The Idea

by Erik Bork

  When in doubt, stick with what actual people would do in that situation. This is how characters start to feel real to the audience. (It also makes it easier for actors to believably play them.) Don’t go first for the comedy, or the spectacle, or the action, or the coolness. In this sense, being entertaining takes a back seat to being believable and relatable. Hopefully the basic premise, characters, and situations fit an identifiable genre that has elements that will prove entertaining. That way it’s safe to start with what is “grounded”—meaning what’s real.

  When a writer sends me a logline or short query/synopsis for a script they’ve been working on, I often have believability questions that get in the way. They have characters making decisions and taking actions that don’t seem to make complete sense from the character’s point of view, given their situation. In the rush to come up with an idea that intrigues and entertains, that meets a certain genre, and that sounds fresh and original, writers can take shortcuts, where they don’t really ask themselves, “Would this character really do what I have them doing here, when faced with this situation?” If the answer is anything less than “I can totally see them doing it,” there is probably more work to be done. Professional readers will always ask that question. They might not ask it consciously, but as soon as characters start behaving in ways that don’t meet this test, it will become an issue.

  When coming up with an idea, one has to really think through the perspectives of all the key characters, and make sure they’re all operating in ways that are easy to “buy.” This means exploring each character at some depth and asking, “What might they do in this situation? What would make them do this? How do their situation and desires push them into this? What do they think is going to happen when they do this? How do they believe doing this would serve their goals?”

  This can be especially important with “villain” characters. Not every type of story has to have one main antagonist, but whoever provides strong difficulties for the main character needs motivations for their actions that make sense to the audience. Whether the oppositional force is more of an institution or a government or a creature, whoever is making the key decisions will ideally be driven by something that the audience can relate to and buy into, even if they don’t agree with the decisions and want the villain to lose. Even if the villain is motivated by greed, sadism, lust for power, etc., their actions still have to make logical sense on a human level.

  God and the Devil Are in the Details

  In going for “realness,” we’re not just trying to meet a minimum level, one where audiences think what’s going on seems plausible enough. One of the keys to writing something that gets noticed, and can advance a career, is to achieve a level of detailed specific realness that wows people as authentic and original, because the writer seems to understand their people, settings, and activities, and can bring that to life vividly and memorably on the page. When achieved in tandem with the other PROBLEM elements, this extraordinary level of realness can make a script stand out in a big way.

  This means we’re looking for the detail, especially in terms of character and behavior. God is in the details, right? They also say the devil is in the details. Because it’s not easy to create people that seem so specific and real. It’s much easier to write characters who are vague types, pawns of the author who only exist to go through certain actions in the face of created story challenges.

  Part of the writer’s role is to look for the interesting details that are not what one might expect, and which, because they’re unexpected, actually feel more real, somehow. In real life, people aren’t vague types. They are bundles of contradictions. They can be sympathetic and loathsome, loving and sadistic, vulnerable and cool. So should characters be. This is what makes them feel “three-dimensional,” instead of “one-dimensional,” a term often used to critique characters.

  Is there room for one-dimensional characters in some roles, in some genres? Perhaps. Not every character has to be treated with such complexity and depth. But for the most important characters, a story feels much richer, more interesting, and more real when the audience is able to see the complicated humanity within them and relate on some level to it—even though the character, on their surface, might be very different from them.

  Forced to Coexist

  Television series operate under the same constraints as other story forms, in terms of everything needing to seem “real.” No matter how “out-there” the central situation seems to be (with zombies, aliens, vampires, or other fantasy elements), a good show is ultimately about relatable people dealing with the situation in ways that make sense and are easy to buy into.

  And the same principles apply in terms of overall series concept. One can generally get away with a single fantastical leap in a premise, but only if it’s clearly explained and easy to understand and accept—at the very beginning of the pilot (and the beginning of the writer’s pitch for the series). Convoluted concepts with no familiar elements are usually the writer’s enemy. The goal is to get people buying in quickly so they can relax into engaging with the characters and story problems, which are going to stem from whatever singular difficult situation the series is based on.

  There’s another area where “believability” comes up in television. Because series are about a web of characters in conflict, and certain problematic circumstances they all share, the characters need a believable, organic reason why they will be constantly in one another’s lives, and be affected by the same things, indefinitely.

  This might seem like an obvious point, but series ideas struggle when they don’t have a mechanism for this that makes logical sense. If the series regulars all work together in the same location, or are in the same family, or live together (or close to one another), or are close friends who get together constantly, then they have such a reason.

  But what if they don’t?

  Ideas that aren’t about coworkers, family, neighbors, and/or friends can have a hard time making sure that the characters are continually interacting and dealing with the same set of problems. And a show can easily fragment into what seems like separate shows about separate people with their own separate lives who rarely interact with one another. And this usually doesn’t work so well.

  Writers occasionally pitch shows about a group of people who aren’t really going to be constantly in scenes together—like a show set in a certain industry, in a certain city, where nobody works in the same exact place together. They might have some common experiences, but if they aren’t friends, family, neighbors, or working in the same room together a lot, how will the scenes and stories feature this ensemble as a cohesive unit?

  Even if the characters all live in the same building, if they don’t share common spaces and aren’t super close friends who choose to be together, they’re not forced to coexist (and deal with the conflicts inherent in that), the way TV characters usually are. This is one of the reasons why it’s hard to make shows work when they’re set at a college or university. College students have much more freedom of movement and separation from other people, compared with high school students—who are trapped both in school every day with the same people and in a home with their families. There’s only one cafeteria where everyone eats lunch, and one dinner table at home. For teenagers, there’s no escape. Which is great for drama (or comedy).

  If the series regulars aren’t forced by their situations to be in physical proximity, on a very regular basis, for believable reasons, it’s hard to really have a show. Most series consist almost entirely of regulars interacting and dealing with conflicts. Even on procedural dramas, where the problem is “the case,” and not the other characters, they are usually together almost constantly.

  On a show set predominantly at a workplace (or other place characters must go to every day), the main source of conflict tends to be that these very different people are forced to be together and deal with one another. The dramatic or comedic focus is on conflict-laden relationships that are battled over ther
e. Similarly, a show about a family tends to focus on conflicts within the family. So, the central premise tends to believably put the characters in one another’s constant company for the foreseeable future.

  This need for togetherness and interpersonal scenes accounts for the “wacky neighbor,” which is a staple of comedy series—where neighbors seem to come over much more frequently than in real life. Or the group of friends who are always together and hanging out in a group and never seem to be working their jobs or having separate/alone time.

  Even some shows set at a single workplace can struggle with this issue, because in many workplaces, employees aren’t constantly in proximity. Take a department store, for instance. It could be hard to set a show there if the employees’ jobs would not put them in one another’s presence on a regular basis. (A mall would be even more scattered.) That’s why small offices work so well—where people’s desks are literally right next to one another. A contained setting tends to lead to the kind of interpersonal conflict scenes that television thrives on, more than a sprawling one, where characters have lots of freedom to be physically separate and little reason to be forced to interact.

  Freedom is not something we generally want to give our characters. Hemming them in with challenges makes for more compelling television, in general—even in terms of how they can’t escape the other people on the show, much as they might like to at times.

  “Believable” Checklist

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

  When people read or hear my logline/synopsis, they understand all of it, and have no trouble buying into any of it.

  It’s focused on believable human beings whose attributes, decisions, and actions seem real, given the situation.

  The backstory and “rules of the world” are clear and simple, easy to grasp, and explained at the very beginning.

  Everyone’s motivations for what they’re doing are clear, make sense, and are relatable on a human level.

  The main entertaining “hook” of my premise, while grabby and intriguing, also feels like it could really happen.

  6

  LIFE-ALTERING

  “What are the stakes?”

  This is one of the first questions a professional reader asks about any story idea as they consider it—whether out loud or in their head. What they’re really trying to assess is, “Why should an audience care?” Because they know that audiences have a hard time getting emotionally invested in a story unless it’s clear that something really big is at risk, which they can easily feel something about. As writers, if we don’t have the audience’s emotional investment, we don’t have anything. They will stop reading and will not feel positive about what they read. We have to hook them into caring, really caring about what’s going on.

  If we have a relatable main character who we’re punishing in a believable and original way, we’re on the right track, but an audience might still be lukewarm if what the character is trying to achieve doesn’t matter enough. There has to be a point to all of this—a reason why this journey is worth taking. That means an eventual outcome that is at risk and that represents a tremendous swing between life being great and life being terrible for the main character, and possibly others in the story who the audience comes to care about. If that’s not clearly there, in the idea, and in the first act, it’s hard to get people to willingly devote their time and energy to what we’ve written.

  Sometimes high enough stakes are obvious, like when lives are at risk. But in many story ideas, it’s not clear how things will be incredibly, unacceptably worse if the story goal isn’t reached—and perhaps far better if it is. I say “perhaps,” because the potential negative stakes tend to be the most compelling and important. When there’s a lot to lose, there’s a lot for the audience to empathize with. (A character who could be killed is in a more compelling situation than a character who could win a lot of money, for instance.) But most successful stories combine positive and negative stakes, meaning that there is a possibility for things to get much worse than they are, but in a happy ending, not only has that been avoided, but things are actually now better than ever.

  Stories across all genres are often about massively life-changing situations—once-in-a-lifetime battles where everything is on the line. This is true in terms of both the external stakes—the basic life situations that will be altered, one way or another—and the internal ones, which are how the main character feels about life and themselves, and the attitudes they will take with them, moving forward. In the best stories, life is usually “altered” in both these dimensions.

  But the external comes first—especially on-screen, where delving inside the main character’s thoughts is harder to do. What’s going to initially grab the audience (and the professional reader) is the level of importance of reaching the story goal in their “external” living situation, relationships, and overall prospects for a decent, healthy, happy life—for the main character, and/or others who they heroically fight on behalf of.

  Usually what’s at stake has something to do with interpersonal relationships and conflicts within them. There’s a great gap between what the main character wants from other people and what they’re currently getting. They need other people to change how they view and act toward them for life to truly be better. Isn’t that how most of our lives are? Most of what we consider problems are really a result of the world of other people not treating us in the exact way we want to be treated, whether it’s in terms of money and career, intimate relationships, popularity, etc.

  Even in movies where a magical situation creates all the story problems, as in The Nutty Professor or Field of Dreams, the challenges that ensue almost inevitably play out in the arena of interpersonal relationships.

  Internal Stakes Are Not Enough

  While it’s true that certain novels and stage plays might focus more on a character’s internal world as the place where all the conflict and stakes are, in more commercial fiction or theater (and in all works for the screen), it’s characters’ outer-life situations that have to be primarily at stake. There may well be meaningful internal changes and growth, but what really gets the audience invested (and the industry gatekeepers interested) are the external stakes. That’s what our logline, synopsis, and pitch should focus on: “What is the external problem and challenge that needs resolution here?” The internal arc can be implied or briefly mentioned, but first and foremost, one needs to present massive external stakes. Think of which of these you’d rather read and watch, based on the following two loglines:

  A clown fish who is overly protective of his son must learn to let go and trust him as he sends him out into the big scary world of growing up in the ocean.

  When a clown fish’s son is taken by a man on a fishing boat, the father embarks on an adventure through the ocean—with few clues—to try to find him. Meanwhile, the son tries to plot escape from the dental office aquarium he’s found himself in—which looks like a death sentence.

  Finding Nemo is about both these things—the inner journey of father and son on the subject of the son’s independence and the father’s letting go—and the outer journey of trying to find and save the son. But it’s the outer journey that is exciting and draws people in. The inner journey just gives it depth. When we’re pitching an idea, what gives it depth is not primarily what appeals to people. They want to know what makes it an entertaining story challenge in terms of external stakes and actions. And that’s true when they’re reading the script, as well. Depth is great, but first we need external stakes.

  Life-and-Death Stakes

  The biggest kind of stakes are obviously “life-and-death.” If lives are clearly threatened (or have been taken), then the writer’s job becomes easier. No one can say the stakes aren’t big enough if people are dying or about to die. Perhaps that’s why so many successful stories employ life-and-death stakes. Some writers and filmmakers only do projects where life is at stake.
Look at Quentin Tarantino. Or any crime novelist or TV cop show creator. Life is at stake in virtually all stories about war, space adventures, major crimes/heists, natural disasters, “one man under siege,” superheroes, monsters, and everything in the thriller, horror, and/or action genres.

  I would say roughly half of the produced/published stories out there have lives threatened and/or taken as the main problem of the story and the primary thing that the main character is trying to stop, prevent, or get justice for. If we take comedies out of the equation (which virtually never have life-and-death stakes), it would probably be significantly more than half. And there’s a good reason for this: it’s not easy to hook millions of strangers to really caring about a story. If people they connect with could die, or are trying to save lives or stop a killer, it’s easier to get them to care.

  The greater number of characters who are actively threatened, the greater the stakes—so if all of humanity could die, then we’re pretty much at the top of the mountain, stakes-wise. But even a story about a single individual fighting for their life has exponentially higher stakes than a movie where life isn’t at risk. I would caution, though, that “fighting for one’s life” stories require the main character to be actively battling against opposing forces in an entertaining way, and with some hope of winning, however small. Fighting diseases or other medical maladies doesn’t tend to offer these possibilities—unless the focus is on a heroic doctor, and not the patient. If the main character or a loved one is simply dying, and there’s not really much they can do about it, then we’ve got the opposite of entertaining. We’ve got “bleak.” Audiences don’t tend to want to watch “bleak.”