yes, but am i telling this story well?
Cheers fill the air when the Charlie Daniels Band's "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" comes on the jukebox -- it's like a Disney World redneck bar, akin to those European locales at Epcot that have been re-created so one doesn't have to deal with the messiness of plane travel and actual foreigners.
Two years ago: I talk a bit about Why Web Journals Suck.
Three years ago: I sleep too long.
Four years ago: I look for an apartment in LA. Wow. That was four years ago.
Today's news question:Which former world leader has been formally charged with corruption during his regime?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Why I Write Movies, Part II
Okay, so where was I? Right -- I was writing and writing, but I didn't know what a story was.
(A gigantic discussion has broken out on the Wordplay forums on "Story versus Plot" -- I'm too busy moderating to join in -- and it turns out that the meanings of these terms are far from universal, so I should probably define what I mean by them. For me, a story is overall gist of the tale, complete with the reason you're telling it -- not a moral, exactly, but the reason why this tale should resonate. The plot is the events that you choose to tell that story.)
(I may change those definitions, because I'm not happy with them. Watch this space.)
Sometimes I found the story by accident or with a little help: I sold the first short story I ever submitted, to a Dark Horse series entitled Underground. I did a first draft and Darin critiqued it, saying this part was confusing, that part came in the wrong place, what was the point of this scene? I reworked it until he thought it was good, and I sent it off, and it was accepted.
So, I could do create a story that had an actual structure -- I just didn't know what I was doing.
Most what happened for me was, I would come up with a couple of characters and a situation and I could get number of pages out of that. But then what? I had no idea where I was going or how to develop more out of this initial idea. I would go on and on ("and then this happened...then this happened") in an episodic manner (meaning, each development just sort of happened, rather than building on the previous one) instead of a dramatic manner.
There are plenty of intuitive writers, writers who can instinctively put together a story without knowing what they're doing. There are also plenty of writers who figured out the whole structure thing early. I was neither of these. Even if I'd been a writer who could intuitively make a well-structured story
I was taking screenwriting courses at De Anza but (looks around, wonders who's reading) they weren't very good. I didn't feel I was any closer to figuring out what a story was, but I was enjoying exploring the form of a screenplay. It's very, very different from prose writing.
For one thing, you can't dazzle people with incredible mastery of words and style over plot. Either things are happening, or they are not. I didn't finish anything, but technically I improved. I just never finished anything, because I didn't know where I was going. It was my problems with prose all over again.
I was enjoying learning about screenwriting enough to take film production classes. De Anza is a great place to take film classes -- lots of equipment, lots of support. And they train you well -- you start with silent movies and move up to short films. Some people create really fantastic looking films. I was pretty happy to get something in focus.
Making projects I'd written was invaluable. Seriously, folks, there is no substitute for seeing how something you've written plays out in real life, as opposed to in your head. I would hear some of my stunning dialogue being spoken and I would think, Who the fuck wrote that? I understood why you really have to justify having more than two lines of dialogue (in most cases). Why you can't have pages and pages of people talking -- in America we call them movies.
And even my early projects, which were neither deftly framed or especially well-acted, gave me immediate feedback: when they were shown in class, they got laughter in the right places.
I decided to apply to film school. Not only was I enjoying making films, but I really, really wanted to figure out this screenwriting thing.
I drove Darin crazy. Was I moving away? Was I leaving him? What was going on? Eventually we talked about it and I said I wanted to go to LA for film school, but I would get an apartment and we would see one another every couple of weekends.
I went to USC -- you can read all about it here in this journal! -- and I went with an agenda: I wanted to learn lots more about film, I wanted to learn about story, and I wanted to finish a full-length screenplay (something I was most definitely not doing on my own).
First quarter I did great with the writing exercises, but I didn't know how to develop them. Second quarter I had an idea for a feature, but I couldn't figure out how to build from that initial idea into a full-length screenplay.
And then I took this class, Script Analysis. We didn't analyze scripts at all, we watched movies. We watched them once all the way through, and then we watched them again, starting and stopping, with the teacher explaining the various points of structure. And it wasn't a cookie-cutter approach to three-act structure: the films we analyzed included Some Like It Hot, Notorious, Remains of the Day, The Last Seduction, and The Tenant. All very different...but all containing similar elements.
In this class, I finally saw it. I understood the difference between Acts I, II, and III. And more importantly, I felt I was in control of it: I could analyze a movie -- or a story -- and know where I was in it. And I had the tools to begin putting together a structured story with a beginning, middle, and end.
I realize this is an exercise I could have done at home, a lot cheaper, with a bunch of videos and a pause button. But it's like learning a foreign language on your own: you might learn the vocabulary and the grammar, but are you really going to sound like a native?
Anyhow, I had the first draft of my first screenplay done by May, after the first year of film school.
Second year, in thesis class, with Len, I really learned what a story is, not only through what he did with my work but with others. I got a much better feel for when something was just an idea and when it was a full-fledged story. And I developed a story sense, so that even if I didn't always know what I was doing -- and I definitely don't -- I could help out other people figure out what their story was.
As Len said, "Story is the most difficult thing we do."
The journey I went on to get a clue in the story department was very hard -- and worth it.
Of course, we have yet to see if I am as clueful as I think I am now. Perhaps one day you'll see a movie I've written or a novel I've published and you'll think to yourself, Wow, is she delusional or what?
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com