Tonight’s question

1. Tonight’s question • The plot element that comes immediately after the rising action is called _________. • Place your answer in the top post’s comment section at www.cmat131.wordpress.com.

2. What’s on? Analyzing TV CMAT 131 Prof. Jeremy Cox

3. Today, we’ll talk about... • ... How to write a script. • ... The elements of a script. • The television critique that’s due Thursday.

4. What no one can teach you, or “the limitations of every fiction-writing class” • How to be creative • How to be a fantastic writer (but “good enough” is doable) • To have the intuition it takes to know a good story when you see one • Times is an issue. Even a whole class devoted to script-writing can’t teach you everything. We have a few weeks.

5. The good news • You CAN learn the basics (i.e. how to develop characters, write dialogue, plan your story) • Like all other kinds of writing, you get better the more you do it. So don’t fret. I will take this into account in grading these assignments. • You will turn in a draft of your final assignment – a screenplay. I will offer ideas and help you fix your mistakes. Only the final submission will be graded.

6. Elements of a play’s structure • Unity • Plot • Character • Dialogue • Exposition • Preparation • Setting

7. Unity • All elements should relate in a consistent way to all the rest, all heading in the same direction toward your purpose. • Extraneous elements (“What was the deal with the dog with the shifty eyes.”) only detracts from the audience’s impression of the work. • So even if it’s brilliant, if a scene or character doesn’t contribute to the purpose, it has to go.

8. Plot • Hilliard tells us the plot’s “structure is based on a complication arising from the individual’s or group’s relationship to some other force.” • Think Homer Simpson’s relationship to his boss, Mr. Burns, being complicated by the arrival of Burns’ cherished teddy bear, Bobo. • This is the conflict, and it comes as soon as possible in a play. Harkening back to our TV news days, it’s akin to the “You” in “hey, you, see, so.” It makes the audience care about the characters.

9. Plot • As we learned last week, the plot doesn’t stop there. • It continues with with a series of crises (rising action), each relating to and developing the initial conflict. • These crises build to a crescendo (the climax). One force wins; the other loses. • You can end there or keep going (falling action) to show the audience the consequences of the turning point.

10. Plot tips • As always, grab and hold the audience’s attention. • Conflict comes so early that you will often have to unfurl your exposition as the conflict unfolds. Dialogue and actions show who your characters are. • You don’t have to say where they are and who they are. You can show it as the action develops. • Don’t just have characters doing random things to move the plot along. They are always responding to the central conflict.

11. Character • “Just because you are a character, doesn’t mean you have character.” – The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) in “Pulp Fiction.” • Characters drive the action. • They speak the dialogue. • The qualities of the character determine the action, and the action reveals who the characters really are.

12. Character tips • Show don’t tell. Don’t just say who a character is or have another character say it. Show us through their actions and reactions. • Keep the number of characters to a minimum. • Don’t make them stray “out of character” to bend to the whims of your plot. Be consistent with what they’ve said and done before. • But remember that these aren’t carbon-copies of real people. They are dramatically heightened versions of reality.

13. Dialogue • Just as you heighten and condense the action, so should the dialogue be heightened and condensed. • Characters should speak differently depending on the person, just as people speak differently in real life. Some are academics and use big words. Some have sat in too many business lectures and speak in a series of “win-win situation” cliches.

14. Dialogue tips • Every exchange should move the plot forward. • Avoid repetition. • Avoid stereotyped forms of speech. Just because someone is from the rural South, for example, doesn’t mean they sound uneducated.

15. Exposition • Reveals the background of the characters and the situation so the audience understands the present circumstances. • It dribbles out during the rising action, as naturally as possible.

16. Exposition tips • Too much explanation will sound stilted and awkward. • Condense, condense, condense. Tell us only what we absolutely have to know to be up to speed. • Generally, steer clear of narrators. They yak over the action.

17. Preparation • Also known as foreshadowing, it’s the SUBTLE planting of material through action and dialogue that gets the audience ready for future events. • Like clues in a mystery. • Hilliard writes: “The audience members should never be able to say, ‘Oh, how surprising!’ [at the climax] but should always say, even if they didn’t expect it, ‘Why, of course!’”

18. Preparation tips • Be gradual. Don’t pile on with clues all at once. • The audience shouldn’t be able to guess where they action is heading, but as it unfolds they should be able to have “seen it coming.”

19. Setting • Where the action takes place: the time, place, environment, locale, fantastical realm, a skewed version of the world as we know it (“The Invention of Lying”) • Settings are designed as a kind of arena for the actions of the characters to be most effectively rendered.

20. Analyzing the TV show

21. A few words first from the Museum of Broadcast Communications • “Balanced criticism avoids blatant appeals and gratuitous savaging of media people and projects. The critic serves as a guide, offering standards or criteria for judgment along with factual data, so readers can make up their own minds.” • Source: http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=televisioncr

22. Assignment • Choose a 30- or 60-minute drama or comedy. • It must be scripted. No reality shows (“The Voice,” “American Idol,” etc.) No news or interview shows (“SportsCenter, an Orioles game, “Meet the Press”) • Spend your 500 words analyzing how the seven elements we discussed earlier (dialogue, setting, character, plot, etc.) relate and interact.

23. Considerations • Did the plot make sense? Did the actions follow what you would have expected the characters to do (at least after the fact)? • Was the writing crisp and dramatic or boring and stilted? • Did the ending feel natural or too pat or out of left field? • What was the central conflict and how did the writer(s) develop it? • Were the characters believable? If they were unbelievable for the sake of farce (“Family Guy”), did they at least behave in predictable ways?