Notes, Structure, & Avoiding Emotional Predictability

Stubbornly exploring the emotional vibrancy of the human animal while working in the industry's emotion-flattening storytelling machine

“My boy, never let exposition land as mere exposition.”

One of the biggest traps when you're writing a script — especially if you're developing that script with a partner or a producer or a studio — is creating emotional predictability.

That is, you’ve developed an outline everyone loves and you go to script. Your plot is surprising! Sudden revelations occur! The action is exciting and cool! No real plot holes! But somehow, the characters respond to all of this surprising action with absolutely predictable, rote, routine emotions. The characters get angry at injustices. They cry when sad things happen. They get happy when things turn out well. And your reader gets bored by page thirty because it all feels so familiar.

What may be lacking is emotional surprise. Unexpected feelings arriving at unexpected moments. An unexpected intensity to an emotion. A surprisingly truthful juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible feelings.

It’s not enough for your characters to say interesting things. Characters also need to have their own unique way of reacting to what other characters say and do.

Alexander Mackendrick in ON FILM-MAKING discusses how important it is for dialogue to evoke responses from the other characters. From this insight, I think you can take a jump and say: effective dramatic dialogue doesn’t simply impress the reader/viewer, or give us a key to understanding the speaker’s psychology or motivations. Effective dramatic dialogue creates drama by provoking an interesting response from the other characters.

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A character just giving out info is simply spouting exposition. Boring. But if another character has an unexpected (but ultimately understandable) emotional reaction to that exposition then suddenly otherwise boring dialogue can end up being dramatically interesting. Not because of the quality of the words. But because of the quality of the reaction.

Think about when Johnny Fontane first comes to Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER. Johnny comes into the Don’s office with a dilemma:

Fontane: “I don't know what to do, Godfather. My voice is weak, it's weak. Anyway, if I had this part in the picture, it puts me right back on top, you know. But this... this man out there. He won't give it to me, the head of the studio.”

Corleone: “What's his name?”

Fontane: “Woltz. He said there's no chance, no chance...A month ago he bought the rights to this book, a best seller. The main character is a guy just like me. I wouldn't even have to act, just be myself.”

So far, this is plain-ass expositional dialogue. We’ve seen that Johnny is a singer. Now we hear that he’s also an actor, but a studio head named Wolz is blocking him from a comeback role. All of this will come into play, eventually. But it’s just information right now. Dry.

Fontane continues, a bit weepy: “Oh, Godfather, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do...”

And suddenly, the calm patient mob boss leaps to his feet and starts shaking Fontane.

Corleone: “YOU CAN ACT LIKE A MAN!”

The Don slaps Fontana. Corleone: “What's the matter with you? Is this what you've become, a Hollywood finocchio who cries like a woman? ‘Oh, what do I do? What do I do?’ What is that nonsense? Ridiculous!”

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Corleone’s sudden outburst is what saves this scene. We’ve already seen Corleone be calmly offended when the undertaker offers to pay him for murder. We’ve seen Corleone be calmly gracious when the baker asks for help in keeping his daughter’s love interest from being deported.

So, Coppola has set us up well. Though we may not consciously know it, as a viewer we’re analyzing each supplicant who comes to Don Corleone, trying to decipher how the Godfather sees them through his unique prism.

Coppola gives Fontane just enough time to get out the key bits of information that’ll set up Tom Hagen’s trip to Hollywood, illustrating the reach of the Godfather’s power. In terms of tone, at the start it resembles the prior scenes. But just as Fontane’s dialogue begins to tip into boring exposition, the Godfather has his surprising-but-psychologically-telling outburst.

And suddenly, now this exchange lands as a dramatically interesting scene about competing models of manhood in this cultural world. It just happens to also have slid a bunch of key exposition into that dramatically interesting scene. But the exposition doesn’t feel like the point of the scene. The unique psychologies and codes at play in this world feel like the point of the scene. Info is important for the plot. But human psychologies and cultural codes are the materials of great drama.

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One thing I’ve noticed in my own work: the more I revise and tighten a script, the more it tends towards a certain emotional predictability.

Part of this, of course, is because I become more and more familiar with the emotional beats of the script as I revise. But I think part of this is also because, all things even, the notes process will usually pull your writing towards the familiar — at least structurally.

You can't ignore the tendency in industry people to reign in scripts and pull them into proven shapes and structures that have been shown to work in recent films and TV shows. And although that's a reality as a writer you have to deal with, it doesn’t leave you off the hook. That is, you still have to figure out a way to keep your script emotionally vibrant and alive while also working to get your project further along in the bigger industry machine.

I'm not necessarily crapping on the notes process. Usually, my scripts reach their best form after about two rounds of notes. But in that notes process, I often also have to sorta fight to keep any notable tonal or emotional variety in my scenes, or at least find ways to strategize keeping that vibrancy.

Industry people almost never give you notes that'll tell you to make your scenes more emotionally vibrant or unpredictable. But they will tell you where things get a little boring. (“This stretch feels flat” “I got a little bored here” “Can we up the urgency in act two” etc) And that is super, super helpful.

When a script is getting boring, sometimes it means you’re actually going through the scenes too fast. You’re not really exploring the dramatic and emotional possibilities of a given situation — instead, you’re kind of speeding past those possibilities to get to the next plot point.

But you’ll almost never get notes to slow down and explore a situation or dynamic. If your script feels flat or boring, you’ll usually get notes aimed at getting the story moving faster, or to find surprising plot twists, or to give characters more colors or textures. Or even more common: notes to provide more information to explain the backstory and the motivations of the characters.

Sometimes, notes are even asking for two conflicting things at the same time:

1) requests for the script to get to its big moments earlier and to include more twists, which practically speaking is pushing you to move through your scenes more quickly

2) requests for the script to include more information on the backgrounds, backstories, and motivations of the characters, which practically speaking is pushing you to stop the story in order to get this info into the script

And the thing is: if you do both of these things in the terms proposed by such notes, you’ll likely be handing in a script that alternates between rushed-through scenes that go by too quickly and unbearably slow scenes that stop the drama to dump a bunch of exposition.

So, you’ll be handing in a revised script that does exactly what the notes asked you to do. And you’ll probably get replaced. Because chances are, the script’s probably even more boring now.

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As I’ve gotten along further in my career, I’m now someone who is occasionally in the position of giving notes. So this post isn’t accusatory so much as trying to explain some recurring phenomena. Because I’m implicated in all this shit too. Some overly-generalized thoughts:

1) Notes-givers need to justify their existence. At the script stage, they do this by giving notes. So they're always gonna say something, if only to say something. Otherwise, what are they there for?

2) Often, their notes aren’t even about how they themselves experienced the story. It’s more about how they imagine other people will respond. That places those notes, and your story and characters, on some abstract generalized plane where script elements are judged on how well they approximate already-familiar and successful shapes and moves. It’s trying to recreate the magic of the first JOHN WICK without figuring out the weirdly perfect emotional equivalent of his puppy, and how that informs and grounds all the following cool-ass stunts. It’s trying to recreate the magic of GET OUT by simply adding some particular social trauma to a horror formula without replicating the scene-by-scene funny-horrifying social insights of Jordan Peele’s script.

3) Script notes often arrive less as a creative push than as a form of organizational risk-management. The lower a notes-giver is in the organizational hierarchy, the more risk-management seems to come into play — they don’t want to expose themselves by handing over some hot wild unformed mess to their boss. They often try to shave away rough edges or moments or problematic scenes that might provoke a “How the fuck did this get your ok?’ response.

All three of these points, in my opinion, push notes-givers towards adopting a more conservative mindset, moving them away from embracing riskiness and the unknown.

This means notes will often express — perhaps not even consciously — discomfort not just with strange structures, or politically-risky material, but also with unpredictable emotions.

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A lot of writers feel that their scripts need to hit the right structural beats at the right narrative spots: the "call to action" needs to happen at this spot, "all is lost" needs to happen at the end of act two, etc. And there's a reason for this: a lot of producers and executives and coverage readers have internalized these storytelling structures as truisms and expect scripts to reflect this internalized truth in order to be “professional.”

I consider the traditional three act structure template so common for features to be both an opportunity and a potential trap. It’s an opportunity because it is a tried and true storytelling structure. I saw something like this on twitter.

Act One: get the hero stuck in the tree.

Act Two: throw things at the hero while they’re stuck in the tree.

Act Three: get the hero down from the tree.

Simple, but effective. And easy to divert from if you wish to, say, burn the hero alive in the tree in act three instead.

Understanding this very basic storytelling structure won’t guarantee that your script will work. Scripts live-or-die more on a scene-by-scene basis than on holistic structure.

But! If you can hit a couple of key traditional beats with genuine dramatic effectiveness — if you can write a great all-is-lost scene, or a great call-to-action scene — it can buy you room to explore a wider range of emotional responses and more unexpected textures in other scenes.

That’s one of the opportunities, practically speaking, in embracing traditional structural beats. Or even in embracing genre beats. If you do these familiar-but-pivotal scenes really really well in a way that’s unique to your script, you’re giving your notes-giving partners something to hang their proverbial hats on. You’re making them look good to their bosses, which is sorta the real key to Hollywood success. That’s really the industry sweet spot: something familiar, but different. And when you start producing pivotal-but-creative beats in your script, you’ll also often see a lot of the unspoken anxieties informing their notes slip away. And you can get more and more of your weirdly personal shit in.

The potential trap is that you can end up doing nothing else but offering traditional structural and/or genre beats. And there's a thinner line than we'd like to acknowledge separating professional screenwriter and formulaic hack.

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When buried emotions erupt, the surprise is the point.

In a current project, I have a key scene where a poor young woman is with her niece at a grocery store. The niece’s birthday is coming up. The poor young woman only has so much cash. She works part-time as a waitress and mostly lives off her tips, needing to feed not just herself and her niece but also her sickly father and shithead brothers and their pregnant dog until her next shift. She’s already paid off her water bill to get her utilities back on. And she’s just put like 7 dollars of gas into her car. She’s only got so much money left, but she’d like to fix her niece’s favorite dessert of strawberry shortcake for her birthday.

The poor young woman goes to the fresh produce section. But fresh strawberries are too expensive on her budget. So she gets canned strawberry filling instead, telling herself that the fresh strawberries looked bad (they didn’t) and that canned last longer anyway.

Complicating things: this poor young woman was the valedictorian of her high school. At one point, she wanted to become attorney general of her home state. But a series of family complications and a state of general poverty have caused her to be stuck in her dying small town, even though she seemingly did everything right.

Anyway, she gets into the checkout line with her niece. A nicely dressed middle class liberal type dude is checking out, getting a whole cart of expensive fresh produce. The middle class liberal dude’s son asks why they can’t get canned strawberries: they look tastier. The dad says it’s all corn syrup and sugars, but apparently some people don’t understand that. Raze engages with the dude, and before we know it, he says something about how you can’t expect white trash to understand basic nutrition and she throws the can of strawberry filling at his head and knocks him down.

It’s probably my favorite scene in the script. And in the early drafts, a number of my partners — who don’t share my class background — wanted me to cut it. Or, to simply have the poor young woman express shame about her condition instead of sudden anger at the middle class dude. Because that sudden anger felt tonally off to them. We hadn’t seen this character — our lead — act like this. It seemed to come out of nowhere.

For me, that sudden anger was the whole point. All her fury about how her life has turned out is bubbling right under the poor young woman’s surface. She covers it up with jokes and smart ass remarks, but it’s there. And this clueless middle class dude just happened to push the right button to set her off. Like with the Johnny Fontane/Don Corleone scene, it’s as much about staking out the unique emotional terrain of my lead character as it is about anything else. It’s supposed to be different. And ideally, if the project gets made, it’ll be a rare contemporary Hollywood scene that'll tell a working class viewer at home: this is a story told from your working class point of view.

So far, I’ve managed to keep the scene in, mostly by revising some of the dialogue surrounding the poor young woman’s outburst. And by amping up a different character’s scene that leads into this scene, to sort of subconsciously ease the reader into more intense terrain. But it’s taken me actively defending this scene and identifying it as perhaps the central scene in whole script to understanding our lead — it’s what all the prior scenes emotionally are leading to — to keep it in.

My project is a story mostly about class. And to shave away scenes that express my particular take on the emotional volatility underpinning class levels would cause the whole thing to get very generic.

I don’t hold it against my partners that some of them didn’t get this scene for a long time. The notes are all in good faith and have by and large been hugely helpful. If anything, I blame the notes process itself for so often directing groups of notes-givers to identify anything too unexpected or weird as aesthetically troubling. And I don’t think it’s done intentionally. I think it’s just a byproduct of the process.

How much of the American audience’s rapturous response to PARASITE had to do with its tonal unpredictability and complete disavowal of normative Hollywood storytelling emotional beats? I know it’s one of the things that fed my rapturous response. When the father suddenly stabs the richer man who’d employed him, it had the shock of a genuine epiphany.

Working in the South Korean film industry, Bong Joon-ho managed to dramatize buried class rage by having a poor lead character suddenly stab and kill a seemingly blameless upper class character. Working in Hollywood, I’m rope-a-doping my way through the script development process to try and have my poor lead character express buried class rage by suddenly throwing a can of fruit and giving an upper class character a bad headache.

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Just simply having some surprising human emotions in a script isn’t in and of itself an accomplishment. Though I will say, creating one or two characters who react in a precisely-defined but totally unexpected manner to otherwise pretty normal stimuli — think of Joe Pesci flipping the fuck out when Ray Liotta tells him he’s a funny guy in GOODFELLAS, or Agent Cooper’s adorably excessive appreciation of tasty pie or coffee in TWIN PEAKS, or Lady Bird diving out of a moving car to escape her mother’s lecture in LADY BIRD — can go a long way in making a script feel freshly alive. (And you can always use later scenes to fill-in the missing bits that help contextualize what at the time felt like an out-of-nowhere reaction.)

But I’m also old school in thinking: a healthy range of human emotions also always needs to be in the service of telling a story.

I sometimes describe my writing and revising process as toggling between telescopic and microscopic lenses. I work on individual scenes, trying to mine them for small moments of unexpected human truth. But then I also try to look at these scenes from a bird’s eye view to determine how well they’re working together to tell a larger story.

In my initial drafts, I try to leave enough room in my outline and overall structural design to be able to still make discoveries. I want my characters to surprise me when I write the actual scenes. I want them to provoke each other in unexpected ways.

But when I revise, I want these scenes to accumulate emotional and dramatic consequences; doing this is the real purpose of structure, I think. That is, I try to think of structure not as an abstract shape. But as a scene-by-scene process of building a consequential emotional experience that deepens its emotions and heightens its tensions as it goes along.

There are some small basic things I do to help me revise a TV script in order to check that its structure is working to do this. After a draft is done:

-- On a separate sheet, I write a one sentence logline for each main character's story for the episode. “X is angry for how her life has turned out and seeks revenge” etc.

-- Next, I write down every beat/scene of the episode. That is, a short phrase that expresses what happens in each scene.

X CROSSES PATHS WITH WELL-OFF MOM AT UTILITIES OFFICE
X PAYS WATER BILL WITH 1s AND 5s FROM TIPS
X PUTS IN 7 BUCKS OF GAS
X STRETCHES $ AT GROCERY STORE FOR BIRTHDAY DESSERT
X HITS MIDDLE CLASS GUY IN HEAD WITH CAN OF FILLING

-- Next, I mark each beat in terms of which character's story it helps tell. Does each new beat advance this story? Or reveal a new feature of that story? Or help explain a previous action? etc

Super basic stuff. But the process always seems to illuminate where semi-hidden problems lay. If I can't write a one sentence logline summarizing a character's story/dilemma for the episode, then the script is probably gonna be too loose and vague to be dramatic or emotional.

Then, writing down each beat and analyzing it via the character logline prism helps me clarify where the dramatic momentum is stalling, or goes off-track. If a scene isn't helping deepen or advance this episode's story for the character, it's probably the wrong episode for that scene. Or, the scene needs to be re-staged to add or emphasize some vital new component to this episode’s logline story for the character.

At the beat sheet level, I take out or revise scenes that don't advance or deepen the character's one sentence logline stories. And I add scenes that help intensify and deepen those one sentence logline stories. Sometimes, I combine scenes together so I’m still introducing a new key supporting character or subplot, but also revealing some new shading to the main character’s episodic logline story in the process.

This beat sheet overview — 3-4 pages long, usually — gives me a good bird's eye view of each character's story and where they do or don't intersect and reflect on each other. Then I can go in and do the more immersive scene detail work with a firmer sense of the overall shape. And try to find new surprises.

I hope one thing that comes across here: at least for me, there’s never some secret formula. It’s always this dance between the larger shape and the scene-by-scene details. Often, as I get deeper into the revision process, I start to realize what the larger shapes want to be. Then I go deeper into the individual scenes and start finding unexpected emotional colors in the process of staging that larger story.

But just as often, I’ll make some weird discovery in an individual scene. A character will say or do something I wasn’t expecting. And then I go back and reshape the larger story with this new nugget in hand.

I think part of our job as writers is to come to understand our process, and find ways to protect it in the development and notes-taking process while also making our partners more and more excited about the project. It’s never exactly easy.

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I’ve been lucky in my career so far to have only had pretty much good faith partners giving me notes on my various projects. I’d say in the last 7-8 years, I’ve only had great partners. But I also think the very nature of the developmental process can lead to a kind of emotional predictability in the scripts that come out of it, despite everyone’s best intentions.

It might be a bit philosophical, but I’d actually pin some of it down to this: in the world of script development, a project either starts with a concept or (more often) as an intellectual property. Writers pitch a concept, or they pitch a take on a property.

Now, I’ve pitched on my share of properties. I’ve even been hired and I’ve had pretty good experiences so far. There’s even been a few times that I’ve pitched on a book or podcast or something, and my pitch was mostly to follow the original’s narrative, because I thought that narrative would work great in the TV or film medium.

I’ve never made it anywhere whenever I’ve done that. Why? I think it’s because the winning pitch in these situations never seems to be selected on the basis of its emotional textures or narrative integrity. A pitch is usually selected by how well it resonates as an idea. And that means something novel or clever. In a lot of cases, I would’ve had better luck saying that I wanted to tell the story backwards then I did in following the pre-existing narrative. Because “tell it backwards” registers better at the level of concept. It’s clever.

Okay. Say your clever pitch wins out, partially on the quality of the concept. Next you go to outline. It needs to derive from the winning concept, but it also needs to work well as an outline. That means, it needs to notate a sequence of events that seems compelling from a bird’s-eye-view in a compressed form. I would argue, like a pitch, an outline isn’t so much an emotional or dramatic document as an intellectual one. There’s not enough dramatized humanity, usually, in an outline for a reader to have an emotional investment in it, let alone to experience an emotional reaction. So, it needs to make sense. Hopefully, it should also demonstrate some cleverness in its surprises and twists and turns.

Once everyone is happy with the outline, finally you go to script. Which now needs to be a totally different kind of document, one that invites emotional and imaginative participation in the reader and that provokes strong reactions. And I think this is where you need to anticipate problems. Because the sorts of ideas and concepts and events that seem compelling at the intellectually-centered pitch and outline stages won’t necessary translate to the more mysterious script stage, where feelings, the imagination, the subconscious, and even the body itself all start to come into play.

I believe the pitch and the outline both exist on an intellectual plane. And on that plane, logic rules. 2 + 2 = 4. But on an emotionally dramatic plane, sometimes 2 + 2 = a can of strawberry filling in the face. Or 2 + 2 = an ambitious high school student jumping out of her mom’s moving car. It just depends on the situation and the characters wherein this 2 + 2 is happening.

In my experience, the pitching process favors the clever idea. And the outline process favors the logical, immediately understandable sequence of events. But spending approximately 20 minutes around other people in everyday life will remind us that behaviors and decisions are very rarely dictated by mere cleverness or logic. There are usually weirder, deeper, and hidden-until-they-are-not type of forces at play. For our scenes to have the texture of life, they probably need to harness similar forces.

Similarly, most discussion of structure also occurs on an intellectual plane. Scenes are discussed as though they need to logically lead to the next scene. Or they need to occur in the right order, at the right time, matching some graph or picture. But simply executing a sequence of logically-understandable scenes that occur in a logically-understandable and correct order won’t produce a great story, though. But sometimes, at the pitch and outline and structure-building stages, it’s really really easy to convince one’s self that logical progressions and clever surprises are most of what it takes.

There are severe limits to the auteur theory. There’s something inherently silly about the image of the big shot movie director or TV showrunner as the magisterial autonomous force behind what is in truth always a very collaborative process involving mass sums of capital. But there’s also something to be said for how a Bong Joon-ho or Greta Gerwig or Jordan Peele or a Joel & Ethan Coen do seem to produce stories and characters that have a human vibrancy that most franchise, sequel/prequel and IP-derived stories and character seem to lack. And a lot of that is talent, of course. But perhaps some of it’s because they’ve been able to bypass the step-by-step developmental process that so often leads to so many familiar emotional beats. Or perhaps they’ve just learned how to discover and protect that vibrancy in spite of that process.

It’s the rare screenwriter who can avoid getting notes. And often, notes do help. Sometimes, a lot. (I just turned in a pilot script that I think got at least 50% better when I followed network notes and eliminated an entire C storyline and made more room for the A & B stories.)

So the goal isn’t to avoid getting notes, or to ignore them. I think the goal is to understand that notes often arrive to us on a plane of intellectual understanding — and sometimes from a place of risk-management — that’s often at several removes from the stickier, messier plane of scene-by-scene storytelling. And satisfying those notes on the intellectual level that they arrive on isn’t the same as making your script’s drama more compelling.

Our job isn’t to complain about notes or the development process, or use them as an excuse for producing mediocre work. Our job is to take those notes and let our emotions, imaginations, subconsciousnesses, demons, dreams, and weird instincts translate those intellectualized notes into compelling scenes. And then to arrange those scenes in such a way that a reader can’t stop reading to find out what’ll happen next.

If your script or lead character isn’t working, try going full-Costanza and make him or her start expressing the opposite kind of emotional reaction to events than they currently express. It’s not going to solve all of your script problems. But it might be the kind of spark that’ll make those script problems a whole lot more interesting to solve.