The Extant Storytech R&D Report - Issue #4
Happy Saturday! This is coming to you a day later than I intended but I've on a "hugging tour," visiting friends and family in the Midwest. I hope you're able to do the same soon, if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm still finding my groove with this newsletter and figuring out how it can serve both of us to its full potential. There are so many great resources out there for writers and I don't want this to be a redundancy. I find myself gravitating toward big picture thoughts about writing and creativity in general, trying to articulate my current state of mind. And I'm enjoying talking about the specific craft tools I'm using along the way as opposed to a deep dive into the craft or a straight advice newsletter.
That being said, if there are topics you'd be interested in hearing more about, please let me know and if I have something of value to offer in that area I will do my best to give it to you. Thanks for reading!
Expansion Versus Contraction
(13 min read)
A couple of years ago I started saying, “Oh, you f***ing jagbag” whenever another driver pulled a jerk move in traffic. I meant it as a joke and to drive it home I said it in a thick Chicago accent because I wasn’t really all that irritated.
But at some point during the pandemic it stopped being a joke and it just became something I said while driving. A lot. And with increasing aggression. It got worse when the world started to open back up and people who hadn’t driven in a year were back behind the wheel, getting sucked up into the veins and arteries that move humanity through this city.
Julie and I came to the realization that whenever we were in the car together, which was at least three times a day, we were complaining about all the other drivers and the state of the world in general, like Statler and Waldorf with all of Glendale as our Muppet Theater. We didn’t like those roles so we made a decision to change our language in order to change our POV and so far it’s working.
It relates to an idea I’ve been obsessed with for the past few years, about how aging is really just a battle between the forces of expansion and contraction.
I’ve seen a few people who were open-hearted, generous, easygoing people in their younger years evolve over time into the opposite of that.
Part of this is just the nature of nostalgia. If you had a relatively happy childhood it’s temping to look back on those years fondly and believe that things were genuinely better back then.
Part of it is just that change can be scary. Plenty of people want the world to stop or at least slow down a little bit out of fear that they’re going to be left behind. So they hold tight to what they know and the world keeps changing and they end up in a state of contraction by virtue of inaction.
When I heard myself complaining about traffic and how people drive these days I saw myself in contraction. I’m determined not to do that. I want to keep expanding until the inevitable moment where I push past the confines of this body into whatever happens afterward. We’re pretty sure the universe is in a constant state of expansion, so these “few atoms blown to dust” (thank you, James Taylor) might just keep going with it.
To me, expansion means being open to new ideas, learning new things, challenging myself, not allowing myself to get “set in my ways.” It means rather than looking backward I’m imagining my place in an evolved future.
This doesn’t just apply to my life, it’s also important to my creative work.
It’s easy to look at sea changes in the entertainment business and feel those pangs of contraction. High profile directors are bringing the auteur theory to television, edging out showrunners as the primary voice of a show. Getting something made that isn’t based on (massively popular) IP is nearly impossible. Teenagers are watching Tik Tok and YouTube. They aren’t tuning in to broadcast networks looking for the next great comedy, instead they’re binging reruns of The Office. Nobody makes movies for adults anymore, it’s all superheroes and talking trees, etc.
I’ve heard all of these fears (some well-founded) and at some point you can’t help but internalize it a bit. I don’t want to have to chase trends or repeat myself because of what worked in the past. I don’t want to spend time and energy pining for the days when network shows did 22 episodes. The business is in a constant state of evolution and looking backwards means losing ground. I want to skate “where the puck is going to be,” to quote Kevin Smith quoting Wayne Gretsky.
After eight years on the inside I’ve lost a bit of my spirit of play. I stopped experimenting and pushing the boundaries of my potential. I knew when I sold EXTANT that I’d be placed in the grounded sci-fi box, which was okay with me because it’s my favorite box. My plan was to, over time, cut holes that led to other boxes. I’ve had some success doing that but I still find myself keeping to my box most days because it’s comfortable.
When I start an original pilot now I have a whole checklist in my head. I can’t help but think about where it might fit in the marketplace, or if it will fit at all. How hard will it be for my agents to set these meetings when it’s finished? How does it fit into what buyers see as my “wheelhouse?” There are a lot of questions beyond just, “Am I in love with this idea?”
All of those concerns were having the net effect of keeping me in stasis. In an ever-changing industry, stasis is just contraction by way of inaction. So I’ve been carving out time in between my current projects to imagine myself in the future of this business.
Where do I want to be ten years from now? Twenty?
With STAR WARS, MARVEL, DC, GAME OF THRONES, LORD OF THE RINGS, etc, there is an IP arms race among the streamers. How can my original ideas compete, especially if there’s any sort of scope or budget required? Am I just going to be doing bake-offs for the chance of putting a fresh coat of paint on seventy-five year old characters from here on out?
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of IP I’d be thrilled to work on. I'm co-creating a show right now based on a novel I dearly love. I would kill to have a crack at doing a series based in the world of THE MATRIX.
But you know what would be cooler than that?
Launching my own MATRIX-style story world.
To me, the clear path to that future is by building a library of my own IP in different mediums - short stories, novels, narrative fiction podcasts, etc. None of which I have any experience in. That means starting from scratch. It means failing in new ways and trying to learn from those failures.
My first lesson was that writing a short story just to “proof-of-concept” a movie or a series can make for a terrible short story. I was essentially writing treatments with some dialogue thrown in, doing a lot of telling instead of showing.
But last summer I started looking at it as a way of experimenting with new ideas and voices that weren’t tied to my work as a writer for TV and film. I treated them more like Prince treated the stuff in his vault. It was a place for discovery, and since I could write the first draft of a short story in a few days or even a day, it didn’t have the same high stakes as a spec feature or pilot that took months. As I got better at it I started taking the medium seriously as opposed to just looking at it as a way to circumvent the IP problem.
Writing prose became my version of baking sourdough during the pandemic. Like many a new baker, my early creations have been misshapen, over baked, under baked, lacking in flavor, or saturated with too much of one ingredient or another. I would finish a new piece then pick up a book of short stories or a novel, read a single page, and think, “Wow, I am so bad at this.” But it also ignited a desire to get better, which meant reading more and searching for new tools.
Imagine my surprise when that process opened up a whole new understanding of structure and character POV in my scripts, making me better at my day job.
I’ve still got an overall goal of building my own library of IP in the form of things like short stories, novels, and narrative fiction podcasts. I like the freedom to play and just having that plan gives me the sense that I have a say in my future. But the biggest reward in learning how I tell stories in a new medium has been a period of expansion.
There’s a lot of terrible stuff that will stay in my own vault but there are links below to two of my pandemic sourdough loaves.
The Night Mover is about a techno-paranoiac who takes a job transporting people to a parallel dimension. It was an early effort last summer, mostly an exercise in exploring this tech-noir voice and doing some world-building. As such there’s a lot of telling versus showing and a real lack of forward propulsion. I humbly submit this as a “before” example.
I got a bit better (in my opinion) by the time I got to The Fix-Up. It’s a showdown between a private security android and the refurb agent tasked with erasing his memories, set against the backdrop of a near-future North Dakota.
I finished the first draft shortly before I picked up George Saunders’s book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and used it to work through some of his exercises. He talks about “revising toward specificity” and rewriting as a process of “impulse and iteration.” Every time I went back to it I did my best to listen to the story and see where it wanted to go. I’m pretty happy with it but I’m mostly just grateful for what it taught me.
Check them out if you’re interested.
If you haven't tried your hand at a new medium, I can't recommend it enough. You might be terrible at it. You might fail.
In fact, I hope you fail because failure is an opportunity for growth and growth = expansion.
THE NIGHT MOVER – Extant StoryTech — extantstorytech.com The Night Mover by Mickey Fisher Morgan Vanatta wasn’t a magician but he did make people disappear for a living. Wednesday afternoon he was on the clock, sitting in the corner booth of a joint called Robo Ramen, back to the wall, eyes on the door.
THE FIX-UP – Extant StoryTech — extantstorytech.com THE FIX-UP by Mickey Fisher On the snow-covered plains of a near-future North Dakota, a decommissioned private security android is reactivated, only to find himself in the crosshairs of a refurb agent tasked with erasing his memories. As their paths intersect, both men are
Dialogue Pass Cheat Sheet
I had to do a dialogue pass recently and it compelled me to start a list of things I noticed as I was going through my WIP. This is just what I thought about on this past round for this specific script. I'll add more to it in the future and come back to it from time to time.
1) Don't break up the dialogue with too many action lines. Set up as much as you can in the action line just before and let the dialogue flow in between before the next absolutely essential action line. Otherwise you never settle into a rhythm.
2) Revise toward specificity, honesty, simplicity. If your banter is just a warmup, give it a job (an action) or just cut to the heart of the scene.
3) Michael Green had a great tweet that compared writing dialogue to packing for camping. "Lay out what you think you need then take out half."
4) Get in as late as possible and out as early as possible. It's okay to come in mid-conflict and let the audience catch up.
5) Try to leave each scene on a question that the next scene will answer. Bad example, instead of a character saying "We should throw a party" then cutting to a party, you'd say, "You know what we should do?" Cut to a guy yelling "Cannonball" and jumping from the roof of the house into the pool.
6) Take a look at the first line of dialogue coming out of each character's mouth. Is it just a warmup into the real scene? Is it just a question that tees up someone else's expo? Find a sharper angle of attack on everybody's point-of-view coming into the scene then track it forward. It will keep everybody from sounding the same.
7) Is your lead character driving the action of the scene or are they just a passenger asking questions and taking in exposition? Are you, as Glen Mazzara puts it, "Giving them the stage?" If not, revise and put them in the driver's seat.
Yoda Sessions - stuff that inspired me this week
Joy Oladokun with Maren Morris - Bigger Man (Lyric Visualizer) — www.youtube.com “Bigger Man” performed by Joy Oladokun with Maren Morris. Available now: https://JoyOladokun.lnk.to/BiggerMan► Connect with Joy:Instagram - https://JoyOladok...
The Screenwriting Life with Meg LeFauve and Lorien McKenna: 39 | Andrew Stanton's Storytelling Master Class on Apple Podcasts — podcasts.apple.com Do you have a pen and paper? Might want to grab them now... Andrew Stanton wrote and directed Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, and Wall-E, all of which consistently rank among the best films of this century, and best animated films ever made. In live action storytelling, he's become a critically acclaime…
The Green Knight | Official Teaser Trailer HD | A24 — www.youtube.com SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/A24subscribeFrom director David Lowery and starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, and Joel Edgerton. The Green Knight – July 30, 2021....