How Language Shapes Form

I've been thinking, lately, about feedback, and its relationship to structure.

When I am talking with TV and Film people, I will nearly *always* hear the following:
- Act Break
- Climax
- Midpoint
- "Likeability"
- Logline/hook

When I am talking to theater people, I will nearly *always* hear the following:
- "your intention"
- "realism/non-realism"
- "playing with form/structure/time"
- "stageable"
- "language/poetry"
- "linear/non-linear" and, sometimes "narrative/non-narrative"

Now, you can argue that this language developed as the most useful shorthand to talk about most of what was being created within each medium.  Fair enough.  But it's also fair to say that the majority (CERTAINLY not all, but the majority) of plays, screenplays and television shows are, fundamentally, about moving people and objects around in space to tell stories over a finite period of time.  In other words, on some level, the people talking about screenplays and the people talking about plays have very similar (if not entirely the same) goals.

And what's interesting to me is to step back and think about how my own plays and screenplays, indeed, how the basics of my writing process are shaped, on a DNA-level, by the different language used to discuss each medium.

I noticed it most on the most recent beat outline I did, of a new romantic comedy.  The "beat outline" is a step-by-step description of every scene or key moment in a screenplay -- the story, stripped bare.  And the reason you do it is, in part, so that you can talk to executives about your story...before there even is one.  Before you necessarily know your characters, before you've spent much time in the world you're thinking of creating.  I knew I needed to map things out early, so that the people who might invest in me know where I was headed.  And knowing that -- that I would, eventually, be expected to "hit my mark" as a screenwriter, with the Act One break clocking in somewhere around page 20-25, with the climax hitting about ten pages before the end of the script, with at least 100 pages of screenplay before my manager would think it felt "finished" -- very much influenced the entire process by which I was working, the story that I was telling.  When the silent request is (at least structurally) "no surprises, please"...well...you're gonna get yet *another* iteration of the hero's journey, no matter what other stories you have to tell.

Now, at the same time I was creating this beat outline, I was doing a playwriting workshop with the Flea Theater.  On the first day, we wrote the name of a place on an index card...then swapped cards.  And had to write a play in the place we'd been given.  We were given a series of crazy/interesting constraints...one after the other...each one forcing us to rethink and restructure and renegotiate what we had already begun to create.  The goal:  to surprise each other -- and surprise ourselves.  And we did -- the plays people were creating were imaginative, funny, played with language, jumped through time, space and reality...but you know what?  Very few of them were satisfying.  Characters did things and said stuff, but it was only sometimes clear why.  There wasn't necessarily much forward movement of story.  And there was a distinct undertone of "so what" in the room, as we finished some of the (admittedly very early) drafts.

I can't tell you the number of times I've had a playwright claim they "had no idea what was coming" in his or her own play, "no idea" what they would write next...in fact, it seems to be offered up as a badge of pride, as casual, implicit proof of a writer's "true genius."  The creative act is marked as something spiritual, a laying-on-of-hands by Dionysus or The Muses.  Screenwriters, on the other hand, tend to look at you like you're a moron if you haven't got at least 40 index cards and a beat outline before you type your first "INT-" -- the idea of "waiting and seeing" where a story goes flies in the face of every book on screenwriting I've ever read.

There's wisdom and folly, of course, in both approaches.  One leaves so much room for the muses that it can, at its worst, ignore fundamentals of craft, and lose sight of its relationship to the audience, lose sight of its responsibility to entertain/tell a story (again the caveat: there are people who don't stage shows with these goals in mind.  I'm not talking to/about them).  The other focuses so much on telling a story that it can forget to leave room for the muse at all, can reduce what truly *is* an art to its basic underpinnings of craft.

So what's the upshot?  I think I, at least, need to remember to cross-pollinate the lessons of one genre to the other -- to take my tools that diagnose story with me from screenplays to plays, to take the primacy of language and spectacle, the freedom to manipulate time and space, with me into film...and see what happens.  And I need to remember that the shorthand we use to talk about plays or screenplays is only that -- a shorthand -- not a list of commandments to which I or my work need necessarily be enslaved.