Tyler Gibb - Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

I heard an interesting interview with Nicholas Carr recently on CBC radio’s Spark. A little nugget from the discourse that stuck with me was about our human predisposition to having a lack of concentrated focus. From a prehistoric perspective, it doesn’t suit survival very well to be too focused on any one thing. Because, as Carr was saying in the interview, you’ve got to be on the lookout for predators and make sure you don’t “overlook that nice berry bush”, so we’re constantly distracted.

I like this notion. Especially during days when I find my focus to be a little off. It’s a good excuse. Roaming through a bunch of ideas in my mind and not being able to decide which one to focus on can feel a bit like a failing. But I suppose in those instances I just haven’t found the nicest berry bush to work on.

What interested me more about Carr’s notion was actually the flip side to this. I began thinking, if our natural state is to be distracted, that just makes times of extreme focus - like, say, actually writing a screenplay - all the more astonishing. And I don’t like feeling distracted. I like bringing everything home to the fine point of focus it takes to write… Man, I would have been eaten alive in the jungle!

I wonder if the more focused you are when you’re focused, the more disorientating the distractions when you’re between periods of focus. It can sure feel like that. But maybe that’s what it takes to stumble on a new idea. Extremes over mediocrity. Maybe.

I’d contemplate this some more but it requires more focus than I can spare at the moment. I need to go gather some berries… And sprinkle them on my cereal.

I know, I know, bad blogger. But what can I say, chanterelle season came early.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about investing. Not about banking but about the entertainment business and where those in it place their confidence.

Someone’s making a film about Mattel’s Magic 8-Ball. Battleship, Monopoly and Candyland too. Children’s games. Remember the first Hollywood remake you ever heard announced? And you thought, if it ain’t broke… Why are they remaking something that was great to begin with? Then sequels and prequels became the rage, or rather, the safe bet. And now with Transformers and G.I. Joe bridging the gap between remakes and action figures it’s no great leap anymore to get to boardgames and toys.

(I got an early glimpse at the new Slinky script - so brilliant! Touching, really.)

What’s the lesson here? Business people want to minimize risk. Ergo, an iconic trade mark with nostalgic appeal, few million dollars in marketing and star power and voila: No risk, no worries, and everybody will go see it because the TV told us to. I get it. It makes sense. Where is it going to leave us in ten years when we’re all out of children’s toys to pervert and the remake of 2013’s Jenga: The Movie has just flopped at the box office, well, that’s some else’s problem.

How do I figure into this? Not terribly well, really. I like writing new stories. Exploring new ideas. But, save for grabbing a camera, going out and shooting something myself - which I have been known to do - I also like to try to get others involved when possible. Namely investors. The trouble is, I don’t own the life rights to the shoe from Monopoly or any other property that harkens back to simpler times.

The closest I have is Minushi. It’s no Coke and Mentos video but it’s always had a following and therefore could be the closest thing I have to a property. I spoke to a literary agent a few years ago hoping she’d be interested in reading a new script I’d just finished writing. I was super amped about it, really knew it would impress. She wasn’t interested in reading. “What about this Minushi movie of yours, why don’t you send me that. That looks like something I could sell.”

Sounds like good news, eh? Yeah, at first. Until you realize you’re talking to a literary agent who doesn’t read. Wow. Score one for “picture’s worth a thousand words.”

People don’t want to know you. They want to know what you can do for them. How you can, as quickly and as painlessly, make them money. Once upon a time, people invested in people. In long term potential. It took responsibility, foresight and yeah, maybe some balls. But it was an investment. Maybe it’s symptomatic of an industry that’s being shaken up like a cup full of Yahtzee dice, but shortsightedness seems rampant. That’s the same kind of behaviour we see in people going down in a sinking ship.

Once upon a time, somebody at Mattel took a chance on the original Magic 8-Ball. Good for you Guy at Mattel in the 1940s… With your cigarettes and your fedora… Your big post-WWII capitalist balls… Good for you, buddy.

Once upon a time (on the internet) it took a bit of effort to get the thoughts from your brain out to the fickle masses. Now it can be done faster than you can say retraction. For the consumer of this material this means two things where entertainment, in its broadest sense, is concerned: On the bright side, a wellspring of content. On the not so bright side, the other 99.9% of the internet.

But for a purveyor of entertainment, in the broadest sense, the new expedience of this medium recently brought to mind a question. Blasphemous as it may sound, I think that Twitter posts and Facebook status updates can sometimes (albeit rarely) contain as much power and value as the single moral that might lay buried deep within the pages of a book or the frames of a feature film. Take it easy Twitter, don’t get excited, you’re far from breaking new ground on this. The tightly bound truism of a memorable proverb or the artful efficiency of a Japanese haiku has been around for centuries. The difference now is the ubiquity and as I eluded to at the top; the instantaneousness of it all.

And it’s that instantaneousness that brought about my recent question. Should I be tweeting out the good stuff?

I mean, as a writer - as a cultivator of ideas - should I be using these instant thought-to-web tools thereby circumventing their incubation period in my brain? If I’m writing a comedy I’m going to need material. But if I tweet out every hilarious joke or observation that I make (to myself) ten times a day will I be draining my own supply.

Is my brain a renewable resource of entertainment?

During my darker days I may worry that it’s not. But after letting the question incubate in the ol’ noggin for a while I’ve decided that in fact it is. Having a venue where one can instantly reach the fickle masses with one’s writing is a pretty good way to sharpen those skills. The more you output the more you need to work that grey matter to create new ideas, new content. So, I say, yes to tweeting out the good stuff! Yes to keeping the idea nuggets flowing!

For other people, that is.

I’m not big twitterer myself…

… It would be really great if I had something clever to say in under 140 characters to cap this whole thing off…

Hm.

Damn it.

Okay, by now, all the parts have been shaped and I’m ready to put the actual script together. And at this point, I have to say, it’s really as simple as that. With the help of my notes I’ve got my theme to keep in mind. And with my character (and “world“) profiles to reference it’s just a matter of going through my outline and fleshing out each scene in detail and dialogue.

A brief word on formatting. Stick to standard screenplay formatting, you can pick it up easily by reading established industry scripts and fill in the blanks with Google. If you can get your hands on Final Draft, great, if you can’t then there’s a great way to set up Word so that your F-keys will be programmed with the six basic line formats you’ll need in a screenplay (location, character, dialogue, etc). You have to use the Style option (under the Format menu) and pre-program each F-key with 12pt Courier font, the specific margins for each line and whether or not ALL CAPS is necessary. It’s a hack but it does a great job.

As far as the actual writing of the script goes, as before I’m not going to try to recycle all the rules and tips about storytelling or what makes good dialogue. I will simply say, I try to give each character a voice of their own (not simply my voice) and I try to keep action lines to a minimum in the description department. I’ll gladly spend hours crafting one perfectly worded sentence that introduces a character by both describing them physically and giving the reader some background on who they are. Introductions are as important in a script as they are in real life.

And finally, the script is written. Fade out.

Put it in a drawer. Walk away. Take satisfaction in the fact that you’ve accomplished something. Do anything but think about it. Especially about how, in two weeks, when you take it out of that drawer you’re going to blue-pen it to pieces and basically rewrite it.

Rewriting is a whole other post altogether and I’ll leave that for another time.

What I did want to further include here are what I call my assets. The assets are the things I write once I’ve got my “final” draft written and am ready to send my script off into the world. Because there’s something you should know - and I mention this because I think it’s important albeit a little bit depressing, so don’t get too bent out of shape about it, fact of life and all that…

No one wants to read your script.

It’s true. For most people, even (and perhaps especially) people who’s job it is to read scripts, it’s a daunting prospect. So you have to lure them in. You have to shake your assets.

First up - and probably the most difficult so you may as well start thinking about it early - is the log line. Sum up your entire 90 page masterpiece in one sentence. No run-on sentences allowed. And if that’s not a tall enough order, make sure the log line has the tone of your script’s genre (if it’s a comedy, make the line funny; a thriller, the line thrilling; etc). Log lines are a whole other post too - maybe even a whole other blog. It’s like a marketing haiku. But if you do it right, the log line is the first thing that’s going to peak your prospective reader’s interest. Or completely kill it. No pressure.

Next up, the short synopsis or what I think of as the script’s one sheet. I usually break mine up into 3 paragraphs, (1.5 line spacing) one for each act, and try to keep it simple and to the point. Protagonist, antagonist, plot, twists, resolution. I try not to be coy by writing a conclusion that begs for an ellipsis. If you’re giving a producer a one sheet synopsis you don’t want to leave them hanging. Producers usually want to know right off the bat if you’re pitching them a ride off into the sunset or a tragedy.

Also handy is a treatment. Depending on who you ask a treatment can be anything between your one sheet and a 30 page document. But really, if you’re going to make a long winded treatment, then your reader may as well be reading the entire script. Because of the way I proceed in getting to my outline, it’s not a big stretch to transform that into a treatment. It just has to be cleaned up from my personal note taking voice and shaped into a narrative play-by-play of the story without the dialogue.

Assets. The skin over the meat over the skeleton over the heart of that little thought that popped into your head one day while you were out mushroom hunting.

And that is my process.

Can I start writing the script yet? Oh, heavens… No.

In part one of this little story of my method I mentioned that my notes would start to form the story in broad strokes. The next step for me is then to beef things up into an outline while refining the details.

At this point there’s really no creative writing going on, per se. This was a big mental hurtle for me to overcome. When I used to write long or short form fiction I just kind of dove in. I guess I even did so in early screenwriting for my animated shorts. It was a little counter intuitive for me to treat a story as clinically as I do now. It’s truly the opposite of spontaneity and for a while it felt to me as the anathema to poetry. But I think that was really just me being lazy. Not seeing that there’s enormous creativity to be had in properly structuring things from the outset. It’s the creative process slowed down.

So the outline: A new text doc on the computer and it’s broken down into short paragraphs. Each paragraph starts with a location slug (INT./EXT. etc) and a short summary of each scene. This is no different than the old school cue card method or the new school old school cue card feature you’ll find in Final Draft. I like the simple text doc method because it’s easy on the forests and I can expand upon the paragraphs/scenes indefinitely.

But wait! There’s something slowing me down. The loose story is there but it’s hard to figure out how all the parts fit together; how to flesh out the details. Why? Because I don’t know who I’m writing about yet.

Who are my characters? For me the outlining process overlaps with my process for creating the characters.

This is where some psychology 101 classes can be really helpful. In the opinion of this humble writerly type guy, writing is all about psychology. Be it tapping into the psychology of the reader (or viewer) or the psychology of one character towards another. We’re really only concerned with the latter at this point:

For this reason, I write a detailed background for each principal character. A biography. I start with childhood and work my way right up to the point where my story begins. I include essential elements that would have impacted this character’s personality: Family life, social circle, upbringing, interests, etc. I usually include some anecdotes too. Experiences that this character has lived through that may mirror some of the experiences they will face in the actual story. The details of these biographies will never make it into the script. They are purely a way for me to design the character. They are a reference guide for later. They help me figure out what motivates the character and can even help me figure out details about their speech patterns when it comes time to write dialogue.

When I was getting set to shoot Refrain I actually found another use for these character profiles. I shared them with the actors. I wanted to give them background on their characters to help them find the motivation behind what was in the script.

So! With my character profiles written I can now plug away further on the outline. These two elements usually give and take from each other. Sometimes the outline may call for a character to an action to move the plot forward but maybe I haven’t crafted the motivation for that action into that character’s psyche profile - no problem, I can just modify that profile to make it fit. The important thing for me is to have a sound psychology for each character and a sound storyline.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of books on storytelling. Character arcs, plot points, the hero’s journey, all that stuff. My point here isn’t to go over all of that - it’s simply to describe my process of writing a screenplay. The glib version of everything you’re going to find in those books is this: You’ve got a character, she’s doing her thing, living her life, when something happens. It’s a conflict with her enjoyable day to day life. She is faced with handling this something. It looks like she may be able to cope when things suddenly get worse. Holy shit, she’s in trouble now and things just keep going downhill… Oh no, how is she ever going to get out of this situation? But then, she digs deep, finds something inside her that she didn’t know she had and triumphs. She is changed forever. Screen black.

You can also learn this secret to storytelling by watching any movie that makes it to cinemas.

I’ve got my outline (or treatment, at this point, depending on who you’re talking to and how you’ve formatted it) as well as my (secret) character profiles. I’ve added a skeleton to my story’s heart and circulatory system. Next up: Putting meat on the bones and a let’s not forget the packaging.