Genreville

At long last, FILM CRIT HULK has come out with his amazing Screenwriting 101 piece! (It’s actually two pieces because you can’t fit that much awesome in one blog post.) It starts like this:

A GOOD NARRATIVE IS COMPELLING TO THE AUDIENCE, ECONOMICALLY TOLD, FEELS REAL EITHER IN TERMS OF EMOTION, DETAIL, OR TEXTURE, AND SPEAKS TO SOME THEMATIC TRUTH THAT YOU RECOGNIZE IN YOURSELF OR THE WORLD AT LARGE.

And it goes on like this:

HULK WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT YOU IMPLICITLY KNOW STORIES. YOU KNOW THEM IN YOUR BONES. YOU’VE SEEN / READ / HEARD THOUSANDS. YOU, NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, INSTINCTIVELY KNOW WHAT MAKES STORIES GOOD AND HOW THEY WORK.

THE KEY IS BECOMING AWARE OF WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW.

And then it gets better. Even the casual asides are brilliant insights:

BASICALLY YOU WANT TO HAVE THIS VERY RELATE-ABLE TEXTURE OR CONTEXT WHICH LETS THE AUDIENCE SAY “I TOTALLY RECOGNIZE AND SYMPATHIZE WITH THAT INCLINATION!” (NOTICE HULK SAID INCLINATION AND NOT “SITUATION” BECAUSE PEOPLE MAKE THAT MISTAKE. IT’S THE EMOTIONS WE IDENTIFY WITH, NOT THE PREDICAMENT.)

If you work with stories in any capacity–including as a member of the audience–set aside some time to read these posts. They are a serious master class in how to get it right, from inspiration to perspiration to exasperation to culmination, and not to be missed.

I do have one quibble, though, with this:

IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS WRITING CHARACTERS OF DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS? HERE’S A TIP: IF YOU’RE WHITE AND YOU’RE WRITING A BUNCH OF WHITE PEOPLE. TRY JUST SUDDENLY CHANGING THE RACE OF ONE OR MORE OF THE CHARACTERS. THEN CHANGE NOTHING ELSE… PROBLEM SOLVED.

Problem not at all solved! “Just changing the race” is the equivalent of blackface, or saying “I don’t see race because we’re all the same really”. An adult character who has benefited from white privilege is going to think and speak and act differently from an adult character who has not. If you turn your white male Ivy League student into a black female Ivy League student or a Chinese–Jewish trans Ivy League student or a Lenape two-spirit Ivy League student, they may still take the same classes, but they bring along an entirely different set of memories and expectations and emotional baggage.

Casting people of color in traditionally white roles, or women in traditionally male roles, is interesting precisely because we know this, because the same dialogue is really not at all the same when it comes out of a different mouth. (cf. Jo Walton’s Among Others and the brief discussion of a production of “The Tempest” with a woman playing Prospero.) I agree that if you have already written a bunch of white characters, and then you go through and make them nonwhite and reread what you’ve written, it’s a great way to challenge your own preconceptions and get yourself thinking about what makes a character well-rounded and how to avoid stereotypes and so on–but that makes it a useful exercise, which is not at all the same as being a good method.

HULK has promised to write a whole column about this. I hope it’s a good deal more nuanced.