Story Line

by Jennifer Grisanti

  Do you have stories like this? Have your parents told you what you were like when you were a baby? Does this match or conflict with who you are now? If you look at pictures from your past, do attributes like your physical fitness give you clues to how you were feeling at the moment that the picture was taken? I encourage you to go into these moments. A writer’s gold is his/her well of truth. Analyzing your journey and the steps and missteps you experienced along the way will give you a stronger sense of your well.

  After taking a look at your photo albums, think about all the firsts that you’ve experienced. Think about your first day of school. How did you feel when your parents left? Think about the first time you were able to ride a bike or go skiing or ice skating. Think about the emotions behind those moments. Think about the first time you had a crush. Did your crush return your feelings? Think about the first time you got a grade that made your parents proud. Think about the first time someone told you they loved you. It is these moments that we draw story from. Putting these into log lines is how we organize these moments in our life.

  Once you think of a bunch of pivotal life moments, start the organization process. Begin to think of the formula “who, dilemma, action, and goal.” Then, apply this to your own story. If it is easier for you to do this with total truth at first, do it with total truth. Then, begin to think about how you can add fiction. Consider past scripts or novels that you’ve written. With this new awareness of your own story, can you go back into your writing and strengthen it? Chances are you’ll find that your truth can elevate your fiction. It is knowing how to organize it and when to bring it out that is key.

  Fictionalizing your story makes the real difference. Autobiographical story often doesn’t work because you are too close to the story to structure it properly. Good structure usually diverts from the truthful sequence of events. This is why the best thing you can do is to write the emotions behind your stories and figure out how these emotions and “ah ha” moments can apply to your fictionalized story.

  If you work on organizing your true story lines into log line format and adding fiction to them, it will help you structure log lines for your fictionalized stories and see the flaws in the log lines from your past scripts. You will begin to see a pattern. In seeing this pattern, you will unravel what is and what is not working in your story. In my experience, one of the most important elements of telling strong story is the setup of your central character’s goal. We will go into this more in a later chapter, but just be aware that by constructing your log lines, you will begin to figure out how to set up strong goals stemming from dilemmas for your central character. You will also identify stronger goals/dilemmas in your own life and realize how these are great starting points for your personal life log lines.

  EXERCISE

  Go through several photo albums. Write a log line for the pictures that have a strong emotional effect. You can fictionalize it so that it can either reflect the truth of how you felt in the moment or it can be the mask of how you wanted to feel in the moment. Either way, it will reveal a part of your story. It will begin the building of your well.

  During this process of looking back at your life, come up with five to ten log lines that reflect different moments in your life, add fiction, and see what happens. You may find that you suddenly have five or ten new scripts to write.

  After writing log lines from your perspective in the pictures, write log lines from the perspective of the other people in the photos. What was going on in their lives at the time the photo was taken? What part did or do they play in your story?

  Chapter Four

  IDENTIFYING YOUR UNIVERSAL LIFE MOMENTS

  Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

  ~ Sholem Asch

  By now, you have a stronger understanding of what universal life moments are. They are pivotal moments in your life when there was a shift in your reality or how you view the world. Universal life moments can also be very positive moments: the moment that you find out you’ve been accepted into the college of your choice, the moment that you meet the person of your dreams and you feel a mutual connection, the moment that you give birth and you now have a whole new meaning of love to explore, the moment you help in a way that brings about a massive change in another person’s life, the moment you learn something new or prove to yourself that you can do something that you never thought you could do. Your universal life moments can span every emotion in the book. At the core, they basically represent a shift. Often, universal moments are strong starting points/catalysts for your story, and the journey is the unraveling of what you thought was going to happen versus what did. The journey and the obstacles begin after the first shift in your story, then, they take off again in Act III in feature scripts and your second to last act in television scripts when you hit the universal life moment caused by whether your central character achieved his/ her goal or dilemma. If the goal was achieved, what does this look like? If not, what does that look like? They both represent a shift in reality from where your story started.

  Up in the Air uses many universal life moments. The theme starts when Ryan, the central character, equates being in the air to being at home for him. He says, “Moving is living….” This starts to give us a sense of how he sees the world. There are three major starting points for the story: 1) The moment that his boss tells him to get back to Omaha because there’s something big going on that’s going to be a game changer; 2) The moment his sister calls to remind him that their sister Julie’s wedding is three weeks away, and 3) the moment that he meets his love interest, Alex (Vera Farmiga). All three moments create a shift from him living his life the way that he had been, and all three will be explored and intertwined throughout the story.

  Look at these moments and think about your own life. Ryan’s boss, Craig (Jason Bateman), calls to tell him that there’s going to be a game changer. Think about the number of times you’ve been called into your boss’s office, or even go back further, to when you got called to the principal or teacher’s office. How did you feel, not knowing what the news would be, and anticipating either the worst or the best? Most of us hate change. Change is scary. So, dive into the moments in your life when you knew or anticipated that change was coming and think about how this made you feel. Then, apply the truth behind these experiences to the story in your script. Your audience will reap the rewards of connecting with your character because the situation was based on your personal truth.

  The second shift in Up in the Air is when Ryan’s sister, Kara (Amy Morton) calls and reminds him that their sister Julie’s (Melanie Lynskey) wedding is three weeks away. It is clear from the dialogue that Ryan is not big on doing for others, yet here is a situation where he will have to do something that he is clearly uncomfortable doing. Think about all the obligations that you’ve had in your life when you were forced to confront something about yourself. You have to show up to an event but you really don’t want to be there and then, very often, once you get there, you like it a lot more than you thought you would or it turns out to be exactly what you thought it would be. Celebrations have an interesting emotional effect on people. It’s great that the person having the event is having a big moment in their life and moving forward, but it may stir up emotions related to similar personal life moments for those attending the celebration. Go into these times in your life and see if you have some story there. These moments are filled with possibility that you can transfer by fictionalizing them into your writing.

  Lastly, Ryan meets Alex. This is a great universal moment and a great shift. Ryan is attached to his philosophy, living life with an “empty backpack,” and here comes someone that threatens this philosophy. She is a person who could cause him to grow and change his ways. Think about the times when someone new entered your life and posed a threat to your lifestyle at the time. If you’ve been single for a long time, the idea of embarking upon a relationship can be a truly frightening, yet exhilarating, adventure. Think of all the romantic
comedies that stem from truth and made you laugh out loud because you felt like the storyteller understood your pain.

  The worth of identifying your moments is not just in identifying the actual moment but in thinking about everything that led up to your moment of true identification or shift in reality. In the previous chapter, I described how one of my life identifying moments occurred when my conception of marriage changed. In hindsight, I think about how so many of us romanticize marriage. We want what marriage is as it exists in the movies and on television. We forget that many of us grew up with a mom and a dad who were married. We see what the picture is. However, we think ours will be different. We see what works and what didn’t work about our parents’ marriage and we make up our own version of what we believe will work for us. Only, our version is often closer to what we see in movies versus what we see in reality. So, the picture that I was holding onto for dear life and measuring my success in relationships against wasn’t actually a complete picture. It was a picture that I constructed in my mind the way that I wanted to see it. In my universal experience in that moment, I had to wake up to the reality that marriage isn’t what I romanticized it to be. I had to shed my attachment to the fairy tale and define a new “happily ever after” that is a realistic expectation of what could be.

  When you look at the shifts in your life, think back to how they started. The start of my universal life moment was the day that I met my husband. Little did I know then that this was the beginning of a major journey and a life turning point for me. On our very first date, he shared with me the good, the bad, and the ugly of his whole life story. His mom had him at an incredibly young age and she raised him by herself. She was married several times. We talked for hours. By the end of the date, I remember feeling a dilemma. Should I run because his upbringing was just too different from my background or should I embrace the experience because he had the courage to bare all and say, “This is who I am, take it or leave it”? I remember thinking on that date that the friction caused by our very different pasts will be what manifests itself in our relationship and ultimately be the reason that it doesn’t work out. However, being young and in love, I was totally blind to all that was right in front of me. My desire to experience love outweighed my logic. I chose not to listen to my trusty gut and instead took a rocky path towards this crazy emotion that I had heard so much about, but up until this point, never truly encountered. I was jumping off a cliff, but this wouldn’t be the first cliff I jumped off of in my life.

  Along the way, there were so many other pivotal moments leading up to the final universal culmination: The first time we told each other we loved one another. The way we used to talk about our dreams like they were so reachable and so attainable and how together we could make anything happen. The first time we made love and, for the first time in my life, it felt totally right, like there was a soul connection. The first time we moved in together. The first time we fought and I recognized that there was nowhere to run.

  At first, I felt suffocated. Then, I felt like learning to confront what was in front of me was helping me to evolve and grow. It felt good to know that I could get past these challenges and that we could eventually feel even more intimate than we did before. I was hooked. All these moments led to what would be my awakening. I needed to travel through all of them. It was part of my journey. I wouldn’t trade any of it because it made me who I am. With divorce, we often put the brunt of the blame on our ex. As for me, I recognize that my own illusions and expectations contributed to the ending of my marriage. I take you through this to show you how looking at what led up to your universal life moments will add depth to what you gain from them. This will help you with your character journeys. How do we get from one point to another? The answers are in the road maps of our own lives and our own experiences.

  Up in the Air started on what appeared to be a more positive universal life moment that then unraveled through the journey. It is a strong journey full of obstacles and twists. Many strong features and television shows start on universal life moments/catalysts that are not happy, in fact they are the opposite. They often involve tremendous loss or devastating news that forces the central character not only to shift, but to have to immediately take action in moving past the moment.

  In the movie The Hurt Locker, the story essentially begins after J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) loses his leader, who he was supposed to protect. He must deal with this loss. It is this shift that causes all the drama when a new leader, Will James, arrives and he is hell bent on doing things his way and breaking all of the rules. Since he’s been through one loss already, this challenges Sanborn’s ability to do his job and it really gets the movie off to a great start. We feel empathy for Sanborn and we recognize that the journey of these two men will be a strong one because the way they approach their jobs is so fundamentally different. This is a starting moment that leads up to a phenomenal moment when Sanborn asks Will why he does it. Why does he take such huge risks when he has a wife and a child? This is a beautiful scene and it forces Will to think about his answer. This leads to one of the strongest sequences in story that I’ve seen in a long time. Will goes home to confront his truth. We see him with his wife and his son in a grocery store. His wife asks him to get a box of cereal. Will goes to the cereal aisle and looks at the dozens of choices. In this moment, so much is communicated without the use of a single word. He is lost and isolated in this side of his life. He doesn’t know how to fit in here. This comes to a climax when he tells his baby son, “The older you get, the fewer things you really love. When you get to my age, you only love one or two things…. I think it’s one.”

  Cut to: Will returns to the hazardous task of disarming bombs. In this powerful universal moment, Will chooses his love for the adrenaline rush over his family. His true love is his job.

  This is universal. Starting with the cereal aisle, think about the moments in your life when you’ve felt isolated and completely disconnected from your reality. What were these moments? What was the journey leading up to the recognition that made you feel like an outsider? Workaholics can relate with choosing work over family. For so many of us, work is the easy part. It is the emotional world that makes us feel like strangers and like we don’t know how to fit in. If you can parlay this truth into the stories you tell, you will connect your audience on a deeper level. As for the moment that Sanborn poses the question to Will, “Why do you do it?” Have you ever had someone ask you why you chose a destructive path you were on? Why are you continually choosing to do things that bring you pain? Go into these moments and learn to bring them into the stories you tell.

  In Avatar, at the beginning, we learn that the central character, Jake Sully, wakes up at a military hospital. He is paralyzed from the waist down. We learn that Jake has a recently deceased twin brother—Tom, a scientist—who was to be part of a prestigious program overseen by corporate and military strategists. Because Jake and his brother are a close genetic match, he’s presented with a unique opportunity: take over his brother’s contract with the corporate military entity and travel light years away to an outpost on the planet Pandora. On making the long trek, Jake experiences what it is to have the use of his legs again through his own Avatar, which is an alter-self—a genetically bred human-Navi hybrid. It is wish fulfillment at its best, because through this opportunity, he gets to regain the freedom he lost. This is a universal life moment and one that really gets the story off to a beautiful start. What if you could go back in time and change things? Or, better yet, what if you could move forward in time and leave the past behind you as a distant memory?

  Have you ever been in an accident? Have you ever broken a bone or been paralyzed? Try to remember what it felt like. When I was ten years old, I fell from a 40-foot tree and landed on my head. My heart stopped for three minutes. My younger sister, Maureen, saw the whole thing happen. She was my first hero. She pounded on the window for my brother to get my father, who was on the phone. At her young age, she knew enough
not to leave me. My brother, my second hero, was able to get my father, who is a doctor and was on a call with a patient, off the phone. My father gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and saved my life before the paramedics and firemen arrived. He was my ultimate hero. I was in a coma for three hours, had a concussion and was paralyzed on my right side for three weeks. They didn’t know if I would regain the use of my right side. So, I had to learn to use my left side. I remember sitting in this reality. I wished I could turn back the clock. How did this happen? I had no memory of the fall. It was like my brain was protecting me from the truth. I remembered climbing the tree. It was all I remembered. I remember waking up at the hospital and feeling the whole room come to life. I remember the shift this caused in my life, as I knew it. My mother was in New York with her father who was dying. When she learned of my accident, she was forced into a very big life decision: Do I leave my dying father and go to my child, knowing that while I am in the air for five hours I could lose both of them? All of this started with me choosing to climb a 40-foot tree to prove to a guy on my brother’s baseball team that I could climb a tree higher than he could. Do you have any of these moments? I encourage you to go into them.

  In television, Breaking Bad starts on a very dark moment. We see the central character, Walt, in a moment that gets out of hand from the beginning. Drugs are involved and he almost loses his life. We have no idea what all of this means until we travel back into the story and see everything that led up to this moment. We learn that the universal life moment that Walt experienced was the diagnosis that he has terminal lung cancer. He has a short time to live. He is a chemistry teacher. He has a wife and a handicapped teenage son. In this moment, he is forced to look at his own mortality and figure out what he can do to ensure that he leaves his wife and child with a way to support themselves. Since he knows chemistry, he figures out a solution and hooks up with a drug dealer, Jesse, and the two of them begin making and distributing meth. The irony in the concept is that he is doing it for the betterment of his family. This is a very universal theme. We can all connect with the idea of what it feels like to be backed against a wall. We make choices that may serve for the betterment on one side but for the detriment on the other side.