Agent 99 - Online story telling

Following on from a longer piece I wrote here on storytelling versus plotting (http://www.agoodstorywelltold.com/content/storytelling-versus-plotting) it seemed like a good idea to take some time to talk about storytelling and space.

Over on Twelvepoint.com one of Julian's regular ideas is that storytellers are paramount - and that screenwriters can/should/might consider writing novels instead. There's two parts to his idea:

1) Storytelling is a separable thing - you can define a storyteller as something separate from a screenwriter or novelist. And following this that screenwriters and novelists are types of storyteller: Species - storyteller, genus - novelist.

2) Commercial reality - the odds are better on novels.

There is a school of thought that believes that the script that you are developing will have a direct relationship to your own life - more explicity that the transformational arc of your charcaters and the deeper themes of the piece are probably not so different from that which you need or are going though. Obviously this may not occur at the reality level (if you are writing sci-fi for instance) but at a thematic level in your life.

Ok, so we are used to thinking of designers as people who sit around stirring pixels on screens to make things look pretty enough to buy. In fact I own a pair of glasses that make me look like a designer - but hold on, I make a large percentage of my living as a designer not a writer. I've earned my designer glasses, damn it!

So being a person who is eternally curious about how things work, and constitutionally biased towards finding communality, I wondered if there were any lessons I could take from my day job back into my writing.

First - what is design thinking?

An answer to a question I posted on TwelvePoint.com

Question:

Can you give us some pointers as to the basic requirements for posting film/video on the web and whether it would be better to do this in a number of short clips as opposed to a longer reel?

Answer:

OK, there're two issues here:

Basic video posting

Being so into horror lately I have taken the time to write up a decent analysis and notes on Eli Roths film ‘Hostel’, a recentish horror hit of the ‘torture horror’ sub-genre.

For some strange reason I thought it would be a good idea to start a small book on story - a detailed look at some aspects of story, most notably ideas around plot and transforming plot to story through fable and genre. This will be an 'eBook' for free download.

I guess it will take a while to finish it. Lets count the months together. But as I finish the chapters I will post them up here and add to articles and so on.

What I am spending a bit of time with at the moment is putting sound recording in the centre of the script development process. By running through a draft or getting to a difficult scene there are a few things that I do that help me assess it as I go...

1. Read it aloud

Obvious but much neglected thing to do. The aim here is to get it out of 'sounding right in your head' to actually just sounding right. This whole silent reading thing is actually very new culturally and has only caught on since the mass production of the book; it's certainly of no use at all to the writer of dialogue.

What you are looking for at this level is not only what words but also - as you will naturally tend to pitch it emotionally where you think it ought to be - you will find yourself doing a little impro on the way, adding a few inbetween words to take a breath, make a stutter, change tense as you go and so on.

This also tends to take you out of sentences, a good thing. People often don't speak in sentences, a sentence is just one of a number of speech deliver methods. Sentences belong to jounalists and business writers, to 'communications', to making things clear. When talking people make sentences more or less by accident, they seldom set out with the end of a sentence in mind. Pinter writes sentences in his prose, but that's about it. Best to think in utterances, phrases, outbursts, lists, interjections, overlaps.
I ask writers or developers if they do this and it is surprising how little it is done. It is one of the easiest most effective things you can do for your own writing.

Speaking of overlaps, the master work in the 'slash' technique / is 'Serious Money'.

2. Record it yourself

Next time you read it aloud record it at the same time (into your iPod, your Dad's reel to reel, computer). Then listen to it the next day. This is the fast-turnaround equivilent to putting something in a bottom draw. This really works as it imposes short-order objectivity without all the time and bother of a read-through (though ideally you should have that too of course).

What you get now is probably first a bit of a shock (I don't really sound like that do I?). But then you can hear the phrasing and architecture of the bigger blocks, the kind of things you don't hear when you read it yourself. And you can really hear those sentences, and take a shotgun to them.

This enforced objectivity is a smaller, more digestible version of an opening night. Without critics. If you can't listen to your own work for 2 hours, why would you expect others to invest in it?

So by speaking it loud you discover the speech in your work, by listening back to it you discover more about the structure than you would think. Maybe more than is comfortable. But the main thing is you can action it right away.

And it's a great way to work when you don't have any actors to hand...

Practicalities:

If you have a Windows machine you won't be bale to record more than a minutes worth of audio without a program. Audacity is a free and very good basic tool. And a cheap microphone is all you need for this, don't let the sound geek in the shop make you spend lots of money, his approval isn't worth the cash.