John August

Writer Emergency Pack

The Scriptnotes 200-episode USB drive

News, Writer Emergency, Writer Emergency Pack

For a limited time, we’re selling USB flash drives loaded with the first 200 episodes of Scriptnotes — including all the bonus shows, the Dirty Episode, and special interviews. They’re $20 and available in the Store.

usb drive

These custom-printed 8-gigabyte USB flash drives include:

  • Every episode in mp3
  • Full transcripts
  • Three Page Challenge pdfs
  • Boundless love and umbrage
  • Our autographs printed right on the side

usb drive back

As of Thursday at 4pm PDT, we have fewer than 50 left, so we’ll likely run out. If you’re a collector, a completionist, or survivalist planning for the post-internet future, this is your chance.

We’re shipping these from the same warehouse that handles Writer Emergency Pack, so if you want to get both, you can save yourself some shipping charges.

Both are available at store.johnaugust.com.

Stack of Needles, and giving your characters too much of a good thing

Story and Plot, Writer Emergency Pack

Writers often create challenges for heroes by taking away something they desperately need or want. Billionaires go bankrupt. Children become orphans. Diamonds get dropped in the snow.

Faced with this setback, heroes must find new ways forward, often against staggering odds. In some cases, they’re searching of the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Like many of the cards in Writer Emergency Pack, Stack of Needles invites you to consider doing exactly the opposite.

card

At first glance, Stack of Needles feels like a plot device — potentially an arbitrary one. You’re changing the trajectory of the story by introducing new elements.

Look a little deeper and you realize Stack of Needles can be a terrific way to reveal character. By giving your hero the thing she said she wanted, you force her to confront her true motivations, her future goals, and the burden of abundance.

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”
― Truman Capote

card

How much is too much?

In the second season of Silicon Valley, the small tech startup is frequently overwhelmed:

  • They raise too much VC money.
  • Hooli sends over hundreds of boxes of legal files, crowding them out of their living room.
  • Their dormant video feed suddenly goes viral, melting their servers.

In each of these cases, the heroes were challenged not by scarcity, but abundance. By getting what they wanted, they got screwed.

Stack of Needles Try This

The best consequences are the ones closely aligned with what the hero wants.

If your misanthropic baker wins the lottery, that’s not particularly special. But if his chocolate-horseradish muffins become a national obsession, that’s on-point and relevant. The thing he loves (baking) has brought him the thing he hates (people).

Sudden abundance forces characters to make choices they didn’t expect to make. When the pauper becomes a prince, will he bring his friends with him? When the zombie-outbreak survivors find a massive food cache, do they invite outsiders or close ranks?

Remember that nothing happens to just one character. Your hero’s success will affect everyone around her, for better or worse.

Using Stack of Needles

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

Stack of Needles might be reflected in the main arc of your story. Does your hero struggle because of initial success? From Dreamgirls to Black Swan, many show-biz stories are built around this framework. Sequels often incorporate this idea as well, with the victorious heroes having to rediscover aspects of their earlier, simpler life.

On a sequence level, Stack of Needles works well as a mid-story twist. After finally discovering her real father’s name — Zebediah Obercampf — your hero will be frustrated to learn there are 100 men with that name living in the US.

Finally, Stack of Needles can be a great focus in a single scene. Your bank robber has just broken into the vault, but rather than one million dollars, he finds 100 million. Does he try to take it all? How will he get it out?

No matter how you use Stack of Needles, make the most of its much-ness. Give your hero more than he can handle, and watch what happens.

Stack of Needles is Card 12 of 26 in Writer Emergency Pack, which you can find in the Store and on Amazon.

You can’t train a cobra to do that

Episode - 192

Go to Archive

Directors, Follow Up, Formatting, News, QandA, Scriptnotes, Words on the page, Writer Emergency, Writer Emergency Pack

Craig and John discuss backup plans, camera directions, and becoming so good they can’t ignore you. Plus we answer two listener questions about specificity in scene headers and how to indicate that a script is intended for animation.

This episode was actually recorded before 191, but through the magic of editing refers to things that hadn’t yet happened. You won’t be confused because you’re clever. You’ll be fine.

Links:

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 4-10-15: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Writer Emergency Pack, now in stores

Writer Emergency Pack

WEP-1-PackWriter Emergency Pack, the deck of writer tools we Kickstarted late last year, is now available for sale in the Store and on Amazon. It’s $19, and makes a perfect gift for writers. (Or for yourself.)

The logistics behind getting Writer Emergency Pack available online were trickier than I had anticipated. I wrote an update to Kickstarter backers explaining what’s happening behind the scenes when you click the buy button.

Here it is in flowchart form:

3da59278b4950a5b80fca5a4a5cac984_original

Sales have been solid, bordering on brisk. My phone buzzes every time we sell a deck, which is of course the worst kind of Pavlovian conditioning.

I’ll switch the notifications off soon, but for now it’s useful to see the immediate impact of Amazon reviews and user tweets. And it’s oddly gratifying to see something we made out there in the world being purchased by strangers.