Faith, Belief, and Religion
Taking a respite from the usual format for Types Tuesday, as I found this brilliant video essay and just had to share it.
Faith and Belief are unique to every person, whether they are religious, spiritual, agnostic or atheist. It is a universal struggle, whoever you are, and it is something so nuanced that it can make for excellent drama, and create rich, empathetic conflicts for your Characters. It makes for such interesting and engaging stories.
Video Essay
I’ll discuss this in a little more detail on Thursday, but for now, I hope this video essay, by 21st Century Cinephile on Youtube, gives you something to think about:
]]>I hope you’ve been enjoying Writing Advice Wednesday for the last few months, but I’m trying something different for the rest of the year’s posts. As well as a relevant video essay I’ve found, I’ll be giving you writing exercises to jump-start your new script or novel. It’s exercises like this that form part of my One Hour Screenwriter course, which will help you write an entire feature film script in 22 weeks. You can purchase it at the shop here. You can also read testimonies here that show how this process has worked for a variety of writers.
This week, it’s time to feel…
Writing with Empathy and Emotion
This is a two-minute exercise that might change the way you think about film.
Sit back and remember the first time you walked out of a movie thrilled, stunned or amazed by the power of what you just saw.
What was the name of the film that produced that first profound effect for you? Write down the name of the film.
Now write a brief description of the most memorable scene in that film. By this I mean a scene in which something happens to someone.
What physically was happening in the scene you remember so vividly?
Was the scene you described a scene in which the character is incredibly vulnerable? Is it a crossing a border scene or a scene about entering a new world? Is it a release scene after an intense scene where something terrible or unsettling happens to the character?
What we remember most clearly is pain and vulnerability.
Creating vulnerability is the most powerful tool you have to bond your audience firmly to your character. Moments of character vulnerability (physical, emotional or spiritual vulnerability) are what make a film truly memorable.
This is something that you know already intuitively. It is an important trigger in all the films that you love best. You may not be consciously aware of it. But it is right there in plain sight and your own experience proves it.
Think of any truly memorable scene in a favorite movie and some kind of character vulnerability will be central to the moment.
Remember a time when you felt really vulnerable, alone, rejected, humiliated, unloved, or misunderstood. Remember the exact words or actions that made you feel that way. Quickly write the circumstances as you remember them.
Remember a time when you felt physically at risk, afraid, or in danger. It doesn’t matter if the danger was real or not. What’s important is that you feared for your safety.
Remember the exact circumstances that frightened you. Quickly write scenario as you remember it.
Remember a time when you were on the threshold of something brand new. Quickly write how you felt leaving your old life, old friends, old job or old circumstances behind.
Explore what it was like to face the complete unknown and dive into an uncharted or untested set of circumstances or a new situation.
How did it feel to cross the “border” into a new life or embark on a new journey? Was it sad or thrilling?
Loss always makes us vulnerable and something isn’t thrilling unless there is a little bit of danger attached. Danger always makes us vulnerable.
Remember a time when someone you loved or trusted betrayed you. It can be a small personal betrayal or a larger more public betrayal.
Remember the details of what that betrayal was and how it was revealed to you.
Remember how it made you feel. Quickly write about the situation as you remember it.
Now write the answers to the above questions for your character.
Write a list of possible events that could make your character feel really vulnerable, alone, rejected, humiliated or unloved.
List the specific actions or circumstances that would make your character feel that way.
List the kinds of things someone could say or do to evoke those feelings in your character in the present.
Write a list of situations in which you character would feel physically at risk, afraid or in danger.
What physical circumstances are most likely to make your character feel panic or terror?
What situations does your character find most physically challenging or frightening?
What new threshold does your character cross? How is that a fearful, sad or dangerous prospect for him or her?
Write a list of possible situations in which your character might feel betrayed, be set up for a fall, or played for a fool.
List the most hurtful possible things that could happen to your character in the story.
Video Essay of the Week
Lessons From The Screenplay gives us two very different examples of detectives pushed to their limits, and how they handle being faced with incredible adversity:
Let me know what you think of this week’s writing exercise by emailing me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you as we go forward with more of these writing exercises. Next week, it’s time to make it all about you…
Until then, remember- all you need to do is Get Started and Keep Going!
– Laurie
I talked about vulnerability in a recent Blade Runner post. The sequel movie, to me, falls flat emotionally. I did not feel moved although I did admire the technical and visual accomplishments of the film.
Audiences are moved because of a character’s vulnerability. A character’s vulnerability is always built on some kind of loss which challenges him or her emotionally and not just physically.
A character is most vulnerable – when he/she faces:
- Jeopardy – loss of physical safety or the physical safety of others close to you
- Terror – loss of emotional or psychological safety
- Horror – loss of hope
- Neglect – loss of nurture or care
- Loneliness – loss of companionship
- Unfairness loss of fair play or impartiality
- Kindness- loss of support or sympathy or human comfort
- Injustice- loss of justice or equity
- Rejection – loss of acceptance or inclusion by others
- Abandonment – loss of connection or support or help from others
- Humiliation – loss of self-esteem or dignity or stature/status
- Frustration – loss of achievement or purpose or potential
- Insecurity- loss of security or stability or a sense of grounding
- Misunderstanding – loss of communication
- Betrayal – loss of trust or not being believed when telling the truth
- Shame – loss of self-esteem or sense of worthiness
Set up situations or circumstances where your character experience these key vulnerabilities. The more vulnerable your character is, the more human he or she becomes. The more human your character seems, the more the audience will care about and embrace him or her.
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I saw this speech by Brene Brown about vulnerability and fear on a Ted Talk. Everything she says applies to writing and is part of the Character Map eBook. I thought it would be interesting to hear about these issues from a researcher, scientist and storyteller. If you want to map how vulnerability and the “whole-heartedness” of a leap of faith happens in a character’s transformation over the course of the story check out the Character Map. Here is an excerpt of Brene Brown’s speech:
….By the time you’re a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we’re here. It’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice and mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is — neurobiologically that’s how we’re wired — it’s why we’re here. So I thought, you know what, (as a researcher) I’m going to start with connection. Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome, and one thing — an “opportunity for growth?” And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.
So very quickly — really about six weeks into this research — I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn’t understand or had never seen. And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won’t be worthy of connection? The things I can tell you about it: it’s universal; we all have it. The only people who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this (fear) “I’m not good enough,” — which we all know that feeling: “I’m not blank enough. I’m not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough.” The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability, this idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.
…. If I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness — that’s what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness — they have a strong sense of love and belonging — and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they’re good enough. There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they’re worthy of love and belonging. That’s it. They believe they’re worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we’re not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.
What do these people have in common? … What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and — this was the hard part — as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.
The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn’t talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating — as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, “I love you” first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They’re willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.
… And I think there’s evidence — and it’s not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it’s a huge cause — we are the most in-debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is — and I learned this from the research — that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say, here’s the bad stuff. Here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment. I don’t want to feel these. I’m going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don’t want to feel these…. You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, your emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.
]]>… This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there’s no guarantee — and that’s really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that’s excruciatingly difficult — to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we’re wondering, “Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?” just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, “I’m just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive.” And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we’re enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, “I’m enough,” then we stop screaming and start listening, we’re kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we’re kinder and gentler to ourselves.
Humiliation Scenes
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY: The scene starts with Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller) gazing out a bathroom window, it appears he is window peeping, he panics and then his zipper gets embarrassingly (and painfully) stuck.
MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING: The scene starts with Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) stirring up trouble by taking Michael O’Neal (Dermot Mulroney) and fiancee Kimberly Wallace (Cameron Diaz) for a drink at a Karaoke Bar. Kimmy is pressed into singing possibly the worst Karaoke debut in history. She completely “owns” it and turns everyone’s groans into cheers. This is also a great example of a comedic turnaround.
BRIDGET JONES: The scene starts with Bridget (Renee Zellwegger) showing up at a party in an embarrassingly tight Bunny costume scene. No one else is wearing a costume. She was never told the party plan was changed.
Rejection Scenes
TOOTSIE: The scene starts with a montage of Michael Dorsey’s (Dustin Hoffman) audition scenes. He is told he is too short, too tall, too young, too old etc.
JERRY MACGUIRE: The scene starts as Jerry (Tom Cruise) is frantically watching the lights blinking out on his phone as all his old clients hang up and avoid him.
WITNESS: The scene starts as Det. Capt. John Brook (Harrison Ford) stumbles on Rachel Lapp (Kelly McGillis) bathing in her room. She drops her towel and he turns away. The next scene finds him in agony in his room.
Unfairness Scenes
ET: The scene starts with Elliot (Henry Thomas) spotting the strange creature E.T. No one believes him and his brother makes fun of him.
TITANIC: Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) is framed for stealing a jewel. He protests his innocence. No one believes him except Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) He is taken away in handcuffs.
HOME ALONE: The scene starts with Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) fighting with his brother. He is blamed for creating a mess, despite his protests, he is sent to his room.
WIZARD OF OZ: The scene starts with Mrs. Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) reporting Toto attacked her cat. Despite Dorothy’s (Judy Garland) protests Toto is taken away.
Abandonment Scenes
CASABLANCA: The scene starts as Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is waiting for Ilsa. He gets a goodbye note from her and is left at the station to board the train without her.
ET: The scene starts as the Mother Ship leaves and ET is left behind.
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