Is Unresolvable A Word? It Should Be. It's A Good Word.

Meeting Expectations and Deadlines

On a personal note this blog has been a great motivator for getting me to put my butt in a chair and write. Meeting the deadline of 2 posts a week has really forced me to write when I would have otherwise procrastinated. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I’m enjoy writing it.

As promised here’s the write up for Nathan Helm, our antagonist. As I gave him some thought I decided the best antagonist for Harlan was someone decisive and proactive to an extreme. I felt like he needed to be a forceful character who can push Harlan into action. I think this first pass does that job nicely.

I think Harlan and Nathan should be friends. Nathan will be the friend who comes over for dinner and tells you about having made the same dish, only better. He’s antagonistic toward people he knows and downright aggressive toward people he doesn’t. He treats everything as an opportunity to argue. He’s that friend you would rather avoid. Why does Harlan still hang out with him? Does Nathan have any redeeming qualities? Nathan’s smart but stuck in that “knows everything better than you” stage. I think the key to why Harlan (and the audience) might be willing to put up with Nathan is in his marriage. Nathan is completely and totally dedicated to his wife. He loves her more than anything. That level of dedication is admirable and it makes up for a lot. Even though we don’t have to like or relate to the antagonist, having something about them that we can understand and connect to is important. Nathan isn’t a moustache twirling villain intent on watching the world burn. He should end up being a person we don’t necessarily like but at least we understand.

Is it a movie?

Matt Nix did an interview on The Nerdist Writer’s Panel where he made a really great comment about the difference between writing for film and writing for television.

“If you tend to think in terms of big resolvable conflicts, and these days they have to be really big really resolvable conflicts of a particular kind, then that’s a movie. And if you think in terms of ongoing unresolvable conflicts, things that you can just do every week. Whether it’s on a procedural level like Law & Order is gonna go on forever because crime’s not gonna stop. On a character level, take a show like House, House is not gonna wake up one morning and go “I’m not grumpy anymore and I’m just a happy guy” eventually that’s all about an unresolvable conflict in a man’s soul. Rescue Me is a wonderful example of that. It was a terrific example of a show that had external conflicts but it was about a character with an inordinately unresolvable conflict. That guy was never gonna get better. So you could just do that forever. That’s a great way to tell. If you tend to think in terms of those stories then you’re probably going to have an easier time in TV.”

The paraphrase of this would be:

Movies deal with big resolvable conflicts and TV deals with long lasting unresolvable conflicts.

The notable thing about this for our purposes is that we’re telling a story that’s all about dealing with Harlan’s small problems. Most of his conflicts are unresolvable. Harlan isn’t taking a ring to Mordor, defeating an invading alien fleet with a computer virus, or boxing Dolph Lundgren.  Wouldn’t Harlan’s story be better told as a TV series? That’s certainly a reasonable path to take. I think Harlan has (or will have) the depth to carry a few seasons of TV. But we’re writing a feature film. What we have to remember is that this story is the climactic event in Harlan’s life. This is the story of the life-defining event in his life. This event will have to be big, dramatic, and (on some level) related to Harlan’s issues.

Making a life interesting

Our day-to-day lives aren’t interesting. No matter how important your job, how dramatic your life, a day in your life is boring. How much time do you spend sitting in a car? Watching TV? Eating? Most of your day-to-day is dull and would be obscenely uninteresting to watch. The life of a police officer is mostly dull. You wander around town in your patrol car waiting and watching. Then suddenly there’s a call and you have 20 minutes of adrenaline fueled chaos. Followed by hours of paperwork. If you were writing a story about a cop you probably want to focus on those 20 minutes of adrenaline. Harlan’s life is dull. It’s routine and boring and he doesn’t do much of note. How the heck are we going to tell a compelling story about this person? How will we find a clear, visual goal for our resolution? If I were to do a story that encompasses all of Harlan’s life it would be boring. A lot of sitting around as his life decays around him. This can be done in a film and it can be done well. That’s not the story I want to write though. My story about Harlan needs to be about that great big thing that changes his life forever. It’s about that turning point sequence of events that will change the course of his life forever. How do we figure out what that looks like though?

Digging for boogers

Right now we don’t know what genre this movie will be. Is it a comedy? A drama? Is it a buddy cop movie with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker? I think great stories come from turning the internal struggles of the characters into external obstacles. In order to figure out what that looks and sounds like we have to dig deep and root out those elements of Harlan’s life that will be good buttons to push. And we now know that Nathan will be the one pushing those buttons. As I compare the two characters I’m starting to get some ideas about scenes and conversations these two might have. Points where their personalities and lives would come into conflict. Harlan is just waiting for his marriage to finally die while Nathan is so devoted to his wife that he would probably cease to exist if she were gone. That’s going to be good for a few scenes of conflict. Harlan is indecisive and Nathan is decisive. There will be some scenes with Harlan being indecisive while Nathan makes a firm decision. Will Nathan’s decision be the wrong course of action? How will Harlan react to that? As often as possible Nathan will be forcing Harlan to make decisions and take a stand. Will this be a master plan on Nathan’s part to get Harlan to figure his life out? I don’t think Nathan is capable of that sort of thing.

The bad version

I’ve been dancing around it a little but now it’s time to get into it. Let’s talk story. This can be a huge roadblock. It’s easy to get caught up in evaluating and reevaluating your ideas to decide whether or not they’re original enough, creative enough, or interesting enough. To get around this I acknowledge that my first pass is the bad version of my story. The bad version doesn’t mean it’s all bad, it’s just a way for me to get started. I put things in writing so I can get past the initial thought and dig deeper for a good meaty booger. So here goes with the bad version.

We meet Harlan, a man whose life is in steady decay. He doesn’t get along with his wife and he doesn’t know his son. His days have metronomic repetition he goes from work at the hardware store to lonely nights in front of the TV and back. His imagination is crazy though, when he’s at the hardware store he imagines dragons made of drill bits and washers coming to life. When he sits in traffic he sees giants wandering the hills. When he gets together with his friends for their weekly gaming session he comes alive and seems to finally have some fun. At the game we meet Nathan, the obnoxious friend he would rather avoid. Harlan loses his job.

With no prospects on the horizon he slips more and more into his imaginary world.Nathan arrives at Harlan’s door and invites Harlan to join him on a road trip to Nerdtacular.  Harlan isn't interested but Nathan finally forces Harlan to join him and they’re off on the road. The trip is easy enough despite being trapped in a car with Nathan. Harlan’s only escape from Nathan’s constantly annoying attitude is his imagination. We get to see the wild things Harlan imagines. Car chases, space battles, and wild west shootouts. Harlan is hit by a car.

Harlan spends a few days in a coma. “It’s a comma, he was just pausing before moving on.”

When he comes out of the coma he discovers that his wife never came to check on him and that Nathan is the only person who stuck by him. They stage a jailbreak like escape from the hospital and they continue their journey. Harlan has an increasingly difficult time distinguishing between his imagination and the real world. Their trip gets more and more chaotic. It’s almost like Nathan, normally a driven and decisive person, doesn’t want to get where they’re going.

Things come to a head when Harlan discovers that Nathan has been leading them on a wild ride with no ultimate destination. When he was in a coma his wife was never contacted. She didn’t know what was going on. Nathan has essentially kidnapped him. They have a big falling out where Harlan discovers some things about himself and has to make a decision about his wife, his son, and his entire life. Will he choose to abandon it or commit to making it better?

Treat it like a treatment

A treatment is a document that essentially lays out the entire story much like I’ve written here. Treatments can be anywhere from 1 to a lot of pages. If we look at this as a treatment you’ll notice that each paragraph is essentially a section of the 3 act structure. Paragraph 1 is act 1. Then the first half of act 2 followed by a single line for the mid point of act 2, the second half, and the third act as the final paragraph. It’s not the best practice to end with a question though. It’s far better to know what your end will be. Don’t be afraid of giving it away in your treatment. The treatment is a way to see how the story works in broad strokes. If the ending isn’t there then there’s no way to know if the story actually works. We’ll get into treatments, the 3 act structure, and endings next time.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

I couldn’t resist that one. Now that we have our two most important characters and a bad version of the plot it’s time to work on a good version and start plugging it into the structure of a script. Your input about the bad version is extremely useful. Does anything in there sound good to you? Absurdly bad? Do you have a different idea of how Harlan’s story could play out? Is a road trip a bad idea? What’s working for you and what’s not? Let me know in the comments. As promised I will consider all of your comments and suggestions before ignoring them and doing my own thing anyway.

Next time: A treatment, 3 act structure, and the all important ending.