Speaker 1: Film Courage We took a break for a moment and off-camera you said something about character and dialogue and how you help your students and how in some ways they are the same thing in some ways. Adam Yeah, so I talked about this sort of more globally in the creative integration video that people can go back that I did for you guys a couple of years ago. I'll give a little more specifics. So this is a little more specifics on the intuitive training and there will be a practical test that people can take at the end to see where they are at. So when I work with someone, especially someone who needs to improve on their characters and dialogue and I'm going to short stroke this a little bit because you can go back to the creative integration video for a full explanation of the conceptual and the intuitive. But often the conceptual brain is very focused on what other people think, fear of rejection, wanting it to be good and it's controlling. And that can be helpful and certainly when we're doing story design we want to design stories that are going to be really engaging to other people, we want to be aware of how people are seeing our scripts. So the conceptual brain is a really important part in this. But the intuitive brain is where our authenticity comes from, our emotional authenticity and the intuitive brain doesn't have a past, present or future, it just has a now. And so the first part of when I'm working with someone to get them better at characters and dialogue, the first thing is to train them through dedicated practice to be able to turn off the conceptual brain and just work from a pure intuitive space. And the metaphor I would give them is imagine it sounds crazy but you ride your horse to work so that's how you get to work and you have to get to work in half an hour and your horse likes to wander and wants to go grazing and look at waterfalls but you have to control the horse because you've got to get to work and you make sure that your horse gets you to work in half an hour. In this metaphor you the rider are the conceptual brain and the horse is the intuitive part of us. And so the first thing is to release and surrender control to the horse and let the horse go wherever the horse wants to go and don't control it and don't even judge it. It's almost like you just get off the horse and for this day the horse can do whatever it wants. And so training people and this is the hardest part of the training and it can take weeks, it can take a month or two but it's literally learning how to just get a prompt and just immediately start writing without any ideas of story, without any control, without any editing. It's just letting that intuitive instinct take over and just go wherever it goes. And it's like a dream in that it doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to be interesting, it just has to be authentic and real. And I really stress non-performance writing, no one is going to read this. So to warm up I have people do journaling, they'll journal for 15 or 20 minutes because when we're journaling, especially if no one reads our journals, what do we navigate toward? We're not trying to be a good writer or an interesting writer, we're just trying to navigate towards the truth, we're trying to find our truth, we're exploring a topic or maybe just writing about how we feel. And that's non-performance writing as opposed to when we fire up Final Draft or whatever software we use, it's like I'm going to write something and people are going to read it and they're going to judge it and by default they're going to judge me or it certainly feels that way. So this first level of training is learning how to turn off the conceptual brain and literally it's like trance-like writing. You eventually get to the place where you could do this for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes and when you're done you don't even remember what you wrote. It's just completely authentic, intuitive, lead writing. So that's the first step. I mean that's not getting you to great characters and dialogue but that's the first step on the journey. To use another metaphor I would say it's like if I was teaching someone yoga but they were so non-limber they couldn't even get down to the floor, this first phase is just getting down to the floor. It's not actual yoga but it's getting someone so they can get down to the floor. So that's the first phase and it's the hardest phase for most writers. So when they get to a point where they can write no judging, no editing, completely intuitive, surrender control of the horse and just trance-like writing then we go to the second phase. And the second phase is I'm going to teach them how to write from a really, really provocative emotional feeling, an autobiographical event like the best, most wonderful…when their child was born or when their father died. I mean we're talking like primal moments and I'm going to train them how to write in a way where they let the feeling that they're feeling, this emotion, lead the writing. And they're going to do it to the point and keep practicing until myself or someone else when they read these pages they can feel what the writer felt. So it's now an energy transference, an emotional transference. To be able to really engage us with characters and dialogue you're going to have to be able to do this. Now there are people listening to this who don't need any training to do this. They are very deep intuitives. They absolutely can do this right now without any training. But there are people that need structured training to get to this point where they can let go of their control, ego, mind, work from a pure intuitive space and write in a way where people can feel what they feel. Then we go to phase three. And in phase three there are techniques to start to discover actual characters and you interview these characters, you spend time with these characters and there are a bunch of play exercises until the character will take over. And what will happen is you can start writing and you put the character in some situation and they just do what they would do and they just say what they would say and they are driving it. You're not. You have no agenda. Now maybe what the character is doing or saying isn't particularly interesting, might not make for a great story but the character is doing what they do and saying what they would say. The next phase is learning how to write where what the character is feeling the reader can feel. So now we can emotionally bond and connect with the character. We can feel what they are feeling. That's really powerful and again some writers naturally do this and some writers naturally don't do anything close to this but through this training they can get there. Then the next phase is we will find another character that they spend time doing this training with. So they will eventually have two characters that they always know what that character would do, they always know what that character would say and they have surrendered control to the characters. We will put the characters in a certain situation, a certain basic conflict and they very slowly will go back and forth writing it from inside each character. So this character would do that. What would this character do? Well what would this character do in response? And now the characters are creating what happens. Now again maybe what's happening is really compelling and riveting, maybe it's not, maybe it's really boring, it doesn't matter. It's the characters doing what the characters would do in interaction with each other. And so ultimately and here's something that someone can do right now if they want to test their ability. This is where I would say someone comes out the other end earning their intuitive merit badge so to speak. So ultimately where we want to get to is organic story structure which is a term that is used a lot but not often really understood. So the way I would define it is organic means everything the characters do it feels like they would really do it. Everything the character says feels like they would really say it. There is never a moment where you see the hand of the writer. There is never a moment where it feels inorganic. There is never a moment where a character is doing a preordained plot point or a character is doing something or saying something because the writer wanted them to do or say this to drive the story forward a certain way. That's organic. Story structure means everything that's happening is the most compelling choice from a story point of view and the story keeps getting more and more interesting. It's really hard for writers to do both, to do organic story structure because in the best scripts, the scripts that can change a writer's life, you read the script and you never see the hand of the writer, it never feels inorganic. It just feels like these characters, these are real people, they all have a unique voice, they are all saying what they would say, they are all doing what they would do and it's never boring. It is just captivatingly interesting and it gets more and more interesting. That's the holy grail. When a writer can do that, they are the needle in the haystack that the industry is looking for. Everyone will want to meet that writer and work with that writer. So the first step I would tell people and this is what we're talking about with this question is the organic. So let's take story structure off the table. So with organic, what I would tell someone is this is how we know you've successfully come through the end of this training. Or sometimes writers will come to me and I'm like you seem like you have really strong intuitive skillsets. Maybe you don't need to do this training, let's test where you're at. So this is what I would have them do. I would have them take two or three characters that they know, they love these characters, these characters have unique voices, they know exactly what these characters would do or say. And we're going to put them into a conflict, a situation and they're going to write, it's not going to be a full script. It's not going to be a whole pilot or a feature. We don't need to do that. Let's say 25 pages and what I task the writer with doing is just let the characters do whatever they would do and say whatever they would say. Don't worry if it's interesting. Don't worry about context and it being funny or dramatic. It could be boring. It just has to be completely organic and when you're done we're going to take these 25 pages and we're going to give it to five or six people that you trust and you're going to give each of them a red marker and you're going to explain what you did and you're going to say I know this sounds crazy but I don't care if what you're reading is interesting, I don't care if it's boring, I don't care if it's illogical. All I care about is it 100% organic. Do all the characters speak with a unique voice? Do the characters all the time feel like they're doing what they would really do, saying what they would really say? If there is ever a moment where you're like I'm not sure I believe the character would have said that or I don't know if the character was motivated to say that or felt the force that they did that or felt like you were controlling or any of that mark it, circle it red, put a red mark on it. It's okay again if it's completely boring, we're going for organic. And if you get the seven drafts back without any red lines you have your Intuitive Merit badge which means you are capable of organic. Now you're not going to take those 25 pages and go out to the marketplace with it but you can do organic. Then and this will be a longer conversation for another day, then you have to train yourself on story structure and then it's a matter of putting the two together to have organic story structure. But in terms of character and dialogue going through those stages and coming out where you can be fully organic is a huge move forward because now when someone reads your script they're going to feel like these are real people and the dialogue is going to feel real and these characters are going to have emotional inner lives and we're going to believe each of the characters. That's the first part. Then when you can do that integrated with story design, with story structure, then you get to those magical scripts where everything is organic and authentic and the story absolutely grabs our attention, holds our attention and delivers us somewhere that exceeds our expectations. I have seen the challenge that a lot of people make is they try to learn to do all of that at once and it's really difficult. It's like trying to bowl when you have that 10-4 split where the two pins are as far apart and if you try to with one ball knock both pins down. So what I train people to do is just focus on organic, just be able to nail that. Then sort of the peak in how I train writers in the workshops, we'll also train people to just do story structure with like puppets. It can be inorganic where you know how to design the most compelling story even if it's completely inorganic and feels like you're controlling the characters. That's okay. We're not going to take that and show it to anyone in the industry, this is all training. But then when you can do story structure and then you can do organic or you can do organic and then you can do story structure, then I can teach you how to put the two together where they integrate. So I always teach these separately.