by Erik Bork
Many one-hour dramas feature this kind of story “franchise.” It’s an endlessly repeatable way to generate stories—they walk in the door, so to speak, as this week’s problem or case. Series that don’t have a procedural story generator have to rely on the personal lives of their series regulars for all the conflict and problems. In these shows (which include all comedies and perhaps half the dramas on television), the central problem, goal, and stakes of an episodic story typically matter only to its main character. They’re usually not heroic, and it’s not about workplace success. They’re personal.
Writers often decide to create shows set at some other kind of workplace and make the story challenges about “work stuff.” They might reason that there have been successful shows about all sorts of other professions: Ad agency executives. High school football coaches. Sketch-comedy-show writer-producers. Certainly, the challenges of working at these occupations have been the foundation for successful television series. Right?
On the surface, it might seem that way. But there’s a key difference. The stories on episodes of these shows don’t focus primarily on job-related assignments and difficulties, unless they lead to engaging challenges in the characters’ personal lives. The audience isn’t meant to be invested in the characters simply succeeding in a work task over the course of the episode the way they would with doctors, lawyers, cops, or starship captains. The stakes just aren’t high enough, and the process of doing most jobs isn’t entertaining to watch (or sympathetic), in the same way that the “heroic” jobs are.
Nobody wants to watch scene after scene of Don Draper on Mad Men wrestling with an ad campaign as the episode’s “A Story”—with the climax of the episode being the campaign’s success. The same is true about Liz Lemon creating an episode of TGS, a fictional SNL analogue on 30 Rock. The minutiae of their work, and its goals, are not why we watch. It’s about the characters and their personal life challenges. We are invested in the characters personally, and we care about the high stakes they face in their own lives. And so, their “workplace challenges” are merely a backdrop that serves to generate conflicts and problems that will affect these characters on a personal level. But there’s no heroic mission to invest in. What the audience cares about instead are these individuals’ frustrations in their personal lives, their fantasies of what they wish their lives could be, the challenges of trying to get them there, and the high-stakes personal crises and conflicts that come up in the process.
“Original” Checklist
If your idea can live up to this five-point mission statement, it should be “original” enough:
My story/series honors the foundational principles of a viable genre but adds something intriguingly brand-new.
The central problematic situation (and my logline) has an easily understandable “hook” that strongly intrigues.
There’s something within it I am passionate about, that is uniquely me in some way, that will come through as part of my “voice.”
There is enough that is different about the concept compared with other similar well-known projects.
My key characters are specific and one of a kind in intriguing ways that elevate the story beyond the familiar.
5
BELIEVABLE
Stories are generally about exaggerated situations—not normal life, with all its boring “realness.” Even in the most grounded of genres, we need to find something that will entertain the audience and get them strongly emotionally invested. This requires “punishing” characters who are “relatable” in some “original” way that is “life-altering,” “entertaining” to watch, and “meaningful.”
In our quest to do those things, we step into a minefield in which, at every turn, we’re tempted to write something that isn’t really believable.
“Audiences will go with us,” we assure ourselves. I mean, after all, they’ve accepted “body-switch” movies and people breaking into song in the middle of scenes, as well as countless variations of zombies, aliens, and/or vampires. Clearly, they’re willing to suspend disbelief and accept whatever we throw at them, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
Yes, it’s possible to get the audience to take a leap at the beginning of a movie. Usually they’ll only willingly take one such leap, and it has to be clearly set up and offered to them in such a way that they go, “Okay, this Zoltar machine is magical, and it turned this kid into an adult Tom Hanks,” or, “The world these characters know is really a computer-generated matrix created by machines who use people as batteries,” or, “Wizards are real, and there’s a school for them.” If it’s carefully set up and explained through some reasonable-seeming mechanism in the first 10–15 percent of the narrative, then there’s a chance they’ll accept it.
But from that point on, the writer’s job is to explore the situation in the most believable way possible. In other words, characters should do and say things that most people would do or say in that situation if they were them. Everything that happens should be understandable and make sense, in a grounded, real-life way, according to the character agendas and situational challenges that have been laid out. Yes, there may be something (usually only one major thing) that’s big and outrageous and different from most people’s normal lives, but beyond that, it should all feel real.
One of the most common reasons readers don’t want to continue with a script—or don’t want to read it after seeing a brief synopsis—is that something about what’s happening doesn’t feel real. They don’t believe people would do or say what this piece of writing is making them do or say. Or they just don’t “get” the concept and buy into it based on the writer’s explanation of it (or maybe the writer didn’t provide enough of an explanation, which is also a common occurrence).
The point of creating an outrageous situation to put relatable characters in is to then explore what real people would do in that situation. That’s what the audience connects with. If the way everything works doesn’t make total sense to them—or if the things people do don’t come across as real, understandable, and believable—then they quickly, and often permanently, check out. They may not even be conscious of the reason. All they know is they’re not invested.
On the other hand, the more real, specific, and understandable things are—and the more people behave in completely believable ways, given the situation and what they want—the more fascinated audiences tend to get. That’s especially true if all the other PROBLEM elements are also in place.
Zombies, Aliens, and Vampires
When a story proposes something fantastical and different from our normal world, it really helps if it’s connected to something audiences have seen and accepted before and that has a place in popular culture already. That’s why there are so many variations on zombie, alien, and vampire stories. (And a few other fantasy tropes.) It’s much easier to present a fresh variation on one of these tropes than to try to get an audience to understand and buy into some completely made-up and brand-new world of beings that have just been created for this project. It’s really tough to get across one’s own brand of fantastical creature or situation that isn’t already understood by audiences due to their lack of past exposure to it. While it might seem like the story would earn points for originality, what tends to happen is readers thinking, “I don’t buy it.” Or even worse: “I don’t understand.”
Readers have to understand what’s going on before they can even decide whether it’s believable or compelling. And “I don’t understand” is a very common response to scripts, especially when they deal with elaborate fantasy or science fiction premises, or otherworldly supernatural creatures and realms. And it makes for what might be the single most unpleasant experience a reader can have: being confused.
Never Confuse
“Don’t bore them” might be the cardinal rule of any dramatic writing, but “don’t confuse them” is equally important, because when we confuse people as a writer, they start to get angry with us. If they don�
�t get what’s going on (especially when we combine that with them not really buying into things as real), they will put down the script in a hurry. Or if they’re forced to read on, they will do so with irritation.
This happens often—and not just with fantasy concepts. Screenwriters often confuse readers when they neglect to convey necessary information, because they’re so concerned with not writing blatantly expositional dialogue—the kind where people woodenly and unbelievably speak information to one another that everyone already knows, because the audience needs to know it. Most writers learn early on to avoid that like the plague. But what some do is err in the opposite direction, and have their characters talk about people and situations that the audience doesn’t know enough about to be able to follow what’s going on, making them feel like they’re on the outside looking in. This tends to alienate readers just as much.
Somehow screenwriters have to walk the difficult tightrope of telling the audience everything they need to know—so they can process and understand what’s happening and being discussed—without being obvious about it. This is why simple story concepts tend to work better than complicated ones—because there is only so much information a writer can download to a reader in an effective fashion and have the reader absorb and accept it all and be compelled to follow what’s happening.
This is true even when “exposition” is handled in the ideal way, which involves “showing” instead of “telling.” What this means is that if we want an audience to understand any facts about a character or situation in our story, we have to do it within compelling dramatic (or comedic) scenes, where that information becomes obvious to the reader because of what’s happening in the scene—not from someone speaking it in dialogue.
Simple example: We want the audience to know two people are married. We don’t have anyone say that in dialogue. We show the two in a situation that makes it clear that they’re married—living in the same house, sleeping together, interacting with their shared kids, etc. (Or even actually getting married.) We can never take for granted that the audience will just understand even such simple things. We can’t just describe a character as another character’s husband in description—because the viewing audience doesn’t get to read the description. (And the description should be only what the audience would see and understand from what they’re seeing.) If the audience needs to know it, we have to lead them by the hand and explicitly illustrate all of it.
It’s helpful, then, to limit the number of facts the audience needs to understand. If every fact requires some scene or moment that demonstrates that fact to the audience, it can add up to a lot of beats that are hard to string together dramatically and make compelling. So, if our idea has a lot of complicated backstory that the audience needs to understand, early in the script, in order to comprehend what’s going on, we may need to simplify the concept.
This issue can really cause difficulty for some writers who are especially interested in elaborate fantastical world building, perhaps more so than connecting with the audience on an emotional level. “World building” only works when the information readers have to understand to enjoy the story is fairly simple and clear, and the story works on a primal, emotional, human level, first and foremost.
How Is the World Different from Ours?
Whenever a story is set in a world where something is not the same as the world we all live in now, it’s important to define all the dissimilar elements quickly, at the beginning. (This also applies to the beginning of any pitch, logline, or query.) When someone hears or reads a story idea and sees that it has some fantastical elements to it—or is set in the future or anywhere different from “Earth in the present” as we know it—they tend to want to know, right away, exactly what these differences are. They must feel that they “get” the world and its rules before they’re able to process anything else.
Successful stories usually make it their first priority to answer any potential questions and define all the “rules” right out of the gate. By “rules” I mean the ways things work in this different world, including any special beings or powers and what the limitations and parameters of those are. The rules must be quickly put into a form that anyone can understand and accept and not have a million questions about (or have trouble buying into completely) so that they can enjoy the story that follows.
Writers of such stories sometimes become so used to the elements they made up that they take them for granted and don’t realize how much explanation is necessary for the rest of us to buy in. Ideally these elements would be fairly simple, clear, and easy to understand and believe. Some writers have a tendency to create complicated, convoluted, and hard-to-understand situations and fail to explicitly clarify up top how everything works. To them, all that they have created is easy to get, even self-evident—but to the reader it can seem beyond comprehension.
Sometimes writers try to parcel out information over the course of a script, not realizing how important it is for the audience to fully grasp everything that’s different about the story’s world at the beginning in order to have any hope of emotionally connecting with it. If they don’t understand the rules, and who is in this world, and what they want, and what’s in the way, and how it all works—and how it contrasts with our world—they usually can’t find a way “in,” where they relate to the characters and what’s happening on a human level.
And that’s ultimately the goal. The audience enjoys watching relatable human beings, behaving in relatable ways while faced with a punishing challenge. They aren’t inherently interested in the fantastical world itself—at least, the majority of them aren’t—and neither are producers, agents, publishers, etc. They’re interested in how the fantastical elements impact people who are basically a lot like us, and how these elements create goals and difficulties that anyone can relate to. So the best scenarios center on a relatively simple and easy-to-understand situation (even if it’s fantastical) explained quickly so that we can then get into the important part—the story.
The general rule is that we get one, and only one, big buy-in from the audience, in terms of the story taking place in a world different from ours in some way. Maybe the zombie apocalypse has happened. Or aliens have come to Earth. Or there are vampires in our high schools. The audience can accept that one fantastical thing as long as we make it clearly understandable. But after that, everything else that happens has to involve people behaving the way real people would behave in that situation. It’s great to put relatable people in extraordinary circumstances, but then they have to say and do things that a real person would say or do, from that point forward.
But lest you think all this only applies to writers of science fiction, fantasy, and the like, the same principles hold true in every genre, including the most grounded dramas and comedies.
Almost every successful story’s “hook”—which is meant to inspire readers to want to escape into watching or reading it—has something in it that could be hard to buy if it’s not handled carefully. It’s important that we understand what that might be, in our story and basic concept, and that we work to make sure that the average person can buy it. Because that’s ultimately our audience—the average person, whom we hope to make feel something with our work.
Going for “the Real”
Beyond just being understandable, we want to make sure that all the elements of our premise really add up, in the audience’s mind, so that they can say, “Yes, I can see all that happening. I can understand why these characters would do what you’re saying they do, given their situation. I get how what’s going on could happen, and how it could present the kind of challenge you’re describing.” Earning that acceptance on the part of readers tends to be tougher than it looks.
For instance, in the world of comedy, it’s funny when things are exaggerated beyond what’s normal and reasonable, usually in terms of human behavior, emotions, and characteristics. Take any episode of Will & Grace or 30 Rock. The characters tend to embody exaggerations of certai
n qualities; and their situations, desires, and ways of acting and speaking tend to be, well, funnier than average, in a consistent way. But the people still feel real, in terms of what’s driving them and their behavior. Exaggerated, but still real.
But what happens when you’re watching a comedy and people do or say things that you don’t really believe any real person in that situation would ever do or say? You don’t laugh. Not only do you not laugh, you might start to get upset with the writer for trying to manipulate you into laughing with such blatant unreality. It might start to make you check out of what you’re watching. This is what we call “over-the-top”—when something just feels too unbelievable. The best comedy is grounded in relatable human behavior. Yes, the situations and characters are somewhat exaggerated, but only somewhat. Ultimately, they behave the way you and I might, faced with the situation they’re in, if we were them.
When plotting out the idea for a story (or specific scenes), it’s always a good practice to check in with each character and make sure everything they’re doing comes from a “real” place. Where are they at, at this present moment? What do they want? What’s in the way? What do they feel? What do they want to do? What would happen if they tried to do it? Ideally everything people do and say stems from believable answers to these questions.