
Where do I find my story?
Drift. Wait. Obey.”
Rudyard Kipling
The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.”
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert
Amongst primitive tribes, there was often a shaman or witch-doctor who had a talent for telling stories and was given the important job of keeping alive the tribe’s oral history and folk-tales. It was a recognised talent and commanded a great deal of respect. There are still people today who have this talent; although, to be strictly accurate, we’re talking about two distinct talents, not one.
The Story-Teller is the person who can keep your attention and hold you spell-bound with even the most banal anecdote. It’s not a literary ability that these people have but something completely instinctive – a gift – that gives them this power. Such an individual knows, without being prompted, how to shape and craft a story to wring the most effect from it.
The Story-Dreamer is something else again. If you are the kind of person who can’t help but think up stories, who filled up exercise books as a child and whose continual mantra is the magic phrase: “what if?” – then you are probably one of these individuals; a human ‘story factory’ who comes up with three likely scenarios over your coffee and toast every morning. These are people with a magpie mentality, who are in the habit of continually making new connections.
The truth is that most of us have something of this shamanistic talent which we can choose to cultivate and develop. The trick is to pay attention to both the physical world around you and the inner world of your dreams and imagination. Start to actively look for story ideas with an open and enquiring mind and you will find them everywhere in embryonic form.
It’s an excellent habit to carry a notebook around with you to gather up these ‘seeds’ and jot them down before they slip away. You’ll soon accumulate quite a list and your next problem becomes: selecting the one which has the most potential.
What makes a good story?
Write hard and clear about what hurts”
Ernest Hemingway
I make no distinction between writing Lear or a play for young people. In fact, I love writing for the young. They’re not interested in plays about paying the mortgage. They’re interested in the universe and the kitchen table”.
Edward Bond
There is one, and really only one, criteria by which stories are judged. It doesn’t matter how hackneyed your plot is, how stereotypical and flat your characters are, how unoriginal your idea, as long as your audience wants to know what happens next. As long as your audience cares, you are winning.
Remember all those times you found yourself glued to something that was obviously of inferior quality on tv, and wondering why you were wasting time watching it? No matter how bad it was, you simply had to find out how it ended. You were hooked. The filmmaker or tv producer had succeeded in their most important task.
Of course, we would still prefer to tell stories that are both compelling and profound, that have things to say to an audience. Stories that will move them and remain in their memory. That is a worthwhile ambition – as long as we remember that the first objective of the story-teller is to engage.
Choosing a story
“You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. “ Joseph Campbell
You would think that selecting a story to develop into a script would be easy. Sometimes the choice is instinctive – you know in your bones the story you will choose. But the decision is an important one because you will be investing a great deal of time and energy in your writing and you don’t want it to go to waste.
If you are at all confused or hesitant about making a choice, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:
Does the story idea excite me?
An important consideration; not only because of the time you will invest in writing it; but also because, if it doesn’t excite you, the chances are good that it won’t excite an audience either.
When we talk about a story in this context what we really mean is the impulse to tell that story. Keeping that impulse alive whilst dealing with the mechanics of storytelling is half the problem. Like a new relationship, what can seem alluring and full of possibilities at the beginning can later lose its glamour – because scriptwriting can be hard work at times.
Therefore the more excited you are by the story initially, the more of a realistic chance you have of bringing it to fruition.
What is it about this idea that interests me personally?
You delve into a particular corner of yourself that’s dark and uneasy, and you articulate the confusions and unease, then you acquire other corners of unease and discontent …”
Brian Friel
Remember, there are no accidents. If a story does excite you, there is probably some connection with your personal life. Investigate this connection because it is often the path to uncovering deeper meaning and other levels.
Some people think of stories as mechanisms or architectural constructs. I think of them more like living, growing things. Just like plants that have been pulled out of the soil, they trail all kinds of roots and debris. Don’t ignore these untidy bits because they are often what brings your story to life.
Is this a real story?
Don’t make the mistake of confusing an abstraction or situation, however interesting, with a story.
“Men working on an oil rig”, for example, is a setting. “Wife beating” is a topic; “grief”, an emotion.
A real story takes you on a journey through time.
Is this story filmic?
An obvious question maybe, but it’s surprising the number of film-scripts written which should really have been novels or plays. There are no hard and fast rules, of course, but a story with a strong external line of action, interesting conflicts, and an original premise is definitely the one most likely to get made.
What are you trying to say?
Every story says something about the universal human condition; even if, in many cases, it’s relatively banal or unoriginal, i.e. ‘love conquers all’. Intentionally or unintentionally, your story is also making a statement but chances are you’ll have no idea what it is when you begin writing.
Don’t worry about it. This is how most stories arrive in our minds. It is quite common to have an idea for a story without really knowing what it is saying – or capable of saying. Let the story reveal itself to you as you work on it.
Gods at bedtime
A lot of the stories we consume on a daily basis deal with little more than the surface of things. They contain all the right ingredients; action, characters, even conflict; but if such stories divert us for a while, we rarely remember them for long.
Then there are the other kinds of stories, those that do stay with us. These aren’t stories that necessarily have a ‘message’ or are trying to say something portentous, but they possess an inner life. They remind us why humans began telling stories in the first place: we created myths about gods and monsters and heroes as a way of explaining what was mysterious and magical.
These are stories that reach out into the unknown, that feel subtly connected to a bigger world outside the operating theatre, or the prison, or wherever the drama is happening. A talented story-teller makes these connections instinctively.
This might sound complicated but here, as in other places on this site, we are in search of simplicity. The best kind of stories are both simple and true – in the sense that we recognise in them something of our own experience of living. And the very best do something more – they return us to the time when we were children and stories still had real power over us.
© David Clough 1995
The string of pearls
The major difference between theatre and film is the importance of dialogue to telling your story. The habit of writing your story through dialogue is a hard one to break, especially if you have written for the theatre. Robert Mckee warns of this tendency in his book “Story”. Dialogue is the one aspect of screen-based storytelling that a screenwriter has complete control over and there is a great temptation to exploit that.
Playwrights, of course, do use dialogue to tell stories. There are few stage directions in Shakespeare’s texts apart from exits and entrances, and no acting directions at all except ‘they fight’. Playwrights, therefore, need to radically re-think their technique when they write for the screen and many have admitted they find it hard to adapt.
The playwright David Hare describes how he had virtually given up on screenwriting until he met the French film director Louis Malle:
” … My life was changed by Louis Malle, who asked me to do Damage, which I really, really didn’t want to do. I said, “You know, I’m finished with the cinema, I’m just getting worse at it:’ And Louis said, “Well, you won’t have to make this one – I’ll make it. All you have to do is write it.” I said no. Later, I was on a holiday; lying on a beach in the south of France. The phone rang and it was Louis. He said, ”I’m coming down to join you.” I said no, but he came down and said, “I know you’re not going to write it, but, on the other hand, why don’t we just imagine you were going to write it? Let’s talk about how you would write it.”
He had this incredible method which taught me everything about writing movies. Louis would start every day at 8:30 with a cup of coffee, and I would have a croissant. And he would say; “Tell me the story of the film.” And I would say; “Well, there’s this conservative politician … ” And within about two sentences he’d say. “What sort of person is he? Why is he doing that?” He’d just ask questions. And so maybe by lunchtime we had got through about six scenes, and it would be really solid. Then the next day, he’d get up and say: “Tell me the story of the film.” And I’d try and pick up where I left off the day before, and he’d say. “No, no, you’ve got to go back to the beginning.”
And this went on for about l0 days. By the end of that process, I could tell the story of Damage in about 20 minutes. He said, “Well, you’ve done the hard work now-you’ve written the film. Just go and hang some dialogue on it.” It was an incredible way to write. And writing the dialogue only took me a few weeks, because the story was already completely laid out. It was the most severe way that I’ve ever worked on structure, but it was also the best way ever of writing a film. It does drive you absolutely mad – you just think, “Oh, I’m going insane.” But that’s when I began to realize why my own films were so bad: I’d never subjected them to this narrative test and created such a taut string on which you could just hang the pearls”
Listening to the silence
When talking about scriptwriting, I once or twice have found myself reaching for analogies in the world of popular music. Maybe because of its lack of pretension or maybe it’s because music is a ‘purer’ and less duplicitous art form.
Eddie and The Cruisers was a minor hit from the eighties, a rock n’ roll fable with all the usual cliches but sufficiently popular to spawn a sequel. I liked it enough to remember this scene where Eddie, who is a self-tortured kind of Jim Morrison character, is trying to convince a young guitarist not to “impress himself” with his playing.
Musicians, whether they’re Mozart or McCartney, understand instinctively that a single great line of melody moves an audience more than a symphony. It’s this distillation into the simplest and purest form that a musician strives for, the great hook or riff that makes a song into a hit. And how do you find it? You could do worse than take Eddie’s advice and “Just listen …”
For the writer ‘listening’ means playing close attention to what is going on in your story and being receptive to everything it might be trying to tell you. Sometimes an idea that seems complex at first contains a truth that is both elegant and simple. You just couldn’t see it before
This is great stuff.