarter history.1

I originally wrote up the blog post as a look-how-far-we’ve-come retrospective, charting how in 12 months we went from an idea to shipping thousands of decks to writers and schools around the world. Basically, “Hooray for us!”

But writing is a process of discovery, and sometimes it forces you to question your central thesis.

Yes, things went well. But they could have gone better.

It’s easy to imagine an alternate history in which Writer Emergency Pack reached a bigger post-Kickstarter audience through better marketing and retail partnerships:

Every time I’m in a bookstore, I see a spot where Writer Emergency Pack would fit. Sometimes it’s on a shelf near the writing books. Other times, it’s near the register. But we’re not there, because we simply haven’t committed the time and resources to figuring it out.

We’ve had conversations with some smart retail folks, and even a tentative discussion with a potential publisher/distributor. But we’ve never gotten past talking.

The good thing about missed opportunities is that most of them are still out there. We can improve our marketing, retail and international distribution. The question is how. I’ve outlined some of what we’re thinking, but I’d encourage you to offer your own suggestions.

More than anything, I’d recommend writing up honest recaps of how things are going in your life. The process is cathartic and useful.

So often, we’re presenting sanitized versions of events in Christmas letters, or context-less status updates on Facebook. Writing up the longer version helps make sense of recent history, and offers suggestions for where you want to head next. Even if you never share what you write, putting words to these thoughts helps focus your attention in useful ways.

You can take a look at my full write-up on Writer Emergency Pack here.

  1. Oh, yeah: Exploding Kittens. That happened later. ↩

Fight the Giant, or Moving Up the Showdown

Story and Plot, Writer Emergency, Writer Emergency Pack

In most stories built around a heroic quest, the big confrontation comes at the end. The heroes face off against their well-established nemesis, and likely prevail. After that, there’s a little time left for wrap-up and rebuilding.

This is the common pattern for most feature films, with a battle or competition happening in the third act.

But it’s not just movies. In novels, the showdown generally happens in one of the final chapters. In series television, the quest to defeat the Big Bad might span a whole season, but the main event comes in the finale. In videogames, this stage even has a name: The Boss Level. The player finally has the skills and hit points to kill Diablo.

Whenever you see such a clear narrative pattern, there’s a great opportunity to subvert it.

card

Moving the fight earlier can take both your reader and your hero by surprise.

card

There are three basic structures for getting the fight to happen earlier than expected.

The hero rushes in. Perhaps the hero gets a tip that the villain is momentarily exposed. She is forced to make a decision: go in fast or wait for the next opportunity. She decides to strike now, for better or worse. Without the benefit of time and planning, she is forced to improvise.

The villain surprises the hero. Rather than wait for the hero to show up, smart villains often attack first. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling lets Voldemort trap Harry so he can battle him face-to-face, breaking the expectation that the showdown would only happen at the very end. In the real world, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is an example of the enemy changing the narrative with a surprise attack.

Fate intervenes. Some outside force — the boxing commission, an avalanche, pure coincidence — puts the hero and the villain in the same space when neither was quite ready for it.

However your hero and villain end up battling, the outcome should have a huge impact on the rest of your story.

Letting the giant score an early victory helps in several ways:

  1. You’ve established what a powerful threat the villain is.
  2. You’ve knocked your hero down. Almost anything that’s bad for your hero is good for your story.
  3. You’ve warned the reader not to assume your story will follow conventional patterns.

Maybe you’ve even decided to Kill The Hero:

card

Sometimes, it’s fun to let your hero win this early battle. Maybe the presumed villain wasn’t the ultimate villain after all — or in killing him, the hero has unleashed something much worse. Perhaps That’s Not the Dragon:

card

In most cases, both hero and villain will survive this early brawl, but both will be changed by the encounter.

card

Using Fight the Giant

Like every card in Writer Emergency Pack, Fight the Giant can be used at both macro and micro levels of the story process.

Fight the Giant might be a key plot point on which your entire story hangs. Perhaps an unexpected, early defeat sends your hero’s allies packing, and he must now assemble and train a new army from the remnants.

On a sequence level, Fight the Giant is a great way to ratchet up the tension. Your hero had a plan for how this was supposed to go down, but the villain had a plan of her own. And she moved faster.

Finally, Fight the Giant can be a great focus in a single scene. Your cat-burglar hero was expecting three minutes notice when the villain would be returning to his penthouse, but suddenly he’s here in front of him.

No matter how you use Fight the Giant, make the most of its surprise factor. Catch your hero flat-footed, and keep your heroes on their toes.

Fight the Giant is Card 2 of 26 in Writer Emergency Pack, which you can find in the Store and on Amazon.