The Idea

by Erik Bork

  But even when we find that one clear, finite problem/goal to focus on, the actual events often don’t help us in making sure that the main character is continually, actively in pursuit of their goal and encountering complications that only build the difficulty. Real life just doesn’t work that way, most of the time.

  If it were a fictional story, it might be obvious that one needs to provide that rising action to the audience. But in a true-story adaptation, writers tend to think that because the events are real and an important part of history, some of their job is already done and the audience will be inherently interested, and forgiving, if things meander a bit or don’t build that much or aren’t singularly focused on one problem that the main character is actively battling.

  I don’t think that’s usually the case. The audience does not make exceptions for true-story adaptations. And I learned this the hard way, by writing scripts professionally for a number of historical projects. What I gleaned from those experiences was that it’s our job as writers not to transcribe history, but to find our “take” on it. To find the story within it that we want to tell, and then to tell that story, using (or creating) what serves it and not using what doesn’t. Hopefully, it’s true in spirit and even in many of its details to the history we’re writing about. But it’s still “ours.” Only we could have written it the way we did.

  To tell any story, “true” or not, requires a lot of creating. For one thing, we’re making up virtually every line of dialogue spoken, because the history books (and even what the real-life subjects might tell us when they recount their story) don’t give us their exact dialogue. They also don’t give us the details of actions and confrontations that a screenwriter would need when writing scenes.

  All of this forces the writer to make their own choices, which usually means detaching somewhat from the facts of the story—and from any people feeding the writer those facts.

  I first learned this approach from writer-producer Graham Yost (Speed, Justified), in his approach to writing episodes of From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers, which we worked on together. He would first familiarize himself with the history of what he was tasked to write, then he would put the research away and decide on the story he wanted to tell. Then he would write that story, without slavishly going back and forth to the research throughout the process. When he had a draft he liked as a story, he could then go back and vet it against the research to see how far he had strayed from the truth. Usually the answer was not as far as he might have thought, and not in ways that needed drastic alteration to be close enough to the truth of what happened. And what he had was a strong story as a foundation for future tweaking.

  I highly recommend that approach, as opposed to the more typical one, that I used to use, where the writer obsesses over the historical source material and goes back and forth from what they’re writing to the research, hoping for it to supply the whole story, nervous about making up anything.

  Whether a story idea is based on or inspired by facts or is completely made up, the process is largely the same: first and foremost, we look to challenge our main characters to their core, with something that will demand resolution, but defy all attempts to get it—right up until the end.

  Television and the “Web of Conflict”

  There are a few fundamental differences between how story works on television and how it works in the singular, closed-ended stories we find in books, movies, and plays (and even “limited series” or miniseries):

  In television, the problems go on and on—so whatever the central thing is that plagues a character, it can’t fully be resolved, or the series would end. As a result, their lives aren’t significantly “altered” at the end of a half hour or hour, either externally or internally.

  A series is not just “a story.” It’s a delivery system for potentially endless smaller, episode-long stories. Each installment needs to have a beginning, middle, and end, in terms of specific problems that are unique to that episode. These need to resolve in some way, so that each hour or half hour stands on its own as a complete story experience, even though the larger issues that drive the series remain unresolved.

  Television is much more of an ensemble medium. Most series have multiple “stories” in each episode, each with a different “main character” dealing with a different problem and goal they’re focused on that week. This means that multiple characters in a series have to be relatable enough—in terms of who they are and what they’re facing—for the audience to care enough to want to follow them. (Most movies, by contrast, have a single main character, and the audience sees everything through their perspective.)

  With a series, we’re looking for a big, overall, problematic situation that affects all the characters and that will never quite be fully resolved—until, perhaps, the final episode of the final season.

  The challenge in TV is not so much about identifying a single main character with a single problem and giving them some sort of character arc. Instead, it’s about finding a group of interconnected people who will have constant problems and conflicts the audience relates to, which can achieve limited and partial resolutions—but not to the point where their lives dramatically change and their main problem ends.

  As with film, determining the nature of the punishment—of the “hell” that characters will be in—is key to the premise of any series. TV characters are generally “punished” by their relationships with other characters—and in the personal interactions involved in trying to solve their problems and reach their goals.

  Modern Family cocreator and co-showrunner Steve Levitan once laid out a technique he used for developing series ideas by focusing on the characters. He was talking about comedy especially, but I think his process works just as well for dramas.

  He recommended that we take any two characters on our potential show and think through their basic life situations. Who are they? What is their personality, the nature of their problems, and their place in the world?

  He used the example of Cheers, with the washed-up ex-athlete who runs a bar and is charming but shallow—a ladies’ man with no real meaning to his life. The show’s creators then added an overeducated, elitist young woman who kind of looks down on such people but who just got dumped by her snooty fiancé and is stuck waitressing there.

  Each character is very specific and easy to imagine, and it sounds like their interactions with others could be entertaining to watch.

  Then comes the key thing. Levitan said to draw a line between those two characters. That line represents the dynamic between them. And that line is, essentially, the show. In other words, the conflicts inherent in that relationship (and other key character relationships) is the main story engine for the series and the heart of the concept. (Unless it’s a “procedural” show about solving murders and the like—although even those usually operate on this character level, as well.)

  So, we look for what happens when two specific characters interact. What’s fun about watching it? How does it have the potential to lead to problems, for one or both people? How does it poke at their basic issues, and some big hole in their psyche, and their life?

  Doing this takes some work. And probably some brainstorming. But Levitan’s advice is to not stop until you have something really solid—something that “crackles.” We’re looking for a dynamic we would want to watch—one that’s relatable and emotional, for both parties. We’re looking to be kind of excited about the pairing of those two people, and the scenes and stories that could be derived from that.

  Once we’re solid with that, we then choose another pair of characters and do the same thing. When we’re finished, every single character should have a vibrant dynamic with every other character. Added together, these dynamics feel like a “show.” They have the potential for endless strong comedy and/or high drama.

  And that’s what they did with Modern Family, arguably the most successful comedy series of its time.

  Think about how much devotion that too
k! That show started with ten series regulars. Granted, some of them don’t interact with certain others all that often, but the creators took the time to come up with an entertaining and intriguing dynamic that each could have with each of the others.

  There’s a patriarch and his much younger, beautiful wife. She has a son. And that son has a very specific and entertaining relationship with both his mother and his stepfather. And if you put that son, Manny, together with his pretty (and older) step-niece, you had another fun dynamic: Manny has an unrequited crush on her. And if you put the patriarch together with his son-in-law Phil, you have something else: a man trying to impress a guy who will never respect him. Put Phil with the patriarch’s young wife, and you have nervous lust. Put that wife with Phil’s wife, and you have a prickly competitive conflict, where the daughter can’t accept her father’s new wife, who wants nothing more than this family to love her. Et cetera, et cetera.

  At the end of the day, this entertaining web of conflict is the foundation of virtually every high-quality series idea. Developing it to a place that feels really solid before writing a word of a pilot (or even pitching the idea to anyone) is, to my mind, time and energy well spent.

  “Punishing” Checklist

  If your idea can live up to this five-point mission statement, it should be “punishing” enough:

  It’s about one big problem that takes the whole story to solve. (In TV, it can essentially never be solved.)

  What my main character(s) want(s) seems extremely unlikely and difficult to achieve, but not entirely impossible.

  The difficulty of the problem will push my main character(s) to their limits as they actively, continuously try to resolve it.

  These actions will lead to consequences, complications, and conflicts they didn’t expect, which require further action.

  The problem will grow through the middle of the story (or episode) until all seems lost. Only a huge final battle will resolve it.

  3

  RELATABLE

  We want our main character to be punished. But we also want to tell the story in such a way that the audience feels personally identified with this character so that they really care about what happens.

  We’re basically trying to get strangers to feel strongly about someone they’ve never met. Ideally, these strangers make that person’s problems as important to them—for two hours—as if they were their own. Saying it this way emphasizes how hard this is to do. It doesn’t just happen naturally.

  There are two aspects to achieving this:

  (1) Making the character someone the audience can relate to, sympathize with, be fascinated and entertained by, and/or want to see succeed. Part of this is about who the character is, and part of it is about what they’re facing. The more they get beaten up by other people and events (especially when it’s undeserved), the easier it is to feel for them.

  (2) Telling the story from that character’s point of view so that the audience can fully understand and share their perspective, their emotions, what they’re trying to do, and why it matters to them.

  Many scripts don’t do one or both of these things. And because of these “main character issues” or “point of view issues,” it’s hard to really connect with the story.

  The Role of the “Main Character”

  “Relatable” is really a mild word for what the best stories achieve: they make the audience become one with the main character and experience everything as if it were happening to them. Across genres in successful stories, whether it’s Pretty Woman, Jaws, or Hamlet, the audience feels what the main character feels and can’t help but start to want what they want. This is what it is to be “emotionally invested” in the story, i.e., “really engaged and wanting to see what happens.” This, of course, is every writer’s goal.

  Achieving emotional investment starts with understanding that any story really does have only one main character—the one whose perspective the audience is focused on and learning and experiencing things through. (But you might find multiple stories, and thus multiple main characters, within some movies, books, or plays, and almost all series.) The main character is the audience’s point of view on the story, and the one they most relate to, understand, and, usually, root for.

  That means that the main character is typically in nearly every scene of their story, and other characters don’t get many moments separate from them—aside from a brief “cutting to the bad guy” scene in a movie like Die Hard. The story is essentially the main character’s experience of it—it’s all about their problems and goals and what they’re doing in the face of those. Nothing else really matters.

  Main characters are generally not mysterious. What they are trying to learn about others might be, but what’s driving them at every moment needs to be apparent—what they think and what they feel. When these things aren’t clear, the audience tends to lose that emotional connection. If they don’t know what the character they’re following is engaged in at any given moment, or why, they tend to become confused and detached.

  The best main characters are also not passive. They’re actively engaged in something that’s hugely important to them. They keep going, despite lots of difficulties. If they give up, or just let things happen to them without taking meaningful action that affects the situation, then they become harder to care about and root for, and less fun to watch. It stops being their story. Audiences invest in the struggle and improvisation in pursuit of an objective, not in characters who are only “acted upon.” And if it’s a big enough problem to be worth telling as a story, the main character doesn’t rest until it’s resolved.

  Other characters are affected, interested, and involved, but we see them through the main character’s eyes, in terms of how they affect what the main character wants and is trying to do. We look at them, but through the main character.

  If a story is told “objectively,” where the reader is looking “at” all the characters, and not focused on what one particular person is wanting, feeling, and trying to achieve, the reader feels on the outside of the story and less engaged. This is one of the main reasons they will stop reading and pass on the project.

  Subjective Point of View

  The first script I wrote professionally was an episode of the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. I had been given an amazing opportunity by Tom Hanks and HBO. And I was totally out of my depth. I had been writing spec sitcom episodes and didn’t have any idea how to approach this kind of dramatic true-story adaptation.

  But I knew enough about “story” to pick an episode that seemed like it was about one clear main character with a problem. Some of the episodes seemed to have this potential much more than others.

  The one I chose was about the first American in space, Alan Shepard, and his fall from space-flight glory when an inner ear disorder grounded him. This forced him to work behind the scenes as a kind of “boss” to the other astronauts, but unable to fly himself and unhappy about it. Eventually, though, he found a cure, in time to be put back on active flight status, command the Apollo 14 mission, and land on the moon.

  Sounds like a clear “story,” right?

  It did, but when I embarked on writing the first drafts of the script, I got so caught up in the research—and the responsibility of accurately documenting all the key events of the mission this episode was focused on—that when I gave the script to a more experienced professional writer involved in the project, he clearly didn’t care about the story. He was nice enough not to put it that way. What he said was that he thought it needed a clearer point of view.

  He didn’t just mean that this character needed to be at the center of events—he already was. What was missing was that the audience needed to experience what he thought, felt, and wanted more from inside his perspective, and everything I depicted had to be about that—not the dry facts about what caused problems for him and his mission, which, not being life-threatening, were mainly of interest only to space junkies.

  This episode
(like all successful stories) had to become an emotional journey for millions of people, which starts with making it one for the main character and staying focused on that. It was not enough for audiences to be somewhat interested in his situation and the mission he ended up flying on. The real goal was for them to care—to relate to this human being and strongly want him to achieve the goal this story was focused on.

  After many more drafts, I pushed the script as far as I could in the direction of a subjective emotional experience for Alan Shepard, and tried in every scene to focus on how his “one big problem” and goal was evolving—making sure that it kept evolving, with him actively grappling with it at the center of every scene. Eventually, the script was accepted as good, and I was asked to do some additional writing on other episodes. Which, let me tell you, was a huge relief.

  The Relatable Center

  A good idea for a story has a situation at the heart of it that virtually everyone can relate to, because it explores some fundamental human desire and/or problematic situation.