Screenwriting for Slackers
Sirena's Slacker Dispatches #2
This is the second update on the progress of our film to broaden the slacker genre. Past dispatches: #1
I’ve finally caught a rhythm on this project, but only after months of paralysis. This always happens, and my process makes it hard to prevent. For years, my approach to scripts has been very linear: start with research, write progressively more detailed treatments and outlines, leading to one very detailed step outline of about 20 pages, and only then (about 6-7 months in) slog through a script draft.
I picked up the philosophy of researching and relentlessly outlining before starting a draft–knowing my path before I walk it–from every screenwriting book I’ve ever read, but non more forcefully than Robert McKee’s Story (of Adaptation fame).
The workhumper McKee school of screenwriting
Beyond merely having an idea of initial plotting, the “McKee School” counsels you to iterate outlines (and build character biographies) to become all-knowing about your world and your characters, to the point where you consciously know how they’d react to anything.
“Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences? Finding the answers to these grand questions and shaping them into story is our overwhelming creative task.”
I find this to be reasonable advice. It’s also a lot of pressure, and gave me a year’s worth of writer’s block back when I first read McKee. It made it very hard for me to give myself “permission” to start writing my stories if I didn’t feel like I knew everything ahead of time.
Fifteen years later, putting the story into script format remains a fraught step for me, and Sirena is no exception. I spent all summer and fall putting off the earnest work of outlining the story, happy to let Slacker Fest become a “productive” excuse to procrastinate. I dreaded the months-long process of “earning” the fun of writing the actual story, like a school child having to earn recess by doing math drills.
Discovering the “half-known” school
It was serendipitous, then, that I picked up Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World during this stretch of procrastination. The book–admittedly meant for literary fiction, not film–encourages writing without fully knowing your characters or your world in order to let them surprise you. Emphasis mine:
“I come to know my stories by writing my way into them. I focus on the characters without trying to attach significance to their actions…I remain purposefully blind to the machinery of the story…I work from a kind of half-knowledge…Invariably, things have arrived that I did not invite, and they are often the most interesting things in the story.”
Beyond half-knowledge as a way to generate surprising discoveries as you write, Boswell argues that knowing everything in advance hinders the quality of your work (again, emphasis mine):
“The listing of characteristics in advance of real narrative exploration tends to cut a character off at the knees. Such a character may be complicated but is rarely complex…The writer who has typed in the answers to the preceding questions may feel knowing…but may find it difficult to let the character break out of these imaginative restraints…Here’s another definition of stereotype: any character that is fully known.”
Discovering the “half-known” school was like finding a jug of lemonade in the middle of a barren wasteland. Here was an invitation to be reckless, to run straight to recess, to start writing before I knew anything.
The taboo of not knowing
In principle, McKee isn’t opposed to discovering character ideas through rewrites. But he clearly prefers outlines, and has called the notion that a character would have a “will of their own” (and lead the writer, not vice-versa) “childish.”
While it’s true that all decisions–and all characters–come from writers, McKee’s attitude overestimates the extent to which writers can consciously know the contents of their psyche before they make the art. His school cautions “being led” by sudden discovery as lacking professionalism and seems generally weary of the artistic impulse–something it shares with most of studio Hollywood.
Something it shares with most workplaces, actually. In professional culture, it’s taboo to “leave bases uncovered,” to start projects without a full strategy that claims to map the expected path. It’s taboo to say “I don’t know,” despite the fact that not knowing is the constant state of most human experience.
I’m feeling drawn to the “half-known” school because, ironically, the workplace itself has taught me how irrational it is to want to fully know. The most successful work projects I’ve been a part of were those that just kind of happened before we knew what we were doing. We just pretended after the fact to have thought things through in advance.
Synthesizing a new process
While I still value outlining and researching, it’s been necessary for me to figure out a process that integrates the “half-known”approach, if only so that I can have fun sooner and actually, you know, get started. This has become my approach:
Continue the original plan of slowly iterating longer and longer outlines, with some character explorations and other research in between each iteration
However, for every outline or piece of research I do, I’m writing at least one scene in script format
Worse, I’m allowing myself to write scenes out of order, without knowing how they connect or if I will even use them.
This has already resulted in some awful scenes. But if I ignore my inner boss’ attempts to mortify me, it’s also a lot of fun! It’s fun to already be writing the thing–even if I will eventually have to rewrite it all. It’s fun to have a process that’s more chaotic. And, as Boswell promised, “meeting” the characters on the page has given me new ideas for the outlines I’m fleshing out in parallel.
Speaking of which, let’s catch up with these characters. Here’s your official dispatch.
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Progress Report
(everything labeled “same” can be referenced in dispatch #1)
The basics
Working title and logline: same
Current stage: After writing four short prose versions of the story, I’m two drafts into a “step outline” that more deliberately maps out each beat in the plot. That, and I’ve written 20 or so pages worth of actual screenplay format scenes (some are alternate versions of the same scene, which has been a fun way to experiment). The goal is to write 1-2 more iterations of the step outline before summer, when I’ll focus exclusively on writing the screenplay itself.
Current working outline file: Find it here (you’ll also find a “mood board” for Sirena in there, which I explain below)
A lot more characters have names now! They all started out as placeholder names but the longer they remained, the more natural they felt. In the spirit of the “half-known school,” I think it’s better to keep the names and forget why they came up in the first place.
The thematic “north star”
Same, with one additional wrinkle–I’m now not just trying to poke at the command to be productive in order to “belong,” but also the sense that some people are more “worthy” because they have marketable talents.
You’ll note that the current outline plays with the recurring gag of Zoe seeing “talents” in Sirena–chess, business, etc–that Sirena actually doesn’t actually have. I like the possibility of making Sirena as unremarkable as possible, because it contradicts the usual immigrant/poverty story trope of a special protagonist that has “the stuff” to succeed. Contradicting the conventional wisdom that a protagonist has to be “special” is a nice plus too. We’ll see if it works.
Your slacker: Sirena
While I’ve only done some cursory explorations into Sirena’s “biography,” (and there’s a ton I don’t know about her), I’ve had fun supplementing this character exploration with a “mood board” where each slide is a person (fictional or real) that I may model her after. So far, in my attempt to make Sirena unapologetic and combative, I’ve given her a bit of a one-note personality, so I like keeping in mind models–like Ozu’s Noriko or El Norte’s Rosa–that have an independent edge but are also pulled by a sense of duty.
I’ve also landed on a provisional “character arc” for Sirena that I’m excited about:
Feeling separate and wanting to be free from her community (and the expectations placed on them) → Feeling pressured to take responsibility for her community → Feeling a sense of responsibility to lessen the work-driven burdens placed on her community (driven to play a bit of a “liberator” role)
I have not yet really brought this to life in the story, but I like that it may give Sirena a sense of larger purpose while providing a container to explore the sense of duty that many women and people of color have to “make good” on behalf of their identity groups.
Her antagonist: Zoe
It’s become apparent to me that Zoe should, despite her relative position of power and wealth to Sirena, be in turn crushed by her own employers, men who she has to constantly manage and impress. Maybe Zoe, deep down, wants to be as reckless and antiwork as Sirena, and her drive to tame her “protegé '' comes from not wanting to face the “Sirena” she carries inside.
I also have a mood board for Zoe, but as of now it’s exclusively non-fictional people, who it’d be mean to put on blast as models for a “villain.” The upside of this is that looking at her models’ social media, I get a vivid sense of their loving, complex side, and it reminds me to put a generous amount of that into Zoe.
Her possible love interest / best friends / secondary antagonists: Paco and Grizzie
The “suitor” has a name! I haven’t fleshed him out too much otherwise. If anything, writing the script has brought the other secondary character, Grizzie (Zoe’s bratty teen daughter) into starker relief as an important partner-in-crime for Sirena.
Right now, I can see endings where Grizzie and Paco end up as enemies to Sirena just as much as I can see endings where the three of them end up collaborating in more revolutionary ventures. We’ll see.
What does Sirena want, and what’s the main societal/psychic “enemy” in the way?
There’s been a surprising development on this front: does Sirena perhaps have a workhumper deep inside of her, and does she deeply want to feel like a contributor to society?
At the very least, she wants to be accepted into her community. BUT! At the same time, she’s absolutely terrified of a life where she constantly has to prove herself in order to belong to a community. You could say that what she wants is a community where she can belong simply by being who she is, no accomplishments needed.
If that’s indeed her desire, then what gets in the way is nothing else than American/Western work culture itself. How that best manifests in our humble story is still TBD.
By the way, her “surface” desire has changed from an afternoon at a spa to taking one of those cliché van-life years with Grizzie. I don’t love this either, but it’s an improvement in the sense that it gives Zoe grounds to feel that Sirena is corrupting her own kids with her slacking.
Other new notes/aspirations/doubts
There’s no true strong “inciting incident” that ends act one and forces the story to “start” (the discovery of the van is a stand-in). This might not be an issue in the end–a lot of slacker movies don’t have a strong inciting incident–but it doesn’t feel ideal.
Right now the conflicting desire (sense of responsibility toward her community) that drives Sirena to change her mind at different parts of the story isn’t clear. We have Sirena agree to go on a job interview and later take a job with Zoe, but these are based on impassioned speeches and vague threats by Zoe, which is a weak way to turn people’s minds in a story. Gotta figure out a more credible pressure to acquiesce.
There’s a couple scenes involving a neighborhood priest which right now stick out like a sore thumb. They’re in there because a friend suggested the idea of someone evangelizing work while not quite believing in it and I like it, so I’m still trying to make it work. But if I can’t make it fit more seamlessly in later drafts, I’ll have to drop it.
If they indeed join a commune of squatters, this commune can’t be introduced in act three. Right now, I seed them when introducing the van, but right now that’s placeholder and weak as hell.
Act III is still extremely placeholder and disconnected from the rest of the story. I’m not even pretending otherwise. MAJOR THIRD ACT PROBLEMS!
Except I do like the last two scenes as a payoff for a lot of themes that I have in mind, and some of the details that are seeded in acts one and two.
Those of you that actually read through these updates are the most hardcore BQE aficionados. I salute you. And, as always, I’m all ears for any suggestions, feedback, criticism, or even for more involved collaboration if you’re feeling it.
Thank you for your support and readership!
Love it all, L. Vago. The "total knowledge" of a character seems off to me...because we humans are not always predictable or self-consistent. Keep it up, my friend!