Emotional Structure

Creating the Story Beneath the Plot: A Guide for Screenwriters

Pete Dunne

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781610350815
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Drehbuchschreiben

The leap from concept to final draft is great, and the task is filled with hard work and horrors. It is here that most writers struggle to get the plot right at the expense of the story's real power. The result is a script that is logical in every way, yet unmoving. ""Emotional Structure, "" by Emmy- and Peabody-Award winning producer, writer, and teacher, Peter Dunne, is for these times, when the plot fits nicely into place like pieces in a puzzle, yet an elemental, terribly important something remains missing.

Part 1

What Writers Write About and Why

1

The Writer’s Rulebuuk

Rule No. 1 — Write

Rule No. 2 — See Rule No. 1

Writers must make choices. The first choice you will have to make as a writer is to choose to be a writer. This means you will choose to write. Every day for the rest of your life. Because you can only be a writer on the days you write. On the other days, the days you decide not to write, you will be something else. However, there is a caveat. On the days you decide to be a writer and you write, even if it’s for only an hour, you get to be a writer for the other twenty-three hours, too. Pretty good, huh?

You can see, then, that it’s possible to be a writer no matter what your day job is. Notice, too, there’s nothing in the writer’s rulebook that says you have to write about certain things. You just have to write. Anything. And it doesn’t say anywhere in the rulebook that you have to sell what you write. You just have to write. Whatever you want to write. Especially write what’s important to you. Write what’s on your mind. It wouldn’t be important to you if it weren’t on your mind. When you have so much on your mind you don’t know where to begin, begin with that, that there’s too much on your damn mind. By the time you get that off your chest, there won’t be so much on your mind. And you’ll know what to write next.

Sometimes this can seem like an impossible undertaking. Sometimes we fail. For which we are forgiven. Sometimes we don’t try. For which forgiveness comes harder.

Because trying is the key.

And trying is hard work. Turn what’s inside of you into entertainment for a mass audience, and you’ll see what I mean. It can be torturous. It is not the same as baking a cake. People will eat cake even if it’s not good cake. People will laugh at stupid jokes. And even more will bob and weave to idiotic songs. But the people sitting in a theater watching your movie are far less gregarious. And far less generous. They came for what they thought the movie should be. They are unforgiving, self-appointed critics more concerned with their dates, and their popcorn, and their parking meters and babysitters. So naturally, a lot of writers don’t want to open themselves up to people who don’t give a crap. Some writers, scared and bitter about this reality, actually write the crap they think those people deserve. But creating crap is a dumb way to go through life. And creating crap on purpose is not officially writing.

You must never give in to the fear of others’ responses to your writing. If you do, you will be trying to write what you think someone else will like. And that is not officially writing, either. Writing to please someone else will destroy the true writer in you. Writing what’s important to you will make you an important writer.

It takes time to develop as a writer. A lifetime. And yet time is the one thing we are guilty of not giving it. I would imagine that a great majority of all people, not just writers and artists, are guilty of the same thing. And the sad truth is that more people than not wind up immobile in a rest home angry with themselves and the world for not having done the things they most wanted to do in their lives. Who is to blame? Are we lazy? Are we stupid? I don’t think so.

I think we are human. We have doubts. We have fears that if we try to live out our dreams and we fail, we will have to live the rest of our lives without a dream and with self-loathing. What a risk, we say. It is too great a risk for any individual who doesn’t have a cheerleading section behind him or her, or a way out. So we try to lessen or eliminate the risk. A common approach to lessening the risk is to wait for the right moment. The moment when the risk is lowest. And that moment never comes. Because the paradox is that that moment has to be made by taking the risk.

So we choose to take the risk by dropping the argument that we don’t have the time to write. We all have the time. How do I know that? I know that because that is Peter Dunne’s Secret to Writing:

The time you spend writing must never be thought of as time not spent doing something else.

Some things are, because they are. “Beauty is its own reason for being,” according to Shakespeare. And I believe writing is its own reason for being. It is not something you should ever think of as a thing to get to when you’re not doing something else.

You give your body food and drink, and air to breathe. You give your mind nutrition, too, by remaining inquisitive and teachable. But most important of all, you must feed your soul. Praying can feed your soul. Meditation certainly does. Acts of kindness and selflessness are at the top of that list, too. And right up there with them, because often they are vehicles for the others, is artistic expression. Art is born in the soul. It is actually the expression of the soul. So if we don’t make time for that, we are not making time for the most important thing a human can do: express himself.

So we must find time to express ourselves.

Knock fifteen minutes off lunch and dinner, and put that half hour aside for writing. Knock another fifteen minutes off the time you spend zoned out in front of the television and bank it with the other minutes. Knock fifteen minutes off your cell phone obsession, and take at least fifteen minutes from browsing the web. Put those minutes in the bank, too. Now take all that time, that hour or hour and a half, light an aromatherapy candle, grab your Calgon, a pad, a pen, and turn on the hot water. Slip into the soapy mix and rest your mind and body in the best part of the day… your writing part. Wiggle your toes, take a deep, relaxing breath, and be a writer.

Okay, you’re in bubbles up to your eyeballs and you’re committed to being a writer. All you have to do now is to decide what to write about. Another choice. And amazingly, this is a very difficult choice to make. It seems that we have so much to write about that we can’t wait to get started, but we have so much trouble starting. We know we have a hundred good ideas, better ideas than the ones we see made into films day in and day out, but when it comes to putting those ideas down on paper, more often than not, we are stumped. We can’t get started. It’s frustrating and humiliating. And the more frustrated and humiliated we become, the harder it is to start. So how do we break that cycle? How do we start?

With one idea.

We have to learn to stop tossing around two or three or more ideas at a time. When we do that we just go back and forth forever. There is no “better” idea to start with. All your ideas are good. Well, almost all of them. Remember, we said in the beginning that writers have to make choices. The first choice is to be a writer. The second choice is to choose one, and only one, idea to develop into your screenplay. You will have plenty of time to develop the other ones in the future.

This act of choosing your first idea is a giant step. And, once you make the choice you must stick with it. Just because the idea may prove difficult to develop into a screenplay does not give you the right to abandon it. Every idea is difficult to develop into a screenplay. And most times, the better the idea the more difficult it will be to get down right. That’s the way it goes. I’m almost willing to say that if it’s too easy, something’s wrong. And the “something wrong” is almost always a symptom of an undeveloped Emotional Structure. And that is because most of us feel we should develop the broad strokes of the plot first, and fill in the emotional layer later on. Big mistake. It is precisely this big mistake that ruins script, after script, after script.

The emotional through line, that is to say the Emotional Structure, is the first story to be developed deeply. Only then can the plot be developed to serve it. Never vice versa.

Now, this is about the time, if you were in my writing class and I were standing in front you and your fellow students that I would be getting…The Deadly Stare.

What is it that you and they are feeling, I wonder. Expectation? Self-doubt? Judgment of me or of each other? Buyer’s remorse? Because, really, they just sit there and stare.

So I stare back. I sit on my desk and give nothing. Time passes. They shift. They look at me. They look at each other. Back and forth, back and forth. Then a hand goes up, and I win because I know what the hand will ask.

“Mr. Dunne,” the hand says. “What the hell is emotional structure, anyway?”

They all nod. The same question on every mind. Every class. And these are people who have already paid for the course.

To most people, maybe you too, Emotional structure certainly sounds like an oxymoron. After all, aren’t our emotions those mutinous little rats that jump us when we least expect them? Shocking us? Angering us? Confusing us, and embarrassing us, and depressing us?

And in fact, isn’t the secret of their power in their ability to surprise us? And isn’t the surprise element the thing we dread most about them? We don’t so much fear the emotion, as we do the emotion’s unpredictability. That’s why we “fight our emotions.” That’s why we say we “hate surprises.”

If you’re like me, you don’t know when your anger is going to flare up. And you don’t like it when it does. You don’t know either, when or why anxiety will grab you by the throat and turn you into a shivering mass. But it will attack whenever it damn pleases, and when it does, like some hysterical preschooler off his medication howling in that startled hollow between your ears, you just have to deal with it. Right then. Right there. That’s the nature of emotions, and of our relationship with them.

So then, how the heck do we discipline them?

How do we structure them?

First, let’s consider a screenplay’s “structure.”

While I am not a structure fanatic, I do bow to the necessity of it and teach it, and acknowledge that without an understanding of it no writer will succeed in creating a logical work. However, having said that, and having sat through a few hundred painfully unsuccessful movies, I do not subscribe to the theory that understanding structure is the same as understanding writing. To understand writing we must understand emotion and capture it. And we do that by learning emotional triggers and responses, and tricking them to show up in the script where and when we want them.

Now you’re probably asking yourself if all this tricking and triggering is really necessary? You don’t want to be a psychiatrist; you want to be a scriptwriter for crying-out-loud. Well, yes, it is necessary, and here’s why. Without understanding Emotional Structure, the beginning, the middle, and the end of your script have a 100 percent chance of becoming the beginning, the muddle, and the end. Because emotions rule the central, most misunderstood and most feared element of a screenplay: that of the story’s underlying meaning. And only by understanding Emotional Structure can we bring solid, creative solutions to the writing process, and meaning to your story. It is the only sure way to turn your script’s problems into your script’s power.

So now we consider “emotions.”

Knowing your idea for a screenplay is a start. Knowing who you are as the writer of that idea is equally vital. Who you are emotionally, that is. If you’re like me, you probably had a father and a mother. Let’s see a show of hands. Good.

Some of you had, as I did, siblings. Hands? Good.

Others of you were, as I was, raised in a fun-loving, balanced, nurturing, peaceful, sober, non-judgmental, spiritual home. Hands? Anyone?

Okay, so here’s the point. I may never actually start out to write about my family and my upbringing, but I can’t write anything with meaning without allowing those influences to inform what I’m writing about. There is proof aplenty of failure to do so.

Earlier in my career as a “Development Executive” I read scripts by the pounds, week in and week out, year after year. Where did they come from? They were breeding out there. Inbreeding. These were “spec” scripts mostly, written not on assignment, but on a wing and a prayer, in the hopes of selling it to a studio for a sack full of gold.

All across town, dozens of other development executives at agencies, studios, and networks were doing the same thing I was. Often we’d be reading the same scripts. We’d compare notes, shake our heads and wonder, “where are the good scripts?” How can so many people—many of them professional writers—turn out so many mediocre scripts? Are the ideas that bad? Are the writers that bad?

No. And, no. But, getting the best out of the idea, and getting the best out of the writer were the great, unmet goals.

Turning a good idea into a good screenplay is not child’s play. It is work not meant for the faint of heart. Sometimes writing is euphoric, and sometimes it is sadistic. It can be extremely rewarding one day, and it can be a complete waste of time the next. It can be like having a good cry. Or having great sex. Or both at the same time. Or nary a bit of either ever.

Sometimes writing can seem magical. But the truth is, writing is not magic. You are the magic. And it is this magic that turns the hard work into art.

The hard work of writing a screenplay is not, as some would have you believe, analogous to climbing Mount Everest. It’s more like taking a long hike. A very, very long hike where you may risk losing your footing, but never your life. Parts of the hike are uphill. Parts sweep gently downward. There are beautiful glades now and then. Just as there are surprise encounters with bears and bad guys. There are valleys, of course, but they are not the famous valleys of death. Even when they feel like it. There are difficulties in the emotional landscape, and they are there for a reason even when you don’t know why. There are fields of wildflowers. There are lakes of rainbows. And the longer you are on this screenwriter’s hike, the more elevation you will gain until your reach the point of rare atmosphere where only writers and writing breathe. To the home of meaning, and the triumph of ideas. To emotional gratification.

In the end, it won’t matter if you write about dog sleds in the Klondike, or gay monks in Greece. What will matter is your ability to touch me with your story. To move me with your movie. To inspire me. To validate me. To encourage me. Those a...