A synopsis is not a synopsis

From time to time, funding programs (Canada) and producers (the US) will ask you for a synopsis.

A synopsis is "An outline of the plot of a play, film, or book," right? It recounts what happens.

Technically, yeah. A secret that took me years to find out is: when they ask for a synopsis, always send a pitch.

When you turn in a synopsis, you want the reader to get excited about your project. Your goal is to get them to read your script if they haven't. If they have, and they're going through a big pile of synopses, your goal is to remind them of why your script is the best one, and possibly even get them to think your script is more exciting than they did when they read it.

A good pitch recounts your plot, yes. But more importantly, it hypes the elements of your story. It sells what your main character wants, why he or she can't get it, and why we care. It is long on the jeopardy, the stakes, the obstacles, the antagonist, and the personality of the main character. It is short on details. It contains details, yes, but primarily details that are revelatory of character, or clever, or funny, or thrilling, or fresh.

Generally, the best way to write a pitch is to do it off the top of your head, as if you were writing a letter to a friend in the business, or a friendly producer. You will often reduce the amount of cutting back and forth between storylines that you do in the script. Sometimes you have to double back to mention something that wasn't worth mentioning earlier. You have no obligation to match the pitch story to the actual plot. Who cares if it doesn't match exactly? They'll only find out when they read the script, and that's all you wanted them to do in the first place.

The worst way to write a synopsis for submission is to go through the script and write down what happens. That's how you get "an outline of the plot." You'll wind up with a series of events that lack a strong through line.

It is very, very hard to read a real synopsis. They tend to lack nuance, gusto, and fun. A pitch should be fun to read. It should make us see the movie.

In fact, as you write a pitch, you'll often feel inclined to change your story. Go for it. Changes you make when you're selling your concept are often changes in the direction of a stronger story.

Of course, a beat sheet that you write for yourself is another beast entirely. Then you do want to go into detail about what happens. But a beat sheet doesn't have to communicate the story; it's just a reminder of what your story is.

Step Outline

I’m working on a feature script. I got a bit of funding based on a 13 page pitch; now it’s on to draft.
But before I go to draft, there’s a small step to take: turning the pitch into a step outline. The different is just this: adding sluglines.

Surprisingly, adding sluglines provokes significant changes. In a pitch, you can write, “Suzie and Hans have been cocooning ever since they met two months ago.” But how do we know this? Is it a series of flashbacks? Is it a conversation? With whom?

Simply adding the time and place everything happens to a pitch makes you rethink how you’re telling the story. Should this argument take place at the airport? On the way to the airport? At home while packing?

The step outline is the last point you’re going to look at your story as a whole before you plunge into pages. So it’s good to look at each step and make sure you really need it, and that it’s as cinematic as you can make it. You can do that later, too, but it will cost you more work.

Character Biographies?

Q. I've been writing for 20 years in the documentary / corporate world, and have just finished my first screenplay. I'm having a number of people give it a friendly feedback read, and one said that I was missing the 'character biographies'. Is there such a thing? My understanding was that the characters need to come alive in the screenplay so if it isn't on the page, it either isn't needed (a minor character) or it needs to be added (better dialogue or action).
Who would use a character biography?

Beats me. No one's ever asked me for one in the feature world.

There are two things wrong with the notion of a "character biography." First, as you say, if it's not in the screenplay, it won't help that somewhere in a computer is an explanation of the character.

Second, biography is overrated. When you write up characters for a TV series, you write up who they are, now, and how they behave, and what their relationships are with the other characters. You might mention if a character went to Harvard, but only in the context of him thinking the whole world revolves around him. You might mention if a character never finished high school, but only in the context of her having a chip on her shoulder and always having to prove she's smart.

I never write character biographies. I don't even write character descriptions if I'm writing a feature. I consider them dangerous: you might think you've created a character but you've only done it offscreen.

In TV, of course, you write character descriptions, because the characters come first, and they're expected to outlast any stories you may have thought up. But biographies? The only place a biography belongs is in a TV show bible, to keep track of what canon you have established for the characters -- you don't want to mention a sister if a previous episode established an only child.

Make Sure We Know What Story We're In

Casting about for good TV to watch, I borrowed DAMAGES from the Bibliothèque Nationale, and we watched the pilot.

It's an interesting beast, this pilot. A young woman lawyer, Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) is hired by Patty Hewes (Glenn Close), a hotshot lawyer with a reputation for abusing her staff. And we think we're in the vein of stories about a neophyte hired by a tyrant, who either has to man up or get shredded, e.g. THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA.

We had a tough time watching the pilot because the pilot did a lot of things that didn't make sense -- at least, at first.

/* spoilers */

For examples, when Ellen is asked to interview for the job on the Saturday of her sister's wedding, she refuses. Hewes shows up at the wedding, and decides she likes her. Hewes says "you remind me of me" and hires her anyway. Since Ellen is a bit of a drip who never says anything smart or tough, we weren't convinced.

Then Ellen's sister in law turns out to -- surprise! -- have, as an investor in her restaurant, the very same rich man, Frobisher (Ted Danson) whom Hewes is suing. And Ellen finds out that the case against Frobisher hinges on something her sister-in-law may have seen. That seemed terribly convenient for the writers.

Then Ellen's sister in law is being stalked by Frobisher's private detective. Her dog turns up murdered, to leave a warning to keep quiet. The threat backfires, because Sister-in-law decides to turn witness. I always hate seeing pets murdered -- it's usually a cheesy way to shock the audience -- but it also seemed unlikely, since if Frobisher wants to threaten Sister-in-law, he merely has to threaten to withdraw his investment in her restaurant.

Well, it turns out all the things we were bumping on were clues. Hewes, it turns out, only hired Ellen because of the connection to her sister-in-law, which she knew about all along. And she's the one who had the dog murdered, to provoke Sister-in-law to testify. Clever clever.

That's why Ellen didn't need to say anything particularly clever to Hewes at the wedding, or blow off her sister's wedding to have an interview -- because Hewes wants her for other reasons. Ahhh, it all makes sense now.

This is dangerous territory for a screenwriter. Having characters do things that are seeingly out of character, or don't make sense, can be a lovely misdirect for the audience, or it can lose the audience's trust entirely, if they decide you're a crappy writer.

It's also dangerous because we don't know what story we're being told. If we think we're in a story about a neophyte lawyer put in the grinder at a law firm run by a bitch queen, then all the inconsistencies keep derailing the story we think we're watching, instead of those same inconsistencies driving the story.

What you want to do is make sure the audience knows what story it's watching by throwing out little hints that, yes, there is something odd about what's happening, pay attention.

So, for example, we never find out how good a lawyer Ellen is. We first meet her professionally when she's getting a job offer from a fancy law firm. They've offered her a whack of money, but when they find out that Patty Hewes has called her, they give up -- they know Patty Hewes gets what she wants.

But what if it's not quite such a fancy law firm? What if it's clear that Ellen is not the best young law school graduate in town? And what if the other law firm calls attention to that: "Really? Patty Hewes? Is she friends with your family, or what?" And maybe even Ellen asks her: "Why me? I'm not the top of my class." And then Hewes can bust out her "You remind me of me," but we start to suspect there's something else going on. And we can follow the story.

I love a good mystery. But the first requirement for a mystery is that you know it's a mystery. If your main character's brother has been found dead of an overdose, and it's going to turn out he was actually murdered, then make sure we know he wasn't a junkie. If he crashed his car, then tell us he was an epileptic and never drove. Otherwise we just take the facts at face value: if he died of an overdose, well, junkies do that. If he crashed his car, well, lots of people die in car crashes. It's sad but it's not a story.

To be fair, the series starts will Ellen, bloody and half-dressed, wandering the streets. So we know something is going to go horribly wrong. But that's a fairly broad hint.

And the show further muddies the waters by lost opportunities elsewhere in the pilot. When Frobisher suborns one of the plaintiffs, who turns the whole body of plaintiffs around to accept a lowball settlement, Hewes just lets it slide. Yet at the meeting between the plaintiffs and Hewes, the corrupted plaintiff has so obviously been coached that it is shocking that Hewes never busts him on it. Surely a top litigator knows what a coached witness sounds like. In fact we never see Hewes being a particularly smart lawyer -- just a ballsy negotiator. So when Ellen fails to show any sign of being a clever lawyer, it does not come across as a clue for the audience; we figure the writers just don't know how to show that someone's smart.

(And incidentally, it's so easy and fun to show that someone's smart. Just have a character pick up on a few small details and put them together. For example, if you had wanted to show that Ellen was supersmart, then when Hewes shows up at the wedding, Ellen twigs that when she was asked to interview during her sister's wedding, Hewes must have already known her sister was getting married, and set the interview at that time in order to test her. And then Ellen busts Hewes for her moral failings -- and it's the spunk combined with observation and intuition that makes Hewes want to hire her.)

I've heard very good things about DAMAGES, and Glenn Close does a fantastic job playing Hewes. I'm sure the show gets better. Certainly once you're past the pilot you'd know exactly what story you're watching. One of my flaws as a viewer is I'm horribly impatient -- I want them to be good right away, while it seems to me that a lot of y'all will give a show two or three episodes to get going. And I've come back to shows later and enjoyed them once I got past the pilot. I didn't love the TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES pilot, but now I'm waiting anxiously for the Season Two disks to come out.

But it did seem to me that a few hints up front about what story we're watching would have given me a much more enjoyable pilot experience.

Track your audience. What do they know? What do they suspect? A great storyteller doesn't leave things to chance. You let the audience figure things out for themselves, yes, but you do it by waving clues in front of them. Depending on how sophisticated the audience is, you may have to hang a lantern on the clues, or you may go subtle. But you have to calibrate things so they do in fact pick it up. Otherwise you're not telling the story.

Imagine you're telling the story at a campfire. The audience should be stopping you to say, "But why did she hire Ellen anyway?" If they're not asking that question, you haven't done your job. If they do ask that question, you're on the right track. You don't answer it, of course. You smile and say, "Why indeed?"

Writing Not Typing

In Crafty Screenwriting your advice, as I understand it, is to not write your story down, to mull it around in your head, and tell it out loud to people until you're sure it's a good story. Then write it. I'm trying to reconcile this method with the mantra of most creative writers: "Write every day." What do you write if you're not writing the story in your head? The obvious answer is "another story." But what if all your stories are in the embryonic stage?

Working out your story in your head or by telling it to other people is writing.

It's just not typing.

I have a creative jones, to the point where if I don't write something during a day, I get really cranky. My addiction is completely satisfied by talking through a story.

Writing pages is good, but most people spend far too little of their time working out their story before they start typing, and consequently spend much more time fixing their story once it's written down. You often hear of a writer and director spending a week or even a month talking through the movie. It's really hard to spend too much time talking through your story. When it stops changing, or you're starting to get bored (not just fidgety), you're good to start typing.

This is Just Frakking Awesome

Here's a story conference you might have wanted to sit in on: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan banging out the plot to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ART.

Guess what? They had a secretary transcribing the story sessions. And you can download the transcript. I just did.

Is that frakking awesome or what?

Via Mystery Man On Film.

20 Aspiring Writers Walk Into a Room...

I've been sick as a dog for the past few days, plus organizing a Justin Trudeau fundraiser, so please forgive the silence.

Q. I'm in several screenwriting groups on Facebook, and saw a post about someone who is looking for a group of young screenwriters to write a script for their 1 hour feature. I've enclosed the entire post below -

"Myself and another director are shooting an hour of feature film drama and we want to do it very differently and try to help people in the process. We want to get a group of young screenwriters (20-30 or so) to collaboratively write the script for the film.

We want to give young unknown talent a chance to get some experience and some credits, as well as experiment with the wisdom of crowds to see how it makes the storyline evolve. The idea is to invite everyone to hold up at our studio for an all-nighter and write the thing in 24hrs, as well as modifying it online together. Everyone involved will get shared copyright, credits and be associate directors.

This sounds like an enormous waste of time for several reasons.

One, faster is not better. A good story takes time to take shape. You have to look at it from several angles. You have to work it. Every now and then you read or hear about how someone wrote a script in three days. They didn't. They thought about it for several months, until they knew exactly what story they wanted to tell, then wrote a draft in three days, then reworked it for several months.

Two, twenty heads are not better than one. A good story does not go down the predictable path. Storytelling by committee will get you the obvious ideas, not the clever ones that start out feeble and need nourishing into something surprising and spectacular.

Writing rooms do gather to break story and, later, to punch up jokes. But after you've broken the story into acts, you send one writer (or maybe a writing team of two, that functions as one writer) to beat the story out. And the showrunner story edits the beat sheet all on his own. There needs to be one controlling intelligence telling the story. Otherwise you just get a mishmash of ideas that might be good on their own, but which muck up all the other good ideas that other people have.

UPDATE: Lisa thinks this is a scam. If they ask you to contribute money as an "associate producer," run.

How Many Cards

Norlinda comments on a previous post about index cards:

I'm already at 36, and by knowing a rough max index card number, I'll know how much further I have to go before inserting the final climatic scene. I'm going by card numbers to make sure a decent number of scenes have been devoted to a character's development---it's a multi-character plot and this is the only logical way I know how to manage the depth of the story.

What concerns me about your comment is it sounds like you are trying to weave the characters' stories together as you figure them out. In other words you are beating the story out on the fly.

What I do is figure out all the beats of each story, and then weave them together. That way I know if I'm telling a coherent story about each character whose story I'm telling.

I write top-down, the way I learned to write computer programs back in New Haven. I figure out what the A, B and C stories are. Then I break each of those stories down into acts. Then I beat each of those stories out -- separately.

Now I've got three or four columns of index cards for the beats of each story, all laid out on my dining room table.

Then I open up my card table and start stealing cards from each story to make up the beats of the episode. As I go, I move the cards around to see if a different order might be better. That's how I get to the table you see.

Once I've used up all the cards from the stories -- except for any that suddenly no longer seem necessary -- I have a neat little stack of cards, and I can fold up my card table.

Then I sit at my desk and put the cards back into a Word document -- a beat sheet. That quickly becomes a Final Draft document -- a step outline, with scene headings. And that's what I write my script from.

I would never try to skip any of those steps. I'd get confused, and wind up having to disentangle the whole mess -- probably by reducing the whole damn script back to index cards and moving them around again.

Index Cards

Tuesday, I pitched my completely new episode 2 of my pay cable series to our network execs. I pitched it as a breakdown: here's the A story, B story, C story. They approved the new stories.

So, after a day of this, that and the other thing (amazing how fast things build up when you're out of town for four days), I'm working on weaving the stories together.

I do almost all my writing on computer. The exception is when I'm weaving the stories together. I like to be able to see the whole episode at a glance.

For my pay cable series, there ought to be about 40 index cards; each represents more or less one beat. Fewer, and I'm coming up short. Longer, and I'll go over my goal of 60 or so pages. (Remember this is pay cable, so each episode is around 52-55 minutes long.)

You might be able to see in the photo that I'm marked all the cards with a color. (My friend Shelley actually uses colored cards. That's much cleverer.) That way I can tell at a glance if I'm on one story too long. 

TV pulses. You want the end of one scene to slingshot you into another story; then the end of that scene or sequence slingshots you back into the first story. That way you build up forward momentum, and can easily cut out the dull bits.

You don't want to spend too much time on any one story, or the audience starts to lose track of the other stories. So it's juggling.

Broadcast TV is all about act outs, but really, every time you cut from one story to another, you want to leave the audience wondering "what's going to happen next." A man comes through the door with a gun and-- we cut to the B story. Jack tells Jill that yes, he cheated on her and-- cut to the C story.

What makes it tricky is that events have a chronological logic of their own. You might come up with three perfectly good stories -- but one is really an evening and night story, and the other takes place entirely in school hours. You'll have to figure out how to move some of one story to the other's time slot.

So I've been moving cards around, sometimes scribbling on them, taping them together, and occasionally snipping one in two, in order to touch base with a story that would otherwise fall out of the viewer's head.

Tomorrow, it's on to the beat sheet.