Quantum Storytelling

There’s this thing that movies and TV do from time to time. Sometimes it’s a trick used across sequels. They’ll have characters trade places and sometimes lines. Depending on how it’s done, I tend to like it.

In The Bourne Identity, when Bourne shoots the assassin played by Clive Owen, as the assassin is dying he says to Bourne, “Look at what they make you give.”

In the third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, as Bourne finally discovers the truth of his identity and is forced into a showdown, he says, “Look at what they make you give.” I thought it was clever that they had Bourne come full circle and echo Clive Owen’s line from the first movie.

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I’ve been saying my lines out loud as I type them. It helps a lot, like instant proofreading. More than that, it insures that the reader will believe a real person is talking. Dialogue I hate the most is when I’m watching a movie or a TV show and the character delivers some clumsy line. I wonder, “Who talks like that?” The answer is nobody. But I’m sure the writer thought it looked okay on paper.

It’s not about how the words look on paper. It’s about how they sound out loud. More so for a screenplay, but even for a novel. A lot of people mouth words as they read, or they hear them in their head as they track the lines across the page. Something that doesn’t work when you say it becomes instantly obvious.

An example peeve of mine is two characters who already know each other well addressing each other by first name with everything they say. “Hey Jack, hand me that screwdriver.” And then, “Thanks Jack.” or “Jack, later do you want to grab a beer?” Think about it. Do you use a friend’s name a lot when you’re around them? That’s the kind of thing that probably seems correct on paper but sounds wrong when you say it out loud.

The only downside to saying dialogue out loud as you type it is that you may want to refrain from writing in coffee shops. The staff and other customers might think you’re crazy. :)

I don’t have to worry about mumbling in front of my wife. She already knows I’m crazy.

Story –> Acts –> Sequences (A.K.A. Stages) –> Scenes –> Moments, for lack of a better word.

What is a moment? You know the writing is good when the writer doesn’t need a character to say anything, the actor can just do it through a look. You can write a look. And that would be a moment. Something inside of a scene, we’re talking the atomic structure of a scene. A smirk, a glance, a brief gimpse of action or description. A small movement that makes up the larger scene.

When I first begin developing a story, I’m starting at the highest level, the story level. “He goes here and does this, and then this happens.” This is the high level summary. Then I usually frame out the three acts, but I don’t pay particular attention to the 3-act structure because it’s so big and vague that it’s really not important til later on when you’ve got more of your story developed and can see whether the overall thing breathes in larger arcs the way it should.

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