Idea to Screenplay (and My Trip to the UK)
Victoria Street in Edinburgh, Scotland
Experience Becomes Inspiration
On Sunday afternoon, I lugged my suitcase back into my house after two glorious weeks in Scotland and England. Two weeks was the perfect amount of time to go away—long enough to really get away and fully enjoy the trip, and also long enough to become tired from 22,000-step days and spending 24/7 with other people (I love these fantastic people dearly, but I’m an introvert with a small social battery). It felt great to be back home with my cuddly cat, ready to luxuriate in my own personal space.
At least, until Monday arrived.
On Monday evening, after a trip to the grocery store, I went outside to move my car out of the driveway. (The driveway is the space my piano students use to enter the house, and lessons were resuming the next day.) I went to turn the key, only to discover it wouldn’t turn. Instead, every possible warning light flashed and the radio turned off and on by itself as my dear 10-year-old Fiat refused to let me remove the key from the ignition. After a great deal of stress, I finally wrangled it out, then watched in jet-lagged confusion as the car continued performing its own electrical mayhem for a few minutes. Then, nothing.
Nothing I can do about this now, I thought. I’ll call an auto shop in the morning.
I went inside, grateful I’d at least gotten the groceries and that I didn’t need my car for anything else this week.
But then I went to feed that cuddly cat, and I discovered ants had gotten into the kitchen and were swarming her dry food bowl. I’ll spare you a literary description, but know that it was gross, and I screamed.
The next morning found me sleep-deprived and frantically deep-cleaning my kitchen. A tow truck arrived for the car, whose battery could not be jumped back to life. Hours later, I received an absolutely giant bill from the auto shop. A suppressed foot injury made itself known to me via extreme heel pain after so much walking during those get-away weeks. And my cat—a “special needs” rescue with highly sensitive skin—developed the bright red sores of an allergy flare-up on her forehead, presumably due to the dust that was due to the cleaning that was due to the ants that were due to the vacation.
I begged my cat not to get any sicker, as I did not have a car to take her anywhere. But she looked at me as if to say, I know how much money you have to spend on that car—what about me? and threw up on the rug.
Inspiration Becomes Idea
Learn more about this class here!
I have, naturally, relayed these frustrations to friends in the past 48 hours. Because I’ve also been prepping for my upcoming beginner screenwriting class at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis (Idea to Screenplay—hey, that’s the name of this post!), I’ve been reflecting on how this is the kind of storytelling that’s woven into our everyday lives. We all tell stories to each other all of the time. The experience I just told you about, if incomplete (I’m still in it, friends!), has some pretty basic story components:
A character with a strong want: Me, wanting (nay, needing) to relax at home with my cat after a long journey abroad.
A barrier: The car battery dies, propelling me to take expensive action, which prevents me from reaching my goal of relaxation. (In fact, it makes me feel the very opposite: stressed.)
An escalation: Now there is an ant problem, and I am even further removed from my goal of relaxing.
A relevant cause-and-effect: Cleaning motivated by the ant problem led to a health issue for the cat—who was meant to be part of the relaxation. Now my goal is even harder to achieve.
Stakes: I have piano students coming over soon, but there is a tow truck coming to the driveway who-knows-when and ants on the floor and my cat is throwing up, so I’m in danger of deterring clients (which I kind of need for things like, I don’t know, unexpected massive car bills?)—unless I can figure out a fix to these problems ASAP.
Idea Becomes Story
While I’ve identified some basic story elements, I think we can all agree that this experience, sadly, would not make a good movie. Why? The biggest reason is the lack of stakes. I technically listed some stakes above, but they’re not strong. I’m dealing with a handful of annoying things, but you and I both know I’ll be fine. I’m not actually in danger either physically or emotionally. It’s just annoying life stuff—things we all deal with at one point or another. Which leads to another reason it doesn’t make a good story: it’s not that interesting.
But you could use this experience as inspiration for a story.
What if the stakes were higher?
What if the person coming over is not a student, but a journalist for Good Housekeeping who’s going to interview our protagonist about her perfect house in an hour. And what if our protagonist’s reputation for having a perfect house is the source of her entire sense of self-worth?
What if this cat needs to get to the emergency vet stat, and what if the cat isn’t the protagonist’s cat? What if our protagonist is watching this cat for the person she’s in love with, who she thinks might notice her if she takes good enough care of their cat, but now the cat might die because of her?
What if this protagonist’s foot problem means she literally can’t walk? What if she’s broken her foot (thanks, cruel ants!), but her pride is too great and too fragile to ask anyone for help?
How on earth would this person survive the next hour of her life? Is she going to let her pride get in the way of saving this cat, and take away any shot she has at the romantic relationship she dreams about? And what happens when the journalist knocks on the door?
Now, I’m not about to go write the script for the Hopeless-Pet-Sitter-with-the-Good-Housekeeping-Interview movie, but you can see how one might build a story out of elements like this. You can also see how, without even thinking about these things, I naturally lost the car battery piece altogether (despite it being the “start” of my real-life experience), and I created a character who has a problem with perfectionism (a recurring theme in my life, demonstrating that as artists we tend to be interested in the same topics and questions). (I also, fully unintentionally, created a literal “save the cat” urgency, which is embarrassing.)
The Highlands, Scotland
Ideas Are Easy
In my “Idea to Screenplay” class, we start from the premise that ideas are the easy part. As long as you’re paying attention and willing to take them, ideas will find you. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, “ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).” And good news: you’re the conduit!
If I have one takeaway from my two weeks in UK-tourist mode, it’s that ideas are just lying around waiting for people to find them. Here is evidence:
In Edinburgh, the colorful shops of Victoria Street helped inspire a certain magical fantasy novel’s bustling Diagon Alley. And you only have to cross one street to get to a graveyard full of great name ideas, including “Thomas Riddell,” which inspired the name for that fantasy novel’s famous Dark Lord. And from both spots, you can feel the giant Edinburgh Castle presiding over the city. It’s like all these things were just sitting there, waiting to become the world of Harry Potter.
At The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, I learned about a little boy in the 1800s who had a mahogany cabinet in his bedroom. The cabinet had been made by William Brodie. Brodie was a Town Councilmember (and cabinet maker, of course) who was hanged in the 1700s for leading a double life—thanks to his becoming a burglar by night. The little boy with Brodie’s dresser was named Robert Louis Stevenson, and he grew up to write the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In London, I learned about a woman who worked as a pharmaceutical dispenser in World War I, which resulted in her knowing quite a lot more than the average person about toxic poisons. Agatha Christie, of course, became a crime writer.
Similarly, it’s easy to see how the moody beauty of the Scottish Highlands inspired the dramatic and atmospheric poetry of Robert Burns.
And it’s just as easy to understand how the unpretentious, DIY attitude of Glasgow has brought so many bands to the world—including Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand, Simple Minds, The Fratellis, Chvrches, and more.
Glasgow, Scotland
Stories Are Hard
If you’re paying attention and taking notes, it’s not hard to come up with a whole bunch of ideas. It’s crafting an idea into a story that is the hard part. (See: above jet-lagged attempt to turn annoying homecoming experience into weird indie romcom about a modern-day woman with inexplicable Good Housekeeping dreams.)
It’s the hard part that requires you to be an artist.
So, why am I teaching an “Idea to Screenplay” class and not an “Idea to Whatever-You-Want-It-to-Be” class? Because screenwriting has taught me more about storytelling than any other medium, and the lessons I’ve learned can be applied to all forms of writing.
Essentially, screenwriting requires serious focus on three topics—all of which have strengthened my prose writing practice:
Design. Screenplays are blueprints that (if all goes well!) are used by a whole team of people to make the final artwork. When you’re writing a screenplay, you have to figure out how to turn your idea into a good story that is interesting, meaningful, efficient, and worthy enough of multiple people’s time, energy, and money (just to make the thing in the first place—never mind that you also want an audience). During some parts of the process, you’re more of an architect than a writer, ensuring that every part is essential to the whole. Strengthening this muscle has helped me better identify and strengthen the story spines (and the areas where they’re missing in piles of lovely words) in my prose writing.
Screenplay excerpt of Get Out by Jordan Peele
Clarity. Not only do you have to design your screenplay idea to function as a story, but you also have to figure out how to communicate that story as clearly as possible (because there are so many opportunities for it to become lost in translation in the long journey from script to screen). Good screenwriting is basically effective communication. And a screenplay has to show a story through images and sound, without the luxury of entering characters’ minds or a setting’s context in the way we can access in a book. Honing this skill of clear communication can help make any form of writing more alive and direct.
Humility. Screenwriting has taught me to be humble AF. Why? Because after you come up with your story, build your story, and communicate your story, you are constantly taking notes, applying notes, changing your work, deleting your work, starting over, and repeating the process. If you have a fear of “killing your darlings” in art or in life, screenwriting will snap you right out of it. Who has time for that fear? Screenwriting has taught me to take myself less seriously so I can take my work more seriously. Sometimes the best thing for the work is to delete it all and try again—and that’s okay!
As a screenwriter, you don’t get to be one-hundred-percent in control—in fact, there is a point at which you might be in zero-percent control. While you do need to express your story vision as clearly as possible, you also need to trust other people (directors, producers, actors, editors, and more) to bring that vision to life. Those people bring their own perspectives and wisdom into the mix, and the art is changed because of it (it’s called collaboration, fellow introverts!). Prose writers get to speak more directly to our readers, but the element of trust still applies. We have to trust that readers will bring pieces of themselves to the work that we can’t even see coming. In this way, humility as an artist is about trusting the receiver of the art to complete the art. Ultimately, we’re still just offering what we have to someone and saying, “Okay, here’s what I’ve got.” And they get to hold it however they want to hold it. Isn’t that kind of beautiful?
I’m excited to dig into all these topics and more as we work on our own scenes and discuss passages by brilliant contemporary screenwriters in my class that starts next week. (See you there?) In the meantime, it’s back to ants for me… a story that I hope marches into a good ending very soon.
Cat-saving credit where credit is due.
On the topic of screenwriting advice that can apply to any form of writing, I really like this list of internal conflict ideas from ScreenCraft.
And just in case anyone else needs yoga for their overused feet this week, this practice helped mine.