A Writer’s Notebook: writers talk writing

Screenwriter/playwright Justin Cooper on character development and intricate plotting

From: Samuel Snoek-Brown

To: Justin Cooper

Subject: Questions about stuff

Date: 02 Dec 2002

Howdy, my friendly guru of human literature:

I have for you a question. OK, two questions.

1. You have this profound grasp of human beings and what makes them work inside—somehow, you put forth a character and, with no words behind it, his or her whole history is evident. These characters of yours have not literary depth but actual depth—they breathe. How the hell do you do this? Seriously. I get lucky once in a while; I have real people in stories sometimes, but only because they existed already and just moved in to inhabit my fiction—verbal squatters, if you will. I’m genuinely curious if you have some technique or some trick-o-the-trade to finding these real people. How do you invite them in?
2. You also have an even more profound gift for plot complexity, something you can’t deny controlling. How you manage to draw these great looping circles and ellipses and spirals of storylines and still manage to draw them all together and wind up in a single, meaningful place, I cannot yet understand, but I know you have some trick there. What’s it? Gimme. Cough it up. 🙂

I’m in this strange place right now where I need to push forward, advance my craft. I’m toying with the idea of more grad school, so that’ll help some, but until (assuming) I get there, I’m stuck. Not without ideas or without the drive to write—no such thing as writer’s block—but I’m in the same place. Writing about the same stuff. Using the same bag of tricks.

And your tricks must be badass, because so is your work.

Any brilliant ideas? And not-so-brilliant ideas? Any perfectly lame ideas?

[…]

Peace and happy holidays… Sam the Stagnant Writer

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From: Justin Cooper

To: Samuel Snoek-Brown

Subject: Of pens, plotstrings and other things.

Date: 05 Dec 2002

Hey Sam, how goes it?

I must admit, I checked my email not long after Thanksgiving and saw your missive, but I had to ruminate on it for a few days before I could form a cogent reply. This may be proven wrong if you deem what follows as drivel, but hey, at least it’s drivel that took some time to forge.

Firstly, thanks tremendously for the kind words, and please know that this respect runs both ways; I’ve very much enjoyed what little of yours to which I’ve had access, be it through old copies of The Muse or through the partial novella you let me peruse. It’s an unjust world in which we aren’t literary iconoclasts, if only because it would allow us to use the word ‘iconoclast’ more without such risk of mockery. As pleasant as it was to know I’ve got an ally willing to read my stuff and critique it wholly (rather than the “that’s great, go with it!” fluff from much of my family and friends) as a receptive audience, your accolades also put me on the spot to say something truly helpful here, if not profound. I mean, I can’t exactly respond to an entreaty this glowing with “Practice! Study three-act structure!” without risking your sending me a virulent email worm. Nor would I fault you for it.

A couple of things came to mind as I read your email, but the more I thought about them, the more it seemed too specific; I didn’t want to send a self-serving primer on How To Write One of Justin’s Scripts. Of course, this was followed by an epiphany (don’t worry, I had some paper towels nearby) in the form of my realizing how technically unqualified I am. This was a more pleasant revelation than it sounds. Being a starving bohemian, I can’t really hold myself as an oracle of how to generally write; I can only discuss my own experiences as anything approaching knowledgeable.

See what I just did there? Following that previous paragraph of almost complete dense nothingness, whatever I follow it with will seem positively ingenious! Keen!

Your first question, regarding characters and their inhabiting a personality, left me thinking for quite some time. A good friend from high school once flippantly remarked that a story of mine had “your typical tragic ending” or something to that effect, which stuck with me for years mainly because of its bald truth. Not limited to the ending, my stuff is generally rooted in loss, and melancholy; without sounding too terribly like a pretentious ar-teest, I think I can identify more with that side of the human experience, and it bleeds into my characters. I maintain, hopefully without arrogance, that the best character I ever created was Kenneth Larsen; the reason people identified with him was because of the tangibility (a word?) of his sense of inherited loss; he had come to fear human contact because of his size and unconscious strength, and had forfeited most of his formative years in learning that fear. He’d developed somewhat of a Frankenstein’s Monster psyche, from not only his size and strength but also due to the perception he knew others carried toward him, that of a monstrous murderous brute, a sociopath bull in a china shop. After spending quite awhile devising the hole that this poor guy’s life had dug him into, I went about sending him a rope with which to climb out. His interaction with Dr. Morgan provided an intellectual friend who didn’t look down on him and who could elicit a relaxed conversation without judgment passed; his romance with Rachel re-introduced him to the idea of intimate human contact, and that it wasn’t necessarily forbidden to him.

What I’m driving at here, in my most characteristically roundabout of ways, is that most of my (good, worth-a-damn) characters are defined and rounded by their adversities. This may seem elementary, but no collection of words can seem humanized on paper unless we meet them with a clear idea of what they’ve been through to get them here, however gradually revealed that idea may be. In Ingram I lifted the character of Emerson wholesale from my own morbid dance with Cancer and how it’s changed my glance at the frivolity of much of the world. The script I’m working on now has a female catalyst for much of the mayhem which passes for its narrative; for her character, I basically dredged up the most misogynist side of my thoughts, however mild or hypothetical or derided, and made them true for her.

Essentially, this Tolstoy-esque tidbit comes down to this; no one identifies with some mindless Steven Seagal vehicle because there’s nothing human to work with there. Yeah, I could go enroll in a martial arts class for several years, and then sit and eat lots of cream cheese bagels to round out a nicely Rubenesque ass, but I still wouldn’t know Steven Seagal. As unfortunate as it is for my outlook on life while I’m writing, my best stuff comes from holding a mirror up to the fallibility and the regret of the regular Joe. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all, but if I have to call something “my secret” with writing, I suppose that’s it.

Your second query, regarding the plot complexity, was far easier to ponder as I consider it to be the most fun part of writing, the part I most look forward to. The first part is always about covering your ass, never getting so cute with time-trickery and fractured narrative as to leave gaping continuity errors. Nothing takes me out of a flick sooner than when some hotshot decides he’s going to make the next Pulp Fiction but forgets to make it cohesive from one thread to the next, to the point that it wouldn’t work strung out ‘in the right order.’ When people ask how long it took me to write Ingram, I always hesitate; see, I wrote the script in twelve days, which sounds oh so impressive until I chase it with the fact that I spent nearly three MONTHS prewriting and plotting, filling several legal pads with very careful notes about where each character was at what time of day, whether he could make it to appear in this story thread after having been in this other one fourteen minutes earlier, whether someone’s mood stays consistent from 1:15 PM to 1:30 PM, even when I show the audience 1:30 PM first. It’s a convoluted dance, and potentially the most frustrating part of my ‘brand’, if you will, of manufactured complexity. But hot damn, call ahead and have ‘em put dinner on for you when you finally solve the puzzle, because it’s an immeasurable feeling of eureka.

That was perhaps the worst of my stable of colloquialisms, in that last sentence. Won’t happen again, and I’ll understand if you deleted the email before reading this far.

The other neat little trick I like to employ, even just as a general prewriting activity, is to look at the basic story I’m telling as a straight line, with every major and minor player representing points on that line. I really get a kick out of looking at what happens after the line ends, after the ‘movie’ ends, or seeing where things stand before everything hits the fan in the beginning. It comes down to finding a perspective from which to view your story that you hadn’t considered before, and just playing with it, whether it’s something that you’ll end up using in the final version or if you just want to explore your own world. Say, for instance, you’ve got a story about a cop who has almost apprehended the criminal he’s been chasing forever, and has a chance to shoot the guy dead during a chase through a crowd. The cop is just about to drill him, but our savvy criminal weaves through human traffic and veers just behind an elderly man who has a horrifying glimpse of his own mortality as he sees a cop running toward him, appearing to point a gun at his head. Now, our hero and villain move on to continue their chase as they were, but what of this little old man? How is he changed by this experience, this rude inclusion into someone else’s drama? Had he done something to give a reason to legitimately fear an apprehending cop? Has he been neglectful to his wife, and is renewed in his appreciation for what he thought he’d lost in that split second? Did he recognize in the eyes of the cop a drive to succeed and a desperation at narrow failure that signified life, making the old man question what passes for his life now? Was he subconsciously looking for a way to check out, and is surprised at his own feeling of dismay that he wasn’t accidentally shot?

Now, of course, is where I’d go wildly overboard with the connections from this old man to other seemingly random bits of the story, which is fine. You know you’ll be able to pare it back later, and it’s fun to do. The old man didn’t recognize the criminal as the man who broke into his house and stole the old man’s life savings, making the old man consider the suicidal idea that he almost realized on that cop’s gun barrel. Or the old man used to be a cop, long long ago, before he had to leave in disgrace after accidentally shooting the wrong person in a very similar chase, and is haunted by the fervor he saw in the cop’s eye. Or the criminal masterminded every step of the chase, even down to the choreography of putting the old man between he and the cop’s gun, all because the old man sneeringly denied him the loan that would have allowed him to buy a house for his wife and child, avoiding this life of crime in which he’s found himself.

You get the idea. After you’re done playing with it, you’ll start to see what works and what doesn’t, and much of the ‘complexity’ sort of comes automatically from that winnowing process. Before you know it you’ve got what appears to be a massively intricate world of interconnected lives, often in ways even they aren’t aware, and it all stemmed from just playing around with your own story. In extreme cases, your story may be revealed as somewhat irrelevant to the much larger picture you end up creating, as these human tapestries have a way of being. And your tale mutates into something wholly different, and before you know it, your juices are flowing to work on this new idea.

And there’s my fount of knowledge. It’s kinda sad to see the entire bag of tricks upon which my work is born laid bare in a handful of paragraphs. Ah well, at least it’s less expensive than listening to Robert McKee talk for three hours about three-act structure. If it’s of any help at all to you, I’m glad to have done what I can. If you read it, nod, and remark to yourself how stunningly many words it takes me to convey so stunningly little, then… um… I’m glad to have done what I can.

[…]

Talk to you,

Justin, In A Whiff of Either Pretension or Aging Dairy Products

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