Building A Story One Brick at a Time

Last week I was contacted by a woman who stumbled over my website and wanted to see if I could convert her life’s story into a screenplay. At the very least I was heartened by the fact that someone out there must be reading these things, but an added bonus was that the story actually sounded interesting. Her pitch was at least compelling enough to get me to drive out to Carol Stream, and this is from a guy who considers anything west of Cicero Avenue or north of Howard Street to be practically another country. And I’m not even going to get started on the South Side; that’s another planet.

The commute out on the Eisenhower Expressway reminded me again of why I don’t drive to the suburbs, but I ended up spending more than four hours with this lady, her son and nephew, listening to her tell her tale. Since we’re still in negotiations about how to go forward, I can’t really talk a lot about the story, but it involves a Capone era Chicago gangster with plot twists that encompass everything from the FBI to JFK. It’s a hell of a story, rich in history and intrigue. I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be driving out there again soon.

Actually, this woman has at least four or five stories, and that’s the problem. She started talking and if I hadn’t had another appointment she would have kept on until midnight. She’s in her early nineties, and, as she said, “all I’ve got left is my mind and my big mouth.” She’s quite gal.

When a writer is confronted with a project that involves distilling some huge epic down into a one hundred and twenty page screen play, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. What story am I trying to tell, after all? Is this the story of the woman, of her father, of her father’s associations, of his gangland style murder, of Chicago in the early twentieth century with the all the gambling and whores and bootlegging that that era was infamous for? I have to choose.

Most stories are like that in some respect. When a writer attempts to construct a narrative that spans years, or even only weeks or days, there’s only so much you can use. Choices have to be made about what to include and what to omit. One of the basic mistakes that many a writer makes is to try to tell too much. It’s an often fatal mistake because then you lose control of your story. Once that happens you can be sure you’re going to lose your audience as well.

In his philosophical tour de force, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author Robert M. Pirsig writes about a student that he encountered while he was teaching at Montana State University, Bozeman. He instructed his class to submit a topic for a five hundred word essay and one young lady responded that she wanted to write about the United States. Obviously trying to boil the story of the U.S. down to five hundred words is a formidable task. Not surprisingly, the girl returned in frustration; the topic was so large that she couldn’t think of where to start.

Pirsig thought about it and he told her to try again, but this time to just write about Bozeman. Still no luck. Then he told her to write about just the main street of the town. Nothing again. In frustration, he flippantly told her to write about the face of the Bozeman Opera House, starting with the upper left-hand brick. She came back the next morning with five thousand words.

When you’re trying to tell a big story, it’s important to determine exactly where to begin and where to end. It’s not that you don’t have enough material, it’s that you have way too much. No matter what you’re trying to do, at base you’re still trying to tell a story. It has to have a narrative arc; a beginning, middle and end. There have to be character arcs there too, and the narrative has to have a shape that the audience can understand and respond to. Whether your story is a straight ahead crime noir entertainment or an expansive biography, it’s still a story and it has to look like one on the page.

This project is going to require a lot of time spent listening to a woman who’s had an exotic life. Obviously, she’s going to want to tell me everything. And, of course, I can’t use everything. I’ll only be able to use a fraction of what she has to tell. It’s in deciding what to tell that the success or failure of the project will rest. Because, if I don’t make the right decisions, if I don’t take control of the project early on and drive it in a manner that makes sense, it will be a waste of everyone’s time. Time is something that none of us can afford to waste.

I think this is going to be a story about a woman’s relationship with her father, and how that relationship formed the basis for everything else that was to happen in her life. It’s about how someone who seems venal, violent and corrupt from one point of view could appear benevolent, charming and larger than life from another. It’s about the relative nature of sin and the nature of revenge and atonement. It’s a story about a life.

Next week I’ll talk about how I intend to attack this saga; this week I’m going to determine that approach. My goal is that when I go to sell this thing, I’ll know my angle inside and out. The future of the project will rest on how I spin the story, how I condense it and which points I decide to emphasize. These are critical decisions. After all, if Capra had gone to the studios pitching a film about a drunken loser who never escapes from his hometown and eventually gives up on all his dreams, he probably never would have gotten the deal to make It’s A Wonderful Life.

— Ric Hess, Jun 16, 05:01 PM

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