by Erik Bork
The first ten pages can be filled with fun-to-watch, high-conflict material, but I believe these should simply be examples of the kinds of things the main character is dealing with in their current normal life. Consider Ryan Reynolds working for hell-boss Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, Tom Cruise showing us his life as a sports agent who has grown a conscience in Jerry Maguire, or still-animated Amy Adams before she comes to New York City in Enchanted. This section should not already be challenging that status quo in a significant way. That should be saved for the catalyst. First, we have to compellingly dramatize what that status quo is, such that the reader is emotionally drawn in and beginning to care.
This means illustrating (not just talking about in dialogue) things like their living situation, occupation, social life, family and friends, and romantic relationships. It’s about dramatizing how they spend their time, what their life is focused on, and who else is in it.
Knowing where the main character starts—and what we want to present about them to quickly get the audience up to speed—is key to understanding the idea, and is generally part of any pitch, no matter how brief. It’s the jumping-off point.
And since the opening pages are so determinative to the rest of the script getting read, it’s crucial that they engage the reader with the main character. This means almost immediately putting their most important feelings, life desires, and overall conflicts front and center and making them crystal clear. Ideally, the reader would be intrigued and entertained by them, liking them and even caring about them, before the catalyst sets the story in motion.
If we can deliver all of that in the first ten pages, they will keep reading.
Why We Care about Tony Soprano
In any story, in any medium, the audience needs a reason to connect with at least one character, to identify with what they’re going through, and to get invested in their process of trying to resolve it. Television is no different.
But what if you’re writing a dark drama centered on an antihero, as so many writers want to do these days? Well, the rules of “empathy” still apply. If the character isn’t traditionally likable or sympathetic, then they at least need to be facing problems so big that the audience can’t help but start to connect with them.
People often reference Breaking Bad as a show with a “dark” main character, but if you look at how the series began, Walter White was the most sympathetic person you could imagine—a loving husband and father and also a passionate chemistry teacher whose students didn’t care, and who was underpaid, underappreciated, and diagnosed with a terminal illness. And as soon as he makes a critical decision to start cooking meth (to sympathetically provide money for his family, let’s remember), he immediately places himself in enormous and constant jeopardy—his life will now be at risk, as well as his freedom. Also, his family could find out his horrible secret. It’s hard to imagine a character with more to “root for” than this one. And all of that was necessary to balance out the fact that he was getting into a business that otherwise could seem completely unsympathetic to the audience.
Let’s look at another example, which arguably kicked off this trend in earnest—HBO’s groundbreaking The Sopranos, which Writers Guild members voted the best-written series of all time, in 2013. On the surface, Tony Soprano is unlikable: he’s a violent mobster who also lies and cheats. But as he’s introduced in the pilot, what we mostly see about him is that he is having panic attacks, feels scared, and is humiliated that he has to go to a therapist. Meanwhile, his own mother may be trying to have him killed. And he can’t get the respect and peace he wants, from his wife, children, colleagues, or his life in general. His problems are a combination of really big and really relatable. Yes, on occasion he whacks a guy, but most of the show is about getting us inside his problem-filled life and personal, emotional perspective.
Another common technique is to surround an unlikable central character—like Michael Scott in the American version of The Office—with more relatable characters, like Jim and Pam. But even in that example, the so-called unlikable character was still made relatable and vulnerable in certain ways, so stories could be told from his point of view, where we are simultaneously shocked by his lack of self-awareness, which hurts others, but also at times sympathetic to the way he’s trying to be loved and never getting what he wants.
Some comedies, like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Veep, go further with making their characters hard to like. But these people are such underdogs, and the show punishes them so mercilessly (and they are so funny to watch), that we don’t come away thinking, “I hate these despicable people and never want to watch them again.” Actually, many viewers probably do feel that way, which limits these shows’ reach somewhat, but most fans of the show don’t actively hate the characters and respond to them as jerks. They more experience them as losers who get the crap kicked out of them, who desperately pursue selfish desires that never work out. If characters are always losing, and it’s hilarious to watch them lose, we can forgive a lot.
On the other end of the spectrum, in terms of “likability,” is a series like Downton Abbey—which found a way to get the audience to care about each member of a very large ensemble, by making them all pretty likable (though flawed). Downton had a couple of regular characters who would play a “bad guy” role at times, but even they got their humanity highlighted eventually, in stories of their own, which made the audience sympathize with what they were going through.
Somehow on this show, the audience consistently got why each of its huge cast of characters felt the way that they did and couldn’t dismiss nearly anyone as truly unredeemable or the source of all the problems. Rather, the problems came from the complicated situations and agendas that the various people carried, which inevitably led to personal conflicts—where the audience understood and could feel for multiple parties in different ways.
Most series work this way—presenting a variety of relatable people who can “get stories” in any given episode and then intertwining those stories, with each new installment starting from scratch with new “crises of the week” (which are often connected to bigger ongoing problems). “Bad guys” are less useful to a TV writer than complicated and interesting people who have some human problem and desire that will forever torment them and help audiences to connect with them.
“Relatable” Checklist
If your idea can live up to this five-point mission statement, it should be “relatable” enough:
The main character will be so easy to like—and/or be so entertainingly besieged with problems—that the audience sympathizes. (On TV, this applies to the main character of each story in each episode.)
The main character’s external life problems, in any story, are easy to identify with, on a primal, universal human level.
What they think, feel, and want will always be clear enough for the audience to share in their emotions and desires.
There will be a particular outcome of the story/episode that the audience will root for and feel something about.
If there’s an arc of change (which series typically don’t have), it’s about the main character growing out of a limited version of themselves—not going from selfish to unselfish.
4
ORIGINAL
The most marketable story ideas tend to contain some intriguing conceptual hook at the heart of their premise and/or in their approach to a particular genre. To this extent, they’re about something that we haven’t quite seen before. They add something new—or do things in a new way—which makes them stand out.
At the same time, they observe certain storytelling and genre conventions that are necessary for the audience to buy in and engage. When those conventions are completely ignored or discarded for the sake of originality, things tend to fall apart quickly. It’s a tricky balancing act, trying to figure out which “traditional” elements need to be there and which ones are fair game for innovation.
Some writers make originality their number one prio
rity, without understanding or observing the other foundational aspects to a viable story idea or their genre. In looking to be different, they throw out the baby with the bathwater and come up with ideas that might be unique but don’t have enough of these core qualities that are necessary to capture an audience.
One might assume newer writers would be more likely to copy what’s already out there, and not be especially fresh or unique. But it’s actually more common to see scripts from inexperienced writers fall short in the other six PROBLEM criteria—while focused on being “original.”
This may be because writers tend to tire of what they see as a boring sameness to what’s in the marketplace. They might decry all the sequels and other projects that seem to have gotten made because they were similar to something successful that came before. Creative people tend to want to push for something fresh, not see new variations on the same old thing. Critics—who have to watch everything and can become jaded by that—also tend to value originality extra highly. And both might decry what they see as too much “formula” out there.
This is an understandable impulse. But when something comes off as formulaic, it’s not because it stuck to certain guidelines and principles that have been proven to be essential. It’s because it did so in a way that seemed paint-by-numbers. In other words, the execution didn’t elevate the material to something that seemed brand-new. And maybe the writer was too slavish to whatever formulaic elements they were using, to the point where the seams really showed. Maybe their concept fulfilled a classic, proven genre of some kind, but did so in ways that felt overly familiar, without adding anything special to it.
That’s the key—creating something fresh and new, but within a somewhat familiar package—if the goal is to sell one’s work. Because industry buyers, writers’ representatives, and audiences don’t value “newness” quite as highly as writers or critics. They tend to respond better to stories of a type they’ve seen before, with one big new and intriguing thing added. They aren’t looking for writers to reinvent the wheel completely or to be different for the sake of being different.
It’s easy to create something that’s really “out-there” and doesn’t fulfill foundational storytelling criteria. What’s harder and more valued is to break fresh and intriguing ground within a tried-and-true genre, with a story that is not only “original” but also punishing, relatable, believable, life-altering, entertaining, and meaningful.
A Fresh Twist on the Familiar
Successful stories in any genre tend to give the audience the things they come to those genres for (action, comedy, romance, horror, etc.), but they do it in a way that seems original. So it helps to first study and understand the relevant genres and brainstorm ways to conceptually evolve from some of the best examples of it.
I once heard literary manager Victoria Wisdom give some great advice on this topic, which was this: build on successful movies in a genre, that you’d like to emulate, by adding or changing one key element of what has worked in the past. She used the example of how James Bond begat Jason Bourne (a spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy), and also Mr. & Mrs. Smith (about two spies who are married), which then led to Spy Kids (about two married spies whose kids become spies). Each was successful, and each was different enough from the others to feel like its own unique and special thing. And each observed the primary rules of the “spy movie” genre—and of story in general. The spies are on a mission with huge stakes and have a particular enemy they spend the whole movie fighting (in highly entertaining ways). They’re overmatched by this villain and only able to defeat them in the very end. There’s plenty of compelling action, and the audience emotionally bonds with the main character, and relates to and roots for them as they get punished on their way to an eventual breakthrough.
It helps to have a solid genre as a starting point—meaning a type of story that has worked many times for audiences. That way, a writer can build from a foundation that has certain PROBLEM elements inherent in it—which usually still need to be there in the new variation. In other words, if we think of the kinds of scenes and situations that tend to be in a successful spy movie (or whatever genre we’re working in), we know that a successful new variation will probably need those, too. It just will be delivering them in original ways.
What doesn’t work so well is when writers simply become test marketers who second-guess the audience and “what’s currently in demand,” and write only what they think will sell, or copy what’s been successful without bringing some spark of intriguing uniqueness to it. A piece of writing needs its creator to have passion for it, and really love it, for it to come alive for readers. One generally can’t create the next great and marketable anything if they don’t personally believe in it and bring something of themselves to it that’s fresh and new. The key is to mix one’s own personal passions and creative tastes with knowledge of—and willingness to learn and work within—the fundamentals of story and genre.
Once a writer learns how to do this, and commits to it, they start focusing on the kinds of stories and projects that actually do have a fighting chance in the marketplace, if done well. And that’s when the challenges of “originality” start to really become an issue. Because when we understand what makes an idea potentially sellable—and we focus only on generating ideas and writing stories that fit those criteria—we start to see that a lot of the things we come up with seem similar to things that have already been done. Meaning, they are not so original. The reason for this is that now we are eliminating 99 percent of what we might have tried to write about before we understood all this. It narrows the possibilities greatly.
This is a good thing, and a necessary step for a writer to get to, because it means they’re no longer someone who doesn’t truly understand story and genre and who can’t work within them effectively. But they may start to look around at other examples within a certain genre, and feel that there isn’t enough new territory for them. Every idea they come up with may seem too similar to examples of the genre in the past. After all, successful and capable writers have been racking their brains to come up with new variations on those same genres for decades. And now here they are, trying to do the same thing. That is where the real hard work of trying to be original within a viable framework begins.
I’ve witnessed this firsthand in the TV-development marketplace. Every year, the major networks will tell the big agencies (who tell their writer clients) what they are “looking for,” meaning what kinds of new show ideas they want to be pitched. Inevitably, on the one-hour-drama side, these “network needs” will include fresh and original examples of staples like the cop show, the medical show, and the legal show. These three genres have worked over and over on television, so they know they want more of them. But for an idea to go the distance, it has to carve out fresh territory that hasn’t quite been seen before.
Now, one might look at what’s on TV and say that there are a lot of similar cop shows. But if we ignore spin-offs and franchises, for a moment, and look only at original show ideas that were successful, they usually did something different from all shows that came before. Something about the cops, the unit, the cases, and/or how they work on them was fresh—even while the basic genre elements remained basically the same.
How many unique variations on a “cop show” can there be, in the end? Especially if we accept that the cases have to be really high stakes (like murders) and solved by the end of an episode? Well, that’s the question hungry TV writers ask themselves every year as they work to come up with ideas for their own new cop show, and try to sell them to the networks. Hundreds of new ideas are pitched, but only a handful will ever make it on the air. And this is from seasoned professional TV writers. It isn’t easy.
This same challenge holds true in every genre and medium where writers seek to tell stories. Inevitably, others have already taken what seems like every possible new idea for our genre, our topic, and our type of story. So, what are we going to do? Sometimes the answer could be to
blend two genres in a way that delivers the expectations of one or both of them really effectively, but in a new way. Consider “vampires” meets “teen romance” in Twilight. In other cases, it can be about finding some fresh type of challenge, liability, conflict, or difficulty that could add further complications to the main character’s situation. Since we’re always looking for more of those things, that’s a good place to start.
There’s Another Project Just Like Mine!
It’s almost inevitable that with anything we write, someone else has written or is writing something similar, in terms of concept, subject, and/or setting. There are only so many ideas and types of premises out there that can fit the criteria for a winning story, and only so many kinds of human experiences to base a story on, so it’s a common occurrence to find out that our piece isn’t as unique, special, fresh, and new as we might have hoped it was. (Even if it’s based on a specific true story.) And sometimes, other projects we hear about that are similar are much further along toward being produced and have much bigger names behind them.
It’s normal to despair in this situation and to feel that it renders all our hard work a waste. But that’s not usually true, and all is not lost. There are several reasons why this incredibly frequent state of affairs is not cause for panic:
Most movie and TV projects—even the ones that big-name writers are being paid to write—never get produced, or if they do, they don’t reach a large audience. The people we send our work to likely haven’t seen them or aren’t familiar with them. Even when news stories make it seem as though a competitive project is on the fast track toward success, there’s usually more to the story, and very often, nothing ever comes of them, or at least nothing significant.