by Erik Bork
So the number one piece of advice I now give to writers is this: get serious objective feedback on the idea before you launch into structuring or outlining—let alone writing the script. And expect people to have notes on the idea, and for you to have to do some substantial rethinking, before you ever get past that stage. This can go on for a long time and involve lots of different ideas that you get temporarily excited about. Most of these will never quite take or win over professional readers. This means that the finished script probably wouldn’t, either. Wouldn’t you rather fix that now, instead of months down the road? So whatever you would do to get high-quality feedback—whether it’s from writer friends or a paid consultant—do that with the idea.
The 60/30/10 Rule
I would say that 60 percent or more of what makes a project potentially successful (or not) is the core idea that could be communicated in a short synopsis of a few sentences up to a single page. And this is all that industry professionals will generally be willing to look at to consider whether they want to read further.
Think of it: 60 percent of what’s most important to our chances is what is contained in that mini-pitch of our basic idea. It’s mostly not about all those months of outlining, writing, rewriting, and getting feedback—that’s not the most important part. The most important part is what comes before all that.
But the work in coming up with that basic idea is not easy. It can take a lot of time and much trial and error to arrive at one that could garner the interest of professionals. Most of us don’t want to spend that much time questioning our core story premise. But the reality is that “the business” will question it, and will usually dismiss it—and all our hard work—unless we have an idea they see as viable.
Many if not most writers never come up with a story idea that solidly addresses the criteria in this book, despite years of pursuing the craft. And this is a big part of the reason most never end up selling anything or becoming professionally employed. They might focus on bringing their scene writing and narrative structure up to professional quality, but not on their understanding of what makes a viable idea. Which is arguably the most important thing.
If there’s nothing else you take from this book, please take this “60 percent” figure and reconfigure your efforts toward “basic idea” development accordingly. Spend more time and energy on ideas. Make it your number one goal as a writer to learn what makes a great one and to get better at generating them.
Once you have an idea that really works, and you feel reasonably sure (because you’ve vetted it thoroughly with others), then, and only then, does it make sense to turn to the other 40 percent of the process.
What does that consist of?
To me, 30 percent of what’s important to a project’s success lies in the structural choices, the decisions about what will happen, scene by scene, in a story—or what you’d see in an outline.
That means only 10 percent is about the actual words on the page—the description and dialogue that people will read in the finished product. The actual scene writing—that’s the last 10 percent.
This seems shocking to many beginning writers. Ninety percent of what matters is what’s behind those written pages—what the writer worked on before they ever fired up any script-formatting software.
Again, I’m not saying the writing doesn’t have to be really top-notch for a script to advance a writer’s career and move forward in some way. Of course it’s best if your scene writing is memorably great, and your structure and outlining choices are very strong, too. I’m just saying those two things are not the key factors that determine a project’s success. And in fact, those two things usually are never even considered or seen, because the project’s chances die at the earlier idea stage.
And when they die, it’s for one simple reason: the idea struck whoever read it as insufficient in one or more of the seven elements that this book will focus on—elements that are universally understood as key, even if different readers would use different terminology to describe them (or might not even be conscious of the fact that these are what they look for and respond best to).
So without further ado, here’s what they are . . .
The PROBLEM
At the heart of any story is a problem that takes the whole story to solve. It’s a challenge that the story’s main character is actively engaged with, which consumes their attention, energy, and emotion—and that of the audience. It usually starts by about 10 percent into the story and continues until essentially the very end (having built and become worse and more difficult along the way), when it’s finally solved.
An idea for a story really is that central problem. It’s about what the main character is faced with and/or trying to achieve—its difficulty, its importance, what’s in their way, and what they do to try to resolve it.
These are the things that professionals want to understand from any logline and/or synopsis. Until they can see the problem in this way, and until they think it sounds really viable and intriguing, they won’t want to read anything else.
So what makes a “problem” (i.e., your basic story idea) viable?
It needs to have the following seven essential characteristics, the first letters of which form the acronym PROBLEM:
Punishing.
Not only does it take the whole story to solve the problem, but the main character spends virtually every scene trying to solve it. But they can’t, because it is so vexing and complicated—and it generally only gets more so as they try to address it. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t take a whole “story” to overcome. The problem defies resolution and besieges the main character as they grapple with it.
Relatable.
The main character of a story—and what they’re dealing with and why it matters—is easy to identify with on a human level. Because of this, we in the audience are able to strongly care that they reach their desired outcome, making us want to stay with the story. We even put ourselves in their shoes, such that it feels like their problem is our problem. We stay invested because they do. They remain active, and they keep trying to address whatever it is, despite all the slings and arrows that come at them in the process. If they didn’t, it would feel like things weren’t moving forward in a compelling way, and our interest would slacken.
Original.
Something about the premise of the story and its approach is fresh and brand-new—even though it also fits within the conventions of good storytelling and genre. There is a spark of uniqueness to the idea, and preferably to the writer’s voice, as well.
Believable.
It’s easy for someone hearing or reading the basic idea to understand and buy into it, even if it requires taking a leap and suspending disbelief, in some clearly defined way. In other words, it all feels real. The characters seem driven by identifiable human wants, needs, and behavior. It all sounds like it adds up, makes sense, and doesn’t leave people asking any “why” questions or being skeptical or confused about anything.
Life-Altering.
The “mission” to rise to the central story challenge is of huge importance to characters the audience has come to care about. If it doesn’t get solved, life will be unthinkably worse for them. Something in their outer life circumstances, on a primal level, is at stake. And if they solve their problem, things will be so much better than they are. All will be right with the world. In addition, the process of going through this challenge may alter them internally, in a hugely important way. But it’s the external stakes that come first.
Entertaining.
The process of trying to solve the story problem is fun to watch or read, consistent with its genre. Whether it’s comedy, action, suspense, etc., the material creates desired emotional experiences in the audience, of the kind that they came to the project hoping to have. So it becomes like candy to them—something they want more and more of, something they really enjoy and would spend time and money on.
Meaningful.
The audience comes away feeling t
hat value has been added to their life—that something worthwhile has been explored, which has resonance beyond the time they spent watching/reading it. It was really about something more than just its surface plot—something meaningful to them.
Sounds simple, and even obvious, right? Fulfill these seven characteristics with your idea, and you’ll have a piece of material that could get you the interest of a manager, agent, editor, or producer.
Or maybe it doesn’t sound so simple. Maybe it sounds impossible to do all these things at once. If you’re a little overwhelmed by the task, then you’re probably recognizing what a big job it really is.
There’s a reason such a tiny percentage of aspiring writers succeed, and why those who do are so handsomely rewarded. It’s rare to successfully achieve all of this in a script or in an idea for one.
When we look at our favorite stories, they probably do it so effortlessly that we didn’t even notice. These criteria are so basic to our experience of consuming good stories, that they might seem to be self-evident. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy to pull off. The reality is that it takes a lot of work to create what might appear effortless. And writers don’t usually instinctively get what it takes to achieve this.
How “High” Is Your Concept?
In Hollywood, the logline is the standard tool for expressing the idea behind a movie or series. It is typically no more than a sentence or two, and it distills the premise down to the basic problem being faced. A good logline suggests a story that would clearly meet the criteria set out in this book. It presents a compelling situation for a character or characters that one can imagine audiences caring about. And it lays out a central challenge that sounds really difficult, and entertaining to watch, such as:
A slick German industrialist profiting from World War II becomes sickened when he sees what’s happening to the Jews, so he starts employing them, to try to keep them out of the clutches of a psychopathic Nazi camp commandant he’s become friendly with. (Schindler’s List)
A naive recent college graduate gets involved in a secret affair with a married friend of his parents, whose daughter they think he should date. (The Graduate)
A down-on-her-luck maid of honor seems to be losing her best friend to a richer, prettier, more confident married woman, so she sets out to defeat her and prove that she’s the better bridesmaid. (Bridesmaids)
When we talk about an idea for a story, we’re really talking about something that could be easily understood in this short form—which is generally true of the most sellable ideas.
Successful loglines often have a “high-concept” element. “High concept” means an outrageous situation of some kind, not necessarily fantastical, but extreme, unexpected, unlikely, and with obvious entertainment value and broad appeal. Usually they come from a “what if” question, like “What if there was a theme park with dinosaurs that got loose?” or “What if a teenager time travels to the past and gets in the way of his teenage parents’ meeting, so he has to get them together, then find a way back to the future?”
But even some non-fantastical premises can be called “high concept” if they are intriguing and clear and make the potential audience start conjuring entertaining images in their minds right away. “What if a forty-year-old man was still a virgin, and his sex-obsessed male coworkers tried to fix that?” Consider the original poster for this movie. Just the image of Steve Carell and the title alone is almost enough to make one get the comedy and challenges in this premise. It seems pregnant with possibility and makes one wonder why nobody ever thought of it before.
In a compelling logline with a high concept element, it’s clear what the idea is, and why it’s compelling. There’s enough there that one can really picture the story. No one needs to ask a bunch of questions to understand what it is. They instantly “get it.”
Nailing the Logline
Loglines can be a struggle for writers. Not because it’s so hard to write up a sentence or two that contains these key elements, but because their story itself doesn’t really contain them.
Ideas that lack some or all of the seven PROBLEM elements will usually reveal that fact in their loglines. As such, loglines are a useful tool for professionals when deciding whether to pass on reading a script. And that’s the logline’s main reason for existing—and for buyers to want to see only a logline before committing to read further. Because 99 percent of the time, they can tell from the logline that they don’t want to read further.
So the challenge isn’t in writing the logline. It’s in coming up with an idea for a story that is so viable as a PROBLEM that it will be easy to describe in a logline. Then it’s a relatively simple matter to express its essence in a sentence or two.
Having said that, there are some guidelines to follow in crafting one. Our goal is for the reader to be able to picture the movie (or series, stage play, or novel). It shouldn’t “tease” the story while leaving out key information. It should clearly communicate what the main story challenge is and why it’s difficult and important.
A film producer or executive looking at a logline wants to be able to imagine the poster, the trailer, the audience, and the genre. They want to be able to see how this idea clearly fits within a certain type of movie that tends to work with audiences—and how it’s a unique and engaging variation on that.
So a good logline generally includes three basic elements:
A quick sense of who the main character is, which makes them seem relatable in some way.
The “catalyst” that launches the story—meaning the event that changes everything and leads the main character to have to act.
The nature of the challenge they now must face, their mission in solving it, and its huge difficulty and importance.
That’s really it.
Two quick examples:
(1) A man raised as a joyful, innocent elf at the North Pole (2) learns he’s human, and heads off to (3) find his father and his place in the world, in a city where his childlike goodness seems to be rejected: New York. (Elf)
When (2) a mafia boss is shot and incapacitated, (1) his youngest son—a war hero who was never supposed to be part of the family business—decides he must (3) take over to try to defeat the rival mob families who are gunning for them. (The Godfather)
The key thing that’s often missing is number 3. That’s the most important part to get across. The most commercially viable ideas have a “mission” of some sort for the main character, which will take the whole story to accomplish, be incredibly difficult, and in all likelihood go badly for much of it—even if the mission is simply to try to escape a bad situation. The audience is meant to become emotionally invested in this character and mission, and be entertained by watching it.
There might also be an “inner journey” the character goes on—an arc of growth and change. But that is not what we’re trying to communicate initially—it’s secondary. The logline usually doesn’t focus on this, or on what the character has to learn. Instead, it lays out what they want and what’s in the way—in terms of both outer life circumstances and relationships with others. It ideally makes people think, “What an enormously difficult and fun-to-watch challenge!”
2
PUNISHING
Audiences are basically sadists.
We like to watch people go through the most hellishly life-altering ordeals, and the worse it gets for them, the more engaged we are, as long as there is some hope of success, which the characters are actively pursuing. Whether it’s a horror film or a comedy or a true story like Hamilton, we tune in to watch people be punished, and we enjoy seeing characters pushed to their absolute limits and beyond. We seem to like our main characters frustrated, beaten down, devastated, and humiliated, and yet passionately, almost insanely driven to try to reach their goals.
Why? I think on some basic level, we consume stories because they are inspirational examples of people trying to rise above. The problems characters face in stories tend to be exaggerated beyond those in our
normal lives—which is part of what makes them entertaining. But on a deeper emotional level, we can still relate to and get caught up in the characters’ attempts to better their situations, and we become invested in the possibility of them defeating long odds to come out on top. And when they do so, we feel like we have done it with them.
But the success can only come at the very end, if at all. There might be glimmers of positive forward motion in the middle, but only glimmers—and these generally have to be immediately followed by things getting worse (or at least a reminder that things, overall, are still pretty bad). This is true from the first emergence of the main story problem all the way to the final climactic battle in what screenwriters call the third act of a movie. The focus is on the difficulties: difficulties that worsen, complicate, and defy solving.
The legendary Broadway writer/producer/performer George M. Cohan is supposed to have once said: “In the first act, you get your main character up a tree. In the second act, you throw rocks at them. In the third act, you get them down.” The nature of what that tree is, and what those rocks are, is key. You could even say that “story = main character + tree + rocks.”
And that’s the main thing any agent, producer, or executive is looking for in a logline, synopsis, or script: “Why should I emotionally invest in this character and what they’re grappling with? How is the tree big and important enough to make me feel something? How might there be enough rocks to escalate the story all the way to the climax?”