The Calling Card Script
Page 17
statement of clarity and coherence:
Does the story work?
Is it the one you wanted to tell?
Would someone else who doesn’t have access to your brain get it?
Does it hang together as a coherent whole?
Does it have the right form and shape?
Is the tone unified?
Are you trying to do too much in your story?
Is it focused enough?
Does it feel original?
What is it that is distinctive about it?
Does it have strong characters and strength of character?
Is it what you wanted it to be?
THE BEGINNING 115
Don’t sidestep these questions. Try to resolve the apparent problems now
before you weave yourself a tapestry that will prove impossible to unpick
and stitch back together again in a different pattern. There will always be
things that can, do and will change, things you get wrong, things you don’t
notice, things you change your mind about – that is true for all writers. But
if at this stage you do know there’s something major and crucial that doesn’t
click, then don’t plough on hoping it will sort itself out. It won’t. Only you
can sort it out. And that will be harder when you are already well and truly
into an actual draft of the script.
BUILDING A BLUEPRINT
A section of spare wall. Scene cards. Colour-coded Post-it notes. Diagrams.
Maps. PowerPoint presentation. Spreadsheet graph. Use whatever works
best for you. Set your blueprint down in a malleable, movable, editable form.
This is not final, definitive or right. It is adaptable, fluid, plastic. It’s a
road map that should set you in the right direction and will hopefully help
you when you get stuck. Don’t be tempted to keep holding it all in your head
in a supreme effort of memorisation and information juggling. When infor -
mation and material is broken down into separate parts, it means you can
move it around and see whether another shape works better.
The point of these blueprints, maps, charts, whatever you want to call
them, is that they allow you to see the foundations clearly before the form
that builds on them clouds your view of what the story fundamen tally is
and whether it works. Detail is a devil. Begin to set down the big picture
clearly before the devil starts trying to distract you from your purpose.
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3
The Middle
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THE MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE
Philip Larkin once said that the joy of stories is in losing yourself in the
‘muddle in the middle’. He was describing great novels but his notion is a
truism for all stories. This doesn’t mean all your work and effort should be
concentrated in the middle. In this book, I advocate spending a dispropor -
tionate amount of time to the beginning of story and process because it’s
where everything that will subsequently unravel is set on course towards
that muddling. But the middle is no less crucial, and it is certainly no easier
to get right. In fact, I’d say the middle is where a great many stories and
scripts unravel – in the wrong way.
MANAGING THE MUDDLE
The muddle is a double-edged sword. Your characters and audience must in
an engaging, dramatic way get lost in the middle. But in order to do that
effectively, you, the writer, must be in control of the muddle, knotting every
strand, engineering hazards and hurdles in the way, leading characters
towards the quicksand that threatens to suck them in.
If the writer gets lost, audience and character will be lost for all the
wrong reasons – because of incoherence and chaos, lack of clarity, lack of
direction and purpose. Be careful you don’t mistake muddling the char ac-
ters’ journeys with losing your own way with the story.
A frequent complaint about the second act of a story – the middle – is
that it sags, loses a sense of direction, gets complicated rather than com -
plex, fails to follow through strands and creates new ones out of a loss as to
what to do next – that it fails to take us meaningfully from beginning to end.
The point about losing the way is that ‘the way’ is ultimately found
again – whether that means a tragic outcome, a comic one, or something in
between the two. ‘The way’ is not necessarily happiness and resolution –
rather, it is the ending that the characters inevitably had to reach as a
consequence of their desires, needs, actions, decisions through the story.
120 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
MUDDLED METAPHORS
It’s good to have a metaphor or image or idea of what your middle is, means,
looks like, feels like:
The beginning and the end are the foothills – the middle is the
mountain to climb.
The beginning and the end are the winding path into and out of the
trees – the middle is the increasingly dense, dark, foreboding and
tangled forest through which it struggles to wend its way.
The middle is a hole – the characters must dig deeper and deeper.
The middle is a state of becoming – between two different states of
being at the beginning and at the end.
One reason why many middles sag and many writers lose their way is
because the mountain/forest/hole is not of the character’s own volition and
doing but a contrived hurdle they are traversing without a strong enough
sense of consequence or causality from their actions at the beginning.
In the middle, the plot thickens – the story of the beginning becomes
more complex, more intriguing, more mysterious, more exciting, more terri -
fying, more entertaining, more necessary.
FAIL BETTER
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
This is a quote from one of Samuel Beckett’s last works, Worstward Ho, one
of the most enigmatic expressions of the avante-garde existential ism for
which he is so famous.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
If ever there were a mantra for your characters to pursue in the middle,
then perhaps this is it. But there is also perhaps an alternative, even more
tragic version of this:
Try again. Fail again. Fail worse.
‘Try again’ is the basic way forward in the muddle that is the middle. The
characters must try. They are bound at some points to fail. And whether
they ultimately fail better or fail worse is a consequence of what they do as
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they keep trying again, and again, and again. You need this propulsion and
momentum and dynamic. The momentum may take your characters into
deep, dark pits from which it appears they may never escape but in the
middle it is the trying that matters. The ending will show whether the result
of that trial is a concluding failure or success – or something in between.
DIG DEEPER
In the middle, you must dig deeper into the conflict, the characters, and the
complexity of both. You don’t want more of the same – you want what we have
already seen to grow, change and deepen. Many writers panic and create new
strands, new plotlines, bring in new characters. They comp
licate the story.
Complication means overcrowding the picture with unnecessary material,
ideas, plots, subplots, details. Complexity means giving the existing picture
more depth, texture, layering – more meaning. It means develop ing the
consequences of what we have already seen, not generating swathes of new
ideas and directions that are not con sequential from what we have seen.
STRETCH THE LINE
You also need to develop the tension – stretch the line tauter and tighter.
Whatever it is your characters want and need, the likelihood of them
achiev ing this must seem less and less, and must be harder and harder to
achieve. The trying must become more and more intense.
The greater the danger, the greater the tension, the greater the muddle.
‘Danger’ doesn’t necessarily mean that in a thriller or tragedy or war film.
If your story is a romantic comedy, the danger must still be there – will he/
she get their girl/boy? When you’re in love, this is no throwaway ques tion –
it is the epicentre of everything you feel. The danger is that characters will
not get what they want or need. The tension is in not know ing what the
outcome of their trying will be. The longer and tighter you stretch that line
of not know ing, the more captivating the middle will be.
DOMINOES
The thing about the muddle in the middle is that it isn’t just a big swamp
into which you just dump your characters after the beginning. It will come
122 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
about in increments, the line will stretch one notch at a time, the hole will
get deeper one spadeful at a time. Each increment will have a causal,
cumulative effect going forward. Each domino will knock forward and the
line will fall one by one inevitably towards the end. And if you miss out any
crucial dominoes, then the run will stop, the momentum will stall – and the
final pattern of collapsed dominoes will not unfold before our eyes.
The muddle is something that you must orchestrate with meticulous
care, and yet will seem as chaotic as possible for the characters caught up
in the middle of it. There will be false starts, short-lived successes, and un -
expected failures along the way – but there will be a sense of inevitability
in where they and we end up.
The muddle is fraught with contradiction. The muddle will be diffi cult.
The only option is to face up to this difficulty, not to avoid it, complicate it
or seek to circumvent it. Without the difficulty, there is no journey. Without
the difficulty, there is no story.
DEEPER INTO CHARACTER
THE ‘ARC’
Great characters are not simply in what you create at the outset, but in
where they go, where you take them, the way they develop and grow, the
journey they go on. Characters that go nowhere aren’t worth spending time
with.
Through over-use, perhaps, ‘arc’ feels more like simplistic jargon than
a useful term. If it feels too ‘Hollywood’ for you, then replace it with ‘jour -
ney’. But both ‘arc’ and ‘journey’ can throw writers because they presume it
means an exerting physical journey or a story spanning a significant length
of time – both of which are mainstays of dramatic storytelling. Yet journeys
can be as much emotional, psychological, religious, social, political, and so on.
Story is not just who characters are but who they become and remain
once they have undergone a journey that tests who they are, what they want,
what they need, what they feel, what they understand, what they believe.
An arc can span a lifetime at one extreme or run in pure real time at
the other. In actuality, most character arcs are somewhere between the two.
It’s difficult to select those necessary parts that represent an entire lifetime,
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and trying to do too much rarely works – Citizen Kane is an extremely un -
usual achievement. It’s also difficult to take a character on a meaningful
journey in real time because you necessarily push the bounds of how much
they can realistically, convincingly, meaningfully change in a very short
space of time – Abigail’s Party is likewise a rarity.
The clearer you are about the timescale and span of your character
journeys, the better. Whatever you choose, make a virtue of it. Each instal -
ment of the Harry Potter saga represents a year in the school life of Harry.
The whole series takes him through school from childhood to young adult -
hood. The arc in each ‘episode’ and the arc across all episodes are both
crystal clear.
CHANGE
Great stories dramatise times of change for a character. That’s why we see
some things and not others. Some aspiring writers nobly set out to ‘tell it
like it is’ and mistake realism (the interesting and extraordinary reality of
a life) with tedium (the uninteresting and ordinary realities of an exist -
ence). Audiences don’t want to see basic, boring existence – they want to see
life. Some simply focus on the wrong parts of the life – the bits in which
meaningful change doesn’t really happen. Great characters never stay utterly
and exactly the same. Even if at the end they are a more or less extreme
version of themselves, that still means change – that still means a journey.
I once confidently said as much in a room full of aspiring writers and
the reply that came back was ‘What about Schmidt?’ It was a good reply,
because About Schmidt is a story in which the anti(ish)-hero doesn’t seem
to go on any great arc or journey of change. I use the word ‘seem’ carefully –
because there is change. Schmidt certainly doesn’t undergo a fundamental
transformation of personality. But strong characters rarely do. Change is
relative. For Schmidt, deciding to pee standing up – despite being trained
by his recently deceased wife to do otherwise – is change. The anger he feels
at uncovering his wife’s affair with his old friend is change. The decision to
set off in the Winnebago by himself, even though it was really his wife’s
dream, is change. Deciding not to say what he really thinks to a room full
of people, microphone in hand, at his disappointment-of-a-daughter’s wed -
ding is change. The changes are not earth shattering. But they are Schmidt’s.
Because the story is about Schmidt.
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STATE OF BECOMING
Everyone is born and everyone dies. Whatever we may believe about what
that signifies or what (if anything) might happen next, it’s a fundamental
truth. It is the states and stages of becoming between the two that con -
stitutes the story of everyone’s life.
Great stories aren’t just about the outcome. We usually know some -
where deep down how the story will turn out, especially if we know what
the genre is (a romcom in which they don’t get it together is not really a
romcom; a tragedy without the death of the hero is not really a tragedy).
Great endings are crucial, necessary, inevitable. But what we love about the
muddle in the middle is how the characters get there – what road they take,
whether real or metaphorical, and how lost th
ey become in order to get
where they need to end up. Whether it’s a single heroic tale or twenty-five
years’ worth of strands and episodes for Ian Beale in EastEnders, both are
states of becoming.
MUDDIED WANTS AND NEEDS
In the beginning there should be an identifiable set of wants and needs in
your characters. If they remain simply the same, unchanging, then they run
the risk of stalling, of not developing and growing and becoming more inter -
esting and engaging the more we see of them.
At the beginning of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is perhaps not the
most complex of characters. He wants excitement, escape, purpose, and he
also needs all three – though he is perhaps as wary as he is desirous of them.
But as the story develops in the middle, his wants and needs change. He
needs to save Leia but he doesn’t know how. He wants to be the Jedi he is
destined to be as fast as possible but he needs to be as patient as he is ambi -
tious. He wants to be the hero, but he needs to think as well as act. He
wants to grow up instantly but needs to learn through a wealth and depth
of experience, which he cannot do overnight. He wants strength but he
needs faith and control in order to gain it.
When Obi-Wan Kenobi dies, Luke instinctively wants instant revenge,
but he needs to accept his mentor’s act of sacrifice (which is also a major step
in his maturity, patience, control) and channel his emotions for the ultimate
revenge against the Death Star. And at the climax he wants and needs to
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use the ‘force’ rather than rely on a computer guidance system to fire the
killer missile, but he also needs the help of the swaggering pirate Han Solo
who has so often frustrated Luke’s pure, simple, heroic aims, beliefs and
perspective with realism, pragmatism, sarcasm, cynicism and at times pure
selfishness.
The point is that Luke pursues each of these wants and so brings