This weekend I was discussing a horror script with an aspiring screenwriter. He was working on the “teaser” (his opening scene) which consisted of a girl running through the forest as a shadowy figure chased her. As you know, this is a common scene in movies, and he was trying to come up with a unique way to execute the scene. We went through a handful of options, but in the end, realized that they had all been done before.
Later, as I busted out some fresh Diet Coke and a bag of almonds, it occurred to me that we live in a world where there are no original ideas anymore. There used to be a time when a writer could stumble upon a bizarre story in a library or the back of a newspaper and he’d have ZERO competition for that story since nobody else had come across it.
Nowadays, we have a living breathing tome of information that every single person in the world has access to. If a weird story appears, it doesn’t get buried on some back page of a newspaper. It becomes “viral” and everyone knows about it within 24 hours.
Take the “Zola the Stripper” story that became famous on Twitter last year which James Franco is now making. In the past, that story would’ve been conveyed to a couple of close friends then never heard about again. That doesn’t happen anymore. Every great story rises to the top of the internet, which means every writer has access to it.
In addition to this, you have so many more mediums to tell these stories. Besides the hundreds of news sites out there and the thousand or so video games that are released each year, we have 400 TV shows broadcasting ideas 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So it isn’t just that ideas are easier to find, it’s that there are more people using them. That’s why so many TV shows feel similar. They’re being written by 5000 eyeballs all reading and looking at the same stuff every day.
I remember when the fated show, My So Called Life, came out. There was a scene in an early episode where a high school character had sex with a guy in a car, and another character secretly video-taped it. At the time, it was a really original plot point. You hadn’t seen it used in any other show or movie beforehand. It was choices like that that made the show a critic’s favorite.
Now I watch this show called “Casual” on Hulu. It’s a good show. The premise is that characters of all ages try and date in this new world where the majority of sexual relationships are casual. The show started off with some original stuff that had a recently-divorced 40 year old mother trying to date off Tinder, and the trials and tribulations that arose from old school and new school dating colliding.
Now in their second season, they’re running out of ideas fast. One of the most recent storylines was something a 2016 version of My So Called Life might’ve used. Three high school friends decide to have a 3-way. Things don’t go well and we watch the bitter fallout afterwards. That might have been interesting…… if it was SEVEN YEARS AGO. Today it’s the third 3-way plotline I saw on television this week.
And don’t get me started on film. Screenplays have to meet such strict structural guidelines that it’s nearly impossible to do anything with them that people haven’t seen before. Watching films these days feels like watching your GPS app as it guides you to your lunch meeting. You’re notified of every upcoming plot beat well ahead of time (“Take a left after…Guy loses girl after an artificially constructed argument at end of second act”), and the destination is never in doubt.
Reading yesterday’s script, Glass, confirmed this to the nth degree. The most predictable jewel heist script imaginable which hit every story beat that every previous jewel heist script had hit before, still sold. And I’m starting to think it’s because producers have given up. They WANT originality. But they understand it’s rarer than a 50 carat diamond. So they settle for good marketable premises where the writer doesn’t screw up the execution.
All this got me wondering: Is originality dead? Should we just throw in the towel and embrace it? Or is there a way to still be original? Because if you had access to that formula, you’d be a valuable commodity in Hollywood, one of the few people who could give audiences something they’ve never seen before.
The good news is that there is a formula. The bad news is: it requires a lot of hard work. Let’s go over the three main elements of the originality formula below.
Unoriginal premises beget unoriginal scripts – This is a complicated way of saying, an original premise does the work for you. If you can come up with an original concept, you’ll find that a lot of the situations in your script are likely to be original.
Take yesterday’s script, Glass. It’s a basic jewel heist gang story. So what kind of scenes are you likely to get in that story? A lot of unoriginal situations, right? But if your concept is dream heists, where people are going into people’s heads and stealing thoughts from them (Inception), you’re going to get a ton of original scenes just by the fact that nobody’s ever explored that premise before.
The majority of unoriginality is born out of laziness – The less you try, the less original you will be. If I told you to come up with with a climax IN ONE MINUTE where my hero has a gun trained on my villain, who’s holding his wife hostage, what are the chances you’d come up with an original scene? Pretty low, right? What if I give you an entire week though? I’m guessing you’d bring me something a little more fleshed out and unique.
So TIME is part of the equation.
But it’s not the only part. TIME is nothing without EFFORT.
There are some writers I could give one minute or one week to and they’d still come back with the same boring hostage-climax scene. Why? Because they don’t want to work hard. They don’t want to explore a dozen different scene options or question whether this scene is a good idea in the first place or if the showdown should take place in another more interesting location or if our hero should be incapcitated in a way that we’ve never seen before in this scene. And when you’re not willing to make that effort, it’s the difference between writing a 4000 theater release type film and a straight-to-Itunes rental.
Characters are where the originality rubber meets the road – The real secret sauce though, guys? The thing that’s going to give you the best shot at blowing readers away with your originality? Characters. Both who they are individually and who they are with one another (their relationships).
How you mix and match a character’s past and their flaws and their eccentricities and their inner struggles – and how you combine that with another character who’s dealing with his or her own set of variables – and then how you use the unique environment or the situation surrounding them to add pressure points to that relationship? That’s where you find moments that nobody’s found before. It’s like cooking. The more exotic the ingredients, the more exotic the meal.
A good example of this is Silver Linings Playbook. Your main character has bipolar disorder. Your female lead has depression due to losing her husband. And these two characters are bound by the oddest of factors (one’s trying to get his wife back, the other wants to win a dance competition). I mean how are ANY of these scenes going to play out like scenes from previous romantic comedies or dramas? They’re not. Because the writer worked their butt off to create unique characters and then paired them up in a unique way.
Contrast that with those formulaic rom-coms based around holidays they seem to make every year now (Mother’s Day! New Year’s! St. Paddy’s Day!) and you can see why one is able to produce something exciting and different and the other is forgotten within seconds.
In addition to this, I should remind you that originality has degrees. Whereas you can go batshit crazy original in a script like Swiss Army Man, you won’t have as much leeway in something like Godzilla. Still, you should always be pushing yourself no matter what the limitations of the genre or audience is. Pixar plays to the broadest audience of all, and their scripts are as original as anything out there.
As we bring this to a close, a reminder that originality is just one element of writing. You still have to write a good story! Cameron Crowe’s “Aloha,” a rom-com set in Hawaii about a satellite launch, was wholly original. But it was unapologetically awful due to the fact that the story sucked. So don’t book your trip to Vegas the second you win your “original concept of the year” award. You still have to buckle down and do the hard work. Create an engaging story with more original choices than not.
SCRIPTSHADOW THURSDAY CHALLENGE!!! – Write the most ORIGINAL VERSION of a “woman gets chased in the woods by a scary figure” scene in the comments section. Upvote your favorite scene and we’ll give that writer a shoutout at the end of the day.
