The writers room weeks 6-7-8: "Writing better dialogue"

It's late Friday afternoon, end of week eight working on the screenplay my co-writer and I are planning to enter into the 2013 Nicholl Fellowship competition, I believe.

Clicking on a link to an Onion article, "Find the one thing you're most passionate about, then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life," has made me feel much better about not updating the blog sooner. Here's the link: onion.com/11YVZeN

In spite of the painful truth highlighted in the Onion feature, my friend and I are making progress on our screenplay. We're working on every day at lunch and some Friday afternoons. with four-and-a-half weeks left we're determined to finish before the May 1 Nicholl deadline.

Here's this week's writing lesson (Writing better dialogue):

When I first began studying screenwriting, I remember struggling to write dialogue. Everything I wrote seemed fake and unnatural. Even worse every character's voice sounded the same. 

During my first screenwriting course, Sandi Berg's favorite saying was, "better line!" She said these words often, to each student in the summer production workshop she taught. What her words really meant was: "that dialogue is weak, pitiful, and I know you can create better dialogue; you owe it to your characters."

As we've been working in the writers room there have been incredibly powerful lines, perfection. But as we try to write other scenes the dialogue is lame and I hear Sandi's directive, "Better line!"

As we worked on one of these scenes nothing was helping. The scene was dead. The audience would squirm uncomfortably. We threw out more ideas but each was as lame as the last. The energy in our writers room lagged.

Then I began talking about our character—She's a kick-ass girl. We talked about the other person in the scene (a doctor). We talked about their relationship to each other (to succeed she may just outwit the brilliant doctor; she is street-wise). My co-writer and I talked about what each person in the scene wanted and what they really needed. Then, magically, lines of dialogue came alive and the energy in the writers room returned.

And even better, the momentum from scene to scene and page to page remains unpredictable and yet right on; the story is becoming powerful and intriguing. 

During a break we spoke about how certain we were about what we were going to include in the story. However, because we had patiently tried to understand each character and honored who they were before beginning to write the direction we thought the screenplay would take faded. While following a solid outline the characters have awakened and are now commanding the creative space. They are alive and are driving the story.

There's no way that their voices are boring and they don't sound identical. In fact they are completely different from anyone who has lived, or who will ever live. I wish I could share this with Kersh; I know he would smile.

Today at 3:40 as we were leaving the office my co-writer mentioned something that meant quite a bit to me after I finished my first screenplay. In less than two months he said, we will do something that most people will not accomplish their entire lives—completing an entire screenplay. 

That's a great feeling and we won't have given up one precious evening to do it. Take that, Onion!

The writers' room, end of week five: Respect

Week five in the writer's room has ended.

My cowriter watched Argo just before we began working on our screenplay and he's determined that our screenplay keep the audience's attention from beginning to end as firmly as Argo did for him. He's way ahead of where I was when I finished the MPW program at USC.

I remember Irvin Kershner's words (shouting): "each scene must have rising tension!" But what does this mean?

In week 5 we had discussions about many scenes and I challenged my cowriter—is the story more powerful if our protagonist locks herself in the bathroom closing herself off, not connecting with her child separated by a door; or is it more revealing and powerful if she's less than five feet away from him in the same room, her mind a million miles away?

In another scene she was curled up on the couch, reeling from a painful event that had just happened.

After re-reading the scene we agreed that we would be losing the audience the way it was written. We knew what would happen next from our short story that had become cards and then had become our sequence breakdown. We rewrote the couch scene. How much more effective to watch her reeling from pain, and with her whole being, fight to numb the pain by doing something shocking and dangerous?

It's still Act 1; we aren't yet that interested in her. She hasn't yet earned the right to lie on the couch.

Explanations and understanding don't only come from dialogue; searching for visual clues is satisfying for the audience. Today we wrote a scene where our protagonist is thrust into a new and unfamiliar location--is it dangerous? How do we reveal this without dialogue, in a satisfying way? How are the characters in the new environment dressed to show their rank, the order of the place; what equipment do they use? And finally, should our character be trusting when everyone has let her down, beginning from early childhood? No, she fights! She has fought to survive her entire life; she cannot stop fighting now.

As we work and create, I continue to respect the process even more each day. I'm glad I kept going back to USC to take more classes. Everything is coming together in a pretty incredible way and our energy is high. 

Writers' room, End of week 4 • Structure

Four weeks have passed, an entire month in our improvised writers' room at work. One scene has been written and I'm thrilled with our progress.

I took a vacation day during week 4 to meet family in LA for a mini family reunion. When I went back to the writers' room on Thursday it was the most challenging session so far.

My cowriter and I weren't making progress and I felt low energy (unusual and a bad sign). We meet Monday to Thursday during lunch to write, but because we had to stay at work for an open house on Friday we decided to add an extra day.

Thursday night I looked up detailed notes and sequence breakdowns from Don Bohlinger's Advanced Screenplay Analysis course that he had emailed to the 80+ students in his class (USC School of Cinematic Arts). In one message he wrote that he hoped to feature some of our screenplays in his future classes. Such an amazing person!

We'd felt so lost in the writers' room that I printed notes for all of the movies we had studied in class. I printed detailed sequence breakdowns for movies including "Silence of the Lambs," "In Bruges," "The Apartment," "American Beauty," and "Lars and the Real Girl," among others. The terms listed in bold were familiar—planting, payoff, need, theme, scene of aftermath, stakes. Seeing the words "Act I: Sequence One" was scary—how could we make all of those index cards and the story fit into just eight sequences?

I also printed a glossary of film terms and a handout titled, "Want vs. Need."

One thing that has helped us decide what to include and what to eliminate as we have developed the story so far has been to continually ask if each element supports our protagonist's character arc. The details of the story and each of the people in the true story are intriguing and alluring. At one point I said, "we've lost her (our protagonist) completely!" That brought us back to our heroine and her journey.

Though Mr. Bohlinger had lectured about "want vs. need," I didn't have a full understanding of what it meant until I took Pamela Douglas's TV script analysis course last year. At the beginning of many dramatic films the character is unaware of their greatest/deepest need, only to become aware of it and against all odds, change. It's fascinating for the audience to be present with the character as the story unfolds and the character transitions from not needing or wanting love to experiencing love; or as he transforms from living a life of bitterness to experiencing hope. The film term for this is "polarity,"* and it must be equally challenging/fascinating for the actor who will play the part.

Pamela Douglas's class helped me understand that in the best television and cable programs, the characters become our friends; their character arcs often take place over several seasons/years. In a movie, extreme change (polarity) takes place during the telling of the story, often in less than two hours.

As I reviewed what comprises the three acts of a screenplay I paged through the glossary of film terms; one term led to another and then to another, equally important in understanding a single concept. I followed wherever new concepts/definitions led. As I reviewed the breakdowns for each of the movies we had studied in class I realized that the point of attack in our story was wrong. 

(Point of attack as defined by William Archer in "Playmaking," is where the dramatic conflict first appears. It's the thing in the story that changes everything;* the character/s will never be able to go back to their normal existence when it happens.)

In our writers' room we knew our characters completely; we'd discussed them for a month. We had done reviewed the facts of the real events that happened in the early 1980s and were crafting the storyline that will be written as our screenplay.

As I identified the point of attack for each movie Thursday night, I realized that in the examples the point of attack isn't a series of events. It is a single thing, a package being delivered or a character being admitted to the hospital.

There are usually two 10- to 12-minute sequences in Act I; four in Act II; and two in the third act (in Act III, the sequences are shorter than in the first two acts).*

I shared what I'd reviewed with my cowriter Friday afternoon as more than 1,000 guests toured the center where we work. At first he thought that we'd have to start writing from scratch. I assured him that nothing was going to be lost. We would use everything and would build on it.

Realizing that the point of attack often ends the first sequence in act 1 inspired us to pause and  expand on the characters' lives before we reveal the shocking event that will change her life forever. Now she doesn't stay in her living room, she goes out into her environment which is fascinating. We follow her. Who is she, why is she fighting so hard to keep her life the way it is and why is she acting so destructively that she is endangering her life and another life?

So for us, instead of constricting our creative process (which was stalled anyway), thinking about screenplay structure made the attacking octopus retreat and sink back into the depths.

As we worked, something surprising happened. Not only did we use everything we had created so far, when we began applying structure, points in the story revealed even deeper meaning. While we had been stalled completely the day before, with the structure of a screenplay as our guide we each suggested new scenes that worked beautifully.

By the end of the day Friday, we had placed the new and improved story into same format as the sequence breakdowns used for the movies in advanced screenplay analysis class. 

I'll post the rest of what happened Friday afternoon in the writers' room after I finish my homework (transcribing Friday's handwritten notes into our own formal Sequence breakdown for our screenplay). We plan to begin writing the screenplay tomorrow as we begin week 5 in the writers' room.

Our goal remains the same: to complete and enter the screenplay into the 2013 Nicholl Fellowships competition.

*From notes/Don Bohlinger's advanced screenplayl analysis course.