Note from the MasterClass

Intention and Obstacle

⭐ Intention and Obstacle. The most important thing in drama.
Strong, clear intention.
Formidable Obstacle.

At some point, grip and rip it: get your foundation and then just... hit it as hard as you can.

Start with the intention and obstacle.
Someone who wants something and there's something in their way.

It can't be a leisurely drive across the country, someone needs to be there (at the destination) on a certain day. A job interview, a wedding, SOMETHING. It has to happen.
Then you've got flat tires and obstacles.
And you can HANG the cool stories off of that tension between intention and obstacle (what Blake Snyder calls fun and games)

How do you know if the intention is strong enough or the obstacle formidable enough?
PRESS ON IT.
There must be urgency.
Want to see the Dodgers play? Not urgent enough!
Want to get there to see a certain player before they retire.
If there are ways to get out of it easily, you have to plug them.

The intention is never too strong, the obstacle never too formidable.
THEY DON'T HAVE TO OVERCOME THE OBSTACLE, THEY JUST HAVE TO TRY.

How do you show the cahracter's intention?
The easiest way is to have a character say I want or I need...
Have a scene where you run through it: why do you have to be there Thursday, can't you get there Friday? No,...
Travel agent: it looks like we're booked tonight, can I move you to tomorrow?

You CAN start out with scene 1 stating intention and obstacle.
"We need to rescue the princess, get across the moat, cross the armed guards. She's locked in..." etc.
Or you can start in scene 1 with stating the intention and have everyone think it's going to be smooth sailing until they get to the moat.

Once once you introduce the intention does the story begin.

And the conflict only starts when you introduce the obstacle.

Without obstacles, you just have journalism, not drama.

When to introduce it?
How much time will the audience give you?
Leaving a play is hard. Putting down a book is easy.
Changing the channel is SUPER easy.
Butch Cassidy: 15 minutes of exposition. Who they are, everything goes well, etc.
UNTIL this one time when everything changes.
Intention and Obstacle: We don't want to get caught, but these guys won't stop chasing us.

Ideas

Two parts:
Knowing what an idea is.
Not "I want to write about surfing"
You have an idea when you can use the words "But, except, and then..."
It was a normal day like any other until...
Everything was great until all of a sudden...
Having it.

Find the conflict.
There's no matter of "Good enough". What pitch do you swing at?
Is there drama or conflict?
Remember, like baseball: if you only fail 2/3 of the time, you go to the hall of fame.

Characters

Character is born from intention and obstacle.
Tactics that the character uses to overcome that obstacle is WHAT the character is.

Mark Zuckerberg: Going off blog post
We see what he wants: to be cool, to date girls, to get into the club.
"I want to be accepted, want a social life"

Tactics: Toby in the West Wing
He gets around obstacles. Is direct with the president.
"You are not fulfilling your potential!" "Don't pretend to be dumber than you are to pander to dumb people" "You are the smartest person in the room, be that person".
Blunt, honest.
Leo: Blunt when he needs to be, manipulates staffers with a sense of humor.

Don't write long biographies
⭐ Anything that isn't tension or obstacle gets cut, especially when you are starting.

The character was born at the age they are. They only get to be 5 years old if they say something like "When I was 5 years old, I saw my father kill himself". If it's not relevant, cut it.

Backstory doesn't help.

Don't try to make them human.

If the scene is about him getting money from his parents, you can play out the intentions and things will come up organically, that's when you introduce the small details.

Write characters not people
You don't want them to be as human as possible.
That's for critics or audiences to talk about.

Photorealism is for paintings. Most of the times, it comes off like a documentary in writing. You rarely want that.

Not good for drama.
Like a singer trying to sound like an instrument.
It's neat, but it's not what you want.

Writing characters different than yourself

Or championing issues I don't agree with.
Don't write about what it's like to be black or gay in the US in the 21st century. I don't know that experience.
Other people with different perspectives can write that (in a script you can collaborate with people, e.g. a writer's room)

Identify with your antiheroes
Have something in common with the characters
Don't judge them.
⭐Write them as if they're making a case to God about why they're trying to get into heaven

For screenwriting: the actor will complete the character

Two types of research

1. Nuts and bolts research
   It's objective, not subjective.
   "How many nuts and bolts did it take to build the Golden Gate Bridge?"

2. When you don't know what you're lookign for.
   "Where is the movie"
   Need to hear it yourself: you don't know what you're looking for.
   Organic, something will pop up.
   Talk to people. As many as possible.
   Most of the research doesn't make it to the movie. But you gotta do it anyway.

How to interview

Don't want to wear them out or take time
Want to keep them happy
Normally an hour is fine

If it's a long process, don't as any hard questions, maybe just coffee no questions (e.g. lisa jobs)

Can be direct: tell me something I don't know about XXX

Often meet once in person then everything can be done over email or phone.

Meaningless research

Aaron finds this useless, others don't
Like filling the garbage cans with period-appropriate trash

Sometimes actors do meaningless research
Like Alec Baldwin watching the surgeons in the OR
That's fine, wahtever

Incorporating Research

Researching lines of dialogue
Don't need to understand it if it's corret
"Cool patois" language specific to a vocation that makes the audience think "Those guys know what they're doing", there's a whole vocabulary I'm figuring out.
Sometimes the audience shouldn't know what the thing is because the moment is these guys know what's going on and what they're talking about

The more important truth
Nonfiction: you have a moral compass to decide what's the more important truth
Because you're lying constantly.
People don't speak in dialogue, lives don't go in scenes

If people are alive, don't tell stories that would hurt them ("Hippocratic oath")
Don't change the fundamental truth of what's happening.
Is this lie unfair to the person or to the concept of truth?

Audience

The audience is a component of the event.

Treat them as smart.
They don't want to observe.
They want to put things together themselves.
AND if you can get them doing that and they don't see a reversal coming, it's satisfying for them.
e.g. you have all the clues that Sherlock has but he puts it together and you don't, that's satisfying.

Don't lose the audience.
You can do something that wouldn't happen IF the audience doesn't know it wouldn't happen.
A lawyer wouldn't brief their client on the steps as their walking to the capital.
They know what you can and cannot do in certain places (like the oval office)

Like no one knows who is involved in military things (national security officer) but if you do something that couldn't happen and the audience knows, you've lost them for good.

Don't confuse the audience.
⭐The biggest question is "Was it comprehensible?"
Did you follow the story, did you understand it.

If you add confusion to the mix, the audience will be apprehensive.
⭐They NEED the storyteller to take them by the hand and lead them through the story. Need to feel like that's true.
❗BUT you don't want to overexplain. The WORST thing you can do is tell the audience something they already know.

Rules of Story

Best way to learn is by watching plays, watching movies, reading their screenplays, watch the movie with the screenplay in your lap.
You gotta take it apart and see how it translates.

Look for exposition, inciting action, action, reversal, climax, denouement

There's a tendency to thing that art has no rules, that it will just flow.

NO!

That's finger painting

Rules are what makes art beautiful

They're what make sports interesting and beautiful. Music has rules, like time signature and so on. Writing has these rules as well.

See Poetics by Aristotle.

Learn by watching and reading others.
Be a diagnostician.
When you see something that doesn't work, don't be snarky about it.
Figure out why it's bad.
Don't use any snark or snarky terms.
Don't make fun of it.
Diagnose it.
Why doesn't it work.
Something that breaks the rules of Aristotle's rules but works, how?
The answer is they only appeared to break them, but didn't actually.

A lot of "rules" are wrong and dumb
"You can't do xyz" (baseball movies, people with mustaches, etc.)
The only rules are the rules of drama

Film Story Arc

Story vs drama
What is a fact?
The queen died.
Story:
The queen died and the king died of a broken heart.
Drama:
The queen died, the king is alone, and the queen was the brilliant one, and now the king has to go it alone in the face of people who are trying to get him off the throne because everyone knows he's dumb.

3 acts usually.
A play is 2.
TV is 6.

3 act structure for movies:
Act 1 Chase your hero up a tree
Act 2 You throw rocks at him
Act 3 you get him down
(or they die in the tree trying to get down)
If they get down in the third act, you still have to show how they will get down in act 1.

Only show a gun if you use it.
And only use a gun if you showed it earlier.

Stakes should be high.
As high as possible.

Exposition

Exposition is the first part of drama.
Second thing is the inciting action
Exposition is telling the audience what they need to know in order to understand the inciting action

You need a character who is just as confused as the audience.

Never start a line with "As you know"

Steve Jobs: You have the stand-in as a doubter: she doesn't get what makes the mac good. She knows what the mac is, it's not "what is this", it's "why is this a big deal?"

Courtroom dramas are "easy" because the jury knows as little as the audience.

Inciting incident

Where the drama begins
Hamlet is the ghost telling him what happened and asking what are you gonna do about it?

Page numbers should be road signs
Most screenplays are 100-125 pages.
Dialogue takes up more space. Social Network was 185 pages long

If you're talking 125 pages, if you're on 20 or 25 and you haven't introduced the protagonist or havent' introduced the inciting action, you're in trouble.

(voiceover doubles pages)

You won't end up with the thing you thought you were writing

⭐The first 15 pages are the most important.
The last 15 minutes of a movie are the most important
BUT if you want to get your foot in the door, you NEED a kickass first 15 pages.
Execs will forgive the crummy next 110 pages, they'll get rewritten.

If you blow the last 15 minutes after a fantastic 2 hours, you get zero credit for the last 15 minutes. Like rounding the bases after hitting a homer.

Writing habits

Bulk up to writing
For him, 18-24 months for one screenplay.
Some people 10-12 weeks

But that 18-24 months isn't writing, it's bulking up, preparing to write.
Once he starts tying if everything's great it's 2-3 months.
But before that is a year of not writing, of banging head against the wall, doing research (reading, meeting people)

❓ Most days you don't write (hmmm)
demoralizing
But they days where you do write and it's good you feel like you can fly.

⭐Start with the first scene.
When you are actually typing the script
Start with the intention and obstacle OR AT LEAST the intention and obstacle of the first scene.

Then writes it blazing, as fast as it takes to write.
If it's coming in spurts, you don't have it yet.

Use Tools to organize writing

He uses Final Draft
Index Cards
Not just floating around

Like walking at night with a flashlight

Write what you like, and write like yourself.
⭐You get better with practice
The more you do it the more comfortable you get with your voice and style

Don't try to write like someone else. It's bad.

Writer's block: he gets it all the time, more often than not.
Listen to music when you're stuck.

Focus on progress.

Painting a fence, you can see the progress remaining, can see the end.
You don't need to be in a good mood to paint a fence. It's hard but it's mindless.
Writing you need to feel good.
So anything you can do an emotional helper, crossing things off, feeling good is helpful and essential.

Writing feedback

Writing action: you want descriptions of action to take as much time as it's going to take for it to happen on screen

This is for reading drafts so agents, etc. can understand the pacing better.
Imagine a scary person coming around a corner. Take a half page to describe their fright.

If it has to take longer than the time it takes on screen, give it a headline (CRASH!!) and then describe the action

sometimes Aaron will say like 'she fell down' and then take some sentences to wind back the clock and explain in 3 sentences why that happened even though it's just a BAM one moment on screen

Don't care about reality, care about the appearance of reality.
Use the right jargon that watchers won't understand.

⭐The real thing goes a long way in establishing credibility (truth)

There's a trick for when you have to pull off something slightly imporbable

A probable impossibility is preferable to a possible improbability

ET following a trail of Reece's Pieces to a guy's home -> once we bought ET existing, the rest is logical.

Possible improbability: you turn on the radio at the exact moment the new you need.

⭐OR, if something improbable happens, it has to be to the DETRIMENT of our protagonist (running into a bad guy, for example)

But there's a get out of jail free card: avoid it when you can, but if you can't avoid it:
Admit it. Fly in the face of it. Have the guy say "Am I the only person in the world? Are you saying that I have to do both of these things??"
Admit what you're doing and you can get away with it.

Do the real thing! (e.g. with bomb defusal). Find out what it looks like and do it.

Writing a scene

If you aren't moving the story forward, you're standing still.
Be careful how long you're standing still, the audience won't hang out with you for very long.

⭐Stories involve motion.
Start at point A and go due north to point B.
But in the writing process, you start going north by north east and eventually you're going due east instead.
That's OK, but there HAS to be motion.
At the end of every scene, we have to be at least one step further than we were before.

Going from one scene into the next

1. Have the next scene be an answer to a question that you asked in the previous scene.

   1. If the jets are hanging out at their hideout and one says "I wonder what the sharks are doing right now"

   2. BAM next scene is lighting up showing the Sharks

   3. "There's no way the supreme court would rule this way" BAM smash cut to "The supreme court has ruled this way"

The end of a scene should be a mini climax that jettisons you into the next.

Reward Patience

2. Not every scene has to end with a cymbal crash, but it should leave you happy to move on, wanting you to keep moving.

Not just spinning wheels, wondering where the traction is.

Make your payoff big and good, especially the ending.

Comedy scenes

Odd numbers are funnier than even numbers.
Words with a K in them are funny.

Don't use anyone's physical appearance as the source of comedy.
Best jokes are ones you don't see coming that are set up early and pay off late.

Opening scenes

Some opening scenes lay out the themes of the entire movie. (Blake Snyder says do this on page 5).

See Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

GRAB THE AUDIENCE
Some scenes that's all they do.
Like starting in the middle of a conversation (The Social Network)

Drop the audience in a situation where you're already going 100 MPG, the audience has to sit forward and catch up.

Character introduction scenes

Great first scenes are showing the audience WHAT THE CHARACTER WANTS, not who they are.
The who they are will come out.

If they don't want something, they don't belong.

I WANT scenes are great.
CAN also introduce the obstacle.

Scenes work when the conflict is clear.
Intention and Obstacle are clear.

DON'T SHOW THE AUDIENCE WHO A CHARACTER IS, SHOW WHAT THEY WANT.
What they're willing to do to get it shows the character.

Tactics: Logic, humiliation, threats, etc.

Three things in a pile.
3 levels of personality (Andy is sheepish and doesn't think Steve is a dick, steve is a dick, Chrissanne using it like a weapon (I'm not the ONLY one who thinks you're a dick))

ONLY write as little detail as possible about emotion and turmoil, etc. The actors will fill it in.
E.G. Actors pretending they're not there, or doing something else.

Aaron hears the scene, doesn't see it.

Dialogue

Hard to teach, it's personal.
Aaron's approach: Dialogue is music.

He writes it like music with back and forth and every syllable in its place.

Don't imitate real people.
Critics will say "That's not the way people really talk."
Who cars? That's not your goal.
People don't rhyme, Shakespeare didn't care, why should you?

Some people can do that. Neat!
But usually that's improv.

BUT don't make them sound like they're on TV either.

Only in plays and movies and TV starts a sentence with "Damn it", nor will they end with it. But it does happen in these mediums.

Physicality

Talking out lout, playing all the parts, walking around, etc.

Then sit down and type it.

⭐ Perform dialogue to test it.

Play every part in the scene. Look for "Are these words speakable?"

He adds the hiccups and idiosyncrasies later.
False starts, ahs, ums, that kind of thing.

⭐And then cuts the lines where it goes too far, NEVER tell the audience something they already know.

Make sure an actor can say it.

Otherwise it becomes stilted and more like dialogue in a novel. So he keeps the hiccups and idiosyncrasies
He writes interrupting themselves, false starts, he writes it all out.
He likes the sound of 2-3 actors speaking at the same time.
This means it's rigidly timed, like a composer

Dialogue as music

It's rarely one line, it's usually multiple notes (multiple lines) coming together. Just like music.

With dialogue you need the next line for it to be music, it goes back and forth.

"We were hung up in traffic" -> "We were, you know, hung up in traffic" -> "We were, you know, we were hung up in traffic"

Taking the words someone has just said and holding them for a moment. And then PUNCHING THEM IN THE FACE WITH IT (see the Ritchie / Bartlet scene in Posse Cometus)

"Is all" is a musical phrase ("You shouldn't enjoy it so much is all")

Rewrites

First draft: get to the END before you rewrite it.

It's not as good as you think it is.
Not when it's first on the page.
It's good in your head but it'll get discovered and come out over drafts.
This will be obvious once you start re-reading it.
You'll notice what doesn't work.

Rewriting is easier than writing (for you, maybe!)

Don't start over from page 1 when you have a problem on 25.
Get to the END then come back and chip away at what doesn't work.
Remove anything that isn't the main conflict.

"I remove everything from the marble block that isn't David"

⭐ Get tot he end of the thing you're doing. Then once you're at the end, THAT'S your big block of Marble.

It'll be clunky, it won't work.
But now you know more about it, you know the shape, what doesn't work.
And you can remove everything that isn't THE CORE

Kill your darlings

⭐If the thing works without it, it shouldn't be there.

Keep it is tight as possible.
It's hard.
You love it. A good line, a good scene, a good joke.

BUT
If you don't need it, if it's unnecessary, if it's a detour, GET BACK ON THE FREEWAY
Cutting it will be HARD.
But it makes it better.

"No scene is worth a movie, no line is worth a scene"
That means no matter how good a scene is, if it's not serving the movie, it has to go. Likewise, no matter how good a line is, if it doesn't serve the scene it's in, it has to go.

You CAN have some breathing room, if you're good enough.
It doesn't have to be plot, plot, plot.
BUT
⭐You have to earn those moments.

Collect the right script editors

You'll develop relationships with 1-4 people who you really like talk about your work with.
You trust their taste, you have shared vocabulary.
⭐It takes time to collect them

But be careful who you listen to.
Don't listen to people who would try to rewrite the thing the way they would write it.
You want people who understand the way you write.

Listen for the problem, not the solution

Getting Through Notes

Ask for specific notes
Are the obstacle and intention clear enough?

Completely retype out the draft.
Once while reading it, and once from memory (!)

Pointed questions: did you get it, did you feel anything? Did you understand X and Y and Z.

There are thousands of ways to prepare beef.
Filet minion, flank steak, etc. But the way the fewest people find objectionable is a McDonald's hamburger.
A chef doesn't want to make those.
Be a chef.

But the best way to get good is to read and watch a lot.
And WRITE
Practice!!

See Also

Save The Cat