Great Feedback: Not Available in a 24-Pak at Costco

Q. Many writers said in their blogs or guides that is important to get good feedback, so I'm wondering, how to convince people not to "spare" you - meaning, saying what they exactly mean, without being afraid of hurting your feelings. Or, is there a good "read between the lines" technique for all those "it's good, but something is missing - what is missing? - I don't know" comments? And, how you handle these issues? (I mean, even my own brother is being vague with his comments, even though he knows me all his life and knows I'd rather get slammed for not doing something right, than leave it incomplete or not done properly.)

The first thing you can do is pursue the feedback. Make it really clear: "This is a rough draft, and I'm going to be rewriting it anyway, so fire away." Or, "Please kick my ass."

Often you have worries about your own material. Ask about them. "Are there too many minor characters -- did you find it hard to track them?" "Did you like the scene in the convenience store or did you feel that the story lost steam there?" "Did you enjoy the way Quentin is so over-the-top, or did he feel too much like a cartoon?" "Did you buy the romance?" "Did you like Sally or was she too much of a pain in the ass?" "Did it feel too long?" "Where did it sag?" Your reader can then reassure you, or go along with your own criticism.

One great way to get honest feedback is to start up a writing group. Everyone in a writing group is there to give and get honest feedback, so they won't have compunctions about busting you for the flaws in your writing. (Just make sure that everyone starts out saying something nice. See the section in CRAFTY SCREENWRITING on writing groups.) If you don't live in a town with a lot of writers, you could form a long-distance one using Skype (or whatever free internet teleconferencing software allows multiparty conference calls).

Bear in mind, not everyone can give you clear feedback. All feedback is useful to a point, but some people analyze their experience reading something, and some people don't. If someone doesn't think about why he likes movies, he may not be able to tell you why he liked or didn't like a script. If someone doesn't read fiction, they may not be able to imagine the movie from the pages you have written.

Also, you have to match the reader to the reading. If someone doesn't like chick flicks, he may not be able to give you good feedback on your chick flick. It may not be in his wheelhouse.

Now, how do you get great feedback? That's harder. Great feedback not only tells you what seems wrong, it tells you what is wrong. Great feedback tells you what is structurally wrong with your story.

Good feedback: "the middle sags." Great feedback: "the middle sags because it's no longer clear what your main character wants."

Good feedback: "I don't care about the main character." Great feedback: "I don't care about the main character because he doesn't really have a goal, so I have no reason to root for him."

You will find great feedback about as often as you find great writing, which is to say, rarely. And you won't necessarily find the two bundled together. Of the people who've given me the best feedback, maybe half are writers; the other half are development executives and producers. These people are treasures. They give you notes that cause you a lot of work; you think, "Crap. How did I miss that?"

How do you find people like that? Same way you find a great agent or a great producer: perseverance and luck. I found Tommy Gushue by asking on my blog for a reader intern. I met Victoria Lucas when we were both development execs working on projects together. I met Virginia Rankin by taking her a bunch of pitches; she had really good notes on all of them. When someone gives you really deep insight into your material, hold onto them!

While you're at it, develop your own feedback skills. When you read someone else's material, think carefully about what works and doesn't work -- and why. Analyze the elements of story: main character, opportunity/problem/goal, obstacles/antagonist/flaws, jeopardy and stakes. If you're critiquing a TV pitch, really try to go under the hood and see how the story engine works. Trying to come up with springboards yourself. Sometimes you need to play with a story in your head to really figure out how it works.

Then some lucky writer can find you.

His Name is Calvin

And Tyler Durden is really Hobbes.

Also, Ferris Bueller is a figment of Cameron's imagination:

Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets "Ferris" steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the "three" characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day -- Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn't until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane ("He's gonna marry me!"), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.

WRENCE OF ARAB

This is not a frame from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. It is a 16 x 9 rectangle chopped out of a frame from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.

Hey, The Movie Network: if I'm paying over $20 a month for you, I probably have a widescreen TV. It probably really, really bugs me to watch movies in another format than the one they were shot in. If I wanted to watch LAWRENCE OF ARABIA in 1.85 pan-and-scan, as opposed to the glorious 2.35 'scope David Lean framed it for ... I could just put my VHS tape into my VCR, couldn't I?

Next time, can we please have the whole frame? Thank you.

The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test now has its own website.

The Bechdel Test, of course, is about how movies treat women. Does a movie have (a) more than one named woman; (b) do they talk to each other; (c) do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

Lisa and I were going through our Zip.ca rental history. Not too many movies pass the test. We just watched HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, which is one of the best bad movies we've seen in a while. None of the many women talk to each other at all.

It's not surprising. In most mainstream movies, almost all the conversations are between the protagonist and one or two other people. So if the main character is a guy, that doesn't leave a lot of room for conversations between two women. If the main character is a woman, your odds improve, unless it's a romance, in which case she's probably talking about a guy. I bet you SALT passes the test.

In TV, there are lots of female protagonists in non-romances. Going through my rental history again, Sarah Connor in THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES talks to, e.g. Cameron about, e.g., whether she is a good robot or a bad one. Buffy and Willow talk about magic. Echo talks with DeWitt about missions. GILMORE GIRLS is about a relationship between two women, and they talk about everything, endlessly, at high speed, so you don't even have to be in spec fiction.

(TV has female protagonists because women watch TV. Movies have male protagonists because girls will go see guy movies but guys won't see chick movies. Or is it the other way around? Women watch TV because it has female protagonists, and guys won't see chick movies because all the women do in them is talk about men?)

I think the Bechdel Test is interesting. But I think it mostly relates to who the protagonist is. If your movie is about Queen Elizabeth I, there's going to be some conversations with Mary, Queen of Scots, about whether Lizzie's going to cut off her head. If your movie is about Henry VIII, there are not going to be a lot of conversations without Harry in the room, so there won't be many conversations between two women.

But, to carry this a little further, it's not a bad idea, if you're writing a Henry VIII script, to see if there's something to be made of a scene between Catherine of Aragon and that Boleyn girl. It may not fit in the story. But if you have lots of scenes between Henry's male courtiers, maybe we should be listening to the women, too.

A Reader Writes In About His Orientation...

Not sexual, mind you. It's just that I find my ideas for scripts, and the scripts I've written, to be not necessarily un-commercial, just a little too unusual. For instance, [snip].

I've been told that the writing is good (if too long), but that it's hard to 'market,' or sell to a producer, etc. Concepts that are unwieldy. They say originality is an asset --- but I suppose there's a balance to be struck?

Certainly. It's a truism that producers are looking for something that is just exactly like this year's hit, but slightly different. And Lord knows there are enough TV shows about a person with an ability and a cop sidekick, solving crimes.

In cable TV, and in indie features, it's less true. But all TV channels have a certain kind of thing they're looking for. For a while, HBO was all about dysfunctional families.

And there are certain kinds of stories that work in features. The medium itself has requirements. Movies generally like one central character (or in a rom com, two), and a story that would make sense to an intelligent ten-year-old. (They don't have to be a story you would necessarily want to tell a ten year old, but a ten-year-old ought to be able to understand it.)

So not everything works.

So what do you do if you find that your stories are offbeat?

Certainly you want to focus on those stories that tickle your muse that are also in the ballpark of other movies or TV shows that have got produced. If you want to make an indie movie, watch an inordinate number of indie movies. You'll get a sense of what similarities they share, even if they seem at first blush to be all different.

If you want to make blockbuster movies, watch a ridiculous number of blockbuster movies, preferably in a row. That will give you a sense of what's being bought.

A family friend of mine was a bit of a struggling book writer. His books sold, but not really enough to support him. So one day he went into his agent and said, "I want to write a bestseller. What do I do?"

Agent said: "Read every book in the New York Times fiction bestseller list." So our friend sat down and read ten bestselling novels front to back, in a row. (It's important to do it all at once, so the similarities stand out.) Then he went and wrote a novel about killer bees attacking the US.

Bestseller. Movie deal.

Maybe your concepts are off base instead of offbeat. Have you tried pitching your hook to friends? To civilian friends who might be the audience for that kind of a movie? You should. You should be telling your waitress, your postman, the kid cutting your neighbor's grass, about the hook of your movie. If you really pay attention to how they react to your story -- if you listen to yourself pitching it -- your concept will streamline pretty damn fast.

However. As always, beware the feedback you're getting. You have to interpret it.

Note that the feedback is coming back "good (if too long)". Maybe the problem isn't actually that your ideas are too offbeat. Maybe the execution is too unwieldy. Have you tried pitching your story to an intelligent ten-year-old? No? Well go and do that then.

Remember when I told you in my books to pitch, not just your hook, but your whole story to civilian friends, out loud, without notes, over and over, until you can tell the whole story without forgetting anything? You didn't do that, did you? If you did that, your story wouldn't be too long, I practically guarantee it.

Also, movies are characters times story. You might have a perfectly valid popcorn movie, but the main character is uncompelling. Or there's no relationship at the core of it. DIE HARD wasn't a hit because of its concept. It was a hit because it had a good concept and a compelling character propelled by a relationship. Yippee kai yay.

Are you writing what you know? And I don't mean write about your high school experience; I mean write about what's in your bones. I know Morgan le Fay, at least my version of her. I care about Lucifer, or my version of him. But if you're writing about characters you don't really know or care about, we're not going to care, either.

In other words, maybe the concept isn't bad, but you need to step up your writing in general.

In general, as you go forward, you get a sense of what the market wants from you. But there are still projects I write that I think are ridiculously commercial which I can't sell, and projects I wrote in spite of the market that have found a home. That's why you should only write what you love. Ask yourself, not, "would someone pay $15 to see this?" but, "is a producer going to want to spend two or three years of her life trying to get this made?" Because that's what it will take.

And Here's the Kicker

I'm reading AND HERE'S THE KICKER: CONVERSATIONS WITH 21 TOP HUMOR WRITERS ON THEIR CRAFT. It's ridiculously full of useful nuggets of info. Marshall Brickman on Annie Hall:

After watching [the rough cut], we thought, "Where's the relationship?" When people come to me with ideas, sometimes they say, "I want to do a story about a war," or "I want to do a story about a hospital." And I'll always say, "Tell me the story in terms of a relationship." So with Annie Hall, we knew what was missing. It didn't focus on a relationship.

And Harold Ramis:

I always tell students to identify the most talented person in the room, and go stand next to him. That's what I did with Bill [Murray].

And George Meyer:

You can't keep bitch-slapping your creativity, or it'll run away and find a new pimp.

Buy it. Read it.

Key Man Clause?

Does anyone have a "key man" clause in their agency contract? I'd like to see one. Thx.

Venue for a Panel?

Hey, Montrealers: I'm planning a panel discussion on the intersection of games and screenwriting. You're invited! Only, I need a biggish venue. Ideally a free one, in which case the panel will be free; but I'm open to alternatives.

If you can help hook me up with such a place (McGill? Concordia? National Theatre School? Cinémathèque? CBC Building? NFB? The Segal Centre?), please drop me a line at craftyscreenwriting at gmail dot com. Thanks!