My Story Can Beat Up Your Story: Ten Ways to Toughen Up Your Screenplay from Opening Hook to Knockout Punch Read online

  “It’s easy to write a script. It’s hard to write a good one. But after reading My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! Jeffrey Alan Schechter proves it’s not impossible. As a working writer and Gemini Award-winning producer, Jeff has seen all sides of the creative process and has systematically broken down the development steps to their most simple and basic form: how a good story is born. He not only shows you examples of what makes a good story, but lays out the steps and provides you with the invaluable tools to build a better one. Humans have been telling stories ever since we stood upright. What will separate your script from all the others is the internal creative fire that only you can keep lit. Consider this book the first spark.”

  —Jason Blumenthal, producer, The Pursuit of Happyness, Seven Pounds, and Knowing

  “Almost anyone who’s any good at anything checks in with a mentor, doctor, or mechanic at some point just to keep their skills, health, or intake valves honed. Heck, even dentists have a convention to make sure they keep their filling skills golden. Jeffrey Alan Schechter’s book is a refreshing, no-nonsense, incredibly insightful primer for beginners and laser-guided tuner-upper for journeymen. And it’s damned entertaining to boot. Hats off, and thanks, Jeff.”

  —David N. Weiss, writer, Shrek 2, The Smurfs, Further Adventures in Babysitting

  “My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! encourages writers to aggressively attack their manuscripts and their competition with a winning attitude. Highly recommended!”

  —Lee Zahavi, product manager, ScriptShark http://www.scriptshark.com/

  “Jeffrey Alan Schechter has an acute understanding of the kind of story structure that makes for successful movies. By analyzing blockbusters, he extrapolates a story construction model that is surprisingly simple and universally applicable. And, best of all, it works.”

  —Tim Hill, director, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Max Keeble’s Big Move, Muppets from Space

  “Screenwriting is an art, and Jeffrey Alan Schechter conveys both the craft and soul of the trade. A gifted teacher, he provides methods which will help you both structure and elevate your best ideas.”

  —David Sacks, executive producer, writer, Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons

  “Jeffrey Alan Schechter has achieved the near-impossible: He’s come up with an incredibly smart and insightful approach to screenwriting that’s also a terrifically fast and funny read! Trust me, Jeffrey knows his stuff, and by following his amazingly clear step-by-step instructions, you’ll be giving your screenplay a real fighting chance (kinda like Rocky, only this time, Rocky wins). My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! kicks ass!”

  —Stephen Mazur, writer, Liar Liar, The Little Rascals

  “Not only does Jeffrey Alan Schechter’s book give you the tools to strengthen your story so it can beat up other stories, it holds them down and gives them wedgies, too. One of the best books on punching up your script you will ever read.”

  —Matthew Terry, screenwriter, teacher, filmmaker, columnist http://www.hollywoodlitsales.com

  “Writers have been searching for the perfect story structure paradigm for 2,500 years. Jeffrey Alan Schechter may have found it. Take that, Aristotle!”

  —Ian Abrams, chairman, Dramatic Writing Program, Drexel University; writer/creator, Early Edition, Undercover Blues

  “My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! is a blueprint for the successful screenplay. Jeffrey Alan Schechter has once again taken the guessing out of screenplay story structure and laid out a simple, foolproof, step-by-step approach for novices and pros alike to craft stories with compelling characters and engaging plots.”

  —David H. Steinberg, writer, Slackers, American Pie 2, Puss in Boots

  “Smart and engaging, My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! brims with common-sense methods of breaking down and conquering the most stubborn structural problems in screenwriting. With one foot rooted in the mythology of archetypes and the other in a strong business sense, Schechter has given screenwriters of all stripes some of the sharpest tools in the dreamweaver’s box. Like the hero of a Hollywood movie, you will be transformed by this book.”

  —Alvaro Rodriguez, writer, Machete, Shorts, From Dusk to Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter

  MY

  STORY

  CAN BEAT UP

  YOUR

  STORY!

  Ten Ways to Toughen Up Your Screenplay

  FROM OPENING HOOK TO KNOCKOUT PUNCH

  JEFFREY ALAN

  SCHECHTER

  Published by Michael Wiese Productions

  12400 Ventura Blvd. #1111

  Studio City, CA 91604

  (818) 379-8799, (818) 986-3408 (FAX)

  [email protected]

  www.mwp.com

  Cover design by MWP

  Interior design by William Morosi

  Printed by McNaughton & Gunn

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Alan Schechter

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schechter, Jeffrey Alan.

  My story can beat up your story! : ten ways to toughen up your screenplay from opening hook to knockout punch / Jeffrey Alan Schechter.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-932907-93-3

  1. Motion picture authorship. I. Title.

  PN1996.S3355 2011

  808.2′3--dc22

  2011002511

  Printed on Recycled Stock

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: WHY YOUR SCREENPLAY NEEDS TO BE THE TOUCHEST KID ON THE BLOCK

  And why being just as good isn’t good enough

  1. MY STORY CAN BEAT UP YOUR STORY!

  How to avoid the most common mistake of all failed screenplays, a story that’s a ninety-seven-pound weakling

  2. MY THEME IS SMARTER THAN YOUR THEME

  The simple and potent way to understand what your story is really about

  3. MY HERO’S A WINNER, YOUR HERO’S A WIENER!

  Drive your story with a hero who’s not a zero by asking four questions

  4. MY HERO FIGHTS, YOUR HERO BITES!

  Keep your story moving with a hero that rockets through the same four archetypes that all great movie heroes share

  5. YOUR BAD GUY PUNCHES LIKE MY SISTER

  Turn your hero’s worst nightmare into your story’s best friend by understanding the unity of opposites

  6. MY HERO HAS BUDS, YOUR HERO HAS DUDS

  Know your hero, and your villain, by the company they keep

  7. I CAN PITCH, YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL

  The QuickPitch formula, including the three most important words every good pitch must have

  8. I PLOT, YOU PLOTZ

  Tell your story the way people expect, but fill it with plot twists they don’t

  9. I’M NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK

  Meet the “Guide,” your story’s next best friend

  10. I WORK SMARTER, YOU WORK HARDER — AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY!

  The My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! tough writer’s business plan

  CONCLUSION

  Write now, right now… (and then write again, right away!)

  APPENDIX: FIVE MOVIES, ALL BEAT UP

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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  INDEX OF FILMS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have come into existence without the help, love, and guidance of a number of people.

  First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife Marla and my children Sara, Rachel, Noah, and Maya for letting me hide in my office during all the time that it took to write this book. My wife is the best-kept secret in Hollywood, giving the absolutely best script notes. It is Hollywood’s loss and my gain that her insights are all mine.

  Next, I must thank Gilbert McLean Evans. Gil is a seriously smart fellow as well as a gifted screenwriter and teacher. He and I have been having a decades-long conversation about how screenplays work, and there’s no end in sight. Gil contributed greatly to the overall system of story development employed by this book, and his knowledge and insights were invaluable to both this book and to my own understanding of screenplay writing. I only hope that he has learned as much from me over the years as I have learned from him.

  My parents have always been and continue to be hugely supportive, and most days I’m very grateful that they encouraged my creative side and didn’t insist I become a chiropractor. Most days.

  I’ve had the privilege of knowing several outstanding teachers; however, two stand out in my mind: Howard Enders and Aram Avakian. Howard was a gifted writer, fully able to impart his love of the craft to young minds, both eager and stubborn. A million years ago Howard’s words of encouragement to a very fragile college freshman made all the difference in the world to said freshman.

  Aram Avakian was the first person I ever called “mentor.” At one time, he was one of four world-class film editors. Sometime around the late seventies he was invited to teach at my college, the State University of New York, College at Purchase. He immediately took me under his wing and threatened that I would have a career. In 1981 he helped me get my first professional job as an apprentice sound editor in New York. In 1984 he counseled me (and made my parents easy with the decision) when I wrestled with moving to Los Angeles. In 1986 I cried like a baby when I heard that he had died of a heart attack. I still miss him.

  Michael Wiese, my publisher, is an enigma to me. I’ve spoken with him a few times, emailed him countless times, and his utter belief in me and my ideas is one of the unexpected delights of my middle years. Thanks also go to Ken Lee, my editor at MWP. Unless I don’t like his notes on this manuscript.

  What kind of writer would I be if I failed to acknowledge the love and attention given to me by my longtime agents, Sandy Weinberg and Carl Liberman, or my even longer-time manager, Jonathan Baruch? I’d be an unemployed writer, I imagine. Sandy, Carl, and Jonathan are three of the most decent, concerned, and hard-working individuals in the business, and I am enriched both personally and professionally by knowing them.

  Dr. Patrick Maher, whom I’ve mentioned in these pages, is pretty much one of the smartest, most gracious, and insightful people I’ve never met. He lives in Australia and his relentless pushing of me to look deeply into both my ideas and myself as a writer made me on several occasions want to fly to Australia to either hug him or smear him with Vegemite and leave him stranded with a mob of amorous kangaroos. He is a frequent contributor to several screenwriting boards, and his insights are always stunning.

  Michael Wray, Corey Johnson, Dawn Messerly, Teresa Matsuka, and Jim Hensen from Mariner Software have been huge supporters of me and this book. Michael in particular puts up a gruff exterior, but inside he’s all mushy and warm. It is not an overstatement to say that this book could not have happened without his personal support and kindness. Thanks, Michael. Jim also contributed to the movie breakdowns that appear both in this book as well as in the Contour software program.

  Dan Pilditch was my intern and is now my peer. I fully anticipate that soon he’ll be my boss. Assuming he hires me. He has been a loyal friend, always eager to do anything he can to support me and my work whether it be helping at seminars, proofreading, working on movie breakdowns, or any of the myriad little tasks (aka “grunt work”) I conjure up for him. His good cheer and funny British accent are greatly appreciated.

  Richard Rabkin, Alvaro Rodriguez, and Steve Urszenyi, in addition to the aforementioned Gilbert McLean Evans, Dr. Patrick Maher, and Dan Pilditch all made themselves available to review, critique, and improve this manuscript, particularly in its early stages. They definitely helped refine the tone, and I appreciate their insights and good humor, particularly when one of their email addresses got posted on Google Docs in error and opened a floodgate of spam. I won’t mention names, but I hope his trip to Nigeria was successful and that the $30 million he’s gotten from that dying king’s son is put to good use.

  Finally, I would like to thank my students, those whom I have had the honor of teaching already, as well as in advance to those I hope to meet one day soon. I pray that I don’t disappoint.

  JEFFREY ALAN SCHECHTER

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY YOUR SCREENPLAY NEEDS TO BE THE TOUGHEST KID ON THE BLOCK

  AND WHY BEING JUST AS GOOD ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

  One of the first things we learn in elementary school is to get along with others. Beating up on a sibling, a toy that stops working, or the kid who steals your cookies is strictly forbidden. So why would you read a book that wants to turn a nice person — you — into someone who beats up on poor, innocent stories?

  Because you want a career as a screenwriter.

  Production executives, agents, studio readers: These are the people who have the power to change your life. Every weekend these hardworking folks have a pile of scripts the height of a toddler to read. And most of these scripts are bad. Really bad. What keeps executives going is the hope that somewhere in that stack will be a script that leaps out at them, rises above the background noise of all the others, and makes them say, “Finally, someone who knows how to tell a story!” In short, a story that beats up all of the other stories in the stack. You want to be the writer of that script. My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! isn’t about turning you into a bully; it’s about self-defense.

  My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! is a complete screenwriting system, but not in the way you may be thinking. Read this book and you will NOT learn eight tricks to better dialogue, thirty-five secrets to scene construction, seventeen techniques to great action sequences, or two hundred and fifty-one ways to get past the security guard at the studio gate (“#43: Wear a suit, carry a briefcase, tuck a copy of Variety under your arm, and look like you belong.”) What you will learn in these pages is the fastest, most complete way to structure a Hollywood-friendly, character-based story, one that those studio executives are looking to buy. For years, people have been searching for the magic bullet of screenplay writing, the system that would make screenwriting so easy and financially rewarding that you might as well keep an armored truck in your driveway to transport all the gelt. The bad news is, that system doesn’t exist. The good news is that My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! will do just fine until someone smarter than I am figures that other system out. As a matter of fact, Mariner Software thought so much of the ideas and the thinking behind My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! that the company uses it as the foundation of its award-winning story development software, Contour.

  My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! is the product of more than twenty years of professional writing, thinking, analyzing, discussing, and occasionally — all right, frequently — arguing with other working writers, producers, studio executives, and script readers about what transforms a story from a ninety-seven-pound weakling into a story he-man. The resulting system is not only accessible but refreshingly free of screenwriting technique psychobabble doublespeak. But don’t mistake accessibility for lack of muscle. It works. I know, because I use it every day and I work. To that point, My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! is also a business plan for aspiring writers who don’t want to be aspiring anymore. This is a cradle-to-grave approach to writing: from the birth of your ability to write something that can go mano-a-mano with the professi
onals to (hopefully) the death of laboring in obscurity.

  WHAT’S THE SECRET?

  When musical notes are strung together in an order the human brain understands, we call it music. When chunks of information are strung together in an order the human brain understands, we call it story. Remember those hardworking executives, agents, and readers you’re trying to impress? Well, many of them have human brains. Research in the fields of neural biology, linguistics, computer neural net modeling, information science, and knowledge management all prove that storytelling is an information delivery superhighway, but only when stories are constructed in a way that people are hardwired to receive.1 My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! uses the common structure and character arcs found in the top movies of all time and distills those elements down into a reproducible system. It is the easiest, most organized, and most effective way to tell stories that these execs, agents, and readers will understand and get excited by.

  WHAT ABOUT THE AUDIENCE?

  “Whoa! Hold on! I’m not writing just to impress studio executives, right?”

  Uh….

  Let me give it to you straight: There are two kinds of screenplays in the world, the screenplay that gets bought and the screenplay that gets made.

  The screenplay that gets made is the one people see in theaters. Between the time when you deliver your first, perfect draft and the time it unspools in theater number 19 at the Megaplex, producers, directors, other writers, actors, editors, and famously even the occasional hairdresser will all have had a hand in shaping and sculpting it. By the time your story makes it in front of an audience, you’d be lucky if it resembled anything you handed in. That’s why My Story Can Beat Up Your Story! focuses solely on the screenplay that gets bought, not the screenplay that gets made.

  The screenplay that gets bought is yours. It’s the one you have control over, the only one. Your goal — your only goal — is to write a screenplay that someone wants to buy, and the paradox is that you do this by using the same story architecture as the most successful movies that got made. In this way, your script will fit nicely in that compartment where these producers, agents, and executives keep their fondest memories of their favorite movies — the ones whose success they wish they had a hand in — making it easier for them to imagine that your screenplay can turn into a successful movie, too.