A couple years ago, my daughter Maggie had an especially fantastic teacher, Ms. B. One of the things that Ms. B was keen on doing with her students was encouraging them to become brave writers.
I have since learned that Ms. B was drawing on an entire curriculum, started by Julie Bogart. It is focused on “establishing writing voice and the writing process in children and teens first, by helping parents [and teachers] foster the right environment for writing risks.”
I love this so much. So, so much.
Maggie is ten now, and writing and storytelling has become stuck in the corners of her soul. It has been delightful to watch.
But every once in a while, she gets stuck. When she does, we often take some time to talk about the stuckness, and to try to learn about it, and how (if possible) to get past it.
She got stuck recently in a matter of adaptation. By that I mean, she wanted to take a story she had written last summer, and use it as the basis for an end-of-year assignment she was working on during our recent season of COVID-necessitated remote learning.
The assignment was to create a graphic novel. That’s not just a literary medium, but a visual one.
She had told the story one way, and now she had to figure out how to tell the same story in a new way, and she was feeling a little stuck in how to do that.
There’s a huge landscape here that I want to talk about, but in this post, I’m just going to go down one little path. I’ll say more about Maggie, and how she worked on this particular project, in posts to come.
For now, I want to look at one page of notes we made while we were talking about the stuck-ness she was feeling.
She had a protagonist, a young woman named Lucette Barsamalle. She also had an antagonist, named Gular.
Lucette and Gular live in the same world, but they want very different things. If we boil it down, Gular wants the world to be quiet, which means getting rid of noisy children. Lucette wants the world to be safe for children.
That’s the conflict.
What caught my attention for this post, however, was the scribbling I did at the bottom of the page (the part in the big wonky square):
When I was looking back at the notes, it took me a long moment to figure out what we were talking about here, and why. It had nothing to do with Maggie’s story, or its characters.
Then it clicked—I was trying to illustrate to Maggie how you take a conflict, and you ratchet it up as much as you can in order to give the characters reasons to move, struggle, and change.
So I told her about my favorite scene from the Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s The Social Network.
Over on Medium, Scott Meyers has done a scene-by-scene breakdown of the film. Here’s how he describes the scene I am thinking of:
Mark and Parker secure $500,000 from an investor. In New York, Eduardo is in the middle of a fight with his crazy girlfriend when Mark calls. Mark berates him for freezing the account, but tells him the good news and to come back to California for the transition.
So here’s what I said to Maggie: on the surface, the conflict is pretty simple. Eduardo is in New York, and Mark wants Eduardo to come to California. So they talk on the phone.
They are thousands of miles apart, and they are just… talking. “Does that sound exciting?” I ask. “No,” Maggie answers.
So we agree that—while there might be ways to write it on a page that would make it feel more exciting (like giving the reader access to their thoughts and feelings as well as their words), it’s much more difficult to do that when all you have are voices and pictures, like you do in a movie (or other forms of visual storytelling, like graphic novels).
So let’s look at how Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher solved that problem. But before you watch, take a moment and re-read how Scott Meyers described the scene.
Now let’s look a the scene itself:
It’s crazy, right?
Yes, it’s a phone call about whether or not Eduardo should come to California. But it is showing you so much more than that. Watching this, you feel how out of control everything has become in the situation.
Eduardo’s world has become chaos, and he is trying desperately to hold on to the old order and calm that he knew before he got on this journey.
What this scene shows us is what Eduardo has yet to figure out: chaos has won. There is no going back to the old normal, and whatever comes next, it’s not going to be any fun (or do much good) for Eduardo.
What I wanted Maggie to learn from this is kind of what I want us all to learn from this:
There is no such thing as a boring scene.
Or, at least, there doesn’t have to be. By that I mean, there is no reason and no excuse to simple leave a phone call as a simple phone call.
When you are creating something, you might find yourself stuck in getting from point A to point B.
The reason for the stuckness might not be that the bridge between A and B isn’t strong enough; rather, it might be that the bridge is too strong. It’s too safe for the transition to make any difference—to the characters, or the audience.
In this scene from The Social Network, Sorkin and Fincher have a simple bridge to cross: Mark has to convince Eduardo to get back on a plane, and return to California.
Eduardo has every reason not to: He’s exhausted. He’s back in the world he knows (the East Coast, his apartment). Furthermore, Mark is an asshole, and he’s really not very convincing on the phone.
So what do Fincher and Sorkin do? They literally set the bridge on fire while Eduardo is on it. The East Coast is not safe. His apartment is not safe. There’s no way he’s going to be able to sleep in that bed, with the smell of smoke and the memory of violation fresh in his mind—at least not for a while.
This is essential: It’s not what Mark is saying that convinces Eduardo to move. It’s everything happening around what Mark is saying (and that Mark cannot even see) that gets Eduardo in motion.
The result? He gets back on the plane.
I love this scene so much. It is the icing on the cake of a fantastic movie.
But I also recognize how absurd the scene is. It is literally a boring phone call, and the filmmakers have thrown in a clown car full of crazy to make the phone call feel tense and interesting.
But what I was trying to say to Maggie, and that I will say now to you, is that this is part of what makes good storytelling.
Be unwilling to let a boring thing remain simply boring. When and where you can, find ways to get the adrenaline flowing, even in the midst of the everyday and the mundane.
Sometimes it will be hamfisted, I know. You’ll go back and look at it later, and figure out you can’t get away with it this time, and you might need to cut it back.
But a lot of the time, you’ll bring something that not only shows us new dimensions of the characters, but reminds us of why we are watching the story in the first place.
Find out what happens when you set the bridge on fire.
As always, if this post made you think or feel things, I would love to hear about it.
Also, I would be honored if you let others know about it. Thank you!