On Breaking Story - Part 4
The last batch! It ends at 86 for reasons that anyone who has studied numerology would understand. Kidding, that’s just where I stopped. It has no greater meaning. (Or does it?) (It doesn’t.)
61) Bringing in new characters carries a risk of them feeling like a foreign element (that the audience won't care about). Focusing on how they reflect on the main characters (and themes) will help cement them in the story. Best case, new characters deepen the core characters.
62) Characters rejecting the call to action that the show requires gets old very quickly and generally is settled by the pilot. Audiences don’t love characters that don’t want to be in the show they are watching.
63) Be careful that the potential ramifications of the red herring are not more interesting than the actual story that will unfold.
64) If the room runs out of gas, there's no harm in taking an early lunch.
65) The instinct to take what is expected and twist it is good, but not at the cost of basic narrative laws. "The audience will expect [X] to be the villain, let's make it [Y]." Good. "The audience will expect the hero and villain to fight, let's have them never interact." Bad.
66) If a story requires multiple coincidences there is something wrong with it. Question every assumption, particularly in how the story launches.
67) The difference between intellectual stakes and personal stakes is the difference between Global Warming and a character's room being on fire. The former is dangerous with wide-ranging consequences but not as visceral for driving action as the latter.
68) Know the difference between an escalation of size and of kind. The former (the Hero faces 1 swordsman...then 10!) is not as strong as the latter (the Hero faces 1 swordsman...then, oh no, that's a dragon). An escalation of kind isn't just "more" but conceptually different.
69) The Protagonist being saved by another character at a critical juncture feels earned when previous actions clearly led to the salvation. Their past goodness/love/heroics having changed another character creates satisfying cause-and-effect and makes it part of their journey.
70) When creating a character, think about how they'll function a season down the line. What emotions/dynamics might you want to see? Having a sense of what colors you'll need for painting later means including them in the palette at the start--and will make for a better intro.
71) You only get so many surprises that turn out to be false jeopardy before you break faith with the audience. Think a jump scare in a horror movie that turns out to be a cat. You play that card too often, the audience pulls away.
72) When introducing a new character, give them more than one episode in a row to cement them with the audience. You don't want the audience reaction on their exciting return to be "Who is that?"
73) Assume if a story point is causing confusion in the room, it will absolutely lose viewers that need to digest it in seconds of dialogue. Take time to simplify. Once you've found an elegant throughline, you can figure out how to hide the trail for the audience.
74) Two ways to handle a potential plot-hole. A) "Hang a lantern on it" -- have a character draw attention to it and then quickly dismiss it. B) "Steer into the skid" -- consider the plot-hole an opportunity for conflict to be solved by the character, and thus eliminate the hole.
Sometimes hanging a lantern is the way to go, but first consider if steering into the skid might create any interesting new character insights and/or interactions--and turn that plot hole into a great subplot.
75) Tone, like gravity, invisibly binds the world of your story. When it's off, the audience senses it. The effect can be more damaging than a bad plot point as it reveals the artifice of the world; once the spell is broken it may not be recreated.
76) Characters do not change because they want to change. Change is painful and people avoid pain at all costs. Characters change because the plot forces them to confront their greatest fears and weaknesses and either overcome them or be destroyed by them.
77) Two questions to ask yourself when a scene isn't working: 1. Do these characters have too much information? 2. Do these characters have too little information?
Too much and they are robbed of discovery/drive. Too little and their drive will be muddled.
78) The classic question when building a sequence is do you go for Tension, so the audience is aware of a threat that the character isn't, or Surprise--where neither is aware. Both can work, but Tension and Surprise tend to be zero sum. More of one is less of the other.
79) Instead of your protagonists just trying to prevent X from happening consider letting the villain succeed at X and how your characters recover from it. What happens after "the unthinkable" happens? Thanos getting to snap his fingers created a whole new universe of stories.
80) Once you have established a ticking clock anything that the characters do off-mission risks frustrating the audience. Give the characters mission-related business to do while they have those necessary character-deepening scenes.
81) In fiction as in life, if a character threatens consequences and then doesn't deliver them, the character is weakened in the eyes of the audience. If that's not the intention, make sure your characters' mouths don't write checks that their actions don't cash.
82) Fantasy and magic feel "real" when grounded by human nature and history. The One Ring links the thirst for power with inherent corruption. The Holy Grail, our futile desire for eternal life. A genie's lamp, the unintended consequences of our boundless greed.
83) When a scene isn't working, when it feels forced, try stepping back from it. Forget about what *should* happen and look at the larger themes that you're exploring. What is the story about. What are you trying to say? Sometimes that unlocks what *must* happen.
84) A satisfying arc tends to examine what the character wants at the beginning vs. what they need by the end and how these things are distinct if not in opposition to each other. Character wants are easy and don't require change; needs are hard and transformational.
85) The trick of a great ending is that it feels inevitable in retrospect but arrives via an unforeseen route.
86) If a character is struggling to overcome something, let us see the victory before time-jumping ahead. Don't rob the audience of the moment by jumping ahead and backfilling the victory.
You did it! That’s all of them…for now. More may be added in the future as most of these came about because of mistakes I myself was making, and I don’t imagine I will stop making mistakes anytime soon.