Dispatch from The Quest: Scott Reynolds
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the subject of Time. Today’s dispatch: Scott Reynolds ponders the connection between screenplay time and… carrot cakes:
I feel like I just wrote about time. And the Rolling Stones, for some reason. But this week in the Quest we’re talking time, so I’m coming at you again.
When you create a story, you spin up a new universe where all of it is happening. It may look and smell like our universe (I hope it smells better, honestly. I just walked down the east side of Union Square in Manhattan and it never doesn’t smell like garbage), but it’s a different place where this thing you’re describing is happening.
According to certain theories of quantum mechanics (mine, primarily), this universe you create actually comes into existence somewhere, and these people are alive and doing your story and also going to the bathroom and getting stood up on dates and being miserable at work and lying to their dentists about flossing, and they’re doing all of that off-screen even if you don’t write it on the page.
When you create a story, whether as long and deep as a novel or screenplay or as short as an improv scene, those people exist in a moment of time on which you’re choosing to focus, but they lived their lives before you started looking, and they’re going to continue to do so after you stop telling other people about them and invading their privacy. Unless you kill them off, in which case, you’re kind of a jerk. Why are you being such a jerk, jerk?
What I mean is, for them to be complete and whole characters living lives and doing actions that your audience will care about, they have to have a real backstory, spoken or unspoken, that has led them to this part of their lives that you are highlighting to your audience. They existed before the story started and everything that they experienced informs what they will do in your story. The inciting incident is the culmination of a billion-node tree mapping every decision they’ve ever made.
I’m getting a little esoteric here. Let me try to tighten it up. The thing is, the important moments stand out and within them, time warps. Not the passage of absolute time (Chronos, as Ben was talking about), but our perception of time. This is some Einstein, relativity, heavy stuff, guys. Electrical impulses and all that.
The more importance we place on an event, the more detail seems to be shoved into the time it took to complete. The slower it seemed to go. The longer we remember it. The more time it takes to recount that event to a friend later.
I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with this. Hang on. I got this.
We have tricks, like flashbacks, which allow us to zero in on the past and unpack a really important event, experiencing it in real time.
Or we can point to the past in mere lines of dialogue or even actions, showing that something happened to our character that is related to what she’s doing now, but that maybe the details of that event aren’t so important (thus not warranting going back to watch it happen) so much as knowing how it will impact her in the present.
Each of those tools is a debt we owe to the audience that we need to pay off later. That’s what is meant (at least for me) by set-up and pay-off. The set-up (even to a joke) is a debt. It cost the audience its time. We need to pay it off by bringing that joke home with a good punch line, or showing the audience in act three why we made them give a shit about the time Cathy cut her hand while slicing carrots for her grandfather’s birthday cake.
It’s a carrot cake, guys. I think those have real carrots in them. I’m no baker. I’m also not going to look it up. This is who I am.
Okay, so I’m finally bringing a point home, and that’s this. In order to have full and rich stories we need full and rich characters. In order for that to happen we need characters that existed in the story universe before this day that we decided to highlight, living real lives. But we can’t tell the audience all about those lives in great detail, because THIS IS THE DAY! This day is important, more so than the rest. So we pick and choose the things from the past to tell the audience, and we do so judiciously because we want plenty of time to tell the story of what’s happening today, and because taking time away from that is incurring debt that we owe to the audience. By the end of the script, pay off all your debts.
All of which could be summed up by saying that the three prequel movies of Star Wars incur a debt that is definitely NOT paid off in Episodes 4–6, and that is not the fault of episodes 4–6. Darth Vader was complete enough without the backstory, thanks.
Carrot cake. Star Wars. Time.
Clearly what we have here is this: Every scene we write is in the present. Yet it feels the influence of the past… and the pull of the future. So there is a dynamic tension in every moment of every script we write, the present tugged in multiple directions.
Right, Scott?
Next week: More Dispatches from The Quest.
About Scott: Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc.