Wednesday, July 22, 2020

3. Finding the story


Before storytelling can begin, you must first engage in a process of story finding. Truly new stories are rare, and the best way to discover them is to constantly engage your curiosity in the world around you. Your goal should be to find a story that captures your imagination and doesn’t let go. Once that happens, acquaint yourself with the work of filmmakers who have tackled similar subjects before. The aim is not to imitate what the great people before you have done, but to develop your own voice and approach.

A wonderful starting point for inspiration is the written word. Indians were raised on a diet of Russian and English classics, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Keats. When Mira discovered Indian writers writing fiction in English, she was inspired. Her choice of films, The Namesake, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the forthcoming A Suitable Boy reflects her passion to tell stories from her own literary world.

Find a writer to work with who matches your own style and taste. This person will be your most important collaborator in developing your story, and should share your visual sensibility, sense of humor, and knowledge of the subject. If you are telling a story outside your experience, then do the research needed to ‘inhabit’ that world. Explore books and works of art that come out of that culture, involve yourself in the community, and get to know your subject first-hand. As you work on the script together, write each scene with a clear intention, yet also try to weave in additional layers of meaning and subtext so that each moment is doing several things at once.

Interestingly, Mira believes that specificity is key to helping your audience relate to unfamiliar characters and places. The more specific the details are in your story, the more the principles of that story are clear. For instance, Mira chose in her film Monsoon Wedding to preserve her characters’ unique way of speaking three different languages in one sentence. Although most Western audiences were quite unfamiliar with this practice, they could still relate to the honesty and humor of the dialogue, and were willing to follow along with the necessary subtitles. The story, in its particularity, connected with audiences everywhere. The more local you are, the more universal you can become.

Of course, there is always the chance that such details will be confusing for the unacquainted—and confusion can prevent a story from becoming universal. For that reason, always test your screenplay by sharing it with your inner circle of trusted friends and colleagues. Ask where they are confused or bored, and what their understanding is of the story’s world and the character’s motivations. If their understanding does not match what you intended, address those discrepancies in your next draft. Revise rigorously and repeatedly in order to create clarity for those unfamiliar with your story, while still preserving what is fresh and distinctive about your approach.

Before you finalize your script, sweep through one more time to strip out any words from the dialogue that are didactic or redundant with the visual drama of the story. The goal for your writing should be to transport viewers to a world that is new and unfamiliar, and yet still relatable. Your challenge as a writer is to translate those ‘foreign’ elements without pandering to the audience or making it feel as though they are being given a lecture about another culture. Strive to reveal, rather than lecture, and to show, rather than tell.


DID YOU KNOW?

Lovers of fiction will probably recognize the names of several contemporary South Asian authors like Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Seth, Mohsin Hamid, and V.S. Naipaul. But the writers whose work Mira mentions as having deeply influenced her as a teenager are less well-known outside the Indian subcontinent. If you are curious to immerse yourself in literature by the same authors that Mira explored in her formative years, start with her recommended reading below.

Ved Mehta (born 1938 in Lahore, British India) lost his sight at the age of three and went on to become a writer of more than 24 books. His first novel, Delinquent Chacha, was serialized in The New Yorker in 1966, and he was a staff writer on the magazine from 1961 to 1994.

Anita Desai (born 1937 in Mussorie, India) teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been publishing novels for over 55 years. She has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize for three different novels: Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999). Clear Light of Day, a coming-of-age story set in Old Delhi, the neighborhood where she grew up, is her most autobiographical and most popular novel—you should easily be able to find the reprint edition, released in 2000 by Mariner Books.

Nayantara Sahgal (born 1927 in Allahabad, British India) is a novelist and political commentator who was born into the ‘first family’ of India, being both a niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, and a cousin of Indira Gandhi. She has remained independent and even critical of her family’s politics, and her memoirs and essays explore deeply feminist concerns. Her most acclaimed novel, Rich Like Us (1985), is set during a period of political upheaval in India during the 1970s known as ‘The Emergency.’


LEARN MORE

As you sit down to write your screenplay, you may realize that you’re not positive how your document should look. At what margin setting should your dialogue be indented? What font should you use? When should you use shot headings, and do you bold them, underline them, or write them in all caps? Professional Hollywood scripts have an unwritten standard for formatting and style—and luckily an insider from Warner Bros. has written those standards down in a handy reference book. The Hollywood Standard, 2nd edition by Christopher Riley (Michael Wiese Productions, 2009) will help you avoid common mistakes, share clear examples of how to format and punctuate shot headings, directions, dialogue, and transitions, and guarantee that your final draft will look clean and professional.

Alternatively, if you have a couple hundred bucks to spare, invest in screenwriting software like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, or less expensive alternatives like Fade In and the subscription-based Celtx. These tools take care of the formatting for you, so that you don’t have to fiddle with margins, spacing, page breaks, and other clunky word processing commands. These programs also feature many other tools to help you create storyboards, shot lists, schedules, and budgets—but if you’d rather strip out the bells and whistles and work with a free program with the bare formatting essentials, go with Amazon Storywriter.


ASSIGNMENT


Part 1: Finding Your Story

Try the hands-on approach to story finding that Mira recommends: travel, educate yourself, pay attention to current events, and get involved. Choose one or more of the following exercises to get your creative juices flowing.

Travel. Choose a nearby destination that you have overlooked, that you are unfamiliar with and have rarely, if ever, passed through. Counter intuitively, you don’t have to fly overseas in order to find unexplored places. Simply visit a new neighborhood and hit the pavement, with a notebook and pen handy. Explore the streets, step inside storefronts, and talk to the locals. Jot down observations, questions, and discoveries, as well as highlights from your conversations. What stories could you tell about the people who live here?

Educate yourself. Gain familiarity and knowledge about a subject matter that intrigues you. You can easily start by reading a book, but don’t stop there. Explore different facets of the topic as they appear in films, works of art, TV and radio programs, musical compositions, live performances, and more. Take note of what inspires or excites you, and use that to guide your story finding.

Pay attention to current events. If you don’t already subscribe to a newspaper, start now. For at least a week, make a daily practice of reading the news from start to finish. Go beyond the headlines and front-page stories that everyone talks about. What are the local stories? What’s happening in your own backyard? Look for unexpected and overlooked stories, and find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Get involved. The most intimate and authentic stories often come from personal experience. If you squirrel away and do nothing but read, there is only so much you can learn. Get firsthand knowledge by immersing yourself in a community or cause. If the issue of homelessness interests you, volunteer at a soup kitchen. If you are fascinated by 3D printing, join a maker space. Commit at least one hour a week to participating in an organized activity—and gain direct access to story possibilities.


Part 2: Writing Your Story

A first draft of a feature-length film can take anywhere from six to twelve full weeks to write. If you don’t have that much time available right now, start smaller. Aim to write a script either for a 10-minute short film or for a scene from your envisioned film that stands out clearly and vividly in your imagination.

If you have a writing partner, schedule several large chunks of time together over the next week or two. If you’re writing solo, block out time in your schedule to focus.

Begin by identifying a clear intention for your short film or scene. What is at stake for your characters—the central conflict or tension? What outcomes do they want, and what actually happens? Once you have identified a clear central through-line, then add layers of subtlety. How can you build complexity so that your scene conveys more than one thing?

As you write, strive for the kind of specificity that Mira encourages. What concrete details will make the world of your story feel real and authentic, rather than generic?

If you describe a character as being a heavy smoker, for instance, then specify the brand of cigarette. Identify the particular visual attributes that will anchor the story in your viewer’s attention. When you have a draft that does what you set out to do, share your screenplay with two or three trusted friends. Ask them to verbalize what they think motivates your characters, and check for confusions or misunderstandings about the plot.

Then, revise!


No comments:

Post a Comment

8. Scene Workshop: Part 1: SECOND REHEARSAL

Although production of Queen of Katwe wrapped in 2015, Mira has recreated a scene workshop exclusively for MasterClass. Young actress Madina...