The typical Hollywood reader.
As I read through Cuba Libre yesterday, all I could think was, “This is way too complicated.” As I read through The Strain the previous day, all I could think was, “This is way too simple.” Whereas with Cuba Libre, I never quite knew what was going on or why, with The Strain, I not only knew what was going on, but I was always 30 pages ahead of the writer.
This led to an obvious question – how do you find the sweet spot between these two extremes? How do you keep a script simple enough so that it’s not confusing, but complex enough so that it still intrigues? Unfortunately, there’s no uniform answer to this. Every audience member is different, and by association, so are their demands. Some people like simpler stories. Some demand more meat on their plate.
I used to face this problem all the time when I taught tennis. I’d have a group of eight people to teach, all of whom ran the gamut on skill. This used to frustrate me to no end. If I kept the class really easy, the advanced players would get frustrated. If I made the class hard, the beginner players couldn’t keep up. What the hell was I supposed to do??
It’s a challenge that every teacher faces. What I found, and what most teachers find, is that it’s always better to challenge than to make things overly simple. Force the less experienced students to keep up. What you’ll find is that, more often than not, they’ll rise to the occasion. Whereas if you keep things too easy, you’ll bore the more advanced students, which leads to frustration, which kills the energy, and leads to the rest of the lesson imploding.
Here’s the problem though. Most writers don’t know how to challenge their readers correctly. They think “challenge” means disseminating copious amounts of information (which they erroneously believe is synonymous with “depth”) on their readers, forcing them to take in loads of data, whether it be backstory, exposition, or mythology. Their approach is, “I’m writing for smart patient people. So they’ll be okay if, every 15 pages or so, I set up a bunch of boring plot and character points, as long as I entertain them with the fun stuff afterwards.”
No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
No no no no no no no no no.
No no no no.
No.
No no no no no no no.
No.
And no again.
This is exactly what I think the writers of Cuba Libre would’ve argued (whoever that may be, since we don’t know who had the most influence on the draft). They gave you tons of characters, tons of sides, tons of story threads, tons of motivations, in the argument that they were pleasing the more sophisticated reader and/or audience member.
I got news for you. Smart patient people still get bored. If all you’re doing is throwing information at them, they’re not happily keeping a mental journal of it all, eagerly anticipating when you’re going to start using it. They’re saying, “Why are you throwing all this boring information at me? Why isn’t anything happening?”
Ah-ha! Therein lies the trick – and it is a trick. Stuff needs to happen. “Happen” means “entertainment.” You can throw all the information in the world at your reader… AS LONG AS YOU’RE ENTERTAINING THEM WHILE YOU DO IT. Read that sentence 50 TIMES as there is no sentence you’ll read this year that will help your writing more.
You can set up your extremely complicated multi-layered main character. AS LONG AS YOU ENTERTAIN ME WHILE YOU DO IT. You can dish out 15 pages of exposition. AS LONG AS YOU ENTERTAIN ME WHILE YOU DO IT. You can inspect every little blade of grass in your Lord of the Rings-like fantasy world. AS LONG AS YOU ENTERTAIN ME WHILE YOU DO IT.
This has to be one of the biggest mistakes I encounter. Whether it be an amateur or professional script. Writers don’t understand that EVERY SCENE MUST ENTERTAIN. They make excuses. They believe they’ve earned a “scene off.” They think certain scenes are meant to be boring. WRONG! It can always be done! That doesn’t mean that every scene must have Evelyn Mulwray telling Jake Gittes that her daughter is also her sister. But each scene should entertain the reader on some level.
That’s why the scene from Cuba Libre yesterday where Boudreaux changes up the deal on Ben stuck out to me so much. It was the first time in the script where the writers were actually trying to entertain me!
I want to show you how this works. I’m going to use the example of setting up a protagonist in a script. This is usually done in the first act and encompasses everything from showing us their flaw, their work life, their family life, their social life, and how they fit into the larger world you’ve constructed. But remember, you can do this with ANY scene in your script.
Say we need to set up that our protagonist, Doug, has given up on life. That’s our goal in these scenes, is to show that he’s become an uninspired lonely human being who’s no longer contributing to society.
We might start with a scene that shows Doug sitting in his apartment staring at the television, looking lifeless. We then might show him at the convenience store, late at night, stumbling through the aisles, loading up on junk food. We then might show him walking home, spotting a group of trendy partygoers laughing their butts off across the street. Their presence only makes Doug feel lonelier.
Do these scenes set up our character? Sure. We definitely know Doug better after we read them. But nothing’s actually HAPPENED in any of these scenes. Not a single one has entertained the reader. In order to entertain, you must create situations that engage the character, that force him/her to act. Each scene must do this on some level.
So let’s rewrite all these scenes with that in mind. Say in the first scene, our character is watching TV (via a digital antennae), stuffing his sad face with donuts. The feed keeps cutting out as he watches. He stares at this, annoyed. We get the sense that he does NOT want to get up and deal with this. It takes a long inner struggle but we finally CUT to him at the antennae, making minute adjustments to fix the reception. He gets it to work, steps back, it goes bad again, another minor adjustment, it’s good, steps back, it goes bad again. He keeps doing this until FINALLY he gets a clear picture. He very carefully tiptoes back to his chair, desperate not to disturb a single molecule in the room. Sits down. And the feed goes bad again.
Now what about that convenience store scene? Well, while the new TV scene was okay, there weren’t any stakes (who cares if he fixes the reception on a show he’s not really into anyway – I’d probably change that in the next draft). Let’s not make that mistake again. Before Doug goes to the store, we see him struggling with dry mouth after eating all those donuts. He needs to wash them down. So he goes to the fridge, grabs the milk carton… but it’s empty. Fuck! He stares at this as if’s literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to him in his life (now we have stakes – he NEEDS that milk).
Cut to him at the convenience store. He walks straight to the cold drinks, gets to the milk section. Looks inside. ALL EMPTY. There’s no milk. At all. He takes a deep breath, beyond frustrated. Then, on the top shelf, way way way back, he sees one last milk carton. He opens the cooler, reaches as far back as he can, can’t reach it. He has to stand awkwardly on the bottom drink shelf, which feels shaky. He reaches again. He’s almost got it. He finally REACHES it, but just as he grabs it, his weight COLLAPSES the bottom shelf, causing a domino effect where all the drinks SPILL OUT onto the floor, splashing up all over him. During the chaos, he drops the milk, which opens up, spilling everywhere.
Now what about the last scene? The one where he has to walk home afterwards and spots the partygoers? This one’s easy. By keeping the partygoers safely on the other side of the street, there’s zero entertainment value (because there’s no conflict). The scene’s way more interesting if they’re on his side of the street and he has to WALK THROUGH THEM. This is the last thing he wants to do at 11:30pm on a Saturday, drenched in soda.
So he looks for a way out. But there’s no other route to take without being obvious, so he accepts his fate, walking towards the fun-going group with his head down. Just as he’s about past them, he hears, “Doug?” He looks up. One of them is an old girl he knows. “Oh my God,” she says, “I haven’t seen you since high school. What are you…” she just now notices he’s drenched, “…doing?” It’s a nightmare scenario for Doug. There’s no easy way out of this. You’d play up the awkwardness of the conversation for as long as you wanted to until he’s finally able to slip away.
Do you see how we took three lifeless scenes and added an actual story to all of them? All we had to do was add a problem to each scenario. First the antennae wasn’t working. Then the milk was impossible to get. Then he had to get through a group of partygoers.
I know, I know. These scenes weren’t life-changing or anything. But this is the first draft of all of them. I’m playing with the ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. I’d then make adjustments accordingly. The important thing is that I’m trying to add drama to each scene as opposed to only using the scenes to set up my character.
Now some of you might point out that, since the changes, each scene has too much going on. By dramatizing each scene, I’ve made all of them a lot longer. Also, I’m driving the same point home over and over again (this guy’s a loser). Ah ha! You’re exactly right. But this is the beauty about dramatizing scenes. Once you dramatize a scene, it hits the reader harder. They get more out of it because there’s a story involved, something they’re engaged in. Therefore, whatever point you’re trying to make is made more intensely.
Because of this, you might not even need all three scenes anymore. With the way these scenes now sell your character, you could probably get by with just one. So I might drop the store scene and the walk home afterwards. Besides, if I needed one more “sell my character” moment, I could always squeeze one in to a later scene. Like if he’s on the bus on his way to work tomorrow. I could come up with a small problem on the bus he has to deal with.
Some of you might also say that these scenes are too exaggerated. What if you’re writing a more dramatic script, like, say, The Sixth Sense. The scenes are way too over the top for a script like that. Of course they are. My examples were from a dark comedy, but I’d alter the tone, the intensity, the duration and the situation of each problem to fit with whatever genre I’m writing.
If I was writing the TV scene in The Sixth Sense, for example, the problem would be darker and maybe a little scarier. I’d have the protagonist watching TV, and then have the channel change inexplicably. He looks down at his remote, which is free and clear of anything. He changes the channel back. After a few seconds, the channel changes again. You get the idea.
Here’s the point I’m making. I don’t care if you’re setting a character up, setting your story up, explaining the rules of your world, having your characters convey plot points, getting your characters from point A to point B, you should always be doing it in an entertaining way. And you do that by looking at each scene and asking yourself, regardless of everything else the scene is trying to do, does it entertain? If not, change it. Or else we won’t care.
