Vonnegut For Screenwriters

Like so many other writers around the world lately, I've been re-reading Vonnegut.  In truth, while revising my own novel over the past few years, I'd already been obsessively re-reading Breakfast of Champions, trying to steal from it what I could.  No luck there (try to write like Vonnegut, and you only end up sounding like bad Vonnegut), but fortunately, the author has left us a writing manifesto -- a little tool kit of sorts, to help the writer in need.

Tucked into the grab-bag collection of loose ends that is Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, you will find eight rules for writing a short story.  Shortly after Vonnegut's passing, I passed these out to a classroom full of screenwriters, because it seemed to me that the rules applied to the crafting of screenplays as well.  Herewith, Mr. V's rules, and a little commentary to make clear their connections to movie work, using quotes from movie folk to show that Great Minds Think Alike (GMTA).

1.  Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Oh, but that more writers observed this golden rule!  We-the-readers always know when we are bored.  Just take note of how the lead sentence of a given screenplay can instantly stop you from reading further, unless it somehow grabs your attention with a "you need to know this!" subtext.  What does not waste a stranger's time in specific is something that can take writers years of learning on the job to master, but the point is that simply thinking about this issue -- i.e. will this hold someone else's attention? -- is a worthy pursuit, indeed.  GMTA: I'm reminded of screenwriter Callie Khouri's immortal quote, "If you have information on the screen that doesn't move the story forward, you are taking moments away from people's lives."

2.  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Screenwriters refer to "petting the dog" -- i.e. having your protagonist perform some simple act that embodies a positive value, so that the audience can identify with him or her.  They also apply the principle of "unearned suffering": a) I show you a little girl who loves her dolly, b) I have a bully snatch her doll, and c) do you want to see the little girl get her dolly back?  The same holds (especially) true for characters who are seemingly "unsympathetic"; as (GMTA) screenwriter Richard LaGravenese said: "All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience... To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them."

3.  Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Time and time again, I've addressed the rewrite of a given scene, my own or a student's or a consult client's, with this same simple question: what does each character want?  Failing to define this is nine times out of ten what leads to fuzzy and unfocused writing.  Put two characters in a scene with unclear actions to achieve and you risk losing your audience; if the characters don't care about getting something while they're in it, why should we?  Billy Wilder's maxim (GMTA) "Develop a clean line of action for your leading character" speaks to this; "I want to get a glass of water" suggests one clean and powerful line of action.

4.  Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

Because what else is it doing there, describing scenery?  Fine, if the scenery is speaking to character ("His furniture was as cheap as he was") or moving the story along ("The woods are quiet tonight -- too quiet!").  Otherwise?  Zzzzzzz...  Poetry is poetry.  A good story, lyrical though it may be, functions like a shark: it must keep swimming forward to keep breathing.  GMTA: Here's producer Lindsay Doran on the subject -- "Scheherezade was a woman who had to make her stories so interesting she didn't get killed that night.  That's exactly how I feel.  We all have to keep our stories so interesting that... if the reel suddenly broke, everybody would rather die than leave that theater and not be able to find out what happened next."

5.  Start as close to the end as possible.

Screenwriter's credo: Come in late and leave early.  The awful truth about most screenwriters' exposition is that it's for them -- for them to know.  The audience doesn't need all that.  In the opening scene of The Godfather, the Godfather is the Godfather.  Period.  And the movie's story begins when his successor-to-be enters the story: Michael Corleone comes home.  Everything we need to know about everyone in the story gets dealt out to us, economically, as events irrevocably move towards the crisis that will cause the passing of the torch from father to son.  GMTA: Two rules from Mr. Wilder again -- "Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go" and "Know where you're going."

6.  Be a sadist.  No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

I love this rule.  It's so cruel-but-true.  "What's the worst thing that could happen?" is such a time-honored screenwriters' cliche question, they even titled a bad movie with it.  We don't want to see characters have a sort-of blah day, we want to see the most horrible day of their lives.  As Vonnegut shrewdly points out, calamity and crisis is the fastest, most powerful route to revealing character.  GMTA: Screenwriter Audrey Wells told my romantic comedy class, "Steep your characters in pain--make them miserable.  Then after they've really suffered, make them happy."

7.  Write to please just one person.  If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Vis-a-vis the movies, this is kind of obvious, yet many a screenwriter's work has fallen on this sword -- trying to please "them."  There is no Them.  Half the time They -- e.g. the studios, who sometimes can't see a hit when it smacks them in the face (see: everyone who turned down Star Wars), or the critics, who reviled 300 even as it topped the world's box office -- don't even know what Them (i.e. that ever-elusive, fickle "mainstream audience") wants to see.  Vonnegut told NPR that he wrote to please his late sister Allie.  You may write to please yourself or any other one person, but it's this choice -- your own personal "ideal audience" -- that will focus your work and cohere its voice, not trying to be all things to all people.  GMTA: As Paramount's Kathie Fong Yoneda noted in an on-line interview, "Frequently, the writer who tries to add 'something for everyone' ends up pleasing no one."

8.  Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.   To heck with suspense.  Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This last one is a little tricky to translate, in that often, suspense is exactly what a screenwriter is (and should be) after.  I think what Mr. Vonnegut is speaking to is the issue of clarity.  Many pre-pro screenwriters waste a reader's time by being coy and cagey with the simple and necessary facts of who, where, when, what and why.  There's a difference between withholding -- which all too often promotes confusion -- and dealing it out slowly.  The audience needs to be oriented in time and space, and quickly involved in a character's issues (see rules 3, 4 and 5) to stay with a story.  GMTA:  He wasn't a screenwriter, but certainly could've been, and he was an idol of Kurt's who surely had the definitive take on this.  "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." -- Mark Twain

As my journalist honey Tater points out, this dovetails with words of wisdom from poet Allen Ginsberg, in the last line of his poem on the writing craft, Cosmopolitan Greetings: "Candor ends paranoia."  But that, come to think of it, is fodder for another post.

(All typewriter photos from Laineys Repertoire)

Comments

[E.C. Henry]

Billy, I noticed in the last typwriter picture in this post the keys were all pulled out. Is that from someone who disregaurded Mr. V's 8 golden rules?

- E.C. Henry from Bonney Lake, WA

[Barbara]

Mernitman - I'm printing this one out for my class.

[Scott the Reader]

Great stuff. Though "What's The Worst That Can Happen?" is actually named after the perfectly-good novel by Donald E. Westlake that the bad movie is based on, so don't credit Hollywood for the title. Though that's actually the only part of Westlake's book they got right.

[MaryAn]

Be prepared. #8 will get you accused of being predictable.

[dottie]

Re #7: Vonnegut's suggestion reminds me of a passage in a novel by the great Scottish writer Muriel Spark ("The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie"), who passed last month. I love all her books but especially her two most autobiographical works, "Loitering with Intent" and "A Far Cry from Kensington." Mrs. Hawkins in the latter book is a kind of editor-at-large in 1950s London, and she offers this gem to would-be writers: "You are writing a letter to a friend . . . . And this is a dear and close friend, real - or better - invented in your mind like a fixation. Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it were never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you. . . . You are only confiding an experience that you think only he will enjoy reading. What you have to say will come out more spontaneously and honestly than if you are thinking of numerous readers. . . . Remember not to think of the reading public, it will put you off."

Wise advice, and a great help in loosening up when your imagination is burdened with expectations for your script or you're confused by too much input from others.

Helen Fielding has said in interviews that she took this advice to heart in writing "Bridget Jones's Diary."

[deezee]

excellent and very timely that I read this today. thanks.

[mernitman]

EC, I'm sure Kurt would be appalled at the notion of anyone having his or her keys pulled out at his expense! No, those keys belonged to the 17 computer keyboards of the writers who tag-wrote the movie version of "The Flintstones."

Barbara: Pass 'em on, pass 'em on...

Scott: I knew that!!! (You're right, Donald gets the credit and certainly not the blame.)

MaryAn, as my grandfather was apt to say, "We should all have such problems."

Dottie, thank-you for the Muriel.
That's great stuff.

Welcome, Deezee: We aim to please.

[Diana Celesky]

Great post! Thanks for sharing these bits of wisdom.

[sal]

A post for printing out and pinning to my noticeboard, I think - thanks, Billy! I think I worry too much about what "they" will think, and if I can get away from that, the writing works much better. I wrote a v short play about a subject which is pretty dark, but made me laugh, and before I sent it off I had a moment of doubt - "they won't like this - no-one will get it" - sent it off anyway, and it got selected, and will be performed this Friday.

[mernitman]

Welcome Diana You're Welcome!

Sal: Well, there you are and there you have it. And congrats!