How to make your script come truly to life...or the cliche that keeps on giving...

I've just been working on a script with a client of mine and an old truism once again became abundantly clear--the devil is in the details.  Or to put it in more proper dramaturgical terms, the ultimate success of your script--to bring it fully to life--depends on how well you're able to have your audience/reader fall in love with your characters and the only way to really accomplish that is to weave into your telling of your tale an accumulation of the small yet powerful bits of information about your characters and how they behave within their world.

I like to call this the writer's paradox and it goes something like this:  The more detailed, specific, and personal you become in your writing, the more universal it's appeal.  A paradox for sure, because on first glance you'd assume the opposite.  But audiences need many handholds to climb into a story and the best handholds by far are always the little things that make your people unique.  We want to fall in love with your characters, we want to embrace them.  It's the details--the little seemingly insignificant things unique to each personality--that give us access.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art.  Our last residency ran from June 22 to July 1 and we're current considering applications for starting the program next January at our residency scheduled for January 5-14, 2018.  If you're interested, email me at buzzmclaughlin@gmail.com and we can start a dialogue.

I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter) a professional script consultant, and the author of The Playwright's Process.  You can follow me on Twitter @eitherorfilms or @mfastagescreen.  I’m also on Facebook at buzzmclaughlinscriptconsulting.  

Exposing the subtext of your story

Okay, so you've done a lot of character exploratory work, maybe even written some backstory scenes between major characters.  You've been thinking about plot and central character arc and where you want your script to land--in other words, you've been working at a structural framework or basic bones of the script that seems reasonable.  And you're now finally sensing that maybe you're ready to move on in the process, leave all this pre-writing work behind, and take the plunge into the writing of your first draft.

Here's something to keep in mind as you stand on the edge of that diving board preparing to jump off.

It's basically very simple, actually.  Just remember that your script is only the tip of the iceberg--the surface layer of a deeply submerged whole.  Your job now is to write your pages in such a way that there are constant albeit often indirect glimpses into that submerged part of your story, or subtext--that rich stew of intellectual and emotional "stuff" always hovering just under the surface--that you've explored in your pre-writing work. And you tap into this deeper level and make it felt and understood by what you leave unsaid. As a result, your audience is seduced into making its own connections between the surface and what lies underneath and in the process becomes fiercely engaged with the script to get the whole story.  

Take Downton Abbey for example (there, I admit I'm a fan of this lovely period soap opera).  One of the things writer and creator Julian Fellowes does well is constantly invite us as viewers to "lean into" the unfolding story by never having a character say something that we already know or suspect--especially when it comes to the smouldering subtext that hovers underneath each character's conscious present reality like hot coals in an ash bin.  We are allowed to engage with this inner life of the overreaching story and the characters that bring it to life because the subtext is always operating and "exposed" moment by moment, yet is never directly referred to nor ever actually allowed to crack the surface.  And this is one of the main reasons that the series works so well, episode after episode, year after year.

So always write with this dynamic in mind.  It's this quality more than any other that separates good scripts from bad.

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I'm the Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen being offered by the New Hampshire Institute of Art and we are currently accepting applications for entering the program at our June 2014 summer residency until April 1st.  I'm also a playwright and screenwriter, producing partner in my production company Either/Or Films (The Sensation of Sight and Only Daughter), and a professional script consultant.






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When a script doesn't do its job

The other night some friends and I watched writer/director Rahmin Bahrani's 2012 film At Any Price, an official selection at the Toronto, Venice, and Telluride film festivals and starring Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron.  The story centers on a farmer in the Midwest who is involved in somewhat shady dealings wtth GMO seed sales and the big companies supplying them.  It's also a father/son story with the boy not wanting to follow in his father's footsteps as a farmer and instead become a race car driver.  As stories go, there are many twists and turns, but the movie ultimately doesn't work.

So why is this worth writing about?  Because it is an excellent example of what not to do with a screenplay.  And as Edward Albee, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, once told me, sometimes you can learn a lot by studying why a project doesn't lift off.