Every story development principle, and every dimension of the structural paradigm we talk about here on Storyfix–as it applies to novelists–is echoed, verified and presented within a real world context from the biggest stage of screenwriting there is.
These guys struggle with the same things we do.
Except they aren’t handicapped within that struggle by a lack of awareness of what goes where (structure) and the cause-and-effect of scenes and reader/viewer engagement (the various criteria that apply). In other words they aren’t struggling with the paradoxical notion of “not knowing what they don’t know” (the bane of newer writers) because it is the keen awareness of what they need to know to arrive at a story that works that serves them so well.
If anything, this is the modeling they provide us here. Everything they did on the journey of story development for the largest grossing film in history was driven by criteria. The same criteria that is available to us as novelists.
Running time is 19:30. All of it fascinating, illuminating and entertaining. Enjoy!
(With thanks to Todd Hudson and Kerry Boytzun)
If you can’t see the video within an email version of this post, go HERE to view it on the Storyfix website.
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If you want to know more about those criteria, my new book is less than a month out from the pub date, and is available for pre-order now (just click on the book cover image to the right of this column).
Here’s what my editor at Writers Digest Books–who has seen dozens of writing books come and go across her desk–says about this project, which owes much to her keen ear and sharp editorial eye:
“The minute I saw the Great Stories Don’t Write Themselves proposal in my inbox, I knew it needed to be part of the WD lineup. I grabbed a highlighter and started taking notes for my own writing then and there! While I always find it interesting to hear about a successful author’s writing process, those answers never seemed useful for getting to the heart of the matter, the real question being asked: What makes a story worth writing and reading? But that’s exactly what this book does. Read it. Internalize it. Your future writer-self will thank you.”
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If there is any “one, single, absolutely key take-away” from this interview, it probably comes at 5:28.
“Of course there will be somebody out there watching this, saying, ‘it’s a forumla.’ It’s a ‘framework,’ so you don’t dive into despair. It’s something that you can hang things on, so you can actually spend more time on the character work and the interesting details.”
But also in general: “four months in a conference room, being fed under the door.” A definite deadline. “Cards, white-boards, magnets.” Outlines. Story planning at various different levels at the same time.
And also – a process. Something that doesn’t expect to know the end from the beginning but that actually provides a creative way to get there. “What if we just kill that {omnipotent bad-guy}?”
The section beginning at 8:30 is also very relevant – “there’s a very satisfying thing to do, which is to glance off of what you already know and go off in a different direction.” “So you’re getting all these little tweaks of satisfaction as it goes along, yet it is progressing the primary plot.” This is =strategic= ‘story planning.’ (And here’s the real confession …) “That pattern of them figuring it out in the movie is patterned after all of us [in the conference room] going …” Yeah.
In other words: “there never was a point where ‘any one author did it,'” nor when “they knew from the beginning what the ending would be.” But they succeeded. Yeah.
Really cool to listen to how these guys took the existing history (previous movies) and made a stew of characters including their arcs and thus dependencies. It showed the creative processes at work for multiple story arcs to eventually combine them into a single overall story arc (while keeping the focus on the original six avenger characters). It’s like merging chaos, Intuition, with geometric math.
A couple of points.
1 – The preview audiences said the first part was the slowest. The writers said it had to be slow so you felt the character’s dilemma and what they were going through. What they’re really saying is that the audience needed time to develop empathy. But it’s not an amount of time, but more to spending enough time with multiple scenes. Think about getting to know someone at work. After repeititve moments (hours) that take place over multiple days, you either develop a liking to this new person or you don’t like them. IF…you make an effort to get to know them. A writer has to develop this through multiple scenes. One and done scenes don’t work but they’re FAST. Slow and meaningful allows you to have a fast moment.
2 – The writers said they needed to create new, additional material, after they created the draft. Thus it’s normal to revise your story-script during the process to make it better.
Summary, it’s cool to watch people describe their process, in this case with a large consortium of teams.
Wow, that was excellent! Thanks so much for sharing. I love hearing guys like these talk through their scripts and movies. It helps me get inside the head of someone who’s mastered storytelling.