by Erik Bork
Copyright © 2018 by Erik Bork
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Overfall Press
4607 Lakeview Canyon Rd 379, Thousand Oaks, CA 91361
www.overfallpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Design by Domini Dragoone
Cover photo © StillFix/123rf
ISBN 978-1-7327530-1-3
e-book ISBN 978-1-7327530-0-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956851
For every writer
who for the first or thousandth time
has tried to come up with
a great story
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
How I Arrived at This
1: FOCUS ON THE IDEA
The 60/30/10 Rule
The PROBLEM
How “High” Is Your Concept?
Nailing the Logline
2: PUNISHING
Degree of Difficulty
Great Stories Are Like Great Games
Adapting True Stories
Television and the “Web of Conflict”
3: RELATABLE
The Role of the “Main Character”
Subjective Point of View
The Relatable Center
The Eight Types of Story Problems
Likability
What about Character Arc?
The Goal of the Opening Pages
Why We Care about Tony Soprano
4: ORIGINAL
A Fresh Twist on the Familiar
There’s Another Project Just Like Mine!
Writer’s “Voice” and Dealing with Feedback
Why They Make Bad Movies
Doctors, Lawyers, and Cops
5: BELIEVABLE
Zombies, Aliens, and Vampires
Never Confuse
How Is the World Different from Ours?
Going for “the Real”
God and the Devil Are in the Details
Forced to Coexist
6: LIFE-ALTERING
Internal Stakes Are Not Enough
Life-and-Death Stakes
Everything Else
Characters Dealing with Their Stuff
Unmet Needs and Wants
7: ENTERTAINING
Helping the Audience Escape
Feelings We Like to Feel
Ingredients to Add to “Drama”
Rich, Sexy, and Glamorous
8: MEANINGFUL
What Is It REALLY About?
Sticking to the Audience’s Ribs
TV Characters Don’t Really Change
9: PUTTING “PROBLEM” TO WORK
Where Ideas Come From
Finding Story Ideas
Talent Is Overrated
About the Author
Acknowledgments
This book is a product of three decades of studying and working at screenwriting as my primary vocation, including the better part of a decade teaching the craft at institutions like UCLA Extension and National University and as a mentor to hundreds of writers of various levels, around the world. In working with them, I began to codify a body of knowledge, opinion, and advice that led to the principles outlined in this book. And so I’m indebted first and foremost to all of those writers who came to me for guidance and feedback and trusted me with their work. Colleagues in my teaching and writing careers have also helped me tremendously, especially Tom Hanks, who gave me my start as a professional writer and employed me on project after project, with all the charm, intelligence, passion, and easygoing generosity you would expect from him. The amazing producer Tony To helped me make good on those opportunities on the miniseries Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon, the projects for which I am still best known. I also have to thank Brett Loncar, my longtime television packaging agent at CAA, who was a key figure in helping me to understand what makes a viable premise in TV—mostly by shooting down so many that weren’t, but also by advocating passionately for those that were. Finally my wife, Margaret, an immensely talented singer, songwriter, and creator of musicals, has supported me and been my biggest cheerleader as I develop my own projects and help others to do the same.
INTRODUCTION
It seems like things should be getting easier for writers.
There are more resources than ever to finish a book, a web series, or even an independent film and put it in front of people. In this age of self-publishing, digital video, and social media, almost any of us can create and share our work without having to impress powerful gatekeepers.
But if we want to reach a large audience beyond personal contacts and online followers—and actually make money with it—that’s another story. Getting lots of people to pay to watch or read what we write—and turning it into a profession—is still elusive for almost everyone.
Things really haven’t changed much since the old days, when we needed agents, publishers, producers, and big companies behind our work for it to ever have a chance at reaching a mass audience. Even today, the overwhelming majority of successful movies, TV series, books, and plays still go through these traditional systems.
And unfortunately, it’s no easier to impress those “gatekeepers” than it ever was. That’s the sad truth we writers grapple with whenever we finish something and send it out into the world. We usually don’t get back the love that we were hoping for.
Why not? What are those people looking for? Why is it so hard???
The answer is actually pretty simple. These elusive conduits to a potential audience and career respond to the same things audiences do: a great idea that’s well executed—one that grabs them emotionally, holds their attention, and powerfully entertains them.
But most of the time, they don’t get that. It’s not even close, in their minds. They’re severely underwhelmed by more than 99 percent of what they receive. So they move on to the next submission—as quickly as possible. And the writer is sent either a bland rejection or no response at all.
As a result of this frustrating process—and the difficulty of getting true engagement from anyone who could move one’s work forward—we often assume the real problem is that the doors are too closed and the decision makers too hard to reach. If only we could get our work into the right hands! Then we’d have a shot!
But what I’ve learned in my years as a professional screenwriter—and in mentoring others who want to become one—is that “reaching the right people” is really not the hard part of succeeding as a writer.
The hard part is creating something that the “right people” would be excited by if they read it.
And that’s what most of us never quite achieve.
Why not? Where is the disconnect between the excited writer who thinks they’re onto something and the “industry” that disagrees? What turns these tastemakers off and makes them stop reading or decide to pass?
Part of it is an obvious lack of professional-level execution in the writing, which seasoned readers can pick up on pretty quickly. And just a few pages of that convinces them that the rest of the work probably isn’t worth their time. Because it almost never gets better from there.
But believe it or not, that’s not the main issue most of the time. What usually sinks a project, instead, lies in the basic idea for the story—what we might communicate in a “logline” of a sentence or two, or a brief synopsis in a query letter, or a quick verbal pitch.
Most of the time, it all ends right there. The reader is not intrigued enough by the idea. They don’t see potential. They don’t need to read the whole piece to make their decision. They know that the core idea is the most essential, found
ational element in making a project viable in the marketplace. And most ideas they see (and scripts or manuscripts they read) lack a central idea that they think really works.
This “idea” is the core premise or concept of the story, which basically comes down to the answers to the following five questions:
Whose story is it, and why should we identify with them?
What do they want, in their life circumstances and relationships?
What’s in the way of them achieving that?
What are they doing to try to resolve this? What makes it so hard?
Why does it matter deeply—to them, and hopefully, to us?
This is a story’s basic DNA. And a reader’s interest in a piece of material (or lack thereof) tends to stem directly from the answers to these questions.
How I Arrived at This
It took me a while to figure this out.
When I moved to Los Angeles from Ohio after college to try to become a professional screenwriter—and started working as an office assistant at 20th Century Fox studios—the screenplays I was writing, in my free time, did not meet the criteria laid out in this book. Nor was I even aware of these criteria. I was merely trying to emulate what I thought were the key elements of movies I loved—without understanding them on a deeper level. I obsessed about story structure and scene writing (like most writers), but I didn’t really know how ideas worked. I didn’t realize this was something I needed to study, nor did I know how to study it.
That’s because most books on screenwriting—then and now—don’t spend a lot of time on just the idea. There is so much to say about story structure, character, and the writing process itself (not to mention navigating “the business”) that picking what to write in the first place often gets short shrift. And writers often give it short shrift, too.
I had a vague understanding that the biggest Hollywood screenplay sales were mostly “high-concept” ideas, but these were usually in action or fantasy genres that didn’t strongly appeal to me. So I wrote my “low-concept” comedy/dramas inspired by real life. They might have been decently executed. But they went nowhere.
Then I switched gears completely and took a course in sitcom writing at UCLA Extension. After that, I set out to write “spec” scripts for existing shows such as Frasier, Mad About You, and Friends. With those, the need for a great and bold original idea didn’t apply as much. I only needed a “small” idea for an episode of a series that someone else had come up with, and then to execute it really well. Doing this eventually got me my first agent, and it ultimately made my boss in my day job take notice of my writing.
Fortunately, that boss was Tom Hanks (I’d been assigned to his production company from the Fox “temp” pool that I’d been floating around in for two years), and he had a project for me to help with—which became the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. His generosity in giving me a chance to ultimately help write and produce that project changed my life. A few years later, I got to play a similar role on Band of Brothers, another miniseries that he executive produced for HBO—this time partnered with Steven Spielberg.
Both these projects were historical limited series adapted directly from nonfiction books. So they were a different animal from what most writers are trying to do—which is come up with an original idea for a feature film, novel, play, or TV series. I didn’t have to do any of those things—I just had to learn how to adapt these true stories about real people and events into compelling television. (Not that that was easy, or that I didn’t make a lot of mistakes and go through a steep learning curve.)
Thankfully, both of these projects were successful and got my foot in the door of Hollywood as a writer. They led to the opportunity to pitch my own original ideas for drama series to the networks. This meant I was back to having to come up with my own, brand-new, fictional ideas. I didn’t have the crutch of an established series or nonfiction book to lean on. It was all on me to come up with “the idea.”
So I began coming up with premises for drama series. And I soon learned that it was a lot harder than it looked. My own agents rejected most of my ideas as not worth pursuing before I could even get close to pitching them to potential buyers. I realized there was a lot I didn’t understand and needed to learn.
This is when I started seriously exploring “what makes a successful idea” for TV. As I made this my full-time job (in the one-hour drama marketplace), I eventually started arriving at some ideas that my agents liked, and which I sold as pitches to networks—meaning, they hired me to write pilot scripts for them.
Later, when I began teaching screenwriting and mentoring aspiring writers, I noticed that they were almost always starting from an idea that lacked some of the key ingredients that I’d learned were essential. But they didn’t know it. And unfortunately, none of the hard work they did to execute these ideas could ever overcome those core issues.
This happens to virtually every writer, on most projects. Including those written by professionals.
So I began codifying what the key elements of a commercially viable film or TV series idea seemed to be, based on my experience—so I could teach them to others. (This also helped me in my own writing, as you might imagine.) I blogged about these and shared them with writers I worked with. And I began to see that they also applied to fiction, theater, and other forms of “story” beyond screenwriting. And that’s what led to this book.
It might not be easy to arrive at a really winning idea, but it’s also not brain surgery. There are simple and clear elements that are generally present in the best ideas. One can study them and work with them. It just requires getting out of the mind-set that “it’s all about the finished script or manuscript.” It’s not. Yes, the writing has to be executed at a very high level. That’s a given. But even more crucial than execution—than the words on the page of the final product—is the basic idea behind that product. Everything hinges on that. It really is an “idea business.”
In this book, I will present what I’ve come to believe are the seven elements of a successful idea for a story. They can be distilled down to a single word each—which we’ll get to in the next chapter.
But before we do, three quick caveats:
My goal is to help writers looking to sell their work and make a career of it. Artier or experimental films, plays, or works of literary fiction might fall outside this purview and still receive acclaim on a niche level. I’m focusing on ideas with potential American mass audience appeal—this means commercial fiction and theater and the kind of film and television that is widely distributed. In other words, the kinds of stories writers might be paid to write and lots of people might pay to consume.
I am primarily a screenwriter. Though I believe the ideas in this book apply equally to other media for story, for the purposes of simplicity, I will use words like “script” and “audience” where one might substitute “book/manuscript” or “readers,” for instance. When I do use the term “readers,” I’m usually referring to the professional readers a writer needs to impress to move their work forward (including agents, managers, producers, publishers, and paid readers who screen material for them).
A television pilot is a very different animal from a screenplay, novel, or play, because rather than telling one single story with a definite ending, it is meant to introduce a series—which is a container for a potentially endless number of smaller stories, usually for a variety of different characters. So each chapter ends with a section on how to specifically apply the book’s principles to the unique medium of television.
1
FOCUS ON THE IDEA
When a writer finishes a script, they generally understand that it’s time to get feedback on it, preferably from objective professionals—or others who are knowledgeable and serious about the craft—who will give them their unvarnished opinion, hard as that might be to hear.
What they usually don’t do is seek out the same sort of feedback on their idea for a story before they spend months or
years writing it. But that’s the point at which they have the most leverage over what the finished product will look like. That’s when they’re making the most important creative decisions about it that they will ever make.
Why don’t they? Maybe they’re worried about their idea getting stolen. Beginning writers often obsess over this, whereas professionals rarely give it a second thought. While it’s true that one can’t copyright a one- or two-sentence idea for a story (as opposed to its specific expression in a longer document like an outline or script), it’s also true that ideas are rarely stolen, and even if they were, they would usually lead to very different scripts from the one the original writer would have written.
But I think the bigger reason is that for most writers, idea generation and evaluation is a painful and amorphous process, and it seems like nothing is really happening—until they’re writing scenes, or at least structuring a story. Playing with story ideas doesn’t feel like “writing.” But it is—and it’s the most crucial part of the process.
Agents and managers who represent professional (or near-professional) writers understand this and insist that their clients run their ideas past them before they commit to writing. They will shoot down most of them, and typically have lots of notes on the ones they don’t, because they know they can’t sell something if it’s not based on a really strong idea. And they don’t want their clients wasting time writing a script that is flawed from the get-go.
As a screenwriter, I have ignored this fact at my own peril. And as a mentor to other writers, I have seen how universal this problem is. Of the hundreds of scripts I’ve read from writers who haven’t worked professionally yet, virtually all of them had a central idea that was significantly flawed in terms of the principles I lay out in this book. Meaning that if I had heard the idea before they started writing it, I would’ve tried to convince them to rethink it in a significant way. Ninety percent of my most important “notes” or criticisms on a script are concerns I would have voiced about the basic idea if they’d run it past me before writing it.