The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  and so easy to get wrong; the middle can define whether we come away

  from a story feeling that it was either surprising or predictable. A great

  beginning and a sensational ending will not to make up for tedious, long,

  unfocused middles that lose their way.

  TEDIUM

  Tedium is one of the deadly sins of storytelling. To paraphrase the TV

  writer Tony Jordan, audiences would rather have an hour of surprising,

  interesting mess than ten seconds of boredom. Avoiding tedium is about

  doing all the things well that I have described thus far. It is not about

  throwing car chases, explosions, fist-fights, melodramatic revelations or

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  gruesome shocks at the audience. That is mere sensation. Sensationalism

  too becomes tedious when it has no meaningful reason to be in the story.

  You can’t avoid tedium by chucking CGI at it and hoping it will go away

  quietly. It won’t. It will continue to scream its blandness loudly and mono -

  tonously. Don’t make your story ‘exciting’ as a desperate plot measure.

  Make it exciting in every element and everything you do in putting to gether

  your world and characters and story. And keep a very sharp eye on it in the

  middle, because it is here where tedium tends to creep up and set in.

  CLICHÉ

  Cliché is a bit easier to get to grips with. If you have already seen an ele -

  ment – character, scene, idea, dialogue, whatever – before more than twice

  (and you are not making a parody) then you know it’s an unwanted cliché

  and you know you need to do something about it. Unless, that is, you want

  to lull the audience into a false sense of security only to surprise them by

  the radical thing you then do with the cliché. This kind of coup de grâce is

  not easy, but if you think you can do it well, then do it. But not for the sake

  of it. It’s a dangerous game to deliberately tread a path between cliché and

  surprise without it being intrinsic to your idea.

  In Joe Orton’s brilliant play What the Butler Saw, what you see is

  essentially a classic bedroom farce replete with every cliché, but with each

  one turned into something altogether stranger, more interestingly histri -

  onic, more unsettling, more deviant in the transposition to a psychiatric

  hospital. Subverting the cliché is what the play is all about. But you must

  be on top of your game to take this kind of path. As the theatre, radio and

  TV writer Sarah Daniels suggests:

  ‘The two things I always tell would-be scriptwriters to beware of are

  overwriting and clichés.’

  STRUCTURE AND THE MIDDLE

  So you’ve probably worked out by now that (in my view) structure isn’t

  something you simply apply to character or fit story into. Meaningful and

  effective structure is not divisible or separable from character journey and

  THE MIDDLE 147

  story; it is generated by character and by the kind of story you have chosen

  to tell.

  Again, there is no universal formula that will always work to get you

  out of trouble, apart from the most basic one: a beginning, middle and end

  that are inextricably bound together. But for the structural middle, the

  sense of muddle, character development, failing better, digging deeper,

  stages of becoming and the importance of surprise should guide you in the

  right direction.

  One thing you must do, though – you must make sure your middle has

  some kind of structure that suits the story, because aimlessness and shape -

  lessness will make it grind slowly to a disappointing halt. And as in the

  beginning, there are structural functions that you expect to see in all good

  middles, whatever their precise order in the genre of your story.

  THE DIVIDING LINES

  Unless you are writing a TV episode with prescribed ad breaks that pre -

  cisely demarcate chunks of story, then you shouldn’t be rigid about where

  exactly the three ‘act’ divisions fall and where the lines are drawn. You can

  have such defined divisions and lines, but you don’t need them. Remember

  those basic principles of drawing you did in art lessons at school? There is

  no single outline that defines a shape as set against a background or

  against other shapes – it is the dimensions, contours, contrasts and colours

  of the shape itself that define it. I think it is fundamentally the same with

  dramatic structure.

  What is the case with the structural middle of good stories is that it’s

  the difficult (and often big) part that takes character from beginning to end.

  Be it a two-act stage play, a 45-minute radio drama, a 90-minute film or a

  60-minute TV episode, the middle is a potential quagmire of story develop -

  ment. Keeping it an interesting muddle rather than an ill-defined mess is

  the challenge you face. And allocating specific page numbers to act divi -

  sions in a scriptwriting program will not solve the problem for you, no

  matter what some Hollywood movie scriptwriting manuals tell you. But

  knowing what the story is unfolding towards will guide you in the right

  direction.

  In the pilot of Life on Mars, the shift between the beginning and the

  middle is strictly demarcated – Sam is hit by a car, he has a brief out-of-

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  body interlude, and then he wakes up in 1973. But this is not for the sake

  of drawing dividing lines but of marking the shift between the present and

  the past – which only happens again at the end of the whole show. No other

  episode of the coming two seasons is structured in the same way.

  In Hamlet, we could argue for eternity about where the dividing line,

  if any, falls. You might say the moment when Hamlet makes his vow to the

  ghost. But depending on what your ‘take’ on Hamlet is (and there have been

  a multitude, whether in terms of theatre production, film adaptation or

  academic study), it could fall in any number of places – and it wouldn’t

  necessarily change what happens and the story of what happens.

  MOMENTUM

  The ending is the possible light at the end of the tunnel that your story is

  driving towards. If you don’t know where you are going, then the middle

  just can’t work. The beginning and middle don’t exist in the vague hope of

  finding an ending. They make the ending happen, and that’s what gives

  them momentum. It’s the writer’s job to make the story go somewhere, not

  to wait for that somewhere hopefully to turn up along the way.

  It is for a very good reason that structure in the middle goes wrong

  when it feels like it has no momentum and isn’t going somewhere. You don’t

  have to state that ending clearly until the end – but it needs to exist all the

  way through the middle, just as it did in the beginning.

  Look at any really great dramatic work whatever the medium. If it’s

  great, then the journey from beginning to end will exist in the middle, no

  matter how hidden or warped or deceptive or complex that might seem to

  be. Road movies can be a great example of this. The middle is often where

  by virtue of the genre – a physical journey into the unknown – the char -

  acters necessarily get lost in some
way or other.

  Heartland. Butterfly Kiss. Badlands. Wild at Heart. Priscilla Queen of

  the Desert. Easy Rider. Little Miss Sunshine. The ending of each is inevit -

  able both despite and because of the chaos of the muddle – it is there all the

  way through the trials and tribulations and temptations and perils of the

  middle.

  THE MIDDLE 149

  DOMINOES

  The stronger your ending is (in terms of dramatic inevitability) the easier

  it will be to set up character actions which, like a line of carefully placed

  dominoes, knock consequentially into the next situation and action. As your

  characters push forward, so will their actions have consequences and the

  story have momentum. So look again at what your characters want and

  need at the start, then make their changing wants and needs impact each

  action as they pursue and follow them. This is the only way to make it all

  really work.

  Stories and middles sag when there isn’t really a dramatic reason why

  characters do the things they do. Stories and middles sag when characters

  drift forward without a sense of purpose or urge. Again, they don’t need to

  know clearly and transparently where their urge is taking them, but the

  urge needs to be there. The dominoes must fall for the pattern to emerge –

  they must hit one another continuously rather than fall over randomly.

  In drama, things don’t just happen after one another, they happen as

  a consequence of one another. If the dominoes are set right, then once the

  first one goes there is no stopping them until they reach the end. This is

  what you want your story to feel like throughout the middle to the end.

  PEAKS AND TROUGHS

  Dramatic dominoes are not simply about flat lines of consequential momen -

  tum. The point about consequences is not that they just happen ad infinitum,

  but that they rise and fall in peaks and troughs towards climaxes and lulls

  – towards dramatic intensities and pauses in the action. If you keep the

  levels of tension and intensity in the action on one linear flat line, then

  what you get is sameness. What you get is the dramatic equivalent to the

  intense beeping of the hospital heart monitor that indicates the heart is

  in shock. Or the regular beep indicating everything is fine. Or the mono -

  tonous drone that indicates the patient is dead. Whether it is all peak

  (action sequences), all trough (abject misery) or somewhere in between (the

  dull plod of ordinariness), the effect is the same – a flat-line line with no

  variation.

  This can be a real problem in the middle of scripts. The momentum

  shouldn’t simply be linear like this:

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  ACTION CONSEQUENCE ACTION CONSEQUENCE ACTION OUTCOME

  Rather, it might feel something a little more akin to this:

  Each trough is the starting point of events that work towards the climax

  of the peak. But the whole middle won’t be just be one wave, it will be a

  series of connected waves. Each wave is a sequence – or a movement, as in

  musical concertos (‘movement’ is a telling term in that it denotes momen -

  tum, journey, propulsion). So you need to break down the long stretch of the

  middle into more manageable movements or sequences of story. Each wave

  is a stage of the character journey and story. And each wave should

  consequentially follows the previous one, even if the gap between them is a

  year, ten years, a century or whole eras of time.

  There are always apparent exceptions to this apparent ‘rule’. You might

  say that the Bourne films are a relentless series of escalating events that

  never let up. But look hard enough and you will find the moments of pause,

  lull – trough. Or you might say The Station Agent develops in an extra ordi-

  narily measured, quiet, slow manner. But look hard enough and you will

  see the peaks in the waves. At both extremes of genre – action thril ler and

  character drama – the scale of the wave is defined by precisely that genre.

  In Bourne, the waves are massive and noisy and frantic. In The Station

  Agent, the distance between the peak and trough seems much smaller in

  the quietly drawn world of the story and its not-very-demon strative hero.

  Yet on a deeper emotional level, the peaks and troughs are ultimately just

  as high and deep and intense; raher they just show themselves in less

  histrionic ways.

  The great thing about the wave as a way of thinking and visualising

  the story and breaking things down is that it is adaptable and malleable

  and can, I think, be applied in some form to any interesting character jour -

  ney. The peaks and troughs can reach rapid highs and lows at one extreme,

  or measured, gentle undulations at the other – the line of the wave can be

  squeezed in or stretched out like a concertina. So as the story develops and

  builds through the middle, you might get something along the lines of this:

  THE MIDDLE 151

  THE ROAD AHEAD

  If everything in life went to plan, the road ahead would be a straight line

  and we would get what we want without any surprises, cock-ups, dangers

  or disasters along the way. But life isn’t often like that. And drama can

  never be like that. So while there may appear to be straight roads, they

  usually don’t last very long or stay straight for very long.

  If the beginning is about a character stepping beyond their comfort

  zone and following a call, whether that is with excitable energy or fearful

  trepidation, then the initial urge in the middle will often reflect that feel -

  ing. The character(s) set out with some kind of plan or intent, however well-

  or ill-formed it might be, however confident or anxious they might be, and

  whether or not they are really seeing it and understanding it clearly.

  In the middle, Billy Elliot sets out and applies himself to learning to

  dance and fulfilling the talent and desire he knows he has. In his mind, that

  appears to be a relatively straight road, even if it’s one fraught with the

  danger of his secret being exposed.

  Hamlet’s plan is to flush out the guilt of Claudius, though at this stage

  he still doesn’t know quite how to do so, which is why pretending to be mad

  and putting on a play seems like a straight road ahead to him.

  Withnail and I flee to the country to escape the drug and booze-addled

  mess of their jobless Camden life – at that point, the M6 seems a very

  straight road indeed.

  In episode one (and every subsequent episode) of Bodies, Rob Lake’s

  plan is to diagnose the medical problems and do his job properly – the desire

  and principle is clear and, at this point, unsullied and uncompromised.

  In episode one of Life on Mars, Sam’s copper’s instinct is to help solve

  the team’s case, even though he still suspects it might all be a bad dream.

  The aim is simple – prevent the next crime, catch the criminals.

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  SHARP BENDS AND CHICANES

  Before long, this straight road will hit some kind of sharp bend or chicane

  that throws the character and story. They may well find themselves back on

  the same road afterwards, but they will have swerv
ed and veered away

  from the direction they are heading in to avoid an obstacle, and they will

  therefore be forced to work to get back on track.

  The journey forward is not just about peaks and troughs, ups and

  downs: it is about twists and turns – not so much twists and turns in the

  plot for the tricksy sake of it, but twists and turns in the character’s journey

  forward as they try to get what they want. Even in mystery and detective

  stories, it’s not just about twists and turns, it’s about the detective trying to

  find something out for a reason – to catch a criminal, to prevent the next

  crime, to rescue an imminent victim – not just for the sake of it.

  Once he has recovered from his first meeting with Gene Hunt and the

  rest of the squad, Sam tries to call a mobile phone number – but the 1970s

  telephone operator is having none of it and the moment really throws him

  as it warps into what might be the sound of a hospital ventilator and heart

  monitor – is he in a coma? It is a sharp swerve in his journey forward, but

  it doesn’t last long as the sounds are swallowed up by the bustle of the office

  and the news that just comes through about another body being found.

  CUL-DE-SACS

  In any story where a character is trying and at some point inevitably failing

  to get what they want, they will hit dead ends. Not necessarily insurmount -

  able brick walls but cul-de-sacs in which they have to turn around and go

  back the way they came in order to continue on the road ahead. These are

  non-catastrophic set backs – moments of being sidetracked or false starts

  that bring the character’s journey to a temporary halt.

  You get these all the time in crime and detective narrative – the line

  of enquiry that leads nowhere. They can be clever red herrings that have

  been deliberately placed to distract and divert the detective. Or they can

  simply be moments of failure.

  When Sam Tyler is left in charge of the squad for the first time in

  1973, he attempts to get the team started in their investigations of Suzi

  Tripper’s murder. But every idea, question and possibility that comes out of