Don’t worry, it happens to me all the time. It took me ten years to figure out the theme of The Legend of Bagger Vance, and five before I could articulate what Gates of Fire was about. It’s a running joke between me and Shawn, in his role as my editor, that he’s the one who has to explain my stuff to me. “Oh!” I inevitably exclaim, “so that’s what it’s about.” Then he gives me eight more pages of things I’ve got to fix because I was flying blind and operating entirely on instinct. That’s what great editors do.…

  [Continuing our series on Theme in fiction, nonfiction, and movies … ]   I’m a big fan of Blake Snyder. If you haven’t read Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies, please rectify that oversight at once. One of Blake’s lasting legacies (he died tragically in 2009 at age fifty-one) is what he called BS2, the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. The beat sheet is an all-purpose template for writing a screenplay. It breaks down a movie story into fifteen structural beats, e.g. Catalyst, Debate, Break Into Two, Midpoint, All Is Lost, etc. Number Three, following…

  As writers we want a big theme. A theme with power and scale. But, even more, we want a theme with depth, a theme that has level after level of meaning. The theme in Jurassic World, we said last week, is “Don’t mess with Mother Nature.” Let’s examine how deep that theme goes. How many levels does it work on? On the surface, on Level #1, what Jurassic’s theme means is “Don’t resurrect and genetically mutate creatures with very large teeth and extremely aggressive carnivorous instincts—and, if you do, pen them up very, very securely.” Level #2 of the…

  This is our third post in succession about Theme in movies, plays, and books. I’m probably gonna do another six or seven over the coming weeks, so brace yourself. This stuff is important. Let’s go back to that seminal quote from Paddy Chayefsky, cited two Wednesdays ago.   As soon as I figure out what my play is about, I type it out in one line and Scotch tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes into the play that is not on-theme.   Paddy might not approve if he knew I was about to…

What do we mean when we say a book or a movie is “about something?” This question is a lot trickier than it seems. Did you see the movie The Break-up, starring Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughan? A facile answer regarding this film would be, “It’s about a break-up.” Wrong. The subject is a break-up. The story theme is something else entirely. The subject of the Jurassic Park movies is dinosaurs. The theme is, Don’t mess with Mother Nature. The subject of Out of Africa is Karen Blixen’s experiences in Africa. The theme is possession. “Is it possible,” the movie…

  I was talking to a friend who runs a successful Hollywood literary agency. She represents screenwriters. Before she opened her doors, she said, she spent a year doing nothing but reading scripts, searching for promising young writers. She read well over 500 screenplays. “How many,” she asked me, “do you think were worth representing?” Before I could reply, she answered. “None.” I believe her. I’ve read a boatload of screenplays and novel manuscripts myself. Many have interesting, even brilliant premises. Fascinating characters abound; there’s lots of clever dialogue, surprising plot twists, mind-blowing set-pieces. And a lot of what I…

The first movie I ever got sole writing credit on was one of the worst pictures ever made. I’m not kidding. I won’t even tell you the title because if I do you’ll lose all respect for me. But … But I learned one enormous lesson on that movie. We were shooting a gunfight scene. The scene took place in a warehouse. It involved the hero and his girlfriend and about a dozen bad guys. Dudes were dropping from the rafters, plunging through skylights; cars were blowing up, the warehouse was going up in flames, not to mention gunfire was…

We as writers have been admonished a thousand times that a character must have an arc. For sure, our hero has to have one. She must change through the story. The more she changes, the better. Yeah, that’s true. But change alone is not enough. That movement has to be (you’re ahead of me, I know) on-theme. The hero has to learn something through her suffering. But it’s more specific even than that. She has to advance and become more conscious not just in general or willy-nilly, but in line with what the story’s about. What is a character’s arc…

Continuing our exploration of the protagonist’s ordeal: Why, we might ask, does the hero have to suffer at all? Why can’t she just be happy? Wouldn’t that work just as well in a story? Answer: no. The hero has to suffer because: Suffering is part of the Hero’s Journey (as articulated by Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung, and others) and virtually every story is a version of the Hero’s Journey. But more importantly … Suffering produces insight. Suffering leads to wisdom. Suffering forces the hero to change. Jack Nicholson changes in Chinatown, Julianne Moore changes in Far From Heaven, Alan Ladd…

We finished up last week with the idea that our protagonist’s suffering should not be arbitrary or capricious but on-theme. In other words, if Jay Gatsby suffers agonies of rejection by both Daisy and the social class she represents, that suffering is because Gatsby has bought-in so totally to that materialistic, acquisitional (and very American) fantasy himself. If he weren’t so fanatically pursuing the dream represented by the green light on the end of Daisy’s dock, he wouldn’t be suffering so much. And he wouldn’t ultimately be destroyed. The protagonist embodies the theme. (A case could be made, I know,…