Dispatch from The Quest: Scott Reynolds
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the fifth week of Prep. Today’s dispatch: Scott on the challenge of structuring a story and working with nuance:
We’re nearing the end of prep and are really starting to nail down our stories. We’ve got characters, plots, subplots, themes, arcs, maybe some set pieces. But we still don’t know everything.
One of the things I’ve been struggling with the last few weeks is how to balance nuance with structure. When working out 4 (and then 10) plot points, we’re talking in the land of events. And in some cases, that’s good enough to frame a story, but in my case, it’s been hard to convey some of the finer points that are going to lead my characters through beginning, middle, and end using only major events as guideposts.
I’m writing a romantic comedy, and a lot of that is relationship. And a lot of human relationships is about what doesn’t get noticed. The little things. A look. The way you comfort someone when they’re sick. Knowing what to order at a restaurant if the other person is running late. All of the stuff that is just there and you only notice when it’s gone. It’s subtle stuff.
For me, I just haven’t been able to find a way to map plot points with these subtleties. The way I’m seeing it right now, much of what defines the relationships is happening in between what’s happening. Saying that the guy and the girl share a meaningful glance just isn’t enough to call it the Act II midpoint. It’s just a thing that happens.
So that’s what I’m kind of struggling with this week. Now that I have the skeleton of the story, I know that I’ve left myself a big job of filling in the connective tissue. Many of my fellow Quester’s are giving the same note, which is, in essence, that the latest exercises don’t have enough information to really nail down the relationships. And I agree. And I haven’t figured out what I can do about that apart from start writing scenes.
Now, none of this is to say that the structure isn’t important too. Even though it doesn’t describe the nuanced relationships of the story, it is the tracks on which the train will travel. I couldn’t be happier that I’ve worked out my 10 plot points and my themes and all of that because God knows I don’t want to be typing away in the middle of act II with no idea where to go. At least now I have a road map. Just gotta worry about navigating each stop.
And mixing metaphors.
When I interviewed the 21 writers who made the first cut for The Quest, I was emphatic with each of them that to go through this 24 week process, they had to commit to working up an outline. Many of them had not done that before, including some of the final 8. My point was three-fold: (1) Most professional screenwriters and all TV writers work from an outline. (2) Each participant in The Quest should learn an approach how to break a story in prep up through an outline so at least they know how to do it. (3) I wanted each writer to work up an outline to hit my comfort level, figuring the more the writer knew the story in advance of typing FADE IN — and the more I knew — the better for all of us.
This process has been a challenge for the Questers. It’s a challenge to break any story. If a writer isn’t used to spending 6+ weeks prepping a story, that challenge gets amplified.
I also told this group of 8 writers the same thing I tell everyone: There is no right way to write. Every writer is different. Every story is different. So if after they’ve gone through this rigorous Prep process they find they absolutely loathe outlining, fine by me. Every writer has to find their own writing process.
Scott’s story is a romantic comedy and very much relies on the intricacies of relationships between several people. It’s high concept, but it’s also a character driven piece. So it figures his prep process would be a unique challenge unlike say Ben who is writing an action-horror movie or Emma who is writing a physical comedy.
And yet with as much of a commitment as we have to wrangle a story in the prep process, we also have to respect the reality that stories are organic. They are living, breathing entities. So we must naturally expect them to evolve as we type FADE IN and pound out pages.
Therefore an outline is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. Some stories benefit from us figuring out every jot and tittle of the story in advance. Others perhaps only need the major Plotline points and Themeline movements.
But I will say this: If you want to have any reasonable chance of succeeding as a Hollywood writer, where the turnaround time for a pitch on an OWA is perhaps a few weeks, or the time you have to turn in a draft on a project for which you get hired is 8–12 weeks, you must have your act together in terms of your writing process. And that includes how you approach prep.
About Scott: Brooklyn based writer and comedian who bailed on software to focus on writing words that humans could read. Twitter: @scottadhoc.
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