On Breaking Story - Part 3
Pace yourself. Remember to drink plenty of fluids. It’s a marathon, not a race.
41) Darkness is only perceived when counterpointed with light and vice versa. Juxtaposing organic humor with dark moments (and the reverse) brings both into stark relief and gives scenes and stories a sense of reality. Life doesn't artificially separate comedy and drama.
42) Generally speaking, the more characters in a scene, the less emotional they are. Two people can fall in love or tear each other's hearts out, five tend to solve crimes together.
43) "Set-up and payoff" is usually applied to jokes in comedy but is just as important for drama. An audience needs to be aware that a character's issue (or moment of mystery) exists in an episode before its resolution can be satisfying.
The greater the distance between a set-up and payoff, the greater the importance of it should be. Small questions can be asked and answered within a scene, larger discreet questions within an episode. Big character questions/mysteries, within a season or over seasons.
44) When setting up season long arcs keep a board with all of the loose threads that need to be tied up. Makes it easier to not drop plots in the fog of the season and sometimes makes surprising and unexpected connections more evident.
45) Every time a gun is brandished on screen without affect the threat of it is weakened. Don't have characters just pull out weapons for a moment of tension. If it happens it needs to change the conditions of the scene and have consequences.
46) Keep snacks out of the writers room. It's hard enough to not gain weight on staff without staring at candy and baked goods all day.
47) The tricky part of having your characters be betrayed is having them not seem foolish. The more emotionally complicated the betrayal (rather than a pure machination) the better. Showing the betrayer struggling with what they have done also makes for deeper drama.
48) It's good to show your characters being wrong sometimes, but the reason they are wrong is important. While life is full of factual errors and annoying misunderstandings, a character's mistakes must illuminate their nature. Know their central flaw. Every mistake reflects it.
49) Deeper themes need to be woven into the DNA of character choices and dynamics. If they are only spoken to in dialogue it will often as not get cut for time.
50) Whenever you start discussing plot without discussing character, you know you have lost the thread. The plot is there to illuminate & challenge the characters and compel change. Otherwise it's just "stuff happening."
51) When encountering a seemingly intractable story problem, rather than powering through try taking a break. Take a walk. Do anything other than stare at a screen or a white board. The answer isn't there, it's in your brain and it needs to get jostled around a bit to come out.
52) If spending time to set-up an event is feeling dramatically inert, try jumping right to it and back-filling (explaining after the fact) how the characters got there.
53) Take a final pass at the script and actually sound out the dialogue. Anything you trip over saying the actors are likely to as well, meaning more takes and costing precious time on the day of shooting.
54) If a bad guy has every reason to kill the protagonist and doesn't, the audience needs a reason other than that they can't because it's a TV show. Do they need information? Does the bad guy have a character reason for not doing it? A deeper plan?
55) Interrogation scenes work when both characters are active and trying to learn information. The pain of torture may overtly be what's driving the scene but it's the chess game happening under it that makes things interesting.
56) Common writers room interaction: "[Insert show] did that story. "Not with THESE characters." With 3,000 show on the air, some storylines will inevitably repeat. Finding the angle/execution for how that story is specific to your show is what differentiates it.
57) Don't split your mcguffin/bifurcate your goal. A character can't have two motivations at once. This isn't to say they can't have complexity, or their conscious goal can't change over the course of the story...but we need to know what is driving them at each step.
58) If the story doesn't work, the spectacle doesn't matter.
59) The answer to almost every story question of "But why wouldn't they do [X]" is to just have them do it and show why it doesn't work. The audience is satisfied the most obvious route was tried and the characters seem smarter for overcoming the obstacle.
60) When mixing humor and action, the former shouldn't lower the stakes of the latter. Done well, humor is the result of an unexpected raise in stakes. Think Indy punching a Nazi and the look on his face when it has no effect.
You’re still reading? Hopefully you’re finding some of this useful, otherwise you really need to value your time more. Either way, you’re on the last leg now, might as well power through from 61-86.