The One Night Stand of Screenwriting

Hi Kids!
As this was one of my earliest posts as CSSC Writer Laureate -  I figure about 5 people read it, so here it is again with a promise of fresh material later this week!

First off I want to know how it happens to be Wednesday again? Time is truly a fascinating thing, isn’t it? Especially since in some real science way it doesn’t exist. Those of you not inclined to think esoteric thoughts about space time, or question whether or not stars have souls, are likely skipping ahead right now wondering how far I’m going to wander down this time tangent. You tuned in after all to get the answer to that big icky question left outstanding last week – How do you know your idea is a movie? Of course the short answer, and the cheap pop psych answer is, that if you truly see it and believe in it as a movie, then of course it is!

But that’s not the way it works in my head aka the Cocoverse, so leaving that with you as an answer is likely the coward’s way out. Not that I’m against that completely, sometimes the coward’s way is best, but it’s only Blog the 4th so I want to put off any overt displays of creative cowardice on my part for at least a few more weeks.
I’ll try and give you a bit more to work with. Then back to my time ruminations (that’s your word for the week).
First off, when the character chatter gets going in my head and I have to decide whether the story idea is best expressed as a novel, short story, song, poem, play, short film, feature, TV series, webisode, game, etc. It’s kinda like a Broadway audition. Except that instead of yelling “Singers who can Dance stage left and Dancers who can Sing stage right!” I yell “Doers who can Talk in the green room and Talkers who can Do wait out in the house.” Hmmm, that last is going to be pretty cryptic to those of you who know nothing about theatre. If that is you, your homework for the week is to see a play, doesn’t matter what it is, or even if it’s any good. If you want to want to write for the screen you have to know not only what that is, but what it is not.

All that to say that if my characters are exploring ideas and the expression of those ideas through language, I start to frame the story as a play. On stage the play of language takes the place of a sweeping landscape shot or a close up of a cherry blossom falling. So the chatty Cathy’s who want to wallow in hyperbole get the stage.
If the conflict plays out in a place, or places, I start thinking film or TV. If the place is big enough and complex and important enough to the play of the story that it becomes a character in and of itself then I’m thinking feature. Whenever big sky or weather or rocky shoreline or acres of cracked concrete are key to making the story work, it’s a feature. But also to be a feature it has to meet a couple other criteria. Is the plot all of a piece? There needs to be a certain unity of story to make me believe in it, in that I have to at least sense the shape of the beginning, middle and end. As well, it had better be wildly interesting to me if I’m going to invest myself for months and months in the story landscape. For me too, a feature has to have a complexity of plot and action that exceeds the budget of a TV show. Features have scope, even low budget ones.

TV for me is more about complexity of character. Characters that tangle and untangle and re-tangle themselves around each other. As well, TV ideas for me don’t have crisp endings, being so character driven, a good ending of one TV episode is just a good beginning for the next. Feature endings need to come down more, to a place of greater quiet and rest. Maybe because the up part has to be of such scope and intensity that the great exhale at the ending needs to be longer and deeper. And in terms of investment? For a writer a TV series is a marriage while a feature is a fling, so if you don’t want to be married, careful about heading down the TV development road.

Do I really think about all this stuff before I start writing? Yah, sorta. Sometimes I’ll sketch out a few scenes and just ask myself what it feels like. If I produce an inciting incident and a lot of internal dialogue, I start thinking short story, if a new world or a series of events jumps in, I’ll start thinking novel.

Short films come to me quickly, within a space of hours I have a beginning, middle and end sorted out. Writing one is like planning a big party. I know the time commitment won’t be that great but it still needs to be one hell of a good time, so I try to make sure that I give it a tight container to fit in. I like my shorts to have a unity of time, place and/or action. I find setting limits or story parameters keeps it from spinning out of control. Whether it is limiting character number or location or theme, I limit something about the structure in order to stay focused. In the Cocoverse the short film is the one night stand of screenwriting, so I try and have fun and not take it too seriously.

Honestly though, here we are at the end and in truth, back at the beginning because I’m going to leave you with the thought that your story idea is a play, song, painting, graphic novel, short script, feature film, TV series – indeed all of the above. Your idea is all of these things and none of them until you choose. I think the only way you can choose is to actually have some knowledge about the different storytelling techniques that come into play with each format. That means read. Read short scripts, plays, novels, features, teleplays, novels and cereal boxes, and oh, yah, blogs. If you are a screenwriter writer you read every day. Sorry, but it is a non-negotiable. Watching short films on the web, your favorite TV show or a movie marathon, is negotiable. Reading is not. Best of all is to get a hold of the screenplay and a DVD of the film, read, watch, repeat, read, watch, repeat.

Time for me to go do all that right now. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, always has a slot in my space-time continuum.
-Carolynne

A Mutated Chromosome 17

Okay 3:09 a.m. I am really not happy to see you again. Seeing your pale green LED face – a bit blurry from my lack of eyeglasses and a bit wobbly due to the large green plastic water glass strategically positioned to mute your radiant…ah, radiance -- makes me realize that in the past 15 years or so, you and I have spent some part of this Lost Hour together. Sometimes only a few moments, sometimes the whole damn thing and then some, but at least 2 out of 3 nights we exchange our nocturnal greetings. I for the most part groan, sigh and from time to time launch a curse word in your direction. You return to me your intense faintly malevolent green stare. 

While I recognize that our early morning conversation is hardwired into my genes – insert some scientific jibber jabber here about melatonin cycles and genetically linked paucity of the enzyme required to break it down, or else too much of the enzyme I can never remember which it is. No matter, I have accepted you as part of what my Dad used to call “your specialness” in which context “special” takes the same meaning as the word as “funny” does to the word “peculiar”.  That does not mean, however, that I welcome you or have to be polite to you whenever you decide to show up.

Tragically for me, a wage-slave of the most ordinary 9-5 kind, you often come tip-toeing along with my Muse in tow.  He seems to frackin’ love you. A night person he definitely is and I’ve got no problem with that except for when the alarm sounds at 6:45 a.m.

This morning’s thoughts decided to take a few laps of the brain chasing down the idea of winning the Giller Prize. For those of you not in the know of Canada’s literary stuff, the Giller Prize is a big deal north of the 49^th parallel. It is a yearly $50,000 prize given to Canada’s best English novel or collection of short stories and comes with lots of press and a huge bump in book sales. I’d seen a news clip a few days ago about the award and this year’s winner (Esi Edugyan Half-Blood Blues) and her comments were humble and heart felt. I started thinking about what winning a big splashy prize like that would mean to a writer, not in terms of their career so much but a few layers deeper then that. I started wondering what it would mean to the writing.

So my Muse sat down on the end of the bed and started playing one of his favourite games with me – “What if that were you?”.

And so we began. It started with me imagining what I would say if I won such a thing. What would I talk about in an acceptance speech.  Would I spend a lot of time thanking all the people who ever helped me and then all of those who got in my way? Because truthfully they’d have had just as big a hand in any literary success as those who tried to help. Or would I say something real. Something about writing. Then a transformation of some kind took place. Even though I was still writing my Giller acceptance speech in my head, all of a sudden I was talking about why I write. Why I have to write. It surely isn’t to win prizes I thought, for I don’t think it is possible to actually do the work at all with that goal fixed in one’s head.

It may seem odd to many but it was the first time in my life I spent a big chunk of time thinking deeply about why I write.  Diving underneath all the surface reasons like, “I’m good at it.” Or “So I can fully express myself” or “I get to be the hero of every story” or even the big reason that though it appears on the surface is a True Iceberg of Thought – “Because I get to play God.” – so that surface thought is also one that goes all the way down to the bottom.

In the process of trying to explain why I write to my Muse I came to understand that I write because I have to write.  For better or worse, prizes or no, twenty years of writing has created a Writer, which is as you may or may not know is only kind of a half- human, half mythical sort of construct. A creature that splits her time pretty equally between the Here-and-Now(HAN) and the Land-of-What-If and –Maybe (LOWIM) and no matter how fantastic HAN might be at any point in time, she is always pining for the forests and valleys and oceans and planets of three moons that lie in her truest home LOWIM.

So there it is. I write because it is now as much a part of my genome as the weirdness on chromosome 17 that inverts my melatonin cycle. It’s a curious sort of group of thoughts that make me as sad as joyful. But analysis of that emotional response will have to wait for another day’s Lost Hour. For tonight my Muse has snuggled down in the blankets next to me and closed his eyes, so now I will too.