Dispatch From The Quest: Waka Brown
Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.
Today: Waka shares lessons she’s learned about the limits of time… and a script reader’s patience:
I once had a professor who told us a story regarding his insecurities as a freshman at a prestigious Ivy League university. To succeed, he was convinced that he needed to make more out of his time than anyone else. So, quite literally, he made the most of his time. He systematically determined how much time he wasted by not studying, by doing things such as 1. showering, 2. walking across campus, and (this is my favorite) 3. Chewing his food. He determined that he’d be able to get a leg up by 1. reviewing his lessons in his head while showering 2. studying vocabulary for his foreign language classes while walking across campus and 3. examining his lecture notes while chewing. It became a kind of game for him to think of ways to decrease his time wasted (by waste, meaning not studying) and he said he was able to get it down to 19 minutes total (sleeping was necessary and therefore didn’t count). I’m a little embarrassed to confess, this is the only information I remember from his class.
As a parent who works and writes, my professor’s anecdote about making the most of time has come to mind often. It emphasizes to me the importance of time and how one uses it. Screenwriting is a medium, I believe, in which we as writers also must be extremely conscious of time. First, there’s the page count. One executive once told me, “When I have to read a script over 100 pages, I want to shoot myself.” She might have been a little on the extreme side, but it’s a point I’ve heard more than once. And then there’s everything we need to accomplish in 100 (or so) pages. We can’t, as my professor noted, just shower, walk, or chew without something else going on (besides, a scene about chewing would be pretty darn boring). As Christian mentioned in one of his earlier Dispatches, we are the gods of our story universe and we have the ability to control time, make it faster, slower, weeks pass in a page (montage) go back in time (flashback), offer a glimpse into the future (flash forward). I must admit, I’m not comfortable with all these techniques, but it’s exciting to learn and to experiment outside of one’s comfort zone.
Speaking of time, how is it possible that 8 weeks of our Quest have passed by already? It feels like a very short time (fun!), but also a long time (want to get into pages!) But, trusting the process…
My wife was a political science major at Cal. It was through her I learned about zero-sum game. Per Wikipedia:
In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Thus cutting a cake, where taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others, is a zero-sum game if all participants value each unit of cake equally
Setting aside the finer points of the theory, I was reminded of it by Waka’s comment via a studio exec: “When I have to read a script over 100 pages, I want to shoot myself.”
This is a very real phenomenon. As noted previously, when someone tasked with reading a script opens it up, just about the first thing they do is flip to the back to see how long it is — to determine if they love you (100 pages or less) or hate you (120 pages or more).
So let’s say we have 100 pages. That’s the totality of time (page count) we have with a script reader, the limit of their patience with you and your story. That means we have to make every single page count.
Every single page that works is a plus.
Every single page that doesn’t work is a minus.
Handling time in a script is a critical component to how pages work. If we achieve a nice clip to our pace and can sustain a rhythm, the time of the script universe flowing smoothly, that’s a plus. If our pages come off as episodic, that’s a minus.
Every time jump you make in your script, even if it’s a matter of minutes in story time, is an opportunity to create a seamless transition which sustain a reader’s interest and keeps them turning pages… or a ragged one which causes them to step outside your story universe and wonder why the plot went there, what the narrative logic of the jump was, and basically disengage from a direct experience of your story to starting to think about your story. That is not your goal. Rather you want to pull the reader into your story universe and keep them there.
I don’t particularly like the idea of zero-sum game. I especially don’t enjoy it when I realize my own life has a time limit because 24 hours per day is not nearly long enough for me to do what I want and need to do. But it is a reality both in life… and in the scripts we write.
So make each day count. And make each page count.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch From The Quest.
About Waka: Kansan turned Californian turned Oregonian. Fan of Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, Richard Curtis, Tina Fey (who isn’t?), & I still use a $30 Tracfone @wakatb.
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