Why Revealing Character Is Like Boiling A Frog

Characters require contrast. Sounds like a bit of a no-brainer, right? But as with every basic concept in screenwriting, it’s easier said than done. My writing partner and I were reminded of this recently while working on our current, comprehensive rewrite.

There’s this one character, see … and he’s, well … he’s a bad guy. But by introducing him immediately in all his ugliness (which is what we did in the first draft), we made an important mistake: We left ourselves no room to surprise the audience with his nastiness. In other words, the character was too predictable, and therefore his dramatic usefulness was seriously compromised.

It’s easy to make this mistake, because you want the audience to “get” why someone’s going to be such a bastard to some other character. You want to make a point. But that’s precisely where the craft aspect of screenwriting comes in. A screenplay has to be written deliberately rather than impulsively. Dosing character information creates tension and surprise, and it’s a delicate business. It sometimes requires you to write backwards. To start from the effect, the reveal, and carefully cover up the path leading to it with misleading, contrasting actions.

In relation to this particular issue, a metaphor is called for. Popular mythology has it that if you drop a frog in a pan of boiling water, it will jump right out, whereas if you put it in a pan of cold water and turn the heat on, the frog will realize too late what’s going on, and boil to death.

Same with a character: If you introduce a character in one way (sympathetic or otherwise) and subsequently add tiny increments of behaviour that reveal a contrasting trait, it will happen almost imperceptibly, until suddenly you realize the character is someone other than you thought.

So back to our bad guy. We decided to introduce him as a relatively nice guy. As follows:

He’s travelling, alone. We see him arrive at the airport. In trivial interactions we see he’s a charming, friendly guy. Then we see him in a hotel room. He calls home, speaks tenderly to his young kid on the phone. In his hand he holds a couple of children’s drawings and assures the child he’s going to take them to grandpa tomorrow. He wishes the child goodnight, exchanges a few pleasantries with his wife and hangs up. That’s the surface: a loving father and husband.

Now for the contrast: While he’s on the phone, the man unpacks food he’s taken with him for the trip. The careful way he unpacks and neatly arranges the items, suggests a degree of obsessive behaviour. So, almost imperceptibly, here’s a hint that this is also a man who plans ahead meticulously and needs to be in control.

The idea is that the discrepancy between the man’s spontaneous, loving attitude to his child and his calculating, premeditated behaviour in the hotel room, is a contrast that will gather more and more meaning as the story progresses.

It’s impossible to know whether this scene will survive, as is, into the next draft. However, just consciously deciding to introduce this character differently, has made him more contrasted and intriguing than he was in the previous draft, which only presented his bad side. And that’s a step towards a more interesting and intriguing screenplay overall, because the contrast creates scope for tension and surprise.

Why Screenwriters Need To Train Their Dopamine Neurons

At the moment I’m busy reading Jonah Lehrer’s recent book The Decisive Moment (also published as How We Decide), a fascinating summary of current scientific thinking on how humans make decisions. Which turns out to be based on emotions, rather than abstract rational considerations, and more or less unconscious. Very different from the way we think we make decisions.

Rather than get into the details of Lehrer’s book, I want to highlight one aspect of decision-making which seems particularly relevant for screenwriters: Learning from your mistakes.

As Lehrer explains, your brain is constantly predicting outcomes based on previous experiences. When your predictions are correct you feel good, but, more importantly, you feel bad when they’re not.

The dopamine neurons in your brain constantly learn from experience and provide this emotional sense that something is correct or wrong. That gut feeling which you find so hard to explain but which you can’t ignore. Your intuition, in other words. One of the best ways to hone this intuition is to examine bad decisions. The neuroscientific reason for this is, as Lehrer puts it on page 57 of his book:

Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.

In other words, the negative emotions you feel when, say, weaknesses in your writing are pointed out, are a vital part of learning how improve your writing. Especially when you put them in the appropriate context: These negative emotions are not a sign of your stupidity or incompetence, they are flags, held up by your dopamine neurons, showing you where your predictions were wrong.

The more you examine your mistakes, the more you train your intuition to recognize what works and what doesn’t, and the quicker your “gut feeling” will flag up bad writing.

So take solace in the efficacy, time-consuming though it may be, of the learning process. Search out, acknowledge and examine your mistakes. Have your work critiqued, get feedback and take it seriously. Allow your brain to integrate each new insight. Hone your intuition and learn to trust it.

Film Is Entertainment

My writing partner and I recently gave the first draft of our multi-strand feature to a number of readers for feedback. After receiving more or less unanimously scathing notes from all of them, I realized this: The reason the script isn’t working is not a faulty premise or uninteresting characters, it’s not even bad writing. The screenplay simply doesn’t promise an entertaining enough movie.

So what makes a screenplay (and the resulting film) entertaining enough? Depending on the genre, and therefore the expectations of the audience, it could be humour, suspense, mystery, disgust, despair … in other words, emotions. People watch movies because they want to access and release emotion. They want to laugh, cry, get angry, feel terror, and so on.

By far the most fundamental way a movie achieves this effect is by creating uncertainty as to what will happen next. Even in genres where the outcome is more or less a given (e.g., romantic comedies, or historical drama based on a true story), the audience wants to engage in that conscious and unconscious struggle to second guess events.

The last thing movie-goers want to pay for, is to listen to the screenwriter pontificate through the mouths of his characters. Yup, that’s what readers have said about this screenplay. Too much message, too little movie. Ouch.

Reminds me of the famous quote, usually attributed to Sam Goldwyn, but also to others such as Jack Warner, Harry Cohn and even George Bernard Shaw: If you want to send a message, call Western Union.

Which doesn’t mean the opinions of the screenwriter don’t drive the writing to some extent. You can’t put in months, sometimes years of work on a screenplay, if you’re not writing about something close to your heart. But if your opinion isn’t adequately wrapped in story, made consciously imperceptible, as it were, by means of plot … then you won’t be able to get in under the audience’s radar.

This experience has once again reminded me of the importance of having your screenplay critiqued. After a certain amount of time immersed in a screenplay, it’s often difficult to judge objectively whether what you’ve written is, realistically, a solid blueprint for a movie.

Above all, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important criterion of all: Is this going to be an entertaining movie? A movie I myself would pay to go and see?

So I’ve pinned up a new screenwriter’s axiom next to my desk. Besides the various quotes I’ve gathered along the way, such as: In life one thing happens after another, but in drama one thing happens because of another, and Don’t describe things, describe things happening, my wall of inspiration now prominently features an additional card, saying in large print:

FILM IS ENTERTAINMENT

Time will tell if I’ve really learned my lesson …

How Much Do You Leave Up To The Audience?

I recently heard Dutch director Jean van de Velde explaining from Cannes why he had to make a completely new cut of his recent film Silent Army for the international marketplace. Although the film was marketed as a mainstream, multiplex movie in Holland (partly because its star is a local celebrity), a subtitled Dutch movie released internationally is almost certainly only going to be shown on the art house and festival circuit, whatever its subject matter.

Van De Velde says his first priority was to get rid of the subtitles. Reading is too cerebral an experience for this kind of film, it detracts from the visual impact. So the dialogue was adapted. In addition, the soundtrack had to be rewritten in order to make the film more emotionally obvious.

Now here’s the interesting distinction Van De Velde makes in passing (and I paraphrase):

Art house films like to leave as much as possible up to the audience to fill in, whereas mainstream movies work by spelling out the emotional journey of the main characters in big bold letters.

I think it’s essential to understand this distinction when it comes to screenwriting. If you’re not consistent in this regard, the tone of script can be confusing.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s room for emotional ambivalence in any script, in fact it can be a powerful tool. It can create suspense and tension (i.e., the right kind of confusion). The choice is more about whether to resolve this ambivalence for the audience or leave them to make up their own minds.

It may seem obvious to you which approach is preferable, but the truth is that both options have advantages and drawbacks.

Spelling out the character’s emotions too explicitly can feel stereotypical, clichéd, but it’s also a tried and proven way of sweeping the audience along emotionally. It’s just a fact of human nature that we tend to feel what we see characters on the screen feeling, whether that‘s fear, lust, anger, grief, etc. The more intense and unequivocal their emotions, the more we feel too.

At the same time, leaving emotional ambivalence unresolved can feel like a cop-out, a way of avoiding taking a clear stand. However, this kind of openness makes for an extremely personal viewing experience, with different members of the audience interpreting events on the screen in different ways. It creates a strong sense of the film speaking to you as an individual, rather than as a generic human being.

Neither choice is intrinsically better, but you do have to choose. You have to be candid about what kind of creature your script is, what your plans are with it. This choice depends on your own taste, on the realities of marketing and distribution, but also on the degree to which your own position on the subject matter of the film is unequivocal or not. Above all it depends on the simple fact that mainstream movie-going audiences generally want to experience big emotions, and art house audiences generally want a more aesthetic, even intellectual experience.

So how much does your script leave up to the audience?

How Does Your Character Decide?

More and more neuroscientific research is pointing to the fallacy of believing that morality is based in rationality. Jonah Lehrer looks at this subject in detail in his new book How We Decide.

In previous centuries the common assumption has been that we reach moral decisions by thinking as logically as possible about our options and choosing what we consider to be right according to set of abstract ethical rules. Scientific, empirical evidence is making it increasingly clear this is not how it works.

Instead, we decide on a course of action within milliseconds of perceiving the options. The rest is rationalization of a choice we’ve essentially taken unconsciously, on the basis of what we desire most. Which is not to say there’s no merit in overriding one’s impulses, it’s just that often we follow our impulses and pretend (to ourselves as well as to others) that we chose rationally and morally.

Think about your main character for a moment. Are you crediting him or her with too much rational executive power over their decisions? Does your character even really know why they have taken a particular course of action? And more interestingly perhaps, how does your character rationalize and justify their actions? What moral story do they tell, which might not have anything at all to do with the real reasons for their action?

To understand how difficult it is to know how your character decides, try understanding how you yourself decide.

Think about a major(ish) decision you’ve taken recently that involved some kind of moral ambiguity. A secret you kept to yourself or divulged, something of value you found and kept or returned, a malicious rumour you spread or dispelled, and so on. Be honest about how instantaneous your decision was in comparison to the amount of time you spent rationalizing and justifying your actions in retrospect.

It’s quite shocking, if you’re honest about it.

Generally speaking, we don’t really have much conscious insight at all into our moral decisions. The only thing we’re conscious of, is the narrative we construct after the fact, in order to make our actions seem logical and acceptable.

To my mind this distinction between a more or less instinctive, emotion-driven decision and the retroactive illusion of rationality, can be a valuable addition to the screenwriter’s toolkit. It’s a powerful way of thinking about conflict in scenes, but also internal conflict.

Why Your Screenplay’s Future Is More Important Than Its Past

It’s sometimes difficult to accept that no one besides you (and your accountant) cares whether you spent two years writing a screenplay or two weeks. The only relevant considerations are whether the writing is any good and whether the script is right for the current market.

It would be nice if your history with the screenplay mattered, but it doesn’t.

Seth Godin posts on his blog today about ignoring what he calls sunk costs. His take is useful in the context of screenwriting:

When making a choice between two options, only consider what's going to happen in the future, not which investments you've made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.

So let’s say you have two screenplays, one you’ve spent two years perfecting and one you’ve hammered together in two weeks. Which one should you run with? Emotionally, you probably have vastly more invested in the one you’ve worked on for longer. Not to mention the fact that you’ve invested so much time (i.e., your own money) in it.

However, if your aim is to earn a living writing movies, then the more relevant consideration is: Which of the two scripts stands a better chance of being optioned or produced? To decide this, you need to determine which producers you can realistically pitch to, what the potential budgets might be, what the target audiences are, and so on.

Several years ago I wrote a very detailed scriptment based on a biblical story. I did a huge amount of research, and toiled diligently until one day I saw an announcement that the very same story was being produced by a big production company, with some a-list actors attached. I very reluctantly put that scriptment away and turned my attention to other work. The fact that I had worked on it for ages, didn’t stop it’s market value from dropping to zero. Of course the scriptment is still there in my drawer. Who knows, maybe one day the market will be right for it again.

It’s just an unfortunate but understandable fact of the screenwriter’s life, that the value of a screenplay is not determined by the screenwriter’s “sunk costs” (i.e., it’s past), but rather by it’s quality and potential (i.e., it’s future).

What’s “Primal” About Your Screenplay?

In a recent post entitled High Concept Rules, screenwriter and screenwriting teacher Blake Snyder discusses some aspects of what makes a film “high concept.” The term that struck me most was “primal.”

Primal — Bruce Snyder, Distribution President at Fox, used this very word in a recent interview to help explain why Taken was a hit: Someone took my daughter. I have to get her back.

That makes absolute sense, doesn’t it? It’s not completely abstract, but it’s also not very specific and yet it conveys a visceral sense of what the film is about. To my mind this works precisely because there’s no mention of characters or location or any other concrete clue as to the specific content of the story. It’s just the raw emotion at the heart of the story, expressed from the point of view of the main character.

Of course we’re talking high-concept here. These are scripts you need to be able to pitch in a few sentences at the drop of a hat. Once produced, these are movies that are marketed to a mass audience using exactly this kind of pithy, gut-level copywriting. But isn’t this also an excellent way of examining for yourself what’s at the emotional heart of a screenplay you’re still working on, even if you’re never going to say as much to another human being?

Sometimes explicitly identifying a central emotional motive in a story can help to focus the action, create unity and direction. If the main subject is, say, revenge (as in Taken), then everything about the characters, the narrative, the locations and so on becomes focused on one or other aspect of this drive. Everyone who is anyone in the movie has an opinion and a feeling about revenge and acts accordingly.

It’s a similar mechanism to articulating the theme, or the premise, or the designing principle, or the central moral question, depending on whose screenwriting jargon you prefer. And it’s similar also in that not all writers like to know what they’re writing about while they’re writing. In other words it's entirely up to you to determine when, if at all, in the writing process you want to clarify what is “primal” about your story.

Just as visualizing your trailer is a great way of exploring the essence of your story, it seems to me that formulating what is “primal” about your story is yet another useful implement to put in your writer’s toolbox, to be taken out and used at your own discretion.

Thanks to Blake Snyder for pointing that out!