Live To Write Another Day (4 page)

Characters
:

Dr. Jonathon Scott
– Born and raised in a tough blue-collar town, it was always Scotty’s dream to make a great living while helping those in need. Presently a prominent, 35-year-old psychiatrist, it appears that he’s achieved that goal. But in his heart of hearts he knows it isn’t true. The beautiful home, the fancy cars, the country club membership—it’s all just a smoke screen for his inadequacy, a way of convincing himself that he’s done enough. So when Liberty comes along and offers him a way to reconcile these feelings, it ultimately proves an offer he can’t refuse. Now part messiah, part psychic, and part schizophrenic, Scotty is on a mission to truly heal the world—one person at a time.

Liberty
– Brutally forthright, frequently sarcastic, and always witty, Liberty is the ever-present voice in Scotty’s head. Speaking with an English accent, she can be as authoritative as Margaret Thatcher or as whimsical as Mary Poppins. Scotty has no idea where she came from and, intriguingly, neither does she. Liberty is both his sidekick and his muse, his Tonto and his Obi-Wan Kenobi, albeit one that we never actually see.

George Lazarus
– A well-polished, old-guard shrink in his 50s, George is Scotty’s close friend and mentor. But upon witnessing Scotty’s schizotypal behavior, George immediately turns from confidante to antagonist, insisting that Scotty undergo a psychiatric evaluation. George’s character is an ominous presence throughout the series as the search for Scotty becomes a recurring theme.

Melissa Scott
– Strong, vibrant, and intelligent, Melissa is the kind of woman who could run a Fortune 500 company, but still relishes being a full-time mom. She loves her husband deeply, but when he starts to flip out she is completely at a loss. Having met Scotty in her freshman year of college, she thought she knew all his eccentricities, but she never bargained for this.

Isabel Scott
– 7-year-old Isabel possesses a maturity and an intelligence that is way beyond her years. She’s both her father and her mother’s daughter, already excelling both socially and academically.

Christopher Scott
– At this point, 4-year-old Christopher is 100% rough and tumble, and a startling mirror of the youthful innocent his father has, in many ways, reverted into.

Finally, there’s the story summary, which is basically a very abridged version of the next stage of the process, the outline.

Pilot Story Summary
:

Following a session with a bipolar teenager, Scotty’s feelings of professional inadequacy reach a zenith. Shortly afterward, Liberty visits him for the first time. Naturally, Liberty spooks Scotty, but when she inexplicably helps him foil the kid’s attempted suicide, Scotty reconsiders the benefits of her presence and quickly warms to her.

Scotty tries to describe the miraculous experience to Melissa, but she has difficulty taking him seriously. Then, with Liberty’s encouragement, Scotty inadvertently condemns the entire psychiatric profession in a speech to a packed convention house. The exhilaration he feels from speaking his mind eclipses any apprehension he might have had about sabotaging his career. This newfound freedom then spirals further out of control as he attempts to liquidate all his financial assets and take his family on the road. Frightened by the sudden irrational behavior, Melissa turns to George Lazarus for help. Together, George and Melissa make the painful decision to submit Scotty to a compulsory psychiatric evaluation.

Faced with the specter of being institutionalized for life, Scotty enlists Liberty’s help, engineers a bold escape from the hospital, and sets out on his journey to heal the world.

One more important thing about Concept Documents before we move on 
. . .
Generally, this is not a document that I show to anyone. It’s mostly my way of working out all the various elements and internalizing them so I’m absolutely sure I know what the forest looks like before I start working on the trees. Still, it should be thorough and complete. Unlike the Notes Document, which is essentially a napkin sketch (and a messy one at that), when the Concept Document is done, it’s a polished piece of work, usually somewhere between six and twelve pages long. This way, if at any point I do decide to share my story idea (usually with a producer or an agent), I now have a well-organized document that I can show anyone and feel comfortable doing so. The Concept Document is also important should I ever need to re-familiarize myself with the big picture.

I remember the first day I arrived for orientation at the American Film Institute. There was a tremendous amount of consternation among the writers in the program because, other than the one hour per week we had as a group with our writing teacher, there really wasn’t a whole lot scheduled for us. In fact, there was
nothing
else
scheduled for us. By contrast, the producer, director, cinematographer, and production design students had all kinds of different classes they were required to take. Finally, someone asked the question: What exactly is it we’re supposed to be doing here as writers? I’ll never forget the somewhat befuddled expression on the face of the admissions director, who was sitting at the front of the room.

“Well,” she said. “You write.”

Like everyone else, I was a very green writer at that point and thought there was some magic bullet, some secret recipe for great writing, that I would now be privy to simply because I had been accepted into film school. The truth is, there really isn’t. I would even go a step further and say that writing is one of those rare things in life that really
can’t
be taught. You certainly need to acquire all the tools and techniques, attend all the lectures, seminars, and classes you can that identify the common ingredients found in good storytelling; but when it comes to actually preparing
the meal, you pretty much have to develop your own recipe and simply start cooking. There’s just no way around that.

This brings me back to the writer gene. Regardless of the medium in which you’re working, if you are truly one of the writer brethren, you will never be intimidated by the countless hours you will have to spend educating yourself on the craft of writing, by having to be both teacher and student, and by all the sweat and toil it will take to tell your stories well. It’ll never be easy, and nothing will test your mettle more than your next task, which is to write a good, solid outline.

The outline is the mechanism by which you assemble your story’s structure, the key element that ultimately determines the quality of your work. Story structure is an extensive topic, one that has been explored by countless other authors, so to stay within the scope of this survival guide I will concentrate on a few fundamental outlining techniques that I use to structure my stories.

First, I study other works that are close in genre, tone, and structure to the story I’m telling. Yeah, I know. More research! It is more research, but it’s a different kind of research than what I described earlier. This time I focus specifically on learning how other writers executed
their
stories—what they did well and what they did not so well—which means breaking those stories down, scene by scene, to expose the very bones of their structure.

Most of the original stories I write are speculative TV pilots and screenplays, so getting my hands on other writers’ scripts, particularly ones that have actually been produced, is very important. The same thing is true if you’re writing a novel, an interactive game, or any other type of written work. You have to study how other writers have done what you’re now trying to do, and dissect their work rather meticulously in order to learn from them.

Next, I open a document in Final Draft (the screenwriting program most screenwriters use) and start writing down all the scenes I’ve already come up with in my Notes and Concept Documents. At first, I don’t worry so much about the order of the scenes. I just try to get them down on paper, and as I engage in this process, other potential scenes inevitably begin to emerge in my mind, and usually rather quickly.
Though I don't yet formally write each scene with action and dialogue, as one does when writing a script, I do use a slug line for each (for example,
EXT. DINING HALL – NIGHT
) and then simply describe the scene’s
content
as if I were explaining it to someone in conversation.
Later, after I’ve compiled a fair amount of material, I start to work on the structuring (i.e., where each act breaks, and in which order the scenes belong)
.

In many cases I can tune in the entire story structure in this way, composing right on my computer, until I have conceived and described all the scenes in the story—which sounds awfully easy when you write it in a sentence like that, but in reality can be incredibly difficult and take weeks to get right. Other times I will use a white board or lay index cards out on a table, each with a single scene written on it, so I can continually rearrange them like pieces of a puzzle. Creative writers of all different stripes commonly use both of these approaches.

Another technique I use, either after I’ve got the whole structure worked out or when I’m still immersed in the outlining process, is to take out my trusty yellow pad and try to write down every scene in the script using just a single line for each. As you might imagine, this is yet another challenging task. You have to come up with a lot of very nifty shorthand, using as few words as possible to describe each scene, but what you end up with is your entire story structure on about one to two pages of the pad. This allows you to skim down the page imagining the entire story very quickly, scene by scene, from beginning to end. I’ve found this to be an excellent way to root out structural deficiencies, because when you’re reading through it in fast-forward mode like this, any interruption in the natural flow of the story becomes much more glaring and apparent.

Everyone has different approaches to outlining. Some writers like to write very sparse outlines, providing just enough information to trigger the important elements of a scene in their mind when they write it later. Others like to deal with each scene in as much detail as they can up front. As you probably guessed, I’m in the second camp. I like to make tons of notes to myself right in the body of the outline and continue to flesh it out with as much background as I can. This often includes not just what is currently happening on the surface, but also the underlying thoughts, feelings, and motivations of the characters that drive each scene.

In other words, I continue to tune in the story, again, resisting the temptation to start turning it into a formal script for as long as possible, until it reaches the point that it’s so well worked out and bloated with information that the only thing left to do is flesh out the action and write the dialogue.