The Creative Journey of Story Development

The Creative Journey of Story Development

-screenplay development necessitates much creative destruction. It is a process, first of all, of mining or distilling the story into its essence, the essential dramatic truth it has to tell, then rebuilding the story out of that essence. This process takes as many drafts as it takes. There are many revisions in the script along the way, to clarify the throughline, tighten the action, concentrate the subplots, and so on. These revisions, if they are to be productive, must be the fruits of insight

-good movies project an essence. It reaches into our bodies and feelings, into our thoughts and dreams

-these effects all derive from that essence, which is both the source and the product of a powerful dramatic, thematic, and stylistic unity

-as it hits us in the midst of long creative toil, essence is simultaneously visceral and elusive

-in great films, however, essence is projected as a quality of inevitability of every moment on the screen

-what everyone wants are great stories, stories with originality, authenticity, and staying power: that elusive universal appeal that generates excitement

-the craft, the techniques and mechanics of the screenplay construction, must be learned and internalized until they become part of the writer

-a screenplay is a task the outcome of which cannot be precisely know beforehand. It requires a descent into what we have termed the “story’s unconscious,” that larger set of possibilities inherent in the story material but which is not yet apparent to the development team

-asking good questions about the story opens the story up and furthers the development process, while judgmental statements tend to shut the process down

-escapism here means short-cutting the dramatic development by cutting to easier audience-reaction elements – more graphic violence and sex, for example – and inserting pumped-up stakes that are not intrinsic to the story’s premise and need/mode thematic core. Escapism means not pushing the conflict all the way to the impossible double bind that forces a “grow or die” choice for the hero, but giving the character an easy, less authentic way out

-my set of core questions, which I use with writers who have lost their orientation to the script

1. Where is the juice in the story for you?

-this is really the core question to ask every day when sitting down to write and when beginning each scene

2. What about the story is: Universal? Unique? Dramatic?

3. What do you love the most about your story, about your hero?

4. Where do you see the attitudes, modes, and values of: Writer? Hero? Audience? – intersecting and coming together

5. Speak out loud the dramatic/narrative premise in one or two sentences. How does it sound today?

6. Define the character’s mode (attitudes revealed by actions that cluster around a core value) as you understand it today. Identify how your understanding of the hero’s need/more split has evolved since you first formulated it

7. What does this character need to learn about life?

8. How is this character getting in his or her own way?

9. Does character serve plot (genre stories), or does plot grow out of character (character-driven stories)?

10. Who else is in the world of the story?

11. Which character is the “moral center” or heart of the story? (It is typically not the main character). What value does he or she embody?

12. What are the story’s Day World and Night World? How can we see them?

13. What is the scary/intimidating for you about this Night World?

14. Which character embodies the energies of the Night World, and what is his impact on the story?

15. How is the dramatic/thematic conflict reflected in tone, and how is the tone reflected in style?

16. What myth/fairy tale does this story remind you of?

-it is all one gestalt, one living pattern. Change any element and you necessarily change the whole

-one thing we can expect to happen as we step from the map into the territory is that some of our personal attitudes and values will be challenged, knocked around, and perhaps apparently destroyed. Like our characters, we have values which have identified ourselves. That identification tends to give a feeling-tone of absolute certainty to the value. It may also be that we have overidentified ourselves with our main character and have projected our value system through that character. This situation will lead us into a creative double bind. Either, in order not to face the apparent threat to our own values, we will let our character off the hook before the point where the mode must break down – and then throw in some extra outer obstacles to make a flat climax appear to work – or we will go down with the ship and face the devaluation of our own value. In truth, the value itself cannot die. Only our identification with can die

-holding on to the value of efficiency will seriously impede our work as screenwriters because it acts as an inner threshold guardian

-it was a way of ripening the material by working on it and playing with it. Ripening it, bringing it to its full juiciness

-it is not easy to give up implicitly or unconsciously held beliefs. They make up our reality system, our survival mode. There is a struggle because, as we know, the old mode wants to hang on. Not only is it a habituation, it also serves to suppress or repress something else, a countervalue

-how is my present confrontation with one of my own cherished attitudes related to the story I am writing?

-if we can identify what shadow content we project onto another person, we may guess that we dis-identify from that projected quality and tend to identify with its opposite

-at some point in life, the attitude we adopted was an important adaptation to our life circumstances, for whatever reason. We can appreciate that our cherished value brought us this far, to the point where we may transcend it for the sake of greater wholeness. For the greater wholeness lies in the interplay of opposites itself, not in one or the other side. This process of stepping back form one-sided positions to take in a bigger view is basic to living and writing creatively. To the extent that we can say yes to this process and incorporate it into our lives, we find our power to create movement to a new level

-the movement of creation is regressive; that it throws us into duality; that it gests heroic energies going as we face death and rebirth; and that it is always an act of self-creation. We understand that creativity engages our play energy in seriously playful ways, in a rhythm of growth through crisis. And we could further picture the screenwriter’s journey as a kind of alchemy: a transforming and transmuting of a mass of confused material into existence

-the hero in stories always stand for our libido – or energy – in relation to our creative selves

-screenwriter’s actual journey is a real journey that entails real risks: the loss of certain attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives; the upsurge of repressed countervalues; and the possibility of failure

-the authenticity of the story for the writer is bound up with the first impulse

-everything that happens in a movie is metaphorical, as are all stories in general. Stories are metaphors not because they don’t mean what they say, but because they always mean more than they present

-a dialectical constellation is at the dramatic heart of the story

-“Dialectical” refers to opposition, opposing forces in some sort of contact and dialogue. So a dialectic constellation is a constellation of opposing forces, laying them out so that we can see them clearly

-the dialectical constellation process begins by simply identifying an attitude or position that we actually hold. The topic can be anything, but of course the greater the stakes or investment, the more we will get out of it

-the attitude contains a value with which our ego – our sense of “I” is relatively identified

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