I am writing this between Playwriting class and Screenwriting Lab, instead of doing my homework. I'm doing this both as a testament to my passion for a good rotgut discourse, but also to my passion for procrastination. My esteemed colleague here at Guerilla Ink asked me to talk a bit about writing, but true to my contradictory nature, I have decided not to. I will, instead, talk about story. Which is, in fact, very different.
Writing isn't so hard. Sure, beautiful language is important and multi-dimensional characters that really move and sweep through a world, those are necessary. But all of that amounts to a dictionary, a thesaurus, a few glasses of gin and a joint -- the story, though, now that's a pain in the ass.
In my eight months or so of graduate school, I have been asked to write at least a gagillion (real number) stories. It always starts off well -- okay, so we have a space pirate, in space, and she gets stuck in the middle of a civil war.
Good premise. But that's not yet a story.
Well, the Civil War is between Earth and its Colonies, and there's this Revolutionary, right? And he's really awesome, but kind of a pain in the ass, and so the pirate gets hired to kidnap him and she decides to sell him to the highest bidder.
Great, so there's a complication or two in there. But where's the story?
It goes on and on like that, round and round, in circles, until you've kind of looped it all about yourself, tied your own noose and you're hanging in it, story-less, but with a really exhausted brain.
They tell you story is conflict. Well, yes. But story stems from conflict. And if you determine your specific conflicts, and how they interlock and define your specific characters, and how those characters change, specifically, in order to rise to the conflict you've set before them -- then, THEN, you begin to have a story. This, my friends, can take YEARS. Draft after draft after draft -- of not writing, no -- of outlines, and freewrites, and just trying to get from point A to point Q, and how A causes Q to even happen, because your protagonist decided that A was her best choice, instead of B, which ends up being a better choice, but at what cost? The cost is D, brought about when the protagonist tripped over C, though she ends up landing in E, and from there, well...you know the alphabet.
At the end of the day, is what I'm saying, you aren't writing, you are storytelling.
And by the time you actually sit down to write, it's like coming up for air after diving into the deep end of a pool -- a gasp of realization, a wondrous moment of bursting, because you already know this story so well, these characters like your family, and they may surprise you, but you have constructed for them the best possible venue in which to spotlight all their quirks and flaws and glory.
That's how we do it in theatre, and on screen, anyway.
The actual writing is like the prize you win for doing all of the other work -- but without that work, you'll end up tearing your hair out and hurling your laptop into a wall when, at page 60, the entire story has fallen to pieces and you have no idea why. Then you figure out why -- and if only you'd seen it coming. It's because the story wasn't right, kid. It's because the story didn't suit the characters, didn't push them to their own limits -- it's because you did not spend time learning them, and how to expose them, and all their conflicted awesomeness.
Conflict. Internal, external. A sense of rising conflict, and the cost of each step forward as the protagonist struggles to achieve her goal, and heal her wound. Sometimes these two things are divergent, and she must either attain, fail to attain, or alter her goal in order to satisfy -- not just her, or me, the writer, but you, the audience. I've taken you this far, I owe you one hell of a resolution. Or you'll never buy the DVD.
This concludes our dispatch from the Future.
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