Interview (Part 5): Ben Jacoby

This week I’m featuring an interview I did with Ben Jacoby. This has a particularly unique hook in that I have an email thread with Ben dating back to July 30, 2013. Every several months, Ben would contact me with the latest development in his writing life, so in effect the emails are a living history of his emerging screenwriting career. The fact he has been a longtime GITS follower makes his story especially satisfying.

Today in Part 5, Ben responds to some of my questions about the craft of writing:

Scott: I’d love to ask you some craft questions.

Ben: Sure.

Scott: How do you come up with story ideas?

Ben: Oh boy, I don’t know. I don’t really sit down and try to think of story ideas. But, when they come to me I jump on them. I can’t really say that I know how it happens. Maybe I’ll read something, some news event, some strange story. I’ll say, “Wait, what if this happened instead…” then extrapolate from there.

“Earthwalkers,” for example, it’s about two characters cursed in the Bible to walk the Earth forever. So I thought, “OK, if you believe that’s true, what would they be up to today? Well, one of them might be wracked with guilt, trying to redeem himself for his sin. The other might be completely insane and indulgent. He might hate life so much that he wants to end the world and free himself from his curse. So, what if we pit them against each other?”

That’s sometimes how it happens. A theme, a seed, a historical event. I’ll stew on that stuff and basically try to build a story from there.

Scott: How do you go about assessing these ideas? It sounds like it’s probably a pretty intuitive thing.

Ben: When you talk about writing for the market or following your dream, I think you obviously have to follow your dream, but not to the point where you shut yourself out of the market.

I’ve got a ton of ideas that are just not at all commercial, very Charlie Kaufman-type stuff. A lot of play ideas too. I’m going to tackle them one day, but now I’m focusing a bit more on the ideas that I know the market is a little more open to. I absolutely have to be excited about them though, that’s always a requirement.

If there’s a character at the center of a story that I connect with, that’s all I need to get me going. Theme is big for me too. If I can look at the DNA of an idea and try to build this sort of story organism out of it, that’s what I want. So I’d say character and potential for theme. More than anything though, it’s gut. If an idea excites so much that I can’t not write, then I write it.

Scott: How much time do you spend at prep writing and what do you focus on?

Ben: I do a lot of research. I don’t know if it will always come into play, depending on what the movie idea is. If it’s a sci-fi thing for example, I want to make it as realistic and grounded as possible. So I’ll do as much research as I can. Same if it’s something historical like “The Inklings.” I’ll read about their lives and the context of their world as much as I can.

Then when I’ve got this giant hodge-podge of notes, I sort of go through it, organize it, and put it all together and try to build my characters and story from there. Research isn’t just to construct a world around the story though. Most of the time, it’s what actually builds the story for me. I’ll read some tidbit, and that will make me want to take the story in a certain direction.

Scott: You mentioned characters. How do you go about developing them?

Ben: I generally think about motivation most of all. What do they want, what do they lack? From there, I think you can pretty much build everything. Come up with their backstory, what got them to this point in life. How do they see the world? Then, what constitution do they have as they progress forward to achieve their goal.

I also want to identify with my characters. So I guess I’ll sort of unconsciously hone in on some aspect of my own personality that I can infuse into a character. I always want to connect fundamentally with them.

Scott: That’s interesting because that’s one of the things I always tell people when they’re going through their story ideas. Like, “What should I write?” I’ll say, “Well, what’s your point of emotional connection to the story? Do you have one? And if so, how strong is it?”

Ben: It’s critical, I think. Without it, you’re just sort of writing from the outside in. If you really want to be in the story enough to explore the world, you have to feel like it’s a part of you in there doing the exploring.

Otherwise, you’re not going to be afraid when your character is afraid. You’re not going to be satisfied when your character is satisfied. I don’t really like to lean on the mechanics of storytelling. I write mainly based on emotion.

A big way to connect emotionally to a story for me is music. I listen to it all the time when I write. I have different playlists for each project and they really put me in the mood of the movie, and sometimes even the time period. When I’m writing and I hear a musical phrase that captures an emotion, I try to think about what that emotion is, and what’s the best way to try to recreate it and evoke it in the script.

For “The Inklings,” I listened to a lot of fantasy movie scores. The most important piece of music for it was from “Willow,” the main theme. It’s beautiful. There’s a moment that’s just bursting with hope and beauty and triumph, and listening to it made me realize that that feeling was missing from an important scene in my script.

I listened to it over and over as I rewrote the scene and eventually crafted it so that Tolkien’s triumph on the page had the same emotional effect on me as the music itself did. Maybe it won’t evoke that same emotion for a reader, but it did for me and that’s the important thing I think. For “Earthwalkers” I listened almost exclusively to Peter Gabriel’s score for The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s incredible. So music can really be a powerful tool for discovery when I’m writing, and it’s because it sets the emotional tone.

Of course, if you’re not identifying with your characters and if you’re not fully immersed in the world of the story, then none of this really comes into play. You have to be in it, be totally invested in your characters to get to that point.

Scott: It doesn’t sound like you’re one of those writers who’s got some sort of locked down story structure. Certainly, not like a formula or anything.

Ben: Not at all. I really don’t like thinking in terms of act structure. I don’t think in terms of sequences or beats either. The only structure I’ll really think about is beginning, middle, and end. And if I know a producer or exec likes to think in terms of acts I’ll draw some arbitrary lines so I can speak their language.

Not that established structures are always bad, I just didn’t learn how to write with them so adopting them now would be awkward. I just think a story should be organic. If story doesn’t feel intuitive, then you shouldn’t try to fit it into a mold.

Scott: What about dialogue? How do you go about finding your characters’ voices?

Ben: Again, it’s a matter of immersing yourself in the character. Obviously, the world and the time, the era has a lot to do with it. But that’s the cosmetic stuff. Tolkien is in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, and he’s British. So, I crafted the dialogue stylistically off of that.

When he’s younger he’s shy, maybe a little too talkative. As he gets obsessed with the realm, he retreats into himself, he gets more quiet and terse, so the dialogue is much more quiet and terse. The lines are shorter and stunted. Then by the end as an older man, he’s wiser and more confident with his words.

So I guess I try to nail down my characters’ perspective. If they’re closed off to a single point of view, make sure you don’t write from an omniscient point of view. If they’re scared, make sure they sound scared. That’s pretty much it.

Scott: That’s a really good takeaway. I haven’t quite heard a response like that from interviews, which is to be completely aware of where the character is at any given moment, in terms of their own emotional and psychological state. Have a strong awareness of that.

Ben: I think if you know the fundamentals of your character, the basics, then you can allow yourself to put them in those states, but you don’t get to that point if you haven’t fully fleshed out your character. You won’t understand who they are and what their afraid of or what they’re striving for.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Ben gives advice to aspiring screenwriters.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Ben is repped by Verve.