Developing Story Ideas Read online

  Step 4: The director pitches the scene to the class, and briefly describes its evolution and the perceived strengths or weaknesses of this particular story-making process.

  The British film director Mike Leigh (another graduate of the theatre) chooses strong cast members, then works individually at getting impressions from each of a compelling acquaintance. By working for weeks or months with each cast member, Leigh helps ferment a cast of driven, highly individual, agenda-obsessed characters. Then he brings them together, directing improvisations that help clarify and intensify their characters’ needs and differences. Transcribing the best material into a full script, Leigh uses his editorial sense of what will make good drama. During filming, he withholds important dramatic information from the actors, so they enter their scenes uncertain about their content and direction, much as happens in life itself.

  Leigh specializes in “ordinary” people living in obscure, neglected hinterlands. His films, which are full of wry humor and penetrating social observation, usually come to unpredictable and oddly cathartic conclusions. His tour de force is Naked (1993), an apocalyptic vision of the ravaged, despairing British underclass in Mrs. Thatcher’s dog-eat-dog Britain of the 1980s. Quite different is Happy-Go-Lucky (2008, Figure 22–1), a comedy in which incurable optimist Poppy blithely learns driving from Scott, a repressed driving instructor bristling with anger management issues. His eventual breakdown is a cinematic tour de force.

  Figure 22–1 Happy-Go-Lucky: Cheerful optimist and control-freak driving instructor trapped in a car together (frame from the film).

  Discussion

  From your experience of collaborative story generation, what did you learn about:

  Who provided what in the different collaborations?

  Where can you see things going wrong, and how might participants rescue the situation?

  How did the process compare with individual methods of ideation?

  What did you take away from the experience?

  Notes

  1Alexandra Desaulniers’s blog entry 13 August 2012, describing her participation in a Washington, DC production (http://theatrewashington.org/content/devised-theatre-art-impossible).

  2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lh0XuQaT88

  Going Further

  There is such an enormous bibliography on Ingmar Bergman that you should search online for whatever aspect of it—critical, biographical, psychological—particularly interests you. Information on Bergman’s intensely private conceptual methods is, however, not at all easy to track down. The generative methods of John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, and those used in devised theatre are well-documented.

  Bicât, Tina and Chris Baldwin. Devised and Collaborative Theatre: A Practical Guide. 2002 (A detailed how-to for making non-text-based theatre production).

  Carney, Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. 1994 (Impassioned explanation of Cassavetes’s originality, particularly concerning the way he worked with actors to catalyze character development and revelation).

  Carney, Ray. The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World. 2000 (The text weaves together Leigh’s middle-class English background, his influences from working in the theatre, and his restrained use of cinematic language).

  Jones, Edward Trostle. All or Nothing: The Cinema of Mike Leigh. 2004 (Critical study of thirty years of Leigh’s filmmaking, with detailed discussion of individual films).

  Linklater, Richard and Ethan Hawke. Boyhood: Twelve Years on Film. 2014 (The twelve-year process recalled by many of those taking part).

  Orti, Pilar. Devised and Collaborative Theatre: A Practical Guide. 2014 (Another insight into the devising process, with students and theatre departments in mind).

  Tharp, Twyla and Jesse Kornbluth. The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together. 2013 (Anecdotal discussion by the famous choreographer of the perils and rewards of working partnerships, and what makes them fruitful).

  Part VI

  Developing as a Writer

  Telling and consuming stories is essential to becoming fully alive—which some writer, probably Henry Miller, once defined as “living your life as though telling a story.”1 What makes the act of writing extraordinary is that it allows the human mind to contemplate its own workings, then to surpass them. When my friend Lois Deacon said, “Nothing is real until I have written about it,”2 she said a great deal, for writing lets you engage with life’s riddles and recognize the substance of your own life. In a fascinating interview, the distinguished American novelist Paul Auster talks about writing and getting older:

  By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It’s hard for a young person to understand this. It’s not that a twenty year old doesn’t know he’s going to die, but it’s the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can’t know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.3

  Now that you are becoming a writer too, and have some work under your belt, you probably have a favorite outline you are itching to expand into a full work. Before you do that, I suggest a couple of preliminaries. One is to revisit and check your artistic identity; the other is to submit your outline to a final and very demanding quality check.

  23 Artistic Identity and Career

  In Part II of this book you made an initial self-survey and a conjectural profile of your artistic identity. Since then, doing this book’s assignments has yielded hard evidence of those interests, characters, and predicaments that most intrigue you, as well as the genres you prefer. From solving a hundred practical problems, the pulse and bearing of your creative identity is now evident, so it’s time for a review.

  Assignment 23–1: Revisiting Your Artistic Identity

  Step 1: Recapitulate the themes you tentatively identified in Assignment 3–1: Making a Private Self-Inventory (Marks and Themes).

  Step 2: Write a paper comparing them with the patterns and common denominators that emerged from your subsequent work. As a reminder, the assignments and their chapters were: A tale from childhood (Chapter 13)

  A family story (Chapter 14)

  A myth, legend, or folktale retold (Chapter 15)

  Dream story (Chapter 16)

  Adapting a short story for the screen (Chapter 17)

  Ten-minute, news-inspired story (Chapter 18)

  A documentary subject (Chapter 19)

  Thirty-minute original fiction (Chapter 20)

  Feature film (Chapter 21)

  Assignment 23–2: Where I’m Going

  Prepare outline notes on what you’ve discovered about your story preferences, then deliver a six-minute oral presentation. It may help to use these prompts:

  At the beginning, I listed my preferred themes as …

  From the work I produced, my main themes were …

  I think I want to make my audience realize …

  I am interested in making my audience feel …

  From what I have written, my emerging vision of life is …

  From working collaboratively with other writers I learned that …

  My next piece of writing will probably be … (briefly describe topic, genre, any particulars)

  Discussion and Retrospective

  It is time to look back over the ground you have covered, individually and as a group, and to draw conclusions in readiness to move onward. Try considering:

  What has most impressed you or changed you from doing the assignments?

  What most impressed you about the class/group process?

  What did you take from others that you’ll use for yourself?

  What did you
learn from writing the various short forms?

  What was different when you moved on to longer forms?

  What stands out about other people’s artistic process in relation to your own?

  On a Career as a Writer

  Does the writer’s life beckon to you? Could you make writing your work and use it to create the career you desire? If you answer yes, then you will probably first need other work to pay your bills. Most successful actors can point to chapters in their lives spent waiting tables or driving taxis. At the same time, they were in relationships, learning from life about the roles and characters they can play, and becoming seasoned adults. Writers learn in similar ways.

  Who or what you “really are” should never concern you, since thankfully we are dynamic beings, constantly evolving and in negotiation. There is in any case no fast lane for writers, or for artists of any kind, since there is no accelerated path to becoming a full human being. Work diligently at your chosen art, lead a full life, and what you want will come—somehow, somewhere.

  Your Creative Direction

  So where should you go next? What should you do with your enhanced writing skills? This is a fateful moment because many good people:

  Have hopes for their future but make no active plans

  Wait for schooling or a job to lead them

  Let chance decide what’s next

  Avoid any specializing for fear of squelching other opportunities

  Take whatever work comes along, and fall in with surroundings and work never consciously chosen

  At a vulnerable moment in their lives, many hunker down and let chance and circumstance decide their future. I speak not without rueful authority, since my own early life, and that of many of my peers, followed a similar path.

  Some people think that talent makes people successful, and that if they believe in their own talent, others will recognize it in them. But this is a fantasy. Many years of watching students enter their professions has convinced me not in talent, but in the necessity of finding and developing one’s potential. In the arts, as in every other sphere, you become good at something (and get paid to do it) because you have invested energy, courage, faith, and humor in your own development. In general, the person who shines at something:

  Envisions a desired outcome, then works to bring it into existence

  Is realistic about their current limitations, and has a plan to overcome them

  Enjoys the work’s process as much as its outcome

  Can delay gratification

  Makes enthusiastic use of facilities, curriculum, mentors, and collaboration

  Uses networking to locate helpers and advice

  Seeks the energetic and ambitious as partners

  Is not dependent on peer approval

  I suggest you avoid one rather seductive path—taking a favorite thematic concern and writing to illustrate it. This usually leads to cramped morality lessons. However tempting it is to teach what you know, carrying it out becomes oddly sterile and tiring. The reason is simple: we are excited when we are in creative tension, and that only happens when we tackle what we don’t know, never what we do.

  But how, you ask, can I be sure that any theme or meaning will emerge if I pursue what I don’t understand? I can only assure you that honest creative endeavor not only delivers your underlying concerns, it helps you advance in understanding them too. Keep working, keep your eyes open, and you will be surprised at what happens over time.

  Notes

  1I have been unable to trace this, but seem to recall it from Tropic of Capricorn (1939), Henry Miller’s strongly autobiographical novel about his beginnings in New York, when struggling to find his voice as a writer.

  2Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr. Hardy (Hutchinson, 1966).

  3Paul Auster interviewed by Michael Wood in Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 178. (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/121/the-art-of-fiction-no-178-paul-auster).

  24 Story-Editing Your Outline

  Having revisited your artistic identity, you can now think of finalizing your best outline. First, however, make a final pass at eliminating remaining problems, which the novice often assumes will disappear by expanding the outline into a full piece. Handcuff yourself to the nearest radiator and delay expanding it just a little bit longer, because there is some more very useful stuff to come.

  Scene cards. Number each scene and gum its outline to a large index card. Line your scenes up on a table and experiment with moving, combining, and eliminating them.

  Using Scene Cards

  You can test an outline’s viability by turning it into scene cards (see sidebar). These break your work into movable parts, each with its function, and become invaluable when you must pitch a complex project. Especially if you feel your audience is new to the project and skeptical, significant problems will step into the light of day.

  Armed with scene cards at a story conference, you can concentrate on ideas and explanations. You can even invite your critics to rearrange the story and “talk through” an alternative version. This lets you consider structural alternatives on the spot, something only possible while the piece remains in compact outline.

  Seeking Structural Options

  Altering story structure brings various options into play. Try answering these questions:

  How does the piece handle time? Chronologically. Screen time follows chronological order of events.

  Nonchronologically. The story unfolds according to (a) how a character perceives or remembers events, or (b) the priorities of the film’s storytelling method.

  Whose POV predominates? A character in the story. If that person is like Forrest Gump or Scarlett O’Hara, their eccentricities or limitations can make their way of seeing revealingly subjective.

  Multiple viewpoints from several characters. Useful for showing subjective differences between each person’s perceptions.

  Omniscient. The eye and ear of the film are privileged to go anywhere, and to see and hear everything and everybody. This “God’s POV” is useful for epic stories whose complex events no single character can witness.

  A linear story, like Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), follows the order of Harry’s journey. Chronological and nonchronological narratives are also called linear and nonlinear storylines, and their POV can vary according to whose mind-processes you nominate to organize the storytelling. Telling a linear or chronological story:

  Is logical and makes the fewest demands. This may help what is otherwise a complex or even fantastic storyline.

  Makes events seem objectively true, as if seen historically and from a distance.

  Has inbuilt limits, because transposing sequences may alter the apparent cause and effect of events.

  You can use a “dream” or “memory” sequence to temporarily transport us back in time, or you can send us forward in time using an “imagination” or “what if” episode. However, unless you build the subjectivity of memory and imagination into the fabric of the piece, they will look like temporary narrative conveniences.

  Rethinking POV Can Let You Alter the Handling of Time

  If you change a chronologically told, omniscient POV story into one told through the conflicting, subjective perceptions of its two main characters, then you have a new version, different in every way. What do you gain; what do you lose? Nonlinear stories seem attractively haphazard, but are seldom so because they usually conform to a logic of some kind. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001, Figure 24–1) conveys great immediacy and subjectivity, but it demands much—some say too much—of its audience. To decide “what really happened” we search afterward for whatever governed cause and effect. By what logic did events become so fragmented? Eventually one sees that the associative piecemeal of Lynch’s tale must arise from the after-effects of Irene’s amnesia.

  Figure 24–1 A chaotic-seeming mystery like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive derives its logic from a pattern the spectator must u
nravel (frame from the film).

  The Significance of Transitions

  Transitions from shot to shot or sequence to sequence function in different ways and their juxtapositions carry different meanings. They can represent:

  Continuity, that is, a cut between shots or sequences indicating a development in: Information or exposition (series of shots showing the stages of demolishing a building, or cut from fledgling plants to vine with grapes ready to pick)

  Action (man rises from chair to same man opens window so he can call out to a friend below)

  Time (woman on bike to ambulance approaching emergency department to woman on crutches)

  Comparison, that is, there is a special significance in comparing: Actions (cut from A wiping his brow to B wiping his car windshield)

  Images (cut from car headlights approaching at night to the eyes of a hunting cat)

  Sounds (cut or dissolve from traffic sequence to roar of applause at a concert)

  Dialectical, that is, significant tension between conflicting: Actions (river getting angry and swollen cut to townspeople desperately building sandbag dam).

  Sounds (quiet woodland birdsong cut to roar of shipbuilding yard).

  Moods (sergeant screaming at army recruits during drill cut to small boy industriously coloring a picture. Or, busy Christmas shoppers in a bright store cut to homeless people shivering under a dark parapet).