Telling Stories
“A film script is more architecture than literature.”
Isn’t it interesting? A film that is supposed to take you on an emotional roller coaster, is actually architected to make you feel a certain way, and not organically created. Once I started making films, this Elia Kazan’s quote resounded often in my development process, and I saw its reflections in my engineering job as well. Even during my PhD, when I was writing my technical papers, I could use the same principles of architecting ideas, and now it has become my way of thinking. Now, every set of thoughts becomes a story and I constantly engage in a quest of telling them in an effective manner. Let’s talk about that process. (In this article, whenever I say “story”, I am actually referring to any collection of thoughts/ideas/messages/steps in business processes.)
Structure is everything
This is a very simple principle, however often easily overlooked. It is very important for a story to have a structure. I always think of whatever I am crafting as a subway map. I try to figure out the subway stations, before I can map out the journey between them.
“Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
A story is simply a journey of What-How-Why. Usually in the beginning, you create a gap in the knowledge for the audience (What), in the middle, you mention “your perspective” of how to bridge the gap (How), and in the end, you present a holistic view of how the solution fits in the big picture (Why). This is true for any kind of story.
When writing films, in the beginning, you show a hero with a desire and a conflict in achieving it, so the knowledge gap is how she will get what she wants (What). In the middle, it is the hero’s journey about how she is going to get what she wants (How), and in the end, when she gets (or does not get) what she wants, some kind of universal theme of human relationships emerges that allows us to think of the film in the human context (Why). One may think that film stories are organic, they flow intuitively, but in my opinion, that is not true at all. Stories have a structure and the organic flow is deliberately and objectively planned.
In business/engineering, when we are crafting a message, in the beginning, we mention the current situation, where something that we want is not happening, and we create a knowledge gap (What). In the middle, we bridge the gap with “our perspective” of the solution (How). And in the end, we mention how that solution is going to make the business better, and present options (often in terms of cost) to achieve it (Why).
In order to write down the structure of the story, I never start writing in a word document. I fear the desire of writing words would lead me astray. I always start in a spreadsheet (or at least with a bulleted list in a word document. Spreadsheet is better, because the characteristic of the tool itself prevents you from writing long verbose sentences). Once I fix the structure, I start expanding on each idea I wrote in the spreadsheet. This could possibly be done in a word processing environment. More often than not I am challenged by the limitations of the tool I am using to write and expand ideas, and therefore I constantly switch back and forth between spreadsheet and word environments.
What I have found repeatedly is that the middle part of the story is somehow bigger than the beginning or the end. It is because after you start bridging the knowledge gap you have created in the beginning, you realize that there is much more to share than just one straightforward solution to the problem. There could be different perspectives to the solution, a detailed plan for the solution could require a separate section by itself, and many more additions. In films, the middle is almost twice the size of the beginning and the end. If we bring that analogy here, then your story gets divided into four sections.
At the end of section 1, you reach the definition of the problem you are trying to solve.
At the end of section 2, you reach your solution to the problem with some kind of comprehensive analysis.
At the end of section 3, you reach your plan to solve the problem by using the solution you mentioned in section 2.
At the end of section 4, you end with how your solution fits in the big picture.
To quantify this more in the space I am crafting the message in, I divide the space into 4 sections. So let’s say I want to create a two page document, I give half a page for each of the sections above. If I am creating an eight page document, then it would be 2 pages each. This is a rough estimate to plan my writing efforts. Once I decide the space, and the sections, now comes the next part of expanding upon them.
One idea at a time
“Orient the audience.”
How would you tell a kid where the island of Hawaii is? You won’t right away open the map of Hawaii, correct? You will zoom out on Google maps all the way until you can see the entire world. Then you would point to where the Continent of Americas is. Then, you would point to the west coast of the United States, and then slide your finger to the west all the way to Hawaii. What did you just do? You oriented your audience on where to look on your map first, and then took her to Hawaii. That is exactly how any presentation works. Orient, and then lead.
Let’s get one thing clear. Since YOU are telling the story, you are the most knowledgeable person in the room to tell it. You have some information that your audience does not. The audience is ignorant, and wants to get educated about what you want to say. It is extremely important to respect the ignorance of the audience in front of you. However easy it might be to unload information, it is very important to understand the download speed of the person in front of you. When I was writing technical papers during my PhD, my advisor imbibed this habit in me of writing one idea at a time. One paragraph, one idea. Not more. Do not jump to details when you start. This is similar to how we write screenplays in filmmaking. Every scene is a single idea. The entire movie is basically a collection of various ideas. In technical papers, the ideas lead to information. In films, the ideas lead to emotion. That is the only difference.
However, is it enough to only have a collection of ideas? Would it not feel a random collection? It is one thing to orient the audience, and then lead them into your story, but it is whole nother story to sustain their interest. How do you keep them interested?
Cause and effect
If there is one thing you want to remember after reading this article, let it be this.
“Every idea in your story should emerge from the previous one, and should cause the next one.”
This is famously called in the screenwriting world “cause and effect relationships”. It was by far the utmost revelation that happened to me when I was learning writing screenplays. I am an avid film watcher (I watch an average one movie per day) and get inspired by them to make films. In the earlier films I made, I had no clue about such cause and effect relationships. Therefore, I basically just placed random ideas on paper, shot them, and then edited them hoping to get a good story out of it. I took immense pride in the work. However, when I showed the film to the general audience, many people did not realize what I was trying to say at all. It was very disappointing. After that setback, I devoted three years to just knowing how to write screenplays, and started studying films instead of just watching them. Now I can’t watch films like a regular person. Cause and effect relationships are so evident in films, and I can instantly guess whether the film is lagging or rushing and why. Just think about the films you have liked, and films you think are not that great and you will find that 9 times out of 10 the reason is that the cause and effect relationships are not tight enough to hold your interest.
What holds interest is the continuous cycle of creating a gap in knowledge, filling that gap and opening a consecutive gap. In business writings, whenever you are creating a story, usually you would go to your manager to refine the content, she will give suggestions, you come back and modify the content, and go back for feedback. More often than not, this modification is usually tightening the cause and effect relationships between your ideas. This relationship between ideas should be so tight, that if any one of the ideas is removed from the chain, the entire structure should collapse. As much as possible, all ideas should be on a critical path.
After you have written your story, one of the great methods of reviewing what you have written is to not start at the beginning. Start at the last paragraph, and then ask yourself, why did I write this? The answer should be in your previous paragraph. Ask the same question again while reading that paragraph, and you should find the answer in the previous one. This is an effective method to not get caught in your own flow, and figuring out whether the cause and effect is working well or not. We always do this when we finish the screenplay, we start at the last scene, and ask “why did this happen?”. We should find the answer in the preceding scene. If we don’t, that means our film is going to lag there. In films, usually the thing that causes the next scene is an emotional response of a particular character, and in business writing, it is usually some kind of data.
Structure your story. Tell one idea at a time. Orient the audience and then lead them through a flow.
Would love to know about your thoughts.
