CHAPTER 3

DEVELOPING YOUR STORY IDEAS

 

THE DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS

Because a director is a leader responsible for the overall dramatic statement of a film, he or she must know how to choose a piece of writing for the screen and how to shape and develop it. This involves knowing how to critique, deconstruct, and reconstruct a chosen piece, and how to develop its full cinematic potential in collaboration with the writer. This is difficult until you know, as an insider, how writers think and work. In your early training as a director you should write your own scripts. This is excellent exposure to the basics of the screenwriter's craft, about which myths abound. There's no better way to understand something than by doing it.

You will discover that writing is an organic rather than linear process. Accomplished writers switch rapidly between different types of thinking and change hats as a matter of course. The three major modes of writing are as follows:

• Ideation or idea development, which means finding a promising idea and theme as the kernel for a screen story. This is something a writer periodically revisits to check whether the core idea has changed as a result of the writing process.
• Story development, which is the expansion of the idea into characters, dialogue, situations, and events.
• Story editing, which involves revision, structuring, pruning, shaping, and compressing the overall piece. A screenplay will routinely go through many drafts before it is considered ready for filming.

These operations call on different human attributes. Ideation and story development call on taste and instincts and require that you freely follow inspiration, intuition, and emotional memory rather than objectivity and logic. Story editing, on the other hand, takes analytic and dramaturgical skills. You must objectify yourself to judge how best to structure and cadence the work for maximum impact on a first-time audience. This is not possible unless you develop a strong interest in how others assimilate and react. These results, in turn, may or may not tally with what the work first intended to deliver. Changes in any one stage can affect what seemed stable in the others, so writing is a circular—not linear— activity.

IDEATION

In this chapter we will concentrate on ideation. Screenwriting manuals often suggest that an outline is the starting point, but this omits the all-important area of ideation. Ideas often take shape from nothing more substantial than a persistent image, mood, strong feeling, interest, or persuasion. Born from an inner source like this, the beginning is a fragile flame and is easily snuffed out. The best ideational work usually emerges from habits of rigorous self-questioning and examination. As the actor and directing teacher Marketa Kimbrell likes to say: “You can't put up a tall building without first digging a deep hole.” She means you must burrow down into your very foundations before moving upward to shape the superstructure of a film.

Striking authorship never emerges from market surveys, wizard screenwriting methods, or industry insider knowledge. Nor will any amount of desire to excel get you there; writing is no more susceptible to willpower alone than is athletics. If you don't believe me, try it. Sit down to write something “new” and purely from imagination. You will soon be paralyzed by thoughts of how someone else has already had every idea you can come up with. The problem is you are not trying to create, you are trying to excel. Stop it! Truly, no story is original, so put aside all thoughts of being “good” or “original” or any of those other competitive and self-judgmental words.

Ideation begins when you set aside some quiet, self-reflective time from the hubbub of normal life. Many of us live in a welter of noise and activity to avoid reflection, so a part of you will want to reject this stage. Busywork activity is a narcotic that tells you to take refuge in being useful—doing anything rather than being quiet and introspective.

Once you achieve a quiet, reflective mood,

• examine without judgment the marks your life has made on you.
• write how your experiences have specially formed you.
• from these, list:

  the kinds of stories you are qualified to tell.

  the kinds of characters that particularly attract you.

  the situations you find especially intriguing.

  the genres you want to work in (comedy, tragedy, history, biography, film noir, etc.).

• now, go over your answers and substitute something better for anything at all superficial or clichéd and give proper particularization to everything you specify.

Quick, reflex answers usually jump out of the pool of clichés we all carry. Consider them a starting point from which you can refine and sharpen what you are reaching for. Little by little, something that is itself, something you don't have to reject, will emerge. The process of giving birth to a core idea is like becoming a parent. You don't want to crush your children by demanding they become winners. It is wiser to nurture them, get to know their preferences and subtleties, and encourage them to reach for their own best potential. To do this you must work quietly and persistently. Be patient, loyal, and persistent, and stay open to surprises and changes of direction. Good ideas are not ordered into existence, they are beckoned, and the better ones hide out among the stereotypes, where it's your job to recognize them.

It may be reassuring to know you are not alone. You swim in a historical stream, and knowingly or unknowingly, you draw on the well of humanity's story—that is, from life and from other creators. In Chapter 10 of this book, there is a list of the available themes, plots, and situations—just to show how few there really are. But that doesn't limit you, for there are an unlimited number of fascinating characters walking the face of the earth, and an unending number of variations and combinations you can extract from the basics.

At first, when you search for stories it may seem you have nothing dramatic in your life to draw upon. Perhaps the tensions you have witnessed or experienced never matured into any action. But the writer's gratification—and it may even be the chief reward of authorship—is to make happen what should have happened but didn't. Because an event or situation is etched into your consciousness, it can be shaped into something expressive of some theme or vision of life. This, depending on your tastes and temperament, may be tragic, comic, satiric, realistic, surreal, or melodramatic. By projecting the original characters and events into the confrontation and change that could have happened (even if it did not), you can follow the road not taken and investigate the originals' unused potential.

Any real-life situation containing characters, events, situations, and conflicts has the elements of drama and the potential to become a full-blown story. Change one or two of the main elements in this borrowed framework, develop your own characters, and the meaning and impact of the entire work will begin to evolve in their own special direction.

For example, you know two married people who are totally incompatible. You imagine a film that takes their differences to some point of resolution. Because they have never expressed anything more than irritation with each other, you do not know how to do it. In the newspaper you happen to see a true story about a peaceable civil servant, married for 38 years, who flipped and did the unthinkable. This catches your eye because you're fascinated by what makes people conform all their lives and then at some triggering moment shear off into uncharted waters. One Thanksgiving, this man suddenly rose from the dinner table because his wife put the salt shaker back in the wrong place on the table. Irrevocably crossing some inner threshold, he left home without explanation. Later, friends found he had gone to look for a childhood sweetheart. Because this piques your interest, and the article doesn't tell you why it happened, you decide to write a story that makes all this comprehensible.

Now you face a dilemma. You can digress imaginatively from a biographical structure or you can stick closely to it. Here are examples of feature films that followed the biographical path.

• John Boorman's Hope and Glory (1987) is modeled on the lives and emotional evolution of his family during World War II when he was a boy. The film explores with imagination and sympathy his mother's unfulfilled love for his father's best friend.
• Michael Radford's Il Postino (1994) is about the enlightening relationship that developed between a postman and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda while he was exiled to a Mediterranean island.
• Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001) is a film in which Isabelle Huppert plays a repressed and sexually perverted piano teacher who falls for a charming student. The script is based on a novel by Elfriede Jelinek, herself formerly a pianist and teacher.

What makes these films outstanding is what distinguishes any story. They embrace biography as something dramatic and express distinct ideas about the underlying causes of their characters' dilemmas. Without sensitivity to the nuance of the actual, and to how unexpectedly actual people behave under pressure, the writer will fall into stereotype. Those who study real life know that nothing is more mysterious and full than the actual, and that nothing is so untrue as a stereotype.

COLLECTING RAW MATERIALS

If you are by nature a storyteller, you are probably doing what I am about to describe. Here are ways to collect and sift through material that can be made into a story, the story you need to tell, given the limitations you must work within. If you are not yet a storyteller, you can adopt the habits of one. Everyone has a story, always. All you need do is summon the concentration and energy to begin. People work in fiction rather than autobiography because you are not tied to the literal truth and can take artistic license wherever more important truths need telling.

The seeker searches for a larger picture among the many baffling clues, hints, and details that life provides. Some pursue personal respite and may enlist a therapist or support group, others do it out of a need or sense of obligation to entertain—that is, to share with others what it means to be alive. The stories you need probably won't be on hand when you want them. It will take a resolute and indirect search process. Your best materials will emerge piecemeal and from unexpected sources.

Because of the singularity of your identity, you may find you have only one story in you. But—and this is an article of faith—telling it successfully will open the way for the next. The most prolific artists often mine a single, deep-seated theme, and their work becomes a sustained pursuit of ever-deeper understanding.

You will have to collect materials and examine your collection diligently as it grows. You are actually searching for the outlines of the collector, the shadowy self that is implacably assembling what it needs to represent its own preoccupations.

JOURNAL

If you don't train yourself to record things, you will come up empty-handed when you most need story materials. Keep a journal and note anything that strikes you, no matter what its nature. Carry your journal at all times, and be willing to use it publicly and often. Typing material later makes you explore it and will help you remember it better. By transferring your notes to a computer, you can also file incidents in a database under a variety of headings. Then you can call up material by particular priorities or in a particular order.

Because inspiration is a most unreliable handmaiden, most working writers develop their own routines to keep their minds active. Reading your journal is a renewable journey through your most intense ideas and associations. This primes the creative pump and suggests alternatives when you run dry. The more you consciously note what catches your eye, the nearer you move to your underlying themes and interests. This is an example of changing hats—when you move from collecting to analyzing. Good analysis also helps you know what you need to collect!

NEWSPAPERS

There is nothing like real life for a profundity of the outlandish and true. Keep clippings or transcribe anything that catches your interest and classify the information by groups or families. Listing and classifying is a vital activity because it helps reveal underlying structures. Going through 50-year-old newspapers, for instance, will supply you with a profusion of rich sources that nobody else is using. Maybe you'll find a story about two business partners, one of whom absconds with the company bank balance to blow it all in Las Vegas. It reminds you of your best friend's father and the ruin a similar incident caused her family. That sets you thinking about your role in trying to help her through the period of disaster and what you both learned. Here, you realize, is a plot from one source, characters, and even a point of view from another.

The agony columns, the personals, the local crimes page, even the ads for lost animals can suggest subjects and characters. Newspapers are a cornucopia of the human condition at every level, from the trivial to the global. Local newspapers are particularly fertile because the landscape and characters are accessible and reflect local economy, conditions, and idiosyncrasies.

With every new source you have the same possibility: to cross-pollinate ideas by bringing together your overall interests with plots, characters, and situations available elsewhere.

HISTORY

History isn't really something that happens, it's a retrospective view selectively told for ulterior motives. Consider why history is written and you see not objective truth but someone's interpretation. History is all about point of view. The past is a rich repository of figures who have already participated in the dramas that interest you. The playwright John Osborne explored the predicament of the anti-establishment rebel through Martin Luther; Alan Bennett resurrected George III to investigate paternal authority as it veers over the brink of insanity; and Steven Spielberg brought alive Oskar Schindler so he could explore the awful predicament of being Jewish in Nazi-dominated Europe. Jane Campion recreated the dark and isolated beginnings of fellow New Zealander Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table (1991), and in The Piano (1993) she uses a 19^th-century setting to develop themes of isolation and eroticism. In both films she explores a woman's point of view in breathtakingly imaginative ways (Figure 3–1).

No matter what happens to fascinate you—be it charismatic leaders who go wrong, practical jokers who get taken seriously, crooked doctors who find real cures, polygamous family groups who end up at war, neglected inventors, or old ladies who fill their houses with stray animals—there is a wealth of fully realized characters already tied to great themes. A little diligent research and you can find just what you want in the great casting agency of the past.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

Legends are inauthentic history. By taking a historical figure and developing your own version of this person's life and actions, you are fabricating legend. Every culture has its icons (George Washington, Al Capone, Robin Hood, Queen Victoria, William Tell, Adolf Hitler) who reflect the national sense of demons and geniuses. Why not make your own?

Myths frame conflicts that each generation finds insoluble and whose immovable dialectic must therefore be absorbed into regular life. The human truths in Greek mythology (for instance) do not lead to easy or happy resolutions, but leave a bittersweet aftertaste that is perversely uplifting. Each culture has its favorite myths, and they often translate effectively into a modern setting. Each generation regenerates myths and uses them to frame contemporary characters and action, particularly when the issue in question is irresolvable. This quality of paradox and the unanswerable is peculiarly modern. Happily, we have left an age of anodyne resolutions and entered one that recognizes that we face more questions than answers.

FAMILY STORIES

All families have favorite stories that define people and moments. One of my grandmothers was said to find things before people lost them. Conventional in all respects, she loved foraging for flowers and fruit, and during breaks in long journeys she would hop over garden walls to liberate a few strawberries or a fistful of chrysanthemums. How a family explains and adjusts to such foibles might be the subject of a short film.

Another grandmother began life as a rebel in an English village, became an Edwardian hippy, and then married an alcoholic German printer who beat her and abandoned her in France, where she stayed the rest of her life. She and her children lived lives too richly fantastic to be believable in fiction, but there are many single aspects I could borrow and develop.

Family tales can be heroic or very dark, but as oral history, they are usually vivid. Sometimes the surviving information is so trenchant that it begs for a

fictional development. One of my 19^th-century forebears was a Scots milliner who migrated south to sell ribbons and fabric from a pony and trap. Nobody said that he liked drink. Instead they said that his horse would embarrass him when he took his family out for a Sunday drive by stopping automatically outside every pub. He had eight children, all of them earthy and jolly. The daughters grew up to be huge and shake when they laughed, while the sons collected pubs and could navigate southern England from a list of pub names. Yet none was an alcoholic. What kind of man was their father?

CHILDHOOD STORIES

Everyone emerges from a childhood war zone. If you write down two or three of the most intense things that happened, you will have several ready-made short film subjects that are meaningful, have a strong and inbuilt visualization, and contain great thematic significance for your subsequent life.

One that springs to mind is how, at the age of five or so, I found a pair of scissors and cut my own hair. My mother was so dismayed that I clapped a hat on my head and kept it on when my father came home. Thereafter when my hair was unruly my mother would sigh and say it was because I had once cut it myself. This incident lay, emblematically, at the root of a discomfort with my body and appearance for decades after. I had cut my own hair and ruined it. What a childish absurdity. But wait, let's look deeper. Behind it is the idea that you can make a single fatal, self-mutilating mistake for which you must suffer ever afterward. And it turns out my mother—I am realizing this as I write it for you—had in fact made such a mistake. As an 11-year-old, she let her foot be run over by a streetcar, hoping that an accident would bring her feuding parents together. Repairing and setting the broken foot caused her agony, and did bring her parents together, but only for a couple of years, and the streetcar driver who had been her friend was devastated. So many invisible influences direct our destiny. How far have you explored yours?

DREAMS

Your dreams are a sure indicator of your underlying concerns, obliquely expressed in imagery and action. Keep a notebook by your bed and write each dream down while you still remember it. You can even train yourself to wake during the night after a good one. Don't edit or try to shape them, just scribble down the essentials. Look back over an accumulation of entries and you will see a pattern of recurring motifs and archetypal characters. Here are your deepest concerns expressed in surreal visual language. What more could a filmmaker ask?

SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL HISTORY

If, for example, you are interested in how factory workers have been exploited, you can find excellent books and case studies on the subject, many with bibliographies that will lead you to other accounts, perhaps in both fiction and nonfiction. The more modern your source, the bigger the bibliography. Many books now contain filmographies, too.

Case histories can be a good source of trenchant detail. If you are writing a part for a shoplifter, reading about actual shoplifters will supply you with what is typical (you need to know that) and also with detail that is quirky and interesting, so your shoplifter character doesn't get stuck as a stereotype.

Case histories generally come with an interpretation, so the dramatist finds good material and guidance as to its significance. Social scientists are chroniclers and interpreters; their work can confirm your instincts and provide the kind of background information that allows you to root your fiction in what we know about the real world.

SUBJECTS TO AVOID

Many subjects come to mind easily because they are in your immediate surroundings, are being pumped up by the media, or lend themselves to moral propaganda. Despite this, avoid:

• Worlds you haven't experienced and cannot closely observe
• Any ongoing, inhibiting problem in your own life (find a therapist—you are unlikely to solve anything while directing a film unit)
• Anything or anyone “typical” (nothing real is typical, so nothing typical will ever be interesting or credible)
• Preaching or moral instruction of any kind
• Films about problems to which you have the answer (so does your audience)

Your films will be your portfolio, your precious reel that alone tells others who you are and what you can do. If you aim to reach audiences beyond your peer group, you will be making short films that are accessible to a wider audience. Try taking something small that you learned the hard way and apply it to a character quite unlike yourself. Through this, try to make a comment on the human condition. In doing so you should be able to avoid the narcissistic tunnel vision that afflicts many student films.

DISPLACE AND TRANSFORM

After a period of careful inquiry and reflection, take the best issues you discover as if they were your own. Even though they may prove temporary and subject to change, treat them as if they are substantial. When working directly from events and personalities in your own life, displace the screen version from the originals. Deliberately fictionalizing frees you from self-consciousness and allows you to tell underlying truths that might offend the originals. Most importantly, it allows you to concentrate on developing dramatic and thematic truths instead of getting tangled in questions of biographical accuracy.

You can further liberate your imagination and obscure your sources by giving characters alternative attributes and work, by making them composites by amalgamating the attributes of two life models, by placing the story in a different place or epoch, or even by switching the sex of the protagonists. One student director whose script told his own story—about choosing to abandon a suburban marriage and a well-paying job to become a film student—inverted the sex of the main characters and made the rebel into a woman. In rethinking the situation to give her credible motivations, he made himself inhabit both the husband's and wife's positions and came to more deeply investigate what people trapped in such roles expect out of life. The displacement principle forced him into a more empathic relationship with all his characters. This raised the level of his film's thematic discourse.

CHECKLIST FOR PART 1: ARTISTIC IDENTITY

The recommendations and points summarized here are only those most salient or most commonly overlooked. To find more about them or anything else, go to the Table of Contents at the beginning of Part I, or the index at the back of the book.

To Get on Target to Become a Director:

• Get hands-on knowledge of all the production processes you are most likely to oversee.
• Accept that you'll need to know writing, acting, camerawork, sound, and editing.
• Confront your temperament and creative track record to decide which specialty to adopt as your craft stepping-stone toward eventual directing.
• Resolve to make lots and lots of short films.
• Investigate how new technology can liberate expression in those who embrace it intelligently.
• Remember that hard work can get you places, talent almost never.
• Don't wish for too much success; work for it, and hope it comes slowly.
• See what the herd is doing and make something different.
• Settle in for the long haul, and pace yourself accordingly.

As a Director You'll Need To:

• Become a tough-minded leader.
• Be ready to function even when feeling isolated.
• Be ready to make much out of little.
• Stop thinking in literary abstracts and start thinking in filmable, concrete steps.
• Become interested in and knowledgeable of other art forms.
• Become a good leader—one who liberates the best from people around you.
• Develop original and critical ideas about your times. Lots of them.

To Make Educational Progress:

• Use video and finish lots of film projects. The delivery medium isn't as important as producing lots of work.
• Use short works to argue for your competency at directing longer ones.
• Be ready to adapt and improvise when working with a low budget (people and imagination make films rather than equipment).
• Be ready to rewrite the script around the actors.
• Shoot rehearsals documentary-style and learn from the screen how to make right judgments when you see a living performance unfold.
• To arrive at professional-level results, invest in a long, experimental development period prior to production.

When You Deal with Actors:

• Learn to see actors' obstacles and discover how to remove them.
• Learn to be an acting coach; unless you can afford top talent, you'll need it.
• Learn to work with non-actors; you'll learn from them most of what you need to direct actors.
• Lower actors' fears and create an ensemble with an intense period of development prior to shooting.
• Remember, the camera sees and hears everything; actors must be, not perform.
• Actors' egos are threatened when they play contemptible characters or reveal their characters' bad parts.
• “Nothing human is alien to me” (Terence c. 190–159 B.C.). For complexity, find the good in the bad character, and the faults in the good one.

To Entertain Your Audience Means:

• Giving the audience mental, emotional, and imaginative work to do, as well as information and externals.
• Inviting the audience to co-create the movie, which means planting many questions and delaying the answers.
• Making films that activate the mind and heart.
• Using myth and archetype to underpin anything you want to be powerful.
• Using screen language that suggests, not just shows, so your audience can imagine.

Authorship Essentials Require:

• Being willing to reject idea after idea until you get something fresh.
• Learning to operate in different modes: one associative and free as the generating mode and the other disciplined and calculating for the shaping, editorial mode.
• Making use of all available resources and constantly trying out new ideas.
• Using your work to search for what you passionately care about, not illustrating what you know.
• Developing something you sincerely want to say. Simple and heartfelt is always better than big and bombastic.
• Picking a special form after you've found a story—form follows function. Every form you use should be special, not picked off the rack.
• Understanding beats and dramatic units. Practice recognizing them in the life unfolding around you.
• Understanding the creative process and letting it direct you when you, and it, need it to.

Questions to Help You Travel Inward and Develop Your Ideas:

• What marks has your life left on you?
• What ongoing dialogue are you privately having with yourself?
• What is the unfinished business in your life? (Your next story can use and further this quest but it's best to do it in a displaced rather than autobiographical form.)
• From your self-inventory, what authorial role do you see for anyone marked by your kind of emotional experience?
• What major conflicts do you face or which ones seem to perennially interest you?
• What kind of heroes or heroines do you respond to, and what does this say about the issues and needs you understand?
• What constants keep turning up in your dreams?
• What visual images remain with you, charged with force and mystery, waiting for you to investigate and develop them?
• What areas of life do you find abidingly fascinating?

Avoid:

• Self-consciousness and libel by displacing the actual into the fictional, so you can be truthful.
• Worlds you don't know—unless you're willing to do a great deal of research.
• Any personal topic for which you really need a therapist.
• Anything or anyone typical. Nobody and nothing is.
• Anything or anyone generalized instead of specific.
• Preaching. Remember what Louis B. Mayer said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”
• Illustrating what you know. That's just another disguise for preaching.
• Any idea, situation, or character already familiar or clichéd.
• Clichés. All thinking begins with clichés, but only hard work brings something better.

Resources to Probe:

• What genres fascinate you?
• What themes and preoccupations emerge as constants in your journal?
• What kind of characters and themes turn up regularly in the clippings you make from newspapers?
• Whom do you identify with in history?
• Whom do you detest in history? (A nemesis can be important.)
• What mythic or legendary figures are peculiarly your own, and which would you like to develop?
• What major characters or situations can you use from your family history?
• What are the childhood stories that seem to epitomize your growing up?
• What constant themes emerge?