[00:00:00] and what we're going to talk about in this session is how you can test whether or not your story is good before Hollywood. And that might raise the question, well why do I even care? Especially if you're writing a novel.
[00:00:23] What does that have to do with Hollywood? Well, I'll tell you for one Hollywood loves to adapt books Into movies they just absolutely do and the reason for that is because it's a lot less risky It means that there was an audience already for that book. Somebody already approved of it Hollywood is terrified of failing and terrified of Not making the right decisions because everything is So they're always looking for pre qualified material and your book getting published pre qualifies it.
[00:00:52] It says that it was viable and it says that there's an audience for it probably built in which makes it desirable to be converted. And by the way, that's a good thing. If you want to make some money, get your book. I hate to say it, but Get Your Book turned into a movie. I think J. K. Rowling, she made a fortune off of the book series, but my goodness, she made a fortune off of the movie, so she's laughing all the way to the bank.
[00:01:19] Not that that's the goal, by the way, to make money. Unfortunately, we do want to make money. We want to be able to make a living, but obviously, if that's all we're in it for, most of us are pretty much going to be sorry. But hey, I want to make a living as a writer, don't you? So, we might as well be thinking big like that, and we might as well test our story with the sort of criteria that's going to be applied to it later down the road.
[00:01:44] And why not do that? It just makes what we're doing better. Okay, so We need to test Hollywood's approach to story. Is your story good before Hollywood? Would it make a good Hollywood movie? And also, the title of this course is Hollywood Story Structure, so it's a viable, worthwhile thing to explore so that we can write the best possible story that we can.
[00:02:09] Alright, so what does that mean? Well, I'm going to describe a formula that is something that works. I'm going to use terms that are kind of voodoo, voodoo, that aren't maybe your typical ones. But they're basically, these are the same terms that you would find if you went back to Aristotle and those guys that talked about story.
[00:02:29] The pathos, the ethos, the mythos, all those things, it's the same, sort of. But what we're doing is we're contemporizing it for today's audience. and for today's storytellers. So it's a formula that works and I'm going to call it Heart, Smarts, and Sparkle. So what is that? All right, well, when I talk about the heart, the heart of every single story.
[00:02:53] is the emotional connection you make with your audience through your main character. You simply have to make an emotional connection with your audience. That is the only thing that is going to sustain them. That is the thing they're looking for. That is what they want more than anything. You know, there's this whole debate that goes around about whether or not a character has to be likable.
[00:03:16] And everybody talks about, does your character need to be likable? And traditionally, yes. But there are other ways to make that emotional connection. Your character could also be sympathetic or your character could also be really, really interesting. really, really intriguing. There are actually three ways to make that emotional connection, but they've got to make an emotional connection.
[00:03:41] You've got to form a bond between your main character and the audience. Otherwise they will not care about your story at all. So the very first thing you're testing is the quality of your character and whether or not There is heart in your story, whether or not the audience has any reason to emotionally commit to the journey that your character is about to go on.
[00:04:08] Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna go into detail about how you can do that. We're gonna look at that. How do you formulate that? How do you make that bond happen? Right now, we're just looking at what has to happen. I'm not exactly showing you how to do it. We're just talking about what has to happen. But later, we'll solve this and I'll show you.
[00:04:27] Alright, number two, smarts, smarts. Now there are two ways to get smarts. You can either get it through your arena. Or you can get it through insight. And what do I mean by smarts? Smarts is that thing that makes your story sort of special and unique. It makes it original. And how it's original is because it shows us a world we've never seen before.
[00:04:53] Or it shows us a perspective that we're not familiar with. Something new and different. Something fresh. This is why we don't like cliches, by the way. I don't want to watch a movie where I'm learning the same lesson that I've learned a thousand times in a thousand other movies. This is why this whole self love movement has gotten so out of control.
[00:05:13] It is incorporated in all of these narratives and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Seen it, get it. Unless it has something special, a little twist or some sort of different perspective. You don't want to do a cliché. It has to be something unique that you are bringing. An insight that you are bringing to the table.
[00:05:32] And remember, a theme is an argument that you're building, right? So insight basically corresponds to that. It is a special take. It's not this generic nebulous concept. The insight isn't. It's something specific that you're arguing for. And that corresponds to theme. But another way to get What smarts is by taking people into a world they haven't seen before.
[00:06:00] This goes back to Arena. Arena, where does your story world take place? And by the way, I'm not talking about the planet Zeldron in the neosphere, whatever, all this esoteric jargon. That's not what I'm talking about. I am talking about even something simple, the fish market down the street. Something that you're familiar with or that you've done the research to be familiar with.
[00:06:27] It's a world that we haven't seen even if it's here. There was a recent movie that came out. It was called Coda and it was about a Girl who had hearing but she was raised in an all deaf family. That's an arena We hadn't seen it was interesting. So it doesn't have to be a new planet In fact for the most part you want to avoid that unless you really have something good It can be the fish market down the street It can be your life with Lulu My little dog snoring over here.
[00:06:59] The idea is that it brings some semblance of freshness or originality to your story. So, the perfect storm would be an example of a great arena that we hadn't seen before. One flew over the cuckoo's nest, which by the way, was an arena that was life changing at the time. It actually changed culture because it was protest literature to try to bring awareness.
[00:07:23] to the terrible things that were being done in our mental health institutes and it actually completely changed the industry of psychiatry and the way that all those things were practiced and psychiatric institutes and that sort of thing. So really, really, truly an arena we hadn't seen that brought devastating awareness to these terrible practices that were going on.
[00:07:45] Six Feet Under. Six Feet Under is about a family that runs a funeral home. Well, we hadn't seen that before. Now, of course, you still have to have interesting characters within that, but the arena itself is interesting. So take a moment to think about your main character and your arena. Do you have something interesting?
[00:08:07] Or what is the fresh insight? The something new? The something special? The twist that isn't cliche? What are you arguing for in your story? So think about that. Now, when I talk about insight, I'm talking about profound Lines, profound themes, smart themes, something clever. It is the smart factor of your story.
[00:08:30] Sometimes it can be the way your story is told that is the smart factor. So it could be like a traditional love story, but you do something different with it. So, for example, Annie Hall. The smart factor in Annie Hall is that it's a love story told backwards. The same thing happens in Momento, sort of. I mean, Momento, if you have ever seen that film, is about a guy who has short term memory loss.
[00:08:54] And so he can't remember anything, so he leaves himself all these sticky notes, but he's trying to solve this crime and get revenge for something. It's been years since I've seen it, so I can't remember it very well. But the idea is that it's very structurally interesting. It's the smart factor. Now, the smart factor in some books, for example, that come to mind would be like the Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society.
[00:09:18] That was a book, a story, that was told completely through letters. That was smart, insightful, it was something clever. So, the point is, there are two ways to get smart. You want to either have a really interesting, new, fresh, original arena, something that you can actually tell because it's a world that you're exploring and you're taking your audience into that new world, or you have original insight or something special, a smart factor in terms of insight because of how you're telling your story that makes it extra special and fresh.
[00:09:57] But the third is actually the most important. The third category of the formula. Heart, smarts, and sparkle. You gotta sparkle it, you gotta bedazzle it, right? You gotta bejewel it. So what do I mean by sparkle? Well, sparkle is the extra magic. Sparkle is the hardest to quantify, but it is the most important, ironically.
[00:10:24] Now, here's the tricky part about sparkle. It might be the area that a writer has the least control over. And so, Sometimes we can't go chasing the sparkle. The question is what we can, okay, what we have the most control over is the first two. Making sure we have a great character and making sure we have a smart insight slash theme or an original arena.
[00:10:50] Those two things we can absolutely Control. We don't have as much control over the last one, the sparkle, and yet at the end of the day, that's going to be the acid test. When people read your book, will they see the sparkle? But let me give you some examples of what that is and some tips on how you might be able to cultivate that, even though you won't ultimately be able to control it, for example.
[00:11:17] The sparkle in the film Pirates of the Caribbean was the performance of Johnny Depp. Now otherwise that would have just been a conventional pirate movie. And here's a little freebie for you. When Johnny Depp was asked to be in that film, he wasn't asked to play Jack Sparrow. In fact, the role of Jack Sparrow was a much smaller role.
[00:11:39] But he read it, and instead of the hero that he was asked to play, he said, I want to play him. And so then they went and rewrote the script and made that part much bigger. But then They still didn't know that they had a hit on their hands. It was supposed to be a one off. Pirates of the Caribbean was supposed to just be a one off.
[00:11:57] It wasn't until they got in the editing room that they realized, Oh my gosh, we have a hit. And that's when they secured the actors for sequels and blah blah blah. And it's because he played the pirate like he was the rock star of the day. It was Johnny Depp's performance that took a very conventional pirate movie and elevated it into a billion dollar industry, basically.
[00:12:21] But clearly the writer didn't have control over that. That happened later in the production process. So wow, lucky lucky, but it still wouldn't have been up to the writer. Okay, well what about something like The Sixth Sense? Well, if you've seen The Sixth Sense, you know how it ends. There is a twist at the end.
[00:12:41] And without the twist at the end, it would have been a decent movie. But the twist at the end is what made M. Night Shyamalan, it's what propelled him into stardom, and it's what made the movie the most talked about film of that decade, probably. It was so phenomenal, the twist at the end, which was also, by the way, the smart.
[00:13:05] Now, in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter, the extra magic is literally the magical world that she crafted. It is incredible, the world that she created. It is so good that there are now Harry Potter worlds in all these cities. I was just in London and you could go down to the Harry Potter world. I forget what they called it in London.
[00:13:29] But you could go to Universal Studios and you can go to Hogwarts and you can ride the train. I mean, it's all these things. It is incredible. It's the world that she created behind the stories. It is phenomenal. And that is the extra magic. And she did cultivate that. That was in her control because she didn't Because she didn't rush that.
[00:13:52] She didn't skip anything. It is so well crafted. And I highly recommend them if you are looking for examples of how to write great, great fantasy. Okay, so the point is, you may not have as much control. Over this and yet your story must have sparkle at the end of the day And that's something we'll be looking for and I promise you you can get it You will get it if you do these other things that you can do There will be something that you won't even know that you've done, but it will find the extra magic Now here's another little tidbit for you a freebie Originality is good, weirdness is bad.
[00:14:37] And what do I mean by that? Well, there's a subset of, like, spec scripts in Hollywood that keep being floated around that everybody thinks are original. All the writers think they're really original, but they're really just kind of clones of each other. And they're all these new age sci fi stories that are dealing with the future or with UFOs and parallel dimensions and out of body experiences and bizarre creatures and usually featuring beings named Zeldron and stuff like that.
[00:15:09] And then the dialogue is packed with esoteric code and arcane phrases. They're basically just repeats of each other. They're not very original at all. But people think they are because they think it's really a new world. What I mean to say is that you don't want to necessarily I mean maybe you have Maybe you're the next Dune writer, right?
[00:15:30] Maybe you've got a story of that epic proportion. I just read the Red Rising series. It's phenomenal. I highly recommend it. It's excellent in every single way. So maybe you have a story that is an epic sci fi that is truly, truly brilliant. Write it if you do. But otherwise, most of these stories Might be original, but they're impossible to understand and what you want to do is go to the stories that make sense Understanding is really, really important.
[00:16:02] We need to be able to access it. It can't be so jam packed with esoteric code that we're just not resonating with the characters or understanding what's even happening in the story. Understanding is far more important. Making your readers track with you and understand what the world is like is far more important than you trying to be clever and you trying to come up with all these clever things.
[00:16:24] So a better idea is to tell a normal story in an original way. So, for example, Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo was brilliant in that regard. It's basically a coming of age story, of course, about the father. That's basically what it is, and yet it's set in the world of the ocean. And you've got the clownfish, and you've got the turtle, and you've got Dory, and you've got the shark, and I mean, you've got all these wonderful, wonderful characters.
[00:16:53] And You wouldn't have had that if you would have told a conventional story. You could tell the same story, but it would have been totally different. It wouldn't have been as fun. So the thing is, you can tell a normal story, but you tell it in an original way when you allow your voice to come out. When you allow personality to come out.
[00:17:12] Where you are doing things in it where you're not trying to paint by numbers. You're not trying to do that. You're trying to actually get into the story and describe these characters and really let us know who they are. Tell a normal story, but in a way that makes sense to us, that's accessible to us, and makes us fall in love with the characters.
[00:17:28] That is what you have more control over, and we'll get into more about how you actually do that down the road. The question is, is your story good before Hollywood? And what we've talked about is this formula of three things that have to ultimately be in your story. You have to have heart, You have a connection to your audience, through your main character, you have to have smarts, where you have a good arena or insight that you're offering that is fresh and unique, and you have to have sparkle, the extra magic, something special that makes your story truly, truly its own thing, and people fall in love with it.
[00:18:09] So that's what you're testing, you might not be able to see it all right now, but just keep that in mind as we keep building, that's what we're doing, we're building. To get to the point where we can actually dive into your story now in the next session. We're going to talk about What makes a story commercial because this is also a very important aspect of your story And I'll see you there