Tag: John Truby

My favourite screenwriting guru.

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Inciting event

According to Robert McKee “the inciting incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life”. Brian McDonald in “Invisible Ink” describes the inciting incident as a curtain moment, a theatrical term denoting the point at which the curtain is dropped between acts. In theatre you have to get the audience back after the intermission “so acts end on the highest point, when the stakes are at their most desperate”.

While both descriptions tell us that something needs to happen at this point, neither give you any real insight into what needs to happen.

Personally I lean towards John Truby’s interpretation. He calls it the inciting event and describes it as a small step that “connects need and desire”. At the beginning of the story “when weakness and need are being established, the hero is paralysed in some way. You need some kind of event to jump-start the hero out of his paralysis and force him to act”. 

Since starting the redraft of Carrion I’ve struggled to pin down the event that metaphorically takes Adam out of the frying pan and drops him in the fire. I had a whole slew of things going on in the fifteen minutes that lead up to this event.

Adam discovers Reiner murdered his daughter, prompting him to take action. Reiner making a direct attack on Christine, forcing Adam to step in to protect her. I’ve explored an infinite number of permutations based on this scenario ending with Christine attacked, forcing Adam to step in and save her.

In the end it all seemed too complicated, demanding of too much exposition. It wasn’t until I started to think about this section, and where it fits into the story, that I started to get a handle on what the inciting event should be.

Adam needs to see the kind of attack society is making on drug users, see what’s going to happen to Christine if he does nothing. Once I’d realised this, things started to fall into place. Adam and Reiner are part of the squad that is tasked with picking up drug users. When Reiner is particularly vicious in his treatment, Adam gets his first glimpse of the coming storm.

The actual event alluded me until the phrase “Adam has to choose Christine” came to me. The more I thought about it, the more I realise it’s the thing that connects Adam’s need and desire, the thing that takes him out of the frying pan and into the fire.

He’s given a choice, prohibition or Christine.

If he chooses prohibition he’s allowing her to die. From that point, Adam’s desire to save Christine kicks in, and the story is under way.

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Adam’s immoral action

I have a problem, I’ve started to get this nagging doubt that Adam’s actions aren’t going to work, they’re not proactive enough. The moral vision for the end of Carrion has Adam taking action against prohibition. He starts the screenplay a self-righteous policeman and ends a humbled rebel.

For this transformation to work, Adam can’t just take up arms against prohibition, he has to go through a series of actions that teach him the right way to act in the world. He has to take actions that teach him not only to resist prohibition but to fight it.

Structurally the problem can best be explained by paraphrasing John Truby. “In the early part of the story the hero is losing to the opponent. He becomes desperate. As a result he starts taking immoral actions to win. Other characters criticize the hero for the means he is taking. The hero defends his actions.”

I think what Truby means is only by taking immoral actions that fail can the hero learn the moral way to act. In trying to answer this problem I asked myself, what kind of immoral actions does Adam take? The answer can best be summed up as “not fighting back”. The actions he takes are immoral because it appeases prohibition.

Does the make Adam seem passive? What I’m struggling to reconcile is who Adam is at the beginning of the screenplay, and who he is at the end. The key seems to lay in his conflict with Reiner, a rampant prohibitionist who has killed his drug using daughter.

How does Adam deal with that moral dilemma?

He believes in the law so should arrest Reiner, but with the rabid hatred of drug users we’d be at the end of the screenplay before he’d begun. Alternatively the answer might lay in Adam’s desire to save Christine. Why does he want to save Christine? He wants to save her because she is his sister. Initially he thinks he’s saving her from herself, that’s why he arrests her, then from prohibition.

Alternatively a direct threat on Christine, by Reiner, would push Adam to take action, despite his overwhelming hostility to drug users. That way he’s not passive, appeasing prohibition, but taking positive action to save Christine.

The immoral action in the story world is his attempts to save a drug user.

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Summing up Carrion

I read something by John Truby about Breaking Bad (2008- ).

Breaking Bad

Truby had some interesting insights on the character development of Walter White. A journey described by the shows creator Vince Gilligan, explaining he’s “a straight arrow character (Walt) who decides to make a radical change in his life and goes from being a protagonist to an antagonist”. Walt’s change from protagonist to antagonist can best be summarised with another quote from Gilligan, his initial pitch to Sony, “I want to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface“.

Mr. Chips to Scarface” has been with me since I read it. It’s a brilliantly concise premise for Breaking Bad, and one I have been struggling to emulate for Carrion.

I got one half of the equation relatively quickly. Adam Leigh becomes Che Guevara. Adam doesn’t share Guevera’s politics, but when most people think Che Guevera they don’t think of his specific politics, they think rebel, and that’s Adam’s primary characteristic by the end of Carrion.

So by the end of the screenplay, Adam has been transformed from self-righteous policeman into a freedom fighter, willing to take up arms against the oppression of prohibition.

That half of the equation set its complement has taken a little longer to pin down. I’ve found it hard to come up with a policeman with the right amount of character flaws that doesn’t end up being thought of as Dirty Harry. Today I think I might have found my Mr. Chips. John McClane from Die Hard (1988).

The more I think about it, the more it seems to fit. Adam Leigh might be a little darker than McClane but he’s a good hook to hang Adam’s character coat on. I’m still not sure if it works completely.

“I want to turn John McClane into Che Guevara.” Perhaps it works better as a question, “what would turn John McClane into Che Guevara?”

You tell me?

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Weakness, need, and desire

I’ve been thinking about Adam’s weakness, need, and desire. I was prompted to look at Adam’s story in this way by John Truby’s book “The Anatomy Of Story”.

The thing I find most interesting about Truby’s approach is the end result, a story that delivers meaning through the actions of the hero. Central to this approach is figuring out your characters weakness. This weakness should not just be a psychological weakness, something that is hurting just the hero, it should also be moral weakness, something that is hurting other people.

Working through this idea, I found Adam’s weakness by identifying a virtue in him and pushing it until it becomes oppressive. Adam was an only child until he was fifteen, he developed strong connection with his parents, a sense of responsibility that led him to join the army when he was seventeen. He didn’t want to put the financial pressure on his parents of a university education.

It was the same sense of service that forced him to leave the army and take care for Christine when their parents were killed. Adam’s virtue is his sense of duty, he does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. The flip side of Adam’s virtue is a propensity for self-righteousness. That feeling of moral superiority derived from a sense that one’s beliefs are of greater virtue than those of the average person.

For me it’s the single most identifiable quality of prohibition, it’s what makes Adam think arresting Christine and John for possession is the right thing to do. He’s doing it for their own good. Just as prohibitionist think they know what is best for an individual, Adam thinks he knows what’s best for Christine.

After I fixed in my head Adam’s weakness I then had to tease out his need. The need is what Adam must fulfil within himself in order to have a better life. This led me to look a the quality that is farthest from self-righteousness, the quality of humility. If Adam is to have a better life by the end of the story he needs to discover humility, he needs to be humble.

Adam’s weakness: He is self-righteous (psychological), tries to control Christine (moral), enforces prohibition.

Adam’s need: He needs to learn how to be humble (psychological), stop controlling Christine (moral), fight prohibition.

The other key element of this equation is Adam’s desire. Desire is what the hero wants in the story. Although it is intimately connected to the hero’s need it’s not the same thing. I’ve been working under the presupposition that Adam’s desire is to save Christine. The question then becomes, how do I know he has saved her?

Until that solidifies within the story I am forced to wander the plot looking for an answer.

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Looking for what’s compelling

In “The Real Reason Why Most Scripts Fail” Cory Mandell argues “most writers haven’t yet trained themselves to write in professional-level compelling conflict”.

The Real Reason Most Scripts Fail

Initially I thought I knew what he meant when he said compelling conflict, but when I started to think about it, I started to doubt myself.

To compel is to force or drive, especially to a course of action.

Conflict is a struggle or clash between opposing forces.

In “The Anatomy of Story” John Truby describes this as the central conflict, and poses it as a question. “Who fights whom over what?” This conflict forces the character to undergo some kind of change.

He describes this change in the form of an equation. W x A = C. “W” is a characters psychological and moral weakness. “A” is the action the character takes. “C” is the change the character undergoes.

The simple logic of the story is described as another question. “How does the act of struggling to do the basic action (A) lead the character to change from W to C?”

While Truby’s equation describes a conflict that forces the character to change, it doesn’t identify what makes a story compelling.

Interestingly compel also means to force to submit, or to overpower. The word compelling seems to imply a force. A character, an event. a circumstance, that asserts its will, subjugating a character. This elicits a response from the character, and leads to conflict.

I think compelling conflict is somewhere in this binary polarisation of these forces. One character asserting their will, the other resists.

Perhaps I am being too literal in my understanding of the term conflict, but it seem to me, when you are looking for what’s compelling, you are looking for what is forced upon someone. That one thing that pushes them to the point at which they must take action.

Truby describes it as the character’s weakness. I’d describe it as the character’s breaking point, the point at which they can take no more, and push back.

At this point the stakes are at their highest, and you have a compelling conflict.

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Premise versus premise

Over the last few weeks I have read both Robert McKee’s Story and John Truby’s The Anatomy Of Story. While reading these two books I have also been working though some ideas for redraft of Carrion. Not sure if it is a good idea to try and assimilate both treaties in quick succession while still writing, but as paid work has cut my writing time in half, I feel the need to keep pounding the keys, or lose whatever momentum I have trained into myself.

Prompted by what I have read, I started to think about the premise of Carrion. Truby assert that the premise “is your story stated in one sentence. It is the simplest combination of characters and plot and typically consists of some event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story.” On the other hand McKee asserts that the premise is simply “an open ended question: What would happen if… ?” For example. “What would happen if a shark swam into a beach resort and devoured a vacationer? JAWS.”

What Truby calls premise, McKee calls the controlling idea. “A controlling idea may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.” What McKee calls the controlling idea Truby calls the designing principle. “The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole. It is the internal logic of the story, what make the parts hang together organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”

While both notions of premise make sense, Truby’s version sounds to me like the logline, and seems too detailed to be what McKee describes as “the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story.” If Truby is right when he says “if your premise is weak, there is nothing you can do to save the story” I need to seriously rethink the foundations of Carrion.

When I first started work on Carrion. The initial inspiration came from an idea that they, the government, the powers of prohibition, genetically engineered insects to eat drugs. The whole script was written from that starting point. Characters, plot, dialogue, I now realise were built on shaky foundations. With insights I gained reading Truby, I now realise that drug eating insects was too nebulous an idea, and lacks any notion of what’s at stake in the story. With some work, and the help of McKee, I have come to another “what if” question, what if the war on drugs escalates into civil war?

According to Truby this is still not strong enough, and needs to be expanded to include the event that starts the action, some sense of the main character, and some sense of the outcome of the story. While I still have the character of Carrion’s previous draft, I know this draft has a different outcome. What it is I don’t know yet, but I do know I have a lot more work to do.

The thing I’ve realised while writing this is that while both Truby and McKee offer invaluable insights into the craft of screenwriting, neither has the definitive answer, but they are both useful as tools to clarify my own understanding.

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Drugs as a tool

I’ve been reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the intricacies of giving meaning to their story.

For those who haven’t read the book, Mr. Truby approaches story as if it were a body, and dissects it as if her were doing an autopsy. He has a chapter on technology (tools). In it he observes that within a story “tools are an extension of the human form, taking a simple capability and magnifying its power”. Why do I mention this? Because while reading Truby’s book, I have also been working through some ideas for major redraft of Carrion.

One of the ideas at the centre of Carrion is that insects have been genetically engineered to eat drugs. Within my story they are physical manifestation of prohibition. A tool that takes the ruthless unrelenting enforcement of prohibition to its merciless conclusion, the physical destruction of anyone who takes drugs. With that in mind, I started to think about drugs as a tool, and asked the question, what kind of tool are drugs?

This quickly becomes more complicated than you think. It’s all too easy to view drugs simply a tool to alter your mood. I’ve written before about the link I see between drugs and prohibition. In a previous post I outlined a paradigm that uses drug prohibition as a tool for social control.

Why they won’t stop the war on drugs

Certainly that is one function drugs play within society, but it’s not the only one. I read a paper recently by Tammy L Anderson that points to A Cultural-Identity Theory Of Drug Abuse. The paper differentiates between drug use and abuse. “The theory proposes that drug abuse is an outcome of a drug-related identity change process featuring three micro-level (personal marginalization, ego identity discomfort, and lost control in defining an identity), two mesolevel (social marginalization and identification with a drug subcultural group), and three macro-level (economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and popular culture) concepts.”

Without getting into the intricacies of a theory that describes twelve hypothetical relationships that lead to drug abuse. It does point to another way drugs are used. As a tool of cultural identity. From my own experiences I can say there is certainly an identification between those have used drugs, and those who have not. You only have to look at the way those who drink alcohol view those who do not to see a shared identity works.

Conversely in this instance, because alcohol is a socially acceptable drug, those who do not drink are the ones viewed with hostility. This binary polarisation of “us” and “them” points to the dynamics at work when looking at the way illicit drugs are viewed. Cultural-identity theory argues that drug abuse is a consequence of a multitude of marginalizing experiences. “The greater the number of marginalizing experiences… the greater the risk for drug abuse.”

If that is the case, and drug abuse is a consequence of an accumulation of negative experiences both personal and social, drugs become a consequence of negative forces that define those who eventually abuse drugs, and not the other way round. This perhaps accounts for the vicious way in which the sober world treats drug users. There’s a sense of guilt felt by the sober world, a guilt that recognises drug use is not simply people being somehow weak willed, a guilt that can not be solved, and ultimately elicits hostility.

There is a scene in David Mamet’s film The Spanish Prisoner that explains the psychological origins of human cruelty.

Steve Martin explains the psychological origins of human cruelty in “The Spanish Prisoner”

The key line comes at the end of Steve Martin’s speech, when Campbell Scott asks him why his employers will start to act cruelly toward him, Martin replies. “To suppress their guilt.”

For me, and certainly within the context of Carrion, I’m starting to see drugs as a tool of guilt, and motivating forces for both protagonist and his antagonist.

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Beyond three acts

Read this very interesting piece by John Truby at Raindance WHY 3 ACT WILL KILL YOUR WRITING. It made me think about the way my writing has developed.

The first draft of my first feature screenplay was a monster. I think mainly because I tried to stick to the a very rigid three act structure. But as Truby points out “the 3-act structure doesn’t work because it is arbitrary” and “places no emphasis on character”. I think it actually gets in the way of character, it certainly did for me. Subsequent drafts, and subsequent screenplays, have all developed beyond the three act structure.

My most recent screenplay “THE SINGULARITY” has nine very clearly defined sections, one about every ten minutes, and it is every ten minutes, because I structured it that way from the outset.

It felt strange when I started, as if I was a Christian discovering evolution, but once I put the three act structure behind me, I was able to plot a story more in tune with my character.