The Idea

by Erik Bork

  Ultimately, we want the audience to care deeply while being fascinated and entertained by what is happening. This caring only tends to occur when they’re watching relatable people struggle and improvise in the face of some sort of hellish siege—where they’re undertaking a huge challenge that they’re sure to lose but which is desperately important to all being right with their world. This is true whether they’re facing life-and-death stakes or seemingly smaller everyday matters, like you might see in a comedy.

  In 2013, an anonymous professional script reader working for the major studios created an infographic that explored the common issues with three hundred screenplays they had been paid to read (of which only eight were deemed worthy of a “recommend”). Most of these scripts were probably submitted by agents, meaning they came from writers who had already conquered the first major hurdle that most aspiring writers never achieve: getting professional representation. Still, many of the most commonly observed problems relate to things not being “punishing” enough.

  Take these three criticisms from the top ten in terms of how frequently they showed up in scripts this reader had evaluated:

  “The story begins too late in the script.”

  In other words, there isn’t a big enough problem and active effort to solve it until much later than there should be. I often see scripts where the third act has a major challenge as the climax, but prior to that, there isn’t anything big, difficult, and punishing enough that the main character is actively besieged with and trying to solve.

  “The scenes are void of meaningful conflict.”

  On a scene level, there isn’t enough difficulty and conflict that advance and evolve the status of the primary story problem. This is something scenes should typically do. If this isn’t happening, there’s likely a larger problem with the concept, because the best stories provide endless scenes of difficulty that mainly only get worse until the very end.

  “The conflict is inconsequential, flash-in- the-pan.”

  This is another way of noting that the problem isn’t big and enduring enough throughout the script, and/or the stakes of solving it are too low.

  So even in professionally submitted scripts, the top two most common issues are lack of “conflict” or problems (otherwise known as “story”). Often, there’s not a big enough overall problem to rest a whole movie on.

  “Not being punishing enough” is the most common overall weakness I’ve seen in the hundreds of scripts that I’ve read. It’s more common than not that the main character doesn’t have a big enough overall problem, or a high enough level of difficulty as they try to solve it. Things are just not “problematic” enough in terms of what they’re facing.

  If you look closely, even characters in the lightest of comedies are probably in some version of hell and struggling to get out of it. No matter what good things might happen along the way, they have some overarching problem that seems to be in the way of their ongoing happiness, which is the focus of the narrative.

  Degree of Difficulty

  Successful stories tend to center on one big problem that emerges early on and is not resolved until very close to the end. The main character is directing all their efforts toward trying to solve it. They’re not just sitting around, living life. They’re actively engaged. And it’s what we, the audience, are there to watch them do: engage.

  If this main character is actively trying to solve their problem and reach their goal in virtually every scene, what does that tell you about the nature of that problem, which defies solving until the very end?

  It’s difficult.

  So many stories get tripped up because the problem just isn’t hard enough to sustain the entire story. There isn’t enough build, enough evolution, enough changing of the game. The main character isn’t impacting the situation with their actions, causing it to change, but then also facing the consequences of that, in terms of increased conflict and ongoing complications.

  At the heart of a viable story idea is a problem that develops in this way—one that’s thorny and defies resolution. The challenge of solving it gets more problematic and yet more important as the story plays out.

  A good logline for an original story idea would instantly communicate how this is going to be the case: how the main character faces a seemingly impossible challenge, which could go wrong in a million different ways (and probably will) before it’s resolved.

  An accident cripples the Apollo 13 spacecraft on its way to the moon, and mission control must find a way to get the astronauts back to Earth alive, with extremely limited resources and options. (Apollo 13)

  Three groomsmen who lost their about-to-be-wed buddy during a night of drunken misadventures in Las Vegas—which they have no memory of—must try to retrace their steps in order to find him in time for the wedding. (The Hangover)

  These two examples are polar opposites in terms of genre, but both suggest how difficult the challenges will be right away, and anyone who has seen these films can remember how punished the characters were as they tried to pursue their goals.

  Even in a comedy, the difficulty of what the main character is trying to do still seems huge to them and beyond their abilities. They are ill-suited to the task at hand, and the deck is completely stacked against them. What they’re trying to achieve seems extremely unlikely—but we can imagine it will be fun to watch them try.

  The same is true in successful TV series. The characters are under siege virtually all the time, in one way or another. What they’re trying to accomplish is beyond them. But they keep pursuing it. The difference is that movie (and book and stage) characters generally reach that goal at the end of the story (unless it’s a tragedy), whereas TV characters will only resolve some short-term crisis but won’t ever really get what they most would like to have—whether it’s ownership of a successful company in Silicon Valley or control over their mythical lands in Game of Thrones. Every episode will find new ways to deny them that. (More on this later, in the chapter’s TV section.)

  So, when we’re looking for an idea for a story (or series), what we’re really looking for are problems, more than any other single thing—problems that will defy our characters’ attempts to solve them.

  I personally struggled with this for years. My first attempts at screenwriting were met with the criticism that my scripts needed “more conflict.” I thought conflict meant people fighting, and my favorite movies weren’t filled with fights and arguments. But eventually I realized that “conflict” really means people who want something they can’t have, who are dealing with major life challenges and hard-to-reach goals. Yes, this typically leads to interpersonal issues, where characters are trying to get others to do what they want, but it doesn’t always look like two adversaries at cross-purposes trying to defeat each other.

  What it does always look like is difficulty. And in the strongest stories, the difficulties are constant. They’re ever-growing and ever-evolving. The moment they stop growing (or even seem resolved) the tension comes to a stop, as does the audience’s reason to care.

  In my view, earning audience investment is the number one goal and challenge for every writer. “Why should I care?” is the note that I most fear on anything I write—because it’s our most important objective and the hardest to achieve. Readers who “don’t care” usually won’t say that to our faces (thank God), but unfortunately, that’s what they are most often feeling. And it makes them give up on a piece of writing.

  Isn’t that how we all are? We want to care, and if we don’t, we tune out.

  So, what makes us care? It’s seeing someone we feel a connection with battling a big problem and becoming emotionally invested in a certain outcome for them, so much so that it’s almost like it’s happening to us—and the problem looks nearly impossible to solve.

  Great Stories Are Like Great Games

  Over the years, I’ve been a fan of various sports teams, and I like watching big games where everything is on the line for my team. At one point,
something clicked for me as I realized that this sort of entertainment experience is very similar to watching or reading a great story—in any medium.

  Certain elements need to be present for a sporting event to be the most engaging, to keep me glued to the TV screen: high stakes, intriguing backstory, relatable emotion, an awesome opponent, lots of ups and downs, and, finally, a come-from-behind victory. It’s a difficult battle for the team I’m rooting for, all the way through, and it looks like they will lose, right up until the very end.

  Doesn’t this describe a great movie, book, play, or TV episode just as much as it does a big game?

  I first had this insight while reading several scripts in a row where it seemed too easy for the heroes to win, or they seemed to be succeeding a lot in the second act and were clearly more powerful than their opposition.

  In thinking about why these were not engaging to read, I found myself remembering games where my favorite NBA team (the Lakers, of course) was winning by twenty points throughout, and the other team never made it close. Because of this, I could barely be bothered to keep watching.

  As I thought this through, I came up with a list of seven specific qualities we tend to look for in a “great game,” which I think apply equally well to “great stories”:

  The difficulties of this game are huge—they’re facing formidable opponents and seem overmatched.

  The best main characters are not favored to win and really have no business thinking they’re going to be able to. It’s much more exciting to see someone rise to the occasion and be David fighting Goliath than to follow someone who seems to be the strongest, most capable one in the story as they go out and kick butt. Even superheroes need powerful super villains who are beating them, and who look likely to win right up until the final battle of the story. In every viable genre, the forces that oppose the main character’s goal seem to have the upper hand throughout. (In other words, the struggle is “punishing.”)

  The players have an engaging story involving adversity of some kind and positive qualities that make us connect with them.

  This is why coverage of the Olympics includes filmed clips of the athletes in their home environment prior to the competition—to help us care about them as people. Reality shows often do the same. A great game is always better when there is some relatable, emotional human element that gives what’s happening more meaning to us. In a good story, we need the same thing—strong reasons to connect with the main character, even before the competition begins.

  The stakes of this game couldn’t be higher—it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that will change the team’s legacy or the players’ lives forever.

  Professional readers always look at the “stakes.” Is there something big enough at risk here that demands audience engagement? Think of great stories like this: they usually chronicle the single most important turning point in a character’s life, which will forever change them. Their life will typically be much better if they solve the story problem, and much worse if they don’t. It really matters. They have something huge and relatable on the line.

  Far from running away with the game, or building a big lead early and holding it, the “home team” finds themselves facing unforeseen difficulties and complications.

  A star player gets injured. The other team is prepared for what our team brings and counters effectively. Turnovers, errors, and great plays by the opposition (antagonists) give them all the momentum. In the best games (stories), our team (main character) is losing for most of it. And things gets worse and worse, until it seems like they have no chance of winning.

  The team plays with passion and persistence—picking themselves up from numerous crises—and continues in pursuit of their goal.

  They may doubt themselves at times, but they continue to strive to meet each challenge. They make do with what they have, adjust on the fly, and despite all the problems, they stay in the game and keep trying. Our team/main character continues to try to solve their problem, even though most of what they do doesn’t work and leads to complications that only add to their difficulties.

  Nevertheless, they find themselves significantly behind as things draw to a close.

  Near the end, things may even seem hopeless and lost. Their efforts have come up short. But some new idea, new hope, and new plan emerges. However, even this isn’t easy to pull off. They don’t just come back and trounce the opponent. They claw and scrape and get knocked down, and the tension builds to one final climactic moment. It’s the bottom of the ninth, with the bases loaded and two outs . . .

  Our team comes from behind, with one last push.

  Finally, they are able to dig deep and find another level of play that they didn’t know they had. They find their best selves in some way. Miraculously, against all odds, they rise up in the final moment and take the game—in the most dramatic fashion. This victory resolves all the tension in a satisfying way, inspiring a feeling that it will have a lasting impact for our beloved team. (Or sometimes, they lose, and it’s more of a tragic feeling.)

  So, let’s recap. The best games to watch are punishing for the viewer’s team, who they relate to personally. It’s original in that it’s never happened before, even if it’s similar in some ways to past games. Of course it’s believable, because it’s really happening. The stakes seem life-altering, and it’s exceptionally entertaining to watch. And for the biggest fan, it might even seem meaningful on a deeper level.

  These qualities apply to sports (and viewers who love them) across cultures. And they also apply to stories. They seem to be universal elements that we, as audiences, need in order to be most compelled and engaged in the “contest.” Sometimes they occur naturally in a sporting event. (When they don’t, it tends to be a boring one.) We writers have to bring them to our stories. They don’t just show up on their own. They require our creative action.

  Adapting True Stories

  If we look at events that happen in real life, they rarely play out like this. They don’t have the structure of a “story” the way we’re defining it. They might have some of the PROBLEM criteria, but they usually require a writer to sort through, edit, manipulate, exaggerate, add to, and fictionalize in order for the relative chaos of “history” to take on the patina of “story.”

  And yet true stories are constantly looked at as possible source material. And they might seem to writers like they will be easier to pull off, because the facts give them something to cling to, and to hide behind. There’s not as much creative work to do. At least it appears that way.

  I created a class at UCLA Extension called Finding the “Story” in True Stories. In it, students don’t focus on writing a script. They don’t even start the script, or even a scene-by-scene outline, in our ten weeks together. Instead, we focus on looking for whether there is truly a viable movie story contained within the piece of history that they want to write about—and how to turn it into one, in terms of concept and basic structure.

  Usually I find that there isn’t enough there, initially, in terms of a clear main character with a singular important problem that gets worse and worse as they try to address it, and which they only resolve through a “final battle” at the end. “Real life” typically doesn’t give us that. So that’s where the work begins.

  Often students will show up with stories about the first person to achieve some particular worthy or impressive thing. And I generally approach these with two main questions. The first has to do with stakes: Why is it so important that they achieve it? What will happen if they don’t? Will today’s audiences desperately care that they reach their goal? If so, why? (More on this in the Life- Altering chapter.)

  The second question is: How hard is the process of trying to reach their goal? Generally speaking, the big achievement that students want to write a movie about will only be compelling to an audience if reaching that goal is an absolutely hellish battle, if it looks like the main character will never win, and if, despite endless effort, the goal just see
ms more and more unobtainable. It’s not so much the big achievement itself that makes it a movie, it’s the punishingly difficult process of getting there—combined with the high stakes the audience can identify with and feel something about.

  Apollo 13 (on which I proudly have the credit “Assistant to Mr. Hanks”) is a great example of a true story that seems to contain all the required PROBLEM elements. Things just get worse and worse and more and more complicated, and the sense of importance, difficulty, and high stakes just grows and grows as the damaged spacecraft tries to get back to Earth.

  Argo seems to be another good example, with its stirring “final battle” of getting the embassy workers through the Tehran airport and on a plane to safety without being found out by the Iranians. But guess what? In truth, there was no real “battle” to get through the airport. Their plan went off without a hitch. They walked right through to their plane without incident. No one questioned them. They didn’t have to explain their supposed roles on a film crew. Their tickets didn’t get canceled and need reinstatement. And nobody chased after the plane.

  But what kind of an ending to a movie would that be? Instead of showing things as they happened, the filmmakers decided to depict what the greatest fears were of the people involved (and the audience), milking the suspense and difficulty of their final escape, beyond what really occurred. The basic arc of the story is historically true, including their eventual escape and their cover stories. The movie just makes it all harder than it really was, at least in this final sequence. We can argue whether that makes it less viable as history, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t make for a stronger movie.

  That’s the kind of thing professional writers typically have to do with true stories—the same as they do with fictional ones. And it’s usually not just about upping the climax. Often, when one really analyzes the historical source material for a potential movie, it’s hard to find the “one big problem” that takes the whole story to solve, because real lives are not about one problem. They’re about a disparate mix of situations that don’t evolve in the focused way that stories do. Writers usually need to find or create the “story”—a carefully structured dramatic sequence of events—rather than just try to show everything that happened and expect that to work.