TOOLKIT SANDBOX: Some Questions and Your Fave Writer
QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE
EXERCISE: My favorite writer.
CHAPTER 6
IDENTIFY YOUR GENRE’S QUINTESSENTIAL TEXT
36 Plots
The Quintessential Text
How to Find the Quintessential Text
An Abundance of Generational, Ethnic, and Subjective Differences
Room for Debate
Game Changers
Sifting and Winnowing
TOOLKIT SANDBOX: Twilight Isn’t the Only Game In
Town, Some Questions, and Disaster-Rama
CASE STUDY: Vampire literature and finding the
quintessential text.
QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE
EXERCISE: Disaster-rama.
CHAPTER 7
IDENTIFY THE TRAITS OF YOUR GENRE
AND HOW THEY RELATE TO YOUR STORY
How to Identify Traits
Traits That Morph Between Genres
Characters Have Traits Too
“Good” Traits and “Bad” Traits
“Good” Traits — The Scream Franchise
A Fan of Mad-Slasher movies
What Kevin Williamson Did
“Bad” Traits — The Cabin In The Woods Example
TOOLKIT SANDBOX: Non-Utopian Worlds, Some
Questions, and Fish-Out-Of-Water Stories
CASE STUDY: Know your traits in dystopian literature.
QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE
EXERCISE: Fish-out-of-water stories.
CHAPTER 8
IDENTIFY THE MASS PRODUCTION HISTORY OF YOUR GENRE
Run The History
Hybrid Genres
Manuscripts vs. Scripts
TOOLKIT SANDBOX: Steampunk’d, Some Questions, and Westerns, What a Great Combination
CASE STUDY: Steampunk’d.
QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE
EXERCISE: Go west.
CHAPTER 9
ANALYZE AUDIENCE REACTION — MASS OR CULT?
Mainstream or Cult
And Speaking of Lists
TOOLKIT SANDBOX: De Palma’s Obsession, Some Questions, and The Room
CASE STUDY: Brian De Palma and his obsession with Hitchcock.
QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE
EXERCISE: Inside The Room.
CHAPTER 10
TRENDS AND PATTERNS OF YOUR GENRE
Nobody Knows Anything
Spotting Trends
Copying Genre Traits
Two Ways To Go
TOOLKIT SANDBOX: Real Reality Tv, Some Questions,
and a Fun Lunch
CASE STUDY: Why Reality TV has been all the rage.
QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE
EXERCISE: My favorite writer.
CHAPTER 11
CHECKLISTING YOUR AUTHENTIC MATERIAL
Checking and Checking Again
The Writer’s Advantage Checklist
Your Checklist is Now Completed
What Would An Authentic Version of Your Text Look Like Within Your Genre? (The answer is your work.)
Don’t Hesitate, Own this Information with Confidence
SECTION THREE
GETTING YOUR WORK OUT INTO THE WORLD
CHAPTER 12
DEFENDING YOUR WORK
Some Basic Questions to Ponder
Become Your Own Private Development Department
Some Deeper Questions to Ponder
EXERCISE: Testing your idea until it is foolproof.
CHAPTER 13
WHAT MASTERING YOUR GENRE CAN DO FOR YOU
Like-minded Awareness
Altering
Put It On Hold
Tools You’ll Need To Sell Your Authentic Text(s)
Logline
Synopsis
Going Out
Pitch Fests and Conferences
Mastering Your Genre
EXERCISE: Write your logline and synopsis.
CHAPTER 14
WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU GOT?
Players vs. Pikers
Don’t Be A Tease
Authentic Writing
What Now?
No Fear of Success
EXERCISE: Keep writing.
A FEW LAST WORDS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR146
This book is dedicated to my holy trinity of mentors:
Dr. James T. Tiedge, Norma Herron, and Delle Chatman.
And also to Syd Field, everyone’s first screenplay mentor.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kathie Fong Yoneda has believed in this book since its inception and I thank her for sharing the proposal with Ken Lee and Michael Wiese and for believing in me and my work. How refreshing it was that Ken understood the basic essence of my idea and soon he and Michael gave me a green light to move forward. I am honored to be a part of the family.
So many amazing individuals have provided their support and I have been blessed with their grace and assistance during the writing of this book. I thank the great, wise sage Christopher Vogler — without you all writers aspiring to tell their stories would be lost, including myself. You have been a guiding light for me for more than two decades. Ellen Nordberg, a true friend, I thank you for showing up in my class at U-of-C in the mid-‘90s and never — not even for a second — failing to be one of my life’s spiritual advisors ever since. Judy Molland, you have always been there for me and most especially when we were in DC — gracias and merci! Josie Brown, you inspire me daily as you are truly the hardest working author I know, and Dale Kushner, thank you for your ultramarine sparks — how would I have ever lived without them?
Christine DeSmet, thank you for the always beautiful goddess sunbeams, and thanks Laura Kahl, you know so well how to be a swan — I’m still learning how to master that one.
To Brad Schrieber, thank you. I am honored to call you friend. Film pixie Killian Heilsberg, thank you, we only children rock! Gregory Johnson, my soulmate, I love you, thank you, and Wayne Christensen and Nikko for the use of The Fort and for your love — it is wonderful, it sure is, it sure is.
I am appreciative of the folks who believe in me year after year and who have let me share this material with students and conference attendees. Most especially my thanks to Melissa Houghton and Jane Barbara of WIFV DC. Your support means so much. Additionally, thanks to Kristin Oakley and her In Print Writers’ Group, you gave me great feedback and incentive to continue onward. Also eternal thanks to the attendees of my Write By The Lake Retreat session, Summer 2013, I treasure your support and my precious copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
To my mother and father, thank you for your love and for teaching me the practical factors of life and for letting me watch all the television I ever wanted to.
And finally, hugs and smiles (in that order) to Eric Martinot for your integrity, timing, and continuous support the second time around. Thanks for making sure we achieved our New Years’ Intentions.
And thank you to my students — past, present, and future — who continue to teach me so much more than I could have ever imagined.
Laurie Scheer
December, 2013
FOREWORD
by
Christopher Vogler
I like a book that agrees with me. I like it when the author says what I believe, only in better words and with more convincing evidence. I also like a book that tells me things I didn’t know, or that identifies patterns I hadn’t fully understood before. The Writer’s Advantage does both. In its pages I found confirmation of things I’ve observed and suspected about the way entertainment is made, and I also found lucid explanations of what is
happening in the rapidly changing media universe. In fact, I really had little idea what that universe, currently called “transmedia,” might actually be. Now I think I do, thanks to the author’s clarity and depth of informed knowledge on the subject. Further, the author’s intention is to provide you with practical techniques for avoiding the current plague of repetitive, predictable, bombastic, and mindlessly overproduced sequels and remakes. She can even guide you beyond that, to create something totally new for a totally new storytelling environment.
This book has changed my consciousness about the present moment in the history of story-based entertainment. I was aware something was different. Who could fail to notice that stories in conventional Hollywood movies and network television have become more derivative and unwilling to take risks, while entertainment made for cable and many new outlets seems fresher and more authentic? However, the author pinpoints the exact moment in time when that began to happen, using a technique of analysis very similar to my own, which is to look at culture trends with an awareness of chronology and context. In other words, examine the evolution of an idea, a literary property, a story technique or a genre year by year, tracing that development from its earliest beginnings, and closely observing how it altered because of audience reactions and everything else that was going on in the ever-changing jet stream of culture. Know the field you are studying in depth, taking into account all the other developments in the surrounding field of entertainment and society. She offers this approach, part of “The Writer’s Advantage,” as a practical tool for making your work an exciting and novel expansion of worn-out genres, or perhaps even for creating entirely new forms of entertainment.
The author is a seasoned observer of the story development machinery, and correctly points out its flaws and weaknesses. One of these is what she calls a “fanboy” tendency in screenwriters, directors, and story executives. Too often, those controlling media these days were raised upon works of recent years that were already derivative of literature and movies of the past. Fanboys and fangirls create works that are purposely derivative, based on superficial knowledge and understanding of the genres in which they dare to tread. When I was a development executive, I used to call these lazy-minded professionals “skimmers” and “magpies.” They loved to dabble in genres, or loot and pillage from classic works of literature and cinema to create slapdash remakes, but like magpies they were attracted only to the shiniest and most superficial aspects of the genres and works, ignoring or completely missing the glowing radioactive essence of those beloved forms. All they could bring to the classic designs was greater volume, more extreme violence or outrageous episodes, cruder language, hokier and more unrealistic behavior. And often they seemed to deliberately stomp on the true hearts of these genres, subverting them or belittling the very things that made them charming and magical in the first place. Fortunately, the author offers realistic remedies for this fanboy tendency, by urging writers to develop much deeper and broader understanding of the genres in which they hope to make a contribution.
In these pages I read with approval the author’s critique of what has been called “Chaos Cinema,” movies in which there is a high proportion of visually confusing destruction and violence, typically the entire last quarter or third of the experience. As the author says it, “Unintelligible sensory overload abides in this arena.” The signal-to-noise ratio is set so that there is a lot of noise and very little signal; i.e., very little emotional content or advancement of the grand design of the story. So often these days the actual story seems to stop, parked on a siding somewhere, while the filmmakers indulge themselves in an orgy of flying metal, in which what little dialogue there may be is impossible to understand, and I am not entirely sure if what just spun across the screen is the torn-off wheel of a machine or the hero’s severed head. To me the unintelligibility is a great crime against the economy and clarity of cinema. I stand here with Lord Raglan, the English aristocrat who wrote a definitive study of heroes in legend and folklore. One of his rules was: “Everything that is said and done upon the stage must be intelligible to the audience.”
While using rational tools of analysis, the author never loses sight of a quality she calls “wonderment,” an essential element in her view for creating unique new expressions in modern media. Too often in place of true wonderment we find an effort to overwhelm the viewer with digitally-rendered eye candy, with special effects that are no longer special. Simple magic is sometimes the best. Little illusions performed right on the stage, or the small enchantment of an actor creating a word picture or an emotional breakthrough, can still outweigh the impact of an 89-million-dollar post-production budget.
Among the many gems of wisdom found here, gleaned from a career of close observation and hard-won experience, is the author’s insistence that it’s a long game, writing for media and working with genres. Sometimes, when you get rejected because your idea seems untimely, it’s just because you’re ahead of your time. Projects don’t always find their ideal moment in history right away, and may need to be stored away somewhere, carefully, until the time-waves of the zeitgeist coincide to make that project feel fresh and new or simply perfect for that moment in the culture. I can attest that many times I’ve seen story concepts shouted down or laughed out of the room because they seemed hopelessly out-of-date, only to find them returning a decade or so later as if they had just been minted to answer a need of the moment. Of course, like old fashions hanging in your closet, they may have to be re-tailored a bit or reconceived to emphasize the qualities that have been missing from the media environment.
One of the author’s most useful contributions may be pinpointing the effect she calls “fragmentation” — the breaking up of audiences and means of delivering the story experience. Where not so long ago there were a few media outlets dispensing movies, TV shows, and books to a general audience at regular intervals, there is now a shattered landscape in which increasingly balkanized shards of audience consume fragments of entertainment almost randomly. She sees this as a challenge and an opportunity, rather than as a problem, and encourages genre writers to assume a position of mastery, knowing their chosen field of storytelling in great depth and breadth, understanding its history and evolution in view of chronology and context. Instead of getting lost in the web of random connections, she counsels genre writers to remember the tools that have always served storytellers well — linear thinking as well as awareness of cycles and webs, careful analysis as well as fanboy enthusiasm, and genuine understanding of the essential heart that beats in every genre. She points to a high road for genre-loving writers, in which they can not only participate in the forms they admire, but also make fresh contributions that no one has ever imagined, and even spin out completely new genres and styles that others will have the fun of exploring and expanding one day. Enter her world with a sense of wonderment, and you will be rewarded.
Christopher Vogler is author of The Writer’s Journey, co-author of Memo From the Story Department, and a former Fox development executive.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
Following in the tradition of Syd Field’s Screenplay books and A Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Advantage: A Toolkit for Mastering Your Genre is the next step for every type of writer. From time to time, writers need a contemporaneous manual to assist them with developing and writing their material and — just as important — preparing that material for the marketplace. Just as Syd Field provided the bare bones information needed to write an effective script in the late ‘70s, and as Christopher Vogler outlined mythic structure as a way for writers to organize their storylines and characters in the mid-’90s, this book assists writers traverse the 21st century transmedia universe — a marketplace that includes all platforms: print, theatrical distribution, broadcast and cable networks, web channels and websites (including internet radio and podcasts). You’ll learn about the tools you’ll need to navigate through the waters of creating authentic and
competitive ideas, avoiding plagiarism, and assuring that your ideas find an audience in this complicated and vast fluctuating marketplace — all giving you what I call “The Writer’s Advantage.”
THE BOOK’S REASON FOR BEING
We have arrived at a time when mass media is not so “mass” any longer. With so many ways to access and enjoy information and entertainment, the multitasking consumer only has time to comprehend a fraction of a text. It is rare that we consume a book or movie or television series in its entirety, and if we do we are usually marathon reading or binge watching texts. This leads to a great deal of miscommunication among consumers who may say “Yeah, sure, I know the show Mad Men” within a conversation, but they may have only watched it once or twice. Or, “I saw the latest Iron Man movie,” however, during the movie, they texted with their about-to-be-ex-girlfriend throughout the second half of the film, meanwhile losing elements of the storyline overall. We now exist in a culture of missed opportunities due to distractions, multitasking, and the convenience of advancing technology. Awareness of this is important because consumers are confused and overloaded — they think they may know of a text from popular culture, but they probably know very little about that text, and writers dangerously set out to write within their genre having only a fraction of the knowledge of that genre before and while they are writing their work. Writers then go out into the world naively selling mediocre and non-authentic material. In addition, those who choose material to be published and produced (development department execs, editors, producers) are also following along these lines and the result is what we currently see on the best-selling lists, at the box office, and on TV, and that is a preponderance of sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots. Where are the original ideas?
What we have is a group of writers and publishing/entertainment execs who are mere followers. We need innovative writers who arm themselves with information, know complete texts within their genre, and eventually find their own voice and their own authentic texts. We need story innovators.
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