A more complex script than you might’ve thought.
So at the beginning of this week, I reviewed a script from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan that was fairly complex. There were lots of characters, multiple storylines, heavy flashbacks. And while Gaghan managed to make the whole thing work, I’ve spent far too many reading experiences watching amateurs try to do the same thing and ending up at the bottom of a slugline sinkhole.
Part of the problem is that the new screenwriter comes on the scene and believes he has the answers to Hollywood’s problems. Paul Bart: Mall Cop? Garbage. Taken 7? Trash. The problem, the neophyte screenwriter concludes, is that Hollywood’s movies are all fluff. His solution is to write some big sprawling meaty “masterpiece” that’ll win 12 Oscars.
The intention is noble. But the problem is that, 99 times out of a 100, the writer has no idea how to tell a story yet. They don’t even know that their inexperience in storytelling is a problem in the first place. So the resulting script may certainly be “sprawling” and “ambitious,” but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. People who read it categorize it as “unfocused,” “all over the place,” and “confusing.”
This miscalculation boils down to the fact that the writer has no “complexity compass.” Therefore, he marches unknowingly into the Failure Desert.
So today, I want to present you with the five pillars of complexity. This way, you know where the complexity pitfalls lie, and you can figure out how to avoid them. Let’s go through these pillars one by one, then discuss how we can manage them and keep our scripts easy to read.
Description – Description’s contribution to complexity can be broken down into two categories. Writers who describe too much. And stories that require a lot of description. Let’s start with the first one. Screenplays are about saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. Readers don’t want to sit there and read a six-sentence paragraph that just as easily could’ve been one. If this is the writer’s style, the script will start to lose clarity simply due to the fact that you’re making the reader read too much unimportant information. The reader has to “dig” to find the useful bits, resulting in reader exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to the brain shutting down, which leads to the reader unable to take in more information. If you’ve ever found yourself going back to re-read a page a third of a fourth time, this is usually what’s going on. And writers, if you’ve ever had a reader come back and say, “I didn’t understand why Danny attacked Lisa,” yet you explained exactly why Danny attacked Lisa on page 47, over-description is usually the culprit. You overloaded your reader with info and their brain shut down.
The second category of over-description is a bit more challenging. Unlike the first, where you can control the amount of description you add, some stories naturally require a lot of description. Sci-fi and fantasy scripts are notorious for needing large chunks of description due to the “world-building” the writer must do. There’s no way you can write The Matrix, for example, without spending a lot of time describing their ship, describing the “real world,” describing The Matrix itself. So whenever you write one of these screenplays, you’re already going in with a bit of a handicap. There’s not much you can do about it.
Exposition – Exposition is sort of the “dialogue-version” of description. These are the words your characters say to steer us through the story. Exposition can entail plot information as well as character information. “We need to be at the park by sundown or the world explodes” as well as “It turns out Diana lied to us. She isn’t from Rockford like she said she was.” The more exposition you have, the more complex your story reads. As you’re starting to realize, the more information (in the form of description or exposition) you throw at your reader, the harder it is for him/her to keep up.
Character Count – This one is self-explanatory, and yet one writers continue to ignore. The more characters you include, the more information you’re asking your reader to keep track of. More characters typically means more storylines (more subplots), which means even more for your reader to remember. I just told you screenwriting is about saying as much as you can in as few words as possible. Well, character count isn’t much different. Good writers tell their stories with the minimum amount of characters they can get away with. With that being said, every story has different character requirements (a movie about the White House is going to have more characters than a movie about two people trapped in an apartment) but you should be wary of including new characters UNLESS you believe the story needs them.
Intricate or Excessive Plotting – Are you writing a spy movie where characters are never who they seem? Are you writing a “Lost” like feature, with lots of twists and turns and reveals? Does your story go through a number of gestations, like Interstellar? Are you weaving eight subplots in and out of your main plot? The more plot (plot beats, plot points, twists, reveals, surprises) your script has, the harder it’s going to be for the reader to keep up. Yesterday’s script, The Munchkin, was a perfect example. Because the main character was chasing so many answers (the murder of one person, the disappearance of another, the mysterious person who hired him), the story started to suffocate under the weight of its own plot.
Sophisticated Story Presentation – Whenever you try and tell your story in a unique way, you’re adding a thick layer of complexity to it. 500 Days of Summer mashing up its timeline. Inception creating worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. Memento telling its story backwards. Pulp Fiction telling its story out of order. To a lesser degree, even movies like The Notebook, which tells some of its story in the past and some in the present and Gone Girl, which tells its stories through different points of view, are sophisticated paradigms to tell stories in. These scripts tend to get noticed a lot and can be fun to write. But they do make your story harder to follow. Keep that in mind.
Here’s the thing with the five pillars. Using one or two is fine. It’s when you try and do three, four, even five, that you virtually ensure failure. Look at 500 Days of Summer. It has a sophisticated story presentation, but a low character count, minor description, manageable exposition, and a simple plot. The Matrix was high in exposition and description, had the right amount of characters for its genre, a straight-forward presentation, and a simple plot.
Good writers identify the degree of difficulty of their script before they write it and – if need be – game-plan for how to keep it easy to follow. I’d like to do the same for you guys. Now, if you’re writing a movie like John Wick or The Hangover, you don’t need to worry about this. But if you’re writing something more ambitious, pay attention.
Each pillar will represent a number value from 1-10. Take your script idea, and plug it into the Pillar equation. Be honest with yourself. No cheating. Assign a number value (10 for most complex, 1 for least) to each pillar as it pertains to your idea, then add all the numbers up. If you end up between 40-50, I wouldn’t write the script unless you’re extremely experienced. To be honest, I can only think of two movies that would score higher than 40 at the moment: 2001 and Cloud Atlas. So yeah, stay away from this. 30-40 is doable, but hard. Most professional screenwriters still wrestle with screenplays this complex. 20-30 is a nice place to be and where a lot of good Hollywood films operate. The Imitation Game, for example, is probably around a 30. 10-20 is where most mainstream Hollywood movies live. Being in this category does not mean a weak script by any means. Rocky is somewhere between 10-20. Nightcrawer is somewhere between 10-20. The Equalizer is between 10-20. Simple films can still be great. 0-10, however, is probably an indication that your script is too simple and actually needs more complexity.
Here are a few sample movies to get a feel for the numbers…
The Hangover
Description: 2
Exposition: 3
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 6
Presentation: 4
Total: 18
Frozen
Description: 5
Exposition: 4
Character Count: 5
Plotting: 4
Presentation: 2
Total: 20
Memento
Description: 2
Exposition: 9
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 10
Total: 31
Guardians of the Galaxy
Description: 8
Exposition: 7
Character Count: 8
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 3
Total Score: 33
Pulp Fiction
Description: 4
Exposition: 6
Character Count: 7
Plotting: 9
Presentation: 10
Total Score: 36
Again, complexity is NOT an indication of quality. It’s an assessment of how difficult the routine is to pull off. The higher the number, the harder it’s going to be for you to convey your story to the reader. Pulling off bigger routines usually results in a more satisfying experience, but you run a higher risk of failing. So it’s a gamble.
Now, let’s say you don’t want to listen to me. You’re going to write a complex story no matter what. If you’re going to do this, simply look for ways to pare down the complexity of each pillar. So, for description, say in one sentence what it takes you to say in three. For exposition, focus only on the key points that need to be made. If Harry Potter’s hiding a wand in a tree, don’t have him say, “I hid Gobblestorf’s wand in the tree by the 3 Valleys – where Griffindill used to take us when we were in 2nd Year.” Say, “I hid the wand in our favorite tree.” Little changes like that can really make a script easier to follow (and read). For character count, there are usually one or two characters who are pointless in a script. Find out who those characters are in your script and get rid of them. Then combine a couple of others. For plotting, twists and double-crosses are great, but don’t depend on them. One awesome twist is better than three so-so ones. And finally, presentation. There’s nothing you can really do to change this since it’s embedded into the concept of the movie. But you can be aware that it makes your script harder to read. To that end, hold the reader’s hand more than you normally would. Reading an ambitious time-twisting narrative can be a little like walking into a fun house of mirrors. We need you to orient us from time to time.
And really, that’s the best advice I can give you. You don’t have to do all these number-adding things to know that your idea is ambitious. If that’s the case, just being aware of it puts you in front of the problem. You can guide the reader along rather than leaving them on an island with a blindfold and a Da Vinci Code codex. The writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. You need to work together to get to the finish line.
