The Joke

I believe creating scripts for drama is one of the more difficult things you can undertake. One reason is that a script is essentially build upon one joke, and you have to make everything relate to that joke. You have to keep this simplicity in mind while creating a complex world around it. Often a script fails because it looses aim of it's joke or repeats the joke over and over without any complexity. I use the term joke, because of its simplicity, but could also talk about dramatic irony, the inner mystery or

So what is a joke. Here are some examples.
Silence of the Lambs: Starling hopes she can make the lambs stop screaming by saving the girl from Buffalo Bill, but she can't.
Seventh Seal: The Knight has lost all faith, but in facing the most meaningless of all, Death, he finds a new faith.
Sixth Sense: Crowe, the main character, believes he is supposed to save the boy, when in fact its the boy, who can save him.
Last Tango in Paris: The Brando-character has lost all faith in love because of his dead wife's betrayal, and takes out his despair on a young woman in a nihilistic sexual relationship. The joke is that he rediscovers love, but too late - death has been invited into the relationship and the young woman kills him to his big surprise.

When I work on my own scripts, I always stay in notebook-mode, collecting ideas, writing a few lines, arranging the rough structure, until I have a firm hold on the joke. Only then can I progress to treatment or script. In my work as a consultant, I have seen too many times, writers and directors setting out to write their script without a solid idea of their joke. The result is always what I call an unfinished script, even if it gets produced.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The principle of uncertainty

“It is difficult to make accurate predictions, especially about the future” – Storm P.

Drama is exciting because we don’t know what will happen in the next moment. We are observing a conflict playing out in the moment, but we don’t know how the conflict will be resolved. Which one of the opposing forces win? Is the conflict of such a nature that only one of them can win? Or will they find a compromise, or maybe even the unknown, unexpected solution that will fully satisfy each of their wants or needs? As stated in the first principle this is the engine of drama, and the derived principle of uncertainty is a focus for one aspect of this. The uncertainty.
It is an evident fact of life that we can’t predict the future. The unexpected will happen, coming at us from an unseen direction. How we handle the unexpected when it arrives shows a lot about our character. It is the moment of truth, when we are taken by surprise and can’t easily hide behind careful laid plans or well-meaning attitudes. Do we run and hide? Do we face the difficult choice? Can we act with integrity?
Especially the main plot points of your drama should be dominated by the unexpected, because the plot points are there to dramatically change the direction, the stakes or the perception of what is going on. Nothing does this better than the unexpected. From all the plays and films we have watched these are the moments we remember. In Silence of the Lambs the initiating plot point happens when Clarice Starling for the first time is interviewing Hannibal Lecter, and we unexpectedly meet a highly intelligent and civilized serial killer, and at first she doesn’t succeed in getting information from him, but when the prisoner in the next cell, Multiple-Miggs, unexpected throws sperm at her, it also offends Hannibal and in return he gives her a clue to the Buffalo Bill-case. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeos aggressive monologue of despair as he kills Tybalt is the unexpected midpoint, which suddenly changes all plans and our sense of hope for the lovers. In Last Tango in Paris the Marlon Brando-characters confrontation with his dead wife, suddenly revealing to us the depth of his despair and the reason behind his almost nihilistic behaviour, is the point of no return. In The Sixth Sense the point of resolution comes with the unexpected realization that the main character has been dead throughout most of the movie.
How do we create the unexpected? First of all you have to constantly challenge your own confirmed beliefs. You think you know what will happen in the next scene. You think you know how your main character will convince his father to let him borrow the car. You think you know what is good and what is bad. You shouldn’t. Any kind of preconception you have about your drama should be open to a new interpretation, to taking a new direction and to reversals of beliefs. Challenge yourself by questioning these firm ideas. Play with them – the beautiful game of ‘what if…’
When you meet negative response to your script, maybe the real reason is that your script is too predictable. Mind you, I am not at all advocating for a haphazard story, because to surprise convincingly demands a lot of logic. You have to build an expectation and at the same time prepare for the ‘hidden’ logic of its reversal. See again the initiating plot point of Silence of the Lambs. In the previous scenes two clear and obvious expectations have been build up. Two men of authority have stated that Hannibal Lecter is impossible to get any information from. And one suggests that maybe Clarice can entice Hannibal because she is a woman. Clarice fails because he is too clever, but when Multiple-Miggs surprises Clarice (and us) with his sperm-assault, this unexpectedly offends Lecter’s sense of courtesy and manners and as a reparation he offers a clue. But it still seems convincing and believable that he would act like this, because we have just seen him as a man who values courtesy, who likes sophisticated behaviour, but it has been played out at a more subconscious level, and therefore still comes as a surprising turn.
If you always play on two horses, if you let interpretation remain open, if there is value on both sides, then you have a general approach to maintaining uncertainty and finding the unexpected. Even the most negative character has to have something positive, the most necessarily successful action needs a chance to go awry, or we will be bored, because as the Germans put it so well: “Mann merkt den Absicht und wird verstimmt” or in English: “You sense the intention and become resigned”.
I can recommend two ways to train your sense of scenario – that the characters and the action is a dynamic field in fluctuation, where we never know what happens next. It is all about playing. Get together with some actors and play around with some of your scenes, give changing directions about what could happen in the scenes, about the character’s intentions and also let the actors offer their take, their interpretations and improvisations. Or get together with some friends and play role-playing games, yes, that’s right, games like Dungeon&Dragons, only try and find some better ones than that old horse. There is a bunch of more dramatic, narrative, character-oriented rpg-games on the net, to be downloaded for free or bought cheaply. Play around with some stories in this form, and see how it is when you do storytelling with an interactive, participating audience.

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID!

The principle of economics (unity+story)

This is about spending the least to gain the most. And this is a really beautiful principle, because it not only help you to increase the chances of your script being produced as it will be a more financial appealing project, but also because the construction and cohesiveness of the script will be more convincing.
It’s about using the same locations, characters and ideas over and over again, and thus it goes hand in hand with the principle of unity, if it’s not really just another way of looking at the same fundamental quality of drama.
It also relates to the principle of story, because you will focus on being economical in starting it, developing it and ending it, meaning that when you introduce a character, you have to ask where he is going and where he is ending up. Neither leaving him as an unfinished story or over-story him in different directions.
Every time we introduce something new in a script it will cost us – time, money and energy. We will spend an amount of the script’s time in presenting the location, character or idea. We will spend production money on moving to a new location/creating an extra set-piece, hiring another actor or simply shooting/rehearsing something extra. And even more importantly we will spend the audiences’ mental energy on grasping this new locale, person or idea. On the other hand when we are using the same characters, locations or ideas, by elaborating on them, extending them, we add to them, and thereby increase our investment in them. We will be able to develop and show new aspect or depths, without spending as much time, money or energy, as we would have by introducing a new. Unless you have good reason, you should never introduce a new character, location or idea. Always check your script – as you develop it – to see if you can merge characters, re-use locations and streamline or connect your ideas into one.
It is also beneficial for the director, especially when we talk films or TV, as he or she will save energy (by not spending it on moving to new locations, dealing with new characters/actors) and can focus on getting the most out of the script in terms of acting and staging.
Many scripts look good for the first 30-60 pages, but then when closing time begins after the mid-point, they fail to do so, and this problem be could solved if this principle was adhered to. It happens either because they have introduced too many elements and forget or are unable to finish them, or because they keep introducing new elements.