Forget psychological and anthropological studies. Never mind Joseph Campbell. Right here, right now, a genuine storyteller gives us the whole truth and nothing but the truth, from a real storyteller’s POV:
A question I’ve been asked from time to time is, Why do you write?
Talk about a predicament!
On the one hand, Yer Friendly Neighborhood munchola has to confess here and now that he absolutely lurves Bill Murray. Many’s the night, in fact, that I’ve YouTubed myself to sleep listening to My Hero spend a magnificent 59 seconds doing his inimitable rendition of the STAR WARS theme. Nobody does it like Billy Baby, not even Ella Fitzgerald.
On the other hand, I Netflixed A VERY MURRAY CHRISTMAS the other night, and, well, let me put it this way: Why the hell was the fantastically unfunny – and D-E-A-D Robert Mitchum running around the Carlyle Hotel pretending to be the Murrayman in a Christmas special so unspecial that it made director Sofia Coppola’s snoozily inept LOST IN TRANSLATION (which starred the real Bill Murray) look like (no, not an Oscar winner – never!) a Golden Globe nominee?
TV isn’t dead, after all. Instead, it’s just moved to a new location. Our laps:
Do you remember 2007? Way back then in the long-long ago times, movies came on physical discs and you binge-watched a TV series by happening to turn on the TV while a Law and Order marathon was running. Now, however, it seems like basically everything streams to us over the internet… and basically the whole internet, or at least a huge fraction of it, is for streaming.
Well, he breaks it by fixing it, of course. Isn’t that what story-breaking is all about? Making the story work?
The opening credits on most TV shows often come with a side order of lies. The main offender is the “written-by” credit. It’s a suspiciously narrow designation that suggests one or possibly two story-artisans painstakingly handcrafted every plot-point, every turn, and every string of sparkling banter that make up the episode all on their own. Barring some exceptions, what actually happens is an entire writers room full of interlocking personality types forms like a comedy Voltron to pitch and polish ideas until one or two writers have enough material to go off and write up a draft. It’s a process that’s known as breaking a story, and it is incredibly difficult to do.
One person who knows more about it than most, though, is Alan Yang.
Scenes are more than signposts on your way to the end of the screenplay road. They’re more than just moments in which story or character points are thrown out at the viewer or reader. A good scene in a screen or teleplay — and by good I mean EFFECTIVE in terms of getting the response you want — is a mini-film in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end.
Scenes need to be structured so that their intensity grows and then climaxes, like microcosms of your script. (And, I think it’s clear, sex too – but we’re not going there right now.)
This doesn’t mean that a scene should go on and on. far from it.