Short Attention Span

The Oscars are my Super Bowl, it's true.  Yesterday, the IFC Center in NY began its screening of the 2010 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts, a showcase of all five nominated films from around the world. 


Here's why shorts are important.  

1.  Concise writing is good writing.  Boiling story down to its core, it’s simple essence.  Studying good short films can teach how to find the importance and cut through all the stuff we don’t need in six, twelve, twenty minutes. 

Eight basic rules.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote some of the most unforgettable novels that blend satire, literary fiction and sci-fi in a relatable, humorous, and human way. These eight basic rules of creative writing are from the foreword to his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box. 

1.  Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2.  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3.  Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4.  Every sentence [line of dialogue, bit of action] must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5.  Start as close to the end as possible.

6.  Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7.  Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8.  Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.

While these are rules for short stories, they are really helpful to keep in mind for all storytelling.  I give these rules to my beginning screenwriting student on the first day of class.   Nos. 3, 5, and 6 are the most important to keep in mind, and are three things my students should measure their scripts and the scripts of their peers by.

Also, check out this:  15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will.  Great inspiration to use as prompts for freewriting.

Structure is your friend.

It is there to help you tell your story in the best way possible. Simply, structure is choosing what the audience knows and when they know it in order to maximize dramatic effect.  The question you need to always be asking is, “Does it work for my story?”

You can’t talk about structure without talking about plot.  Plot is the most important feature of story.  Something needs to happen.  Two friends sitting at a bar talking is boring, (and if I wanted to watch that, I’d go to the bar.)  These two friends can start out talking at the bar, but then what?  All stories must have a beginning, middle, and an end.  (Aristotle said that.)  All good stories have a conflict and a resolution, because audiences want something to happen and they want whatever happened to affect a change. 

Most screenplays are organized into a three-act structure.  It’s a tradition of storytelling that comes from theatre and is easily identifiable (and expected) by audiences. Audiences like to feel safe.  Structure is safety.  You want your story to be full of compelling surprises.  You want to make your audience think and figure things out.  They should not be confused by the way in which you present to story to them.  

You may be thinking, "To hell with convention.  I'm going to do things how I want to do them.  I'm original!"  Great, yes.  But be original with your story, characters, complexities of the character, not the frame you choose to tell it in.  It's like the frame of a house.  You should not build it with honey and sponges, it won't be sound.  Build a solid frame and then, add your honey and sponges, create your bizarre reality around this backbone that you can trust to stand up on its own. 

If the dependable structure is there supporting even the most complex, unreal plot, your audience will have a better chance to not only follow along, but to believe your story because they trust the way it's being presented. Even a films like Memento, and The Science of Sleep follows the structure.  Lost, with all it's subplots, flashbacks, physics, and time-traveling follows a structure in each episode and in the series as a whole.