Emmy award winning screenwriter Erik Bork ponders this question. The biggest mistake writers make isn’t necessarily in the quality of the writing. Erik believes the answer is much simpler. This single piece of advice could sharply accelerate your career trajectory.
To me, there’s no question.
It’s in the choice of ideas for projects to write.
We all tend to want to get to the actual “writing” and produce pages. Or at least the structuring and outlining of a screenplay. We don’t want to diddle endlessly over what story to work on, playing around with ideas and concepts and getting feedback on them. Instead, we want to jump into something we like, and get feedback on the finished script.
But screenwriting professionals don’t work this way. They have agents and/or managers who want to hear their ideas and have a chance to shoot them down before they devote a lot of time and energy to them. And boy, do they shoot down a lot of them. At least in my experience.
For years my packaging TV literary agents at CAA would have me email them loglines of potential series I might want to pitch and write pilots for. I might spend days or weeks thinking through an idea before putting it into a couple sentences for their consumption. And most of the time, they would not be enthused.
This is just like the agents and managers that unrepresented writers send loglines and scripts to. It’s hard and rare to come up with something that will excite these people who work in the marketplace of film and TV scripts and pitches, and know everything that’s out there, and what sells and what doesn’t.
Of course, a writer can decide their representatives are wrong. But in order to work and sell their material, they generally need them to broker introductions to the buying side of the business. And they will only do that for ideas they think have a real chance. They don’t want to risk their reputations pushing work they don’t really believe in, in hopes that someone will take a chance on it.
Now agents and managers aren’t writers. They aren’t “creative,” and they don’t know how to come up with something that works. But it’s their job to identify a solid, sellable idea, and they have to get pretty good at that to stay in business. They might not be able to fully explain why one idea works and one doesn’t, but they know. And in my experience, they are typically proven right, in terms of the reactions producers and executives will have to any given pitch or project.
When a professional writer goes off and writes a screenplay on spec without telling their representative what it is, and getting their input in advance, there’s a very high chance that when they give them the script, the reaction will be lukewarm. And it will likely be for reasons that the representative would have pointed out if they’d heard the idea before so much time was spent on it.
This is the same thing that happens with scripts writers bring to people like me in my role as a consultant and coach. My reactions are almost always about the basic idea they chose to write, and problems that I see in it. So the most important notes I give on their scripts – and the ones that most dictate its potential challenges in the marketplace – are notes I would have given on the logline, had they pitched it to me before they started writing.
Yes, I’ll have comments on structure and scene writing, and there might be many aspects to their execution which are far from professional-level, which can also doom a project when it gets sent out. But that’s not the key issue standing in its way. The key issue is that it’s based on a foundation that is flawed, and the writer usually doesn’t know it.
So I have made it my mission to codify what makes for a viable story idea – what the key characteristics are that would excite someone who represents writers or buys and green lights projects. While it’s true that those people might not be able to fully explain “what they’re looking for” in a way that’s helpful to writers, the qualities that successful ideas for movies or series have are clear, and they cross genre and medium.
When you write a logline, query or one-page synopsis, or pitch a project, that problem is really what the listener wants to hear about. And what they’re evaluating is the nature of that problem, and its seeming potential as a movie or series premise.
They’re evaluating the problem across a variety of parameters to assess the strength of the idea. Each one of these is important, and while it might seem obvious that good stories possess them, they’re harder to pull off successfully than most screenwriters realize. Let’s look at what I mean by each of these terms.
PUNISHING
A viable commercial story idea is about an external problem in the life of at least one character the audience comes to emotionally invest in. It’s not just an internal problem, like “they need to learn to trust themselves.” That’s the character arc. That inner journey might happen over the course of the story. But that’s not what’s most important in selling the idea and project – to buyers or audiences. What’s most important is the external problem in the their life, which hopefully millions of people could start to care about almost as much as if it was happening to them.
One of the key ways we achieve that is by making the problem really difficult, and putting the main character through some brand of hell as they try to address it. It’s big, it’s complicated, and it’s not easily resolved – even though they spend virtually every scene actively trying to do just that. Most ideas for movies or series fail right here – they don’t put the characters through enough. Being in a story is like being under siege, or like drowning and trying to get your head above water. Even in comedies. Things are generally super challenging and defying resolution.
RELATABLE.
At the same time, the audience needs to identify with at least one character in a strong way. This comes partly from the character having personal qualities and and facing situations (usually really punishing ones) that force us to start to feel for them, and want to see how they’re going to deal with it all. It also comes from telling the story through their perspective, meaning that the audience looks “through” them and “at” all the other characters. It usually means the audience always understands what they’re thinking, feeling, wanting and trying to do, in the face of their punishing story problem and difficult-to-achieve goal. Objectivity doesn’t work in scripts. That’s where the audience looks at all the people from some distance, and moves around from character to character without having a strong enough bond with any one person. Subjectivity is the far better approach.
ORIGINAL
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. And in fact, what sells tends to be a fresh variation on a familiar and viable genre of some kind. There are only so many stories and situations out there, and one can never be entirely unique. However, ideas work best when they have something new and intriguing about them that we haven’t quite seen before, which twists and elevates their story type in a fun direction. And new writers do best when there is something about their choice of idea that indicates an original voice – a perspective and approach that is distinctive, and which only that writer could have written.
BELIEVABLE
You might be surprised how often readers get turned off by situations in scripts that they don’t buy as “real.” Somehow stories have to exaggerate life in order to grab our attention and entertain us. But they also have to depict people the audience accepts as real, behaving how someone really might, in their situation. So if there’s something fantastical about a concept, it usually has to be clearly delivered and explained right up front (even in the logline). Then everything that follows, ideally, will focus on believable people behaving in ways that make complete sense. And the more strikingly,vividly real the characters and writing feels, overall, the more buyers get excited about the writer.
LIFE-ALTERING
In movies, in particular, the stakes of solving the story problem have to be huge. In many cases, they are life-and-death. You can’t get bigger than that. If the main character fails, people die. They might even die. But in dramas that don’t have life-and-death stakes (and virtually all comedies), what’s at stake still needs to mean everything to the characters involved, and the audience needs to agree – that life will be unacceptably worse, in some enormous way, if they fail. (And probably much better if they succeed.)
TV series also need massive stakes of one kind or another (commensurate with their genre), but individual episodes might focus on somewhat smaller problems that are microcosms of the big ones. They still matter deeply to the main character of a story, but they don’t have to present the chance for massive life change in that episode. (Though they might.) A note here – TV episodes (and series as a whole) usually have multiple intertwined stories, each with its own different “main character.” This is pretty rare in movies.
ENTERTAINING
They pay us to entertain them. That means they come to our movies or shows wanting to experience certain pleasurable emotions that fit with the type of material we’ve produced. There are a variety of such emotions, such as amusement, fear and vicarious romantic love. One way or another, it needs to be almost like eating candyfor them to watch our stories play out. If it’s not fun to consume, on some level, they won’t stick around.
MEANINGFUL
The strongest ideas explore something about the human condition that resonates in the audience’s own life and impacts their perspective somehow. This is “theme.” Beneath the plot are larger issues that are meaty and interesting.
It’s a tall order to do all these things well, and come up with ideas that satisfy these criteria impressively. And that’s a big part of the reason why it’s rare to succeed in this field. Of course one has to be able to structure a story and write scenes at an extremely high level as well. But that can be learned. And so can this. The key thing is to give “the idea” enough focus, and take the choice of idea seriously. Because most of a project’s eventual fate stems from those key first decisions a writer makes.
My new book is all about this. It’s called The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage or Fiction. These elements form an acronym for the word PROBLEM, because every story is really about a problem that needs solved.
