How to make a drama out of a story

Having a problem writing a drama script? Do you find it’s full of wonderful character development but somehow it just doesn’t come together? Or you like it but your story isn’t getting across to the people who read it?

There is a rather pernicious false division in some industry people’s minds between “drama” and “genre” – as in “it’s not a genre movie, it’s drama” – as if Drama were not a genre in cinema and TV. Of course it is, and a very well defined genre, albeit one with many variations. And like all genres it has major traps for the unwary writer.

What’s the story?

If the major problem with action movies is that the writer forgets to write the Inner Story – what it is that really drives the characters along – the major problem with drama is the opposite.

Most drama scripts are almost all Inner Story – what we remember is not the characters’ outer goals but their inner struggles. Nowhere is this clearer than in Rite of Passage stories, including Coming of Age.

We are so absorbed by the Inner Story of (say) About Schmidt (Schmidt learning to live with old age) that we remember little or nothing of the Outer Story. Can you remember it? (See below). Or the Outer Stories of Stand By Me, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Diner or The Big Chill?

Get Outside

If you’re stuck with a drama, the chances are you’ve neglected the Outer Story. Go and check it out now. If you haven’t got one – invent one. You  have to have one, even if nobody will remember it! It can be as simple as driving to your daughter’s wedding (that’s the outer story of About Schmidt – did you get it?) or walking through the woods looking for a dead body (Stand By Me).

If you already have an Outer Story, then you may need to focus on it a bit more.

Social Drama and Coming of Age

This is just one of the requirements that get forgotten for Drama, for either film or television. You also need to know what emotions the audience will expect, the role of society in a drama story, what story patterns you have to deliver, and how to deliver them in fresh and surprising ways.

If you want to know more, I’m running a workshop in Social Drama and Coming of Age in London for Euroscript at 6.15pm on Tuesday 28 September. We look at a number of Drama stories in particular Juno – you get a free full script of Juno included in the price. It’s a small training and getting quickly booked up, but there are still a few places left – to find out more and book click here.

And have fun making a drama out of your story.

The Horrific Sentence

You know, I firmly believe that at the heart of many – possibly all – genres there is a single sentence. There is certainly one at the heart of all Horror movies, and I’ll tell you what it is in a moment, but first I have to go into a few things to make it clear.

The most important thing to understand about genre is that it’s all about emotion. Comedy is supposed to make you laugh (though you might not believe that if you saw some of the scripts I see). Thrillers are supposed to scare you. And Horror – is horrifying. Horror movies contain horrible images, sounds and ideas. We get to be afraid too, often, but it’s horror that is at the very core of every good Horror movie.

Horror movies have dismembered bodies, scary ghosts, dark corners where things lurk that we cannot bear to think about. We meet sociable cannibals with gourmet tastes in human offal, murderous dead mothers who have taken over their sons’ psyches. We get incarcerated by pleasant serial killers, turned into monster flies and find our very bodies and minds turning against ourselves. It is the duty of the Horror writer to introduce us to nightmares we never even knew we had.

Now, here’s the thing: we want to be horrified, and yet we don’t. Unpleasant feelings are difficult. We both want to feel them and at the same time we shy away from them. All our natural instincts tell us to run from anything horrific.

The second job of every good screenwriter is to ensure that we can’t run. When we hear the floorboards creak, or see the tell-tale dribble of the Alien, or feel the chill of the mist around the graveyard at night, the writer must shut the door, immobilise the car, ensure the mobiles don’t work and that we have nowhere else to go than where he wants us to.

So the sentence that every great Horror writer has engraved on their heart is: Don’t go into the attic!

Every Horror movie has an attic – real or metaphorical – where we know horrible things live. That “attic” might be an apparently empty spaceship, or a Californian motel, or even a sunlit motorway service station. The writer must build up exactly why we don’t want to go there – and then make sure that there is no possible way not to.

This is also why credibility is so important in Horror scripts and why in my Horror and Noir workshops I always include a section on credibility – the skill of getting an audience to believe your story at every step along the way. All the way into the attic.

There is also a core sentence in Noir. I’ll leave you to work that one out for yourself – and I’ll give you a clue. As Noir grew out of a dark marriage of Horror and Crime so the core Noir sentence is related to the Horror sentence.

And if you want to learn more about Horror and Noir, come along to the Euroscript Horror and Noir Evening in London – 6pm on Tuesday June 29. Click here for more details. There are currently four places left, and it’s the only time it’s on this year.

Avoid the Mistakes Made by Would-be Thriller Screenwriters

I see an enormous number of scripts by writers who want to write thrillers and good on them. It’s a difficult art, but a very marketable one if you get it right.

And the sad thing is that while many are excellent writers, intelligent and hard-working, almost every single one makes the same mistake. (They often make other mistakes too, but this one stands out partly because it seems such a no-brainer).

Before I tell you what it is, I need to give you a few more tips about writing in any genre.

First, ignore anyone who tells you that genre isn’t important. It’s vital – and all the great writers and directors have known that since before movies and TV. Shakespeare was expert at using genre, just as all the great dramatic and cinematic artists have been. They all studied genre with enormous care.

Second, genre is about three things: emotion (the emotion you create in your audience) – expectation (giving the audience the patterns and motifs they expect from that genre) – and surprise (delivering those patterns and motifs in a surprising and fresh way).

One of the challenges of writing in any genre or genres is knowing what emotions and patterns are expected, and finding unusual ways to deliver them.

So – when writing a thriller, what do you have to do?

Get the genre right.

The script has to set up the genre, develop the motifs and raise the tension level from the very start. Not (despite the scripts I see every week) some time after the fiftieth page once the writer has bored you to tears “setting up” all the things he/she thinks you need to know.

In fact, I have personally put out a contract on every writer who ever tells anyone that a scene is only in the script in order to “set” anything up. You’ve been warned.

I don’t pay my £8-12 (depending on cinema) to be bored while you tell me stuff. Make me scared. And do it in ways that I don’t expect. Easy? No… It has to be studied and learned – that’s what they pay the big bucks for when you get it right.

Anything more? Yes – because the Thriller genre is never just one genre. There is always at least one, often two, other genres in your script, whether you know it or not. And you need to learn about those too – find out the emotions – patterns and motifs that they demand – or your audience will not be pleased.

Luckily, if you’re near London, I’m running a series of six workshops on genre on Tuesday evenings – it’s got very limited places and some have already gone so if you want check it out here now – click this link – http://www.euroscript.co.uk/genrecourse.html

Or we know where you live…