Flashbacks

Flashbacks have been a fundamental part of the Lost’s hour-long story template, and one of the foundations for compelling characters in the show. What I find most interesting about the use of flashbacks in Lost is that they go beyond mere backstory. The flashbacks often define and explain every character’s motivation in the present.

As conflicts & complications ensue, the attitudes and decisions characters make are often driven by what has happened in the flashbacks. This seems to happen in one of two ways:

1. The character is maladaptive, has a bad attitude, or holds a grudge because of something that happened in their personal past.
2. The character is adaptive, has the right attitude for the problem, and knows exactly what has to be done because they have already learned the lesson in the past — usually in the flashbacks for that episode.

“What is it?”

Lost has a very strong mystery element and this can be boiled down to the a few core types of question it forces the viewer to task. One of them is “What is it?” And another variant would be, “What does it mean?”

Without spoiling anything, there are many points throughout the show when the characters discover something on the island that begs the question, “What is it?” or “What does it mean?”

Mysterious items or locations are usually the subject of such questions. The nature of such items or locations are often confounding to both the characters and the viewer — there is usually no superior position. Neither the audience nor the character has any idea what “it” is, nor what it means.

The audience is compelled to take the journey with the characters. Superior position or not, isn’t that what every writer hopes to achieve?

As I edit this first scene, I notice a bad habit of mine that crops up pretty often. I’m too explicit. I leave nothing unexplained. It’s not just a matter of using too many words. As I visualize a scene while writing it, I have a hard time resisting the temptation to describe anything and everything I feel is pertinent to the scene. Here’s an example;

Three of my characters are in a gunfight, surrounded by enemies. One of them gets shot. One of them jumps up, reacting badly to the one who was shot. The third pulls him down, and proceeds to explain how they have to keep a cool head because help is on the way.

As I edited this scene down, I realized there’s no need for my hero to explain to his frantic friend why they all need to keep a cool head. All he has to do is pull him down and tell him to stay down. Why would he need to explain any more than that? Clearly standing up into a barrage of whizzing bullets is bad?

And yet, when I wrote it I couldn’t resist the urge to have my hero talk the other character down.

Another example is a detailed description of enemies emerging from a forest. Keep in mind this is a script not a novel, so exactly *how* they emerge from the forest is not as important as the simple fact they do. You can safely leave a lot of little details like this up to interpretation.

Not everything has to be spelled out and made explicit. The core rule of Delete & Forget is if your story is still intact after you’ve omitted a certain sentence or paragraph.

Are you too explicit?

As I’ve been wrestling with my script I found it difficult to organize a good writing schedule. The problem is any schedule worth following needs to be flexible, not just some rote punctual routine paced by ticking stop watches and blaring alarm clocks. We fired the inner nazi, remember? I need something that holds me accountable to the weeks and months, but not necessarily to the day, hour, or minute.

I also wanted a bit more than just a schedule. I wanted a organizational method for writing. Since writers are often woolly creative types who resist organization and embrace chaos I figured it was high time for me to look at some tricks of software development.

Agile Software Development is a method that places emphasis on fast iteration. One of my biggest issues with my writing is that both story development and writing (read: production of writing) often take me a very long time. So long that I sometimes lose sight of the big picture, whether or not the story is where I want it to be, or how to get there.

From my experience in game development, I know that the fast track to results is often defined by tight feedback loops. What do I mean by this? Tightly focused work increments that aspire towards a specific goal.

In a game it might be; “We want to get this monster functioning in the game, which includes A.I. behaviors, sound effects, 3D model, 2D texture, animations, etc.” For a script or novel it might be; “Write scene 12 with the goal of establishing character John’s depression.”

A tight feedback loop would be an obvious measure of work defined by a specific goal. You will know when you are finished whether you got closer to that goal or farther away from it — hopefully closer.

The big picture is to establish a larger plan dependent on these small goals and manageable periods of writing work. There is a more specific mode of Agile known as Scrum, which will help us do this.

Scrum

Scrum is just a method of Agile development. It has a focus on specific team roles which don’t really apply to the lone writer. But team roles aren’t the only benefit of scrum. There are several aspects of Scrum project management that might be useful to writers:

• Product Backlog – A wishlist of elements you want your story to have.
• Sprint Backlog – A master list of tasks required to implement the wishlist elements for your story.
• Burn down Chart – Work left to do vs. time remaining.

A burn down chart may or may not be useful to you, but the product backlog and sprint backlog are concepts I think are useful to writing — especially the sprint backlog and the idea behind sprints themselves.

What is a sprint?

A sprint is a work period focused around the implementation of specific elements or features. In my case (see pic above) I’ve chosen a 10-sequence story structure to act as larger container groups for my scenes.

Why ten?

A more detailed explanation is probably the subject of another post, but after a brief overview let’s just do the math. Sequences in a story should probably be no more than 12 pages long, to focus specific story elements, keep the reader entertained, the drama high, and the conflicts fresh.

Television writing follows the 12 minute mark for commercial breaks, which in term have made TV dramatically interesting by focusing smaller chunks of drama to peak at the 12 minute markers. Build your story in 12 minute chunks to keep the drama tight and your work focused. How does that fit into a 120 minute film script?

120/12 = 10

That’s the short answer. How many scenes per sequence? That’s up to you. What parts of the story fit into what sequences? That’s up to you, although loosely following something like the Hero’s Journey might be a good idea. If you want. Or not. It’s up to you!

The most useful way to define a work sprint for writing in my opinion is by sequence. Official scrum definitions say that a task should be no longer than 16 hours. For writers this is easy if you interpret tasks as the writing of a particular scene. It shouldn’t take you longer than 16 hours of actual work time to write any given scene, should it? Okay then.

So your scenes are your tasks, and a sequence is your sprint. Think of sprints as sprinting towards the finish line. A sprint is one burst of work towards a specific goal like having X chunk of the story done. If you’ve got ten sequences then completing one sequence means you’re 1/10th of the way towards the finish line of your first draft.

In software development, a sprint is usually no longer than a month long. Preferably on the shorter end of two weeks. I think for writing, a week or two is a reasonable time frame for sequence writing.

This gives you an easy way to measure not only your goals but also your progress — without being a nazi. You can copy my model from the picture above or you can define your own work sprints.

And this folks, is how you knock out some Agile Script Development. It seems to be working pretty well for me so far. Let me know if it works for you.

P.S. My calendar whiteboard is by Board Dudes, similar to this one, and I found it in store at Office Max for about $70. Keep in mind my story was pretty well developed before the writing production phase — something I highly recommend. I’m also coming into a new month with some sequences already done, so this may not be an accurate picture of an entire script in a month. I’d also recommend a sequence per week — which as you can see I’m not following because there’s quite a bit I want to get done before GTA IV arrives — it’s going to suck the life out of me.

Upon recently telling a friend this, he asked a great question; Doesn’t culling it down in script form reduce the amount of material you have to work with prematurely?

With the process I use, the answer is no. If culling the story down to its essentials and focusing on the most visual, action, and conflict based material is what it takes to create a good script, well — to me that also creates a great story. If the novel is lacking those things then novel needs to change. Novel or not, I always generate more at the outset, and end up pulling back later on to focus only on the most important stuff.

And think about it this way; It’s easy to expand, harder to contract. I’m growing to love the idea that a novel version can include my own camera directions and focus on detail — I get to play the director, not just the writer. A novel may also feature “deleted scenes,” making it the version with extras vs. something radically different in a fundamental way.

For these reasons, a script seems like a better blueprint than a novel for being more story-focused. What do you think?