4
ORIGINAL
The most marketable story ideas tend to contain some intriguing conceptual hook at the heart of their premise and/or in their approach to a particular genre. To this extent, they’re about something that we haven’t quite seen before. They add something new—or do things in a new way—which makes them stand out.
At the same time, they observe certain storytelling and genre conventions that are necessary for the audience to buy in and engage. When those conventions are completely ignored or discarded for the sake of originality, things tend to fall apart quickly. It’s a tricky balancing act, trying to figure out which “traditional” elements need to be there and which ones are fair game for innovation.
Some writers make originality their number one priority, without understanding or observing the other foundational aspects to a viable story idea or their genre. In looking to be different, they throw out the baby with the bathwater and come up with ideas that might be unique but don’t have enough of these core qualities that are necessary to capture an audience.
One might assume newer writers would be more likely to copy what’s already out there, and not be especially fresh or unique. But it’s actually more common to see scripts from inexperienced writers fall short in the other six PROBLEM criteria—while focused on being “original.”
This may be because writers tend to tire of what they see as a boring sameness to what’s in the marketplace. They might decry all the sequels and other projects that seem to have gotten made because they were similar to something successful that came before. Creative people tend to want to push for something fresh, not see new variations on the same old thing. Critics—who have to watch everything and can become jaded by that—also tend to value originality extra highly. And both might decry what they see as too much “formula” out there.
This is an understandable impulse. But when something comes off as formulaic, it’s not because it stuck to certain guidelines and principles that have been proven to be essential. It’s because it did so in a way that seemed paint-by-numbers. In other words, the execution didn’t elevate the material to something that seemed brand-new. And maybe the writer was too slavish to whatever formulaic elements they were using, to the point where the seams really showed. Maybe their concept fulfilled a classic, proven genre of some kind, but did so in ways that felt overly familiar, without adding anything special to it.
That’s the key—creating something fresh and new, but within a somewhat familiar package—if the goal is to sell one’s work. Because industry buyers, writers’ representatives, and audiences don’t value “newness” quite as highly as writers or critics. They tend to respond better to stories of a type they’ve seen before, with one big new and intriguing thing added. They aren’t looking for writers to reinvent the wheel completely or to be different for the sake of being different.
It’s easy to create something that’s really “out-there” and doesn’t fulfill foundational storytelling criteria. What’s harder and more valued is to break fresh and intriguing ground within a tried-and-true genre, with a story that is not only “original” but also punishing, relatable, believable, life-altering, entertaining, and meaningful.
A Fresh Twist on the Familiar
Successful stories in any genre tend to give the audience the things they come to those genres for (action, comedy, romance, horror, etc.), but they do it in a way that seems original. So it helps to first study and understand the relevant genres and brainstorm ways to conceptually evolve from some of the best examples of it.
I once heard literary manager Victoria Wisdom give some great advice on this topic, which was this: build on successful movies in a genre, that you’d like to emulate, by adding or changing one key element of what has worked in the past. She used the example of how James Bond begat Jason Bourne (a spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy), and also Mr. & Mrs. Smith (about two spies who are married), which then led to Spy Kids (about two married spies whose kids become spies). Each was successful, and each was different enough from the others to feel like its own unique and special thing. And each observed the primary rules of the “spy movie” genre—and of story in general. The spies are on a mission with huge stakes and have a particular enemy they spend the whole movie fighting (in highly entertaining ways). They’re overmatched by this villain and only able to defeat them in the very end. There’s plenty of compelling action, and the audience emotionally bonds with the main character, and relates to and roots for them as they get punished on their way to an eventual breakthrough.
It helps to have a solid genre as a starting point—meaning a type of story that has worked many times for audiences. That way, a writer can build from a foundation that has certain PROBLEM elements inherent in it—which usually still need to be there in the new variation. In other words, if we think of the kinds of scenes and situations that tend to be in a successful spy movie (or whatever genre we’re working in), we know that a successful new variation will probably need those, too. It just will be delivering them in original ways.
What doesn’t work so well is when writers simply become test marketers who second-guess the audience and “what’s currently in demand,” and write only what they think will sell, or copy what’s been successful without bringing some spark of intriguing uniqueness to it. A piece of writing needs its creator to have passion for it, and really love it, for it to come alive for readers. One generally can’t create the next great and marketable anything if they don’t personally believe in it and bring something of themselves to it that’s fresh and new. The key is to mix one’s own personal passions and creative tastes with knowledge of—and willingness to learn and work within—the fundamentals of story and genre.
Once a writer learns how to do this, and commits to it, they start focusing on the kinds of stories and projects that actually do have a fighting chance in the marketplace, if done well. And that’s when the challenges of “originality” start to really become an issue. Because when we understand what makes an idea potentially sellable—and we focus only on generating ideas and writing stories that fit those criteria—we start to see that a lot of the things we come up with seem similar to things that have already been done. Meaning, they are not so original. The reason for this is that now we are eliminating 99 percent of what we might have tried to write about before we understood all this. It narrows the possibilities greatly.
This is a good thing, and a necessary step for a writer to get to, because it means they’re no longer someone who doesn’t truly understand story and genre and who can’t work within them effectively. But they may start to look around at other examples within a certain genre, and feel that there isn’t enough new territory for them. Every idea they come up with may seem too similar to examples of the genre in the past. After all, successful and capable writers have been racking their brains to come up with new variations on those same genres for decades. And now here they are, trying to do the same thing. That is where the real hard work of trying to be original within a viable framework begins.
I’ve witnessed this firsthand in the TV-development marketplace. Every year, the major networks will tell the big agencies (who tell their writer clients) what they are “looking for,” meaning what kinds of new show ideas they want to be pitched. Inevitably, on the one-hour-drama side, these “network needs” will include fresh and original examples of staples like the cop show, the medical show, and the legal show. These three genres have worked over and over on television, so they know they want more of them. But for an idea to go the distance, it has to carve out fresh territory that hasn’t quite been seen before.
Now, one might look at what’s on TV and say that there are a lot of similar cop shows. But if we ignore spin-offs and franchises, for a moment, and look only at original show ideas that were successful, they usually did something different from all shows that came before. Something about the cops, the unit, the cases, and/or how they work on them was fresh—even while the basic genre elements remained basically the same.
How many unique variations on a “cop show” can there be, in the end? Especially if we accept that the cases have to be really high stakes (like murders) and solved by the end of an episode? Well, that’s the question hungry TV writers ask themselves every year as they work to come up with ideas for their own new cop show, and try to sell them to the networks. Hundreds of new ideas are pitched, but only a handful will ever make it on the air. And this is from seasoned professional TV writers. It isn’t easy.
This same challenge holds true in every genre and medium where writers seek to tell stories. Inevitably, others have already taken what seems like every possible new idea for our genre, our topic, and our type of story. So, what are we going to do? Sometimes the answer could be to blend two genres in a way that delivers the expectations of one or both of them really effectively, but in a new way. Consider “vampires” meets “teen romance” in Twilight. In other cases, it can be about finding some fresh type of challenge, liability, conflict, or difficulty that could add further complications to the main character’s situation. Since we’re always looking for more of those things, that’s a good place to start.
There’s Another Project Just Like Mine!
It’s almost inevitable that with anything we write, someone else has written or is writing something similar, in terms of concept, subject, and/or setting. There are only so many ideas and types of premises out there that can fit the criteria for a winning story, and only so many kinds of human experiences to base a story on, so it’s a common occurrence to find out that our piece isn’t as unique, special, fresh, and new as we might have hoped it was. (Even if it’s based on a specific true story.) And sometimes, other projects we hear about that are similar are much further along toward being produced and have much bigger names behind them.
It’s normal to despair in this situation and to feel that it renders all our hard work a waste. But that’s not usually true, and all is not lost. There are several reasons why this incredibly frequent state of affairs is not cause for panic:
Most movie and TV projects—even the ones that big-name writers are being paid to write—never get produced, or if they do, they don’t reach a large audience. The people we send our work to likely haven’t seen them or aren’t familiar with them. Even when news stories make it seem as though a competitive project is on the fast track toward success, there’s usually more to the story, and very often, nothing ever comes of them, or at least nothing significant.
Anything we write when we’re not yet a well-established, successful writer is likely to serve only as a “writing sample” and won’t get produced anyway. At best, it might do well in contests, win us a manager or agent, and/or get us meetings with producers who become “fans” of our work. But typically, they can’t or won’t do anything with this script that made them a fan. They just really want to see the next thing we write. This happens constantly.
And this is considered a best-case scenario. Most scripts for most writers don’t achieve any of these things. But if a piece of writing does, it probably won’t matter that it’s similar to something else that has beaten it to the marketplace. Because they’re judging us by our writing and storytelling ability, and what we did with our concept, and how we made it ours. They’re looking at it as a sample that shows them whether we’re a writer they might want to be in business with moving forward. No writer wants to hear that, and with every project, we really hope we can sell it and get it produced, but the real chances of that happening are always tiny.
On the rare occasion that the competitive project does go the distance and gets made and is successful and well-known, and our project also gets to a place where people might seriously consider producing it, the marketplace often has room for more than one project with similar subjects or concepts. Remember Deep Impact and Armageddon? Both came out in 1998. How about 18 Again!, Vice Versa, and Big? All three were adult-child body-switching movies, and all were released in 1988. Or consider Christopher Columbus: The Discovery and 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Both were about Columbus, and both came out in 1992.
We might then ask, “What if another project out there is exactly the same as mine, to the point where the two could not coexist?” Well, that is incredibly rare. But it is possible that another project is so close to ours, and ahead of ours in every way, that people could look at ours and think it’s basically the same thing or a knockoff, and thus not original enough.
As unlikely as that is to happen, here’s what we can do when we hear about such a potential project, whether it’s in development or already released: research it, and try to read and/or watch it.
This is the opposite of what I’ve seen many writers do in this situation. Instead, they say something like, “I purposefully avoided finding out too much about it, because I didn’t want to be influenced by it.” I disagree with that approach. If our concern is that this other project is too close to ours, wouldn’t we want to make sure? And perhaps have the opportunity to adjust ours so that is no longer the case? No one’s going to give us credit for “accidentally being the same, because we never saw it, meaning we didn’t consciously copy it,” so what’s the point of avoiding it?
Most of the time, when we check out the competitive project(s), we find that although there are some similarities, they have a different focus in certain key ways. And we can also learn from what we don’t think works or don’t like about their approach, and make sure we don’t make those same mistakes. It actually tends to solidify our sense of what we wanted to do, and usually that is different enough from what they did that it can give us a shot in the arm to check theirs out. It helps us to identify what’s uniquely interesting about our idea and what we want to focus on. We can work to carve out our unique territory even further so that what we create is clearly significantly different from any apparent “competition.”
Writer’s “Voice” and Dealing with Feedback
Originality is not just about having an idea with a fresh, new, sellable hook. It’s about one’s view of the world and of people, and how that is communicated within an idea or piece of writing.
New writers are highly valued when they seem to have a unique and memorable “voice,” where readers come away thinking, “Wow, this writer is one of a kind,” or “Nobody else could have written this, in this way, but this person.” There’s a singularity to the writer’s point of view and way of expressing it. The way their brain works and how that comes out on the page is appealingly unique to them.
One key way that “voice” comes out is through characters. Do they feel like real and authentic, one-of-a-kind human beings, different from everyone else on Earth? (The way we all are.) Are they super specific, down to the fine detail? And can their particular qualities be really memorable and entertaining to watch? Can they defy stereotypes and do and say things that only they could do or say? If so, they will feel like original creations.
Some aspects of “voice” come from what a writer chooses to focus on and the level of intriguing detail they can bring forth in whatever and whoever it is they write about. This can stem from writing about one’s own experience. Or it can come from research. The more we can make our writing feel well observed and real but also memorable and unique to us, the more people will think we have a great “voice.”
One can’t force a voice. It’s something that comes out of them with practice and experience. They will tend to write about certain kinds of people and situations, in certain types of ways, that is unique to them. So, it’s helpful to notice and trust in our obsessions. Notice what we’re uniquely interested in, and listen to that. Follow that (while, of course, also making sure to follow these other guidelines).
It’s easy to get talked out of one’s own “voice” by well-meaning others when they give feedback. Some writers will note others’ lukewarm reactions and decide that these reactions are 100 percent right, that it’s “not good enough,” or that they’re “not good enough”—instead of trusting that there is something in their unique ideas, interests, and passions that can really work and be successful if they follow it. It can be easy to get talked out of something that, with more work, could be viable material. And notes are often about someone else’s personal tastes. I am especially cautious about adopting others’ helpful “fixes” to problems they can’t quite articulate. Better to learn what they think the problems are, decide if I agree, and address them in my own voice.
On the other hand, many writers make the opposite mistake, and are too closed off to any notes. They might write off everyone’s feedback as being “really about them” (and “them not getting my voice”) and refuse to change much of anything. This usually means the writer isn’t thinking enough about the audience they’re trying to serve and seeing these first readers as representatives of that potential audience. It can be very valuable to get “notes” on material, especially ones that address the seven elements in this book and that come from multiple honest people whose opinion on such things are worthy of trust. A consensus on what the problems seem to be is very useful.
As with so many things, it’s about finding a balance—where we are boldly willing to hear what others have to say and to rethink our work in significant ways, if needed—without letting go of what makes it potentially special, original, and uniquely “us.”
Why They Make Bad Movies
Beginning screenwriters are often shocked to hear how competitive the field is and how difficult it is to break in. They think their chief problem is that it’s a closed industry. It can’t be that it’s so difficult and rare to create something that impresses the gatekeepers. If only the writers with the very best skill, craft, artistry, and ideas are able to sell their material or get hired, how does that jibe with the fact that there’s so much “crap” that gets made by Hollywood? And this “crap” they’re talking about tends to especially fail, in their eyes, in terms of originality.
It’s a common and reasonable question, but it’s based on making the mistake of conflating two very different events. The first is a new writer getting noticed and moving ahead in their career in some way. (Which of course is every new writer’s hope.) The second is a movie getting green-lit to production and ultimate release. These two things happen totally separately from each other and are based on almost completely different factors.
Let’s start with the new writer getting noticed. What does it take for this to happen? Simple: a single script (in TV or film) that really stands out and impresses the people who evaluate, develop, and/or sell screenwriting for a living (managers, agents, producers, and certain executives at the studios and networks). Those folks are looking for new material and new writers. But they don’t need a huge number of them, and they have to wade through literally hundreds of scripts they feel don’t work to find even one that might.
What are they looking for? A fresh idea they think could sell, backed by a very well-executed script. And just as importantly, they want distinctly original voices from writers who have mastered the fundamentals and can produce on the page at a professional level that is compelling, clear, believable, entertaining, emotionally involving, and a true pleasure to read.
That’s not easy to achieve, and most people who try their hand at screenwriting never get there. Those who do have usually worked very hard and long on many scripts for many years and educated themselves hugely along the way. Their first goal is to simply get represented and develop interest in their work from within the industry. That’s what their scripts are geared to do (unless they’re looking to make the movie themselves, independently).
On the other end of the process, the one where movies are getting green-lit to production, you have executives looking to package existing projects with stars and directors in order to release them as a commercial product. Let’s look at the factors that play into these decisions and that might result in the “bad” movies that make it seem like writers don’t have to be “good” to make it in Hollywood.
First, understand that the film industry is a business like any other, meaning that the only goal of the decision makers who green-light movies is to make a profit. If they don’t consistently do that, they’re out of business. Whether they personally think what they’re making is “good” or “original” or not, and whether they’d love to see it, is largely irrelevant. A lot of these people are smart, educated, worldly types who might personally prefer the same kind of movies that a typical screenwriter might respect. They’re just not personally obsessed with the creative/artistic side of things, as writers often are, and they won’t make such movies if they don’t seem like they will be profitable.
What makes a script or idea for a movie a good choice from a businessperson’s perspective? Obviously, they want the largest number of people to consume it, based on what they’ve seen audiences buy in recent years. It’s not an exact science, because any supposed “sure thing” can end up not working with audiences. But you only have to look at the top-grossing movies to see that prior brand awareness and popularity is a key element. And this can run counter to the priority of “originality.”
It’s much easier to get a distracted population with so many entertainment options to understand, recognize, and be interested in something that’s connected to material they already know. It just makes business sense. We don’t have to like it, and it might lead to a seeming paucity of “good movies” (or startlingly original ones), but it seems to be the economic reality.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 may be a failure in terms of reviews, but it still brought in $108 million in worldwide box office, on a budget of $30 million. That might not be a big hit, but the first Paul Blart made $183 million on a budget of $26 million. From a business perspective, that’s sound decision making.
Very smart people study these things extremely seriously. It doesn’t mean they don’t guess wrong at times; of course they do. But they likely had solid business/economic reasons behind what they did. And those reasons always trump whether a movie is “good” or not.
Another thing to understand is that no one sets out to make unoriginal crap (unless they know it will still make tons of money regardless). They set out to make something that will provide audiences with the types of emotional experiences and entertainment that have proven to be successful in the past. It’s just really hard to make something that works, in any genre. It’s a rare thing. A lot of elements have to come together well, almost like lightning in a bottle. It’s much more normal to make a bad or mediocre movie (just as it is to write a bad or mediocre script) than to truly succeed, either commercially or in terms of “quality.”
None of this has much to do with the other end of the process, where aspiring writers are trying to break in. Writers almost never break in with a green-lit movie. Rather, breaking in means impressing a manager, an agent, or a producer with a script that likely won’t even sell, let alone get made, but that puts them on the radar of the industry, gets them fans, and starts to give them some momentum toward future sales or employment.
You might ask yourself, did the writers of “bad movies” actually make it to the top of the heap at some point, bypassing all the other aspiring writers at the time, with something that completely impressed people as unique and great?
The answer is almost always yes.
This “bad movie” you’re now seeing might be bad for all sorts of reasons that don’t have to do with their individual writing contribution. But even if it does, you’re probably looking at a professional writer who has written many, many screenplays and gradually worked their way up with some very impressive work that ultimately led to their employment on the bad movie. It’s possible that they worked on the bad movie mainly for the money, and it wasn’t the best medium for showcasing their talents. Or the development process could’ve been rushed. There was also very likely a variety of writers employed on it, with the final product a hodgepodge of their different contributions. There might’ve been difficulty reaching a version that equally pleased director, studio, and star with a single, solid creative vision that worked. The financing company might have even (perhaps rightly) recognized that a great script wasn’t absolutely key to the film’s business prospects. Or it could have just been a flawed approach to a movie that the writer either came up with or had forced on them by someone else.
But make no mistake, virtually any writer credited on even a bad movie has gone far past the basic screenwriting fundamentals that vex 99 percent of beginning writers and has written at least one “great” script that proved they “had it.” They aren’t simply bad writers who could easily be replaced by the average aspiring writer who has taken a class and written a script or two.
My advice is to recognize and respect the challenge of rising to the level that would allow one to start a professional career. And realize that the bad movies you see in theaters don’t mean that it should be easy. It isn’t—not because the industry is so closed, but because it’s hard to do this really well.
In Judd Apatow’s book Sick in the Head, Jerry Seinfeld commented on the nature of great comedians. He might as well have been talking about screenwriting when he said, “That’s the greatest thing about comedy. If you’ve got talent, it’s unmistakable. No one misses it and you don’t have to wait around for a break. It’s very easy to get a break. It’s very hard to be good enough.”
Doctors, Lawyers, and Cops
Buyers of TV are always looking for something unique and original, but as in other media, what works best is a fresh twist on a proven genre, where a writer who clearly understands how certain types of shows work (usually from having been a staff writer of such shows) manages to masterfully observe and execute those fundamentals while applying them to something brand-new that hasn’t quite been seen before.
I used to lament the fact that so many drama series focus on some variation of cops, lawyers, and/or doctors. I tried pitching and developing multiple series about other kinds of workplaces, which usually failed. I felt, like many aspiring television writers do, that there are a multitude of different kinds of job challenges that could make for compelling television.
But in my years of doing it professionally—selling some ideas but having many others batted down by executives, producers, or my own agents—I learned some things. And one of the chief lessons is that we don’t want to create a show where the story challenges center on “work responsibilities,” unless it’s for some variation on one of those golden three occupations.
The kind of jobs that can drive the bulk of the stories on a successful series generally have three specific qualities:
They are heroic: they involve doing something for others. The show’s regulars are involved in protecting, helping, and/or fighting for humanity, beyond their personal sphere.
The stakes are sky-high. If they fail, people die, murderers go free, innocent people get life in prison, etc.
The nature of their work consists of entertaining-to-watch scenes of compelling interpersonal confrontations, with high emotions and high stakes for all.
Law & Order is perhaps the quintessential example of this. A unique (at its time) hybrid of “investigative/police” show and “legal/courtroom” show, it focused on professionals fighting on behalf of society and crime victims to identify who committed a murder and bring them to justice.
The process of achieving that goal is made up entirely of high-conflict, high-stakes, high-emotion confrontations with witnesses, suspects, bosses, opposing counsel, judges, and juries. Every scene, on the best episodes, is a fun-to-watch attempt to solve the larger story problem of the episode (the murder), in which the law-enforcement characters meet resistance and/or force revelations, which then require further action on their part—leading to more scenes.
Over the years, audiences have consistently shown that they enjoy watching the procedure of various kinds of police, lawyers, and doctors doing their jobs—for these reasons. So networks always want more of them, albeit with fresh variations. There have also been successful shows about other kinds of heroic adventurers, whose job or role in society involves fighting against dangers on behalf of others—such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alias, The Walking Dead, and Star Trek. These shows meet the same criteria as the classic three “procedural” show occupations, where the audience is mainly concerned with solving the “case of the week.”
Many one-hour dramas feature this kind of story “franchise.” It’s an endlessly repeatable way to generate stories—they walk in the door, so to speak, as this week’s problem or case. Series that don’t have a procedural story generator have to rely on the personal lives of their series regulars for all the conflict and problems. In these shows (which include all comedies and perhaps half the dramas on television), the central problem, goal, and stakes of an episodic story typically matter only to its main character. They’re usually not heroic, and it’s not about workplace success. They’re personal.
Writers often decide to create shows set at some other kind of workplace and make the story challenges about “work stuff.” They might reason that there have been successful shows about all sorts of other professions: Ad agency executives. High school football coaches. Sketch-comedy-show writer-producers. Certainly, the challenges of working at these occupations have been the foundation for successful television series. Right?
On the surface, it might seem that way. But there’s a key difference. The stories on episodes of these shows don’t focus primarily on job-related assignments and difficulties, unless they lead to engaging challenges in the characters’ personal lives. The audience isn’t meant to be invested in the characters simply succeeding in a work task over the course of the episode the way they would with doctors, lawyers, cops, or starship captains. The stakes just aren’t high enough, and the process of doing most jobs isn’t entertaining to watch (or sympathetic), in the same way that the “heroic” jobs are.
Nobody wants to watch scene after scene of Don Draper on Mad Men wrestling with an ad campaign as the episode’s “A Story”—with the climax of the episode being the campaign’s success. The same is true about Liz Lemon creating an episode of TGS, a fictional SNL analogue on 30 Rock. The minutiae of their work, and its goals, are not why we watch. It’s about the characters and their personal life challenges. We are invested in the characters personally, and we care about the high stakes they face in their own lives. And so, their “workplace challenges” are merely a backdrop that serves to generate conflicts and problems that will affect these characters on a personal level. But there’s no heroic mission to invest in. What the audience cares about instead are these individuals’ frustrations in their personal lives, their fantasies of what they wish their lives could be, the challenges of trying to get them there, and the high-stakes personal crises and conflicts that come up in the process.