Authors: Blake Snyder
The same goes for the speed of the plot. As the grip of the bad guy tightens around the hero, things happen faster, and the pressure exerted in the vice-like grip of the forces opposing the hero will finally explode in its Act Three climax with a rush of energy and emotion. If you don't feel your plot intensifying as you make the midpoint turn and start heading for the finish, you have problems.
Turn, Turn, Turn reminds us to accelerate and reveal all with verve as we move the plot forward. Turn, Turn, Turn tells us to make the plot more dynamic and less inert.
So if your screenplay's plot feels in any way static or flat, try looking at it from its other angles. And make it accelerate, not just move forward. Make it Turn, Turn, Turn.
THE EMOTIONAL COLOR WHEEL
When they say a good movie is "like a roller-coaster ride," they mean that as an audience member watching the story unfold, your emotions have been wrung out. You've laughed; you've cried; you've been aroused; you've been scared; you've felt regret, anger, frustration, near-miss anxiety and, ultimately, breathtaking triumph. And when the lights come up, you walk out of the theater feeling absolutely drained.
Whew! What a movie!
Whether it's a comedy or a drama, wringing out the emotions of the audience is the name of the game. Making it an emotional experience, using
all
the emotions, is what it's about. Think why that is. We go to the movies not only to escape reality, and to ultimately learn a little lesson about Life, but to experience a dream state where Life and its attendant emotions are recreated in a safe environment. Like a good dream, we must live the movie; we must run in place along with the hero in our sleep, clutch our pillows at the love scene, and hide under the covers during the breathtaking climax of the film to wake exhausted but fulfilled, wrung out, worked out, and satisfied.
So your movie doesn't have this, so what? So it's one-note emotionally? If it's a comedy and it's funny all the way through, what's the problem? If it's a drama and it's tense from start to finish, that's all. What's wrong with that?
Well, let's take a look at two filmmakers I never thought I'd reference in any how-to book: the Farrelly Brothers. They write and direct comedies like
Something About Mary, Shallow Hal
, and
Stuck On You,
and are known for hilarious, ribald set pieces. But if you think all they are is funny, you're wrong. These guys work it emotionally. In each of their movies they have scenes of great fear, scenes of
intense longing, scenes of lust, scenes of human foible. Their movies work because they use every color in the emotional color wheel. It's not just one-note funny.
And you can do the same.
If your script feels one-note emotionally, go back and flesh it out using all the colors in the palette. Where is your lust scene? Where is your frustration scene? Where is your scary scene? And if you don't have these, take a scene that's just funny or just dramatic and try to play it for one of the missing colors. A good way to do this is to actually choose a color of each of the missing emotions and go back and tag certain scenes to change the emotional tone from one type to another. Take those scenes and use the same action, the same +/-, the same conflict and result, but play it for lust instead of laughs, jealousy instead of flat-out, stare-down dramatic conflict. By varying the emotions you use, you'll create a much more rewarding experience for everyone.
Don't believe me? Go and look at any Farrelly Brothers movie.
"HI HOW ARE
YOU
I'M
FINE"
Flat dialogue even happens to good movies. But your script will never be a movie if you have dull, lifeless repartee. And when you find yourself reading page after page of this "place-holder" talk, you know you're in trouble.
You're bored!
And that is...(Wait for it)...
bad.
Absolutely.
"Hi how are you I'm fine" tells us just how boring flat dialogue can be and what a waste of space it is. Flat dialogue is the kind that
anyone can say. And odds are that if your script is full of lines that are right out of real life, that ring true but ring dull, you're not working hard enough to make the characters come to life. Because odds are that if your dialogue is flat, so are the people speaking it.
Engaging characters talk differently than you and I. They have a way of saying things, even the most mundane things, which raise them above the norm. A character's dialogue is your opportunity to
reveal
character and tell us who this person is as much as what he is saying. How someone talks
is
character and can highlight all manner of that character's past, inner demons, and outlook on life.
Every time a character speaks is your chance to show that.
If you don't think you have flat dialogue, try a simple trick I learned from Mike Cheda. After reading one of my early scripts, he broke the news to me: "Your characters all talk the same." Well, naturally I was insulted; I was ticked. And young bullhead that I was, I did not believe Mike Cheda. What did
he
know?!
Then Mike showed me this simple Bad Dialogue Test: Take a page of your script and cover up the names of the people speaking. Now read the repartee as it goes back and forth between two or more characters. Can you tell who is speaking without seeing the name above the dialogue? The first time I tried it, there in Mike's office at Barry & Enright, I was stunned. Damn it, he was right. I couldn't tell one of my characters from the others, and then and there I figured out something else too: All the characters had MY voice!! In a good script,
every
character must speak differently. Every character must have a unique way of saying even the most mundane "Hi How are you I'm fine" kind of chat.
My best learning experience in this regard was an early draft of a script called
Big, Ugly Baby!,
an alien-switched-at-birth comedy. I gave
every
character a verbal tic. One stuttered, one did malapropisms,
one was an Okie versed in Sartre, and the Alien parents (my favorite characters) always yelled, a point I reinforced by having at least one word in every sentence they spoke CAPITALIZED! While you don't have to be this drastic in your script, that exercise showed me how I could make characters richer. (And more fun to read out loud, btw.) I had learned that amping up even the most "Hi how are you I'm fine" kind of dialogue revealed everything about each of my characters and made the read lOO% better.
TAKE A STEP BACK
I have just been involved in
IO
months of rewrites. My partner Sheldon and I were working on our Golden Fleece and it took seven — count 'em seven — drafts to get it right. One of the reasons it took so long is that we had made a basic mistake. We had broken the rule of "Take a Step Back." Just so you know, it happens to everybody — even the pros.
As mentioned in Chapter Four, our story is about a kid who is kicked out of military school and sent home only to find that his parents have moved away without telling him. So our kid hero goes on the road and has lots of fun adventures where he interacts with people and helps them, because he's a good kid who causes flowers to bloom and changes the lives of strangers wherever he goes. Our mistake was that the way we had created the character — a nice kid who helps others — didn't give him anywhere to go. Our hero had already changed. He didn't need this journey. He was the same person he was at the beginning that he was at the end. And the fixing of that problem, draft by draft, took forever. Each draft was about taking him back a step emotionally so the journey means something.
Okay
,
a
little
bit
further
,
oka
y
let
'
s
take
him
all
the
wa
y
back
! It seems easy now, but in the middle of it, we couldn't figure it out. We couldn't see that what we needed to do was take our hero back as far as possible, so that the story would be about his growth. And believe it or not, this kind of mistake happens all the time.
A lot of us know where our heroes end up and don't want to put them through the torment of growth, so we avoid the pain for them. And just like raising a child, you can't do that. These characters have to grow by getting bumped on the nose, and whether we like it or not, we have to let them. In our case, Sheldon and I liked our hero so much and wanted him to come out in the end being upbeat, positive, and special — but we didn't want to see his struggle to become that. It was like reading the answers at the back of the book without doing the work on the test questions. We wanted to get there so badly, we didn't see that getting there
was
the story. And showing the bumps along the way made the pay-off greater.
Take a Step Back applies to all your characters. In order to show how everyone grows and changes in the course of your story, you must take them all back to the starting point. Don't get caught up in the end result and deny us the fun of how they get there. We want to see it happen. To everyone.
This is just one more example of how movies must show the audience everything: all the change, all the growth, all the action of a hero's journey. By taking it all back as far as possible, by drawing the bow back to its very quivering end point, the flight of the arrow is its strongest, longest, and best. The Take a Step Back rule double-checks this.
If you feel like your story or any of its characters isn't showing us the entire flight, the entire journey... Take a Step Back and show it all to us. We want to see it.
A
LIMP
AND AN
EYE
PATCH
Sometimes in a screenplay, the basics are done, your hero and bad guy are great, the plot explodes and intensifies after the midpoint, and everybody's got snappy dialogue. Everything's great except for
one small problem: There seem to be too many minor characters. It's hard to tell one from another. Readers will confuse that guy with this other guy. And it bugs you! Isn't it obvious?!
What has happened is that you have not given us a hook to hang our hats on for each of the characters that are vital to your story. And while we often rationalize this by saying "Oh well, they'll handle that in casting!" I've got one word for you: Ha! You won't see casting if your reader can't see characters. But there's an easy way to solve this:
Make sure every character has "A Limp and an Eyepatch."
Every character has to have a unique way of speaking, but also something memorable that will stick him in the reader's mind. The reader has to have a visual clue, often a running visual reminder, which makes remembering a character easier. A Limp and an Eyepatch may seem like a silly way to think about how to attach traits to characters to make sure we remember them, but it works — if you remember to do it.
Often the realization that you need something like this comes from a reader. A great example of A Limp and an Eyepatch happened to me and shows just how amazing this simple device can be. Sheldon and I were writing our ill-fated
Really Mean Girls.
We had one character, the lead boy, who has a crush on our lead girl and acts as the "Speaker of Truth" whenever he is around, keeping the lead girl on the straight and narrow with his moral compass. He's a funny kid, mature beyond his years, the type who will be a sterling adult but right now is "too smart for his own good. " He was vital to the plot, but somehow unmemorable on the page. Our manager, Andy Cohen, read draft after draft and kept getting stuck on the boy. Who was he? Yes, he had an important function, but why was he interesting? We tried changing dialogue, making him funnier, smarter, but still got the same note.
Finally, Sheldon came up with a brilliant fix. When we meet the boy for the first time, we described him as wearing a black t-shirt and sporting a wispy soul-patch on his chin. Emblematically it fit, showing his yearning to be hip and older on the inside and not quite cutting it in his appearance. And every time he appeared we referenced this. We gave the script back to Andy, and he called us to say he didn't know what we'd done but the character of the boy really popped for him now. The boy jumped off the page and registered in his mind. We had done very little overall, he was the same kid, we just gave him A Limp and an Eyepatch.
And it made all the difference.
Is this technique "fake" or "artifice"? No, it's screenwriting. It's the job. So when you find yourself with one or several unidentifiable characters who are getting lost in the shuffle, try saying what I say now all the time:
I think this guy needs A Limp and an Eyepatch.
IS
IT PRIMAL?
I have used the term "primal" throughout this book. To me it is my touchstone both in creating a script and fixing it once it's done. "Is it primal?" is a question I ask from the beginning to the end of a project, and making it more primal is the name of the game. To ask "Is It Primal?" or "Would a Caveman Understand?" is to ask if you are connecting with the audience at a basic level. Does your plot hinge on primal drives like survival, hunger, sex, protection of loved ones, or fear of death? At the root of anyone's goal in a movie must be something that basic, even if on its surface it seems to be about something else. By making what drives your characters more primal, you'll not only ground everything that happens in principles that connect in a visceral way, you also make it easier to sell your story all over the world.