Mastering Story-Breaking: Insights from Breaking Bad's Writers' Room (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: What you're looking at here is a still from a time-lapse video of the writers' room on Breaking Bad, and it's showing the show's writers in the middle of breaking a story. Check out that video because you'll find it interesting. Now what these writers are doing is creating and interweaving the multiple storylines for an episode brick by brick. This is how the show's creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan, shown standing here, very aptly describes it. He also says that 75% of the writing of Breaking Bad was done in this room in the story-breaking process, which I can really agree with because it's exactly what I've done a lot of time in television. So what's the point of this? What are they doing here? Okay, so the benefit of breaking a story into beats is to minimize rewrites so as to save time and money while maximizing quality because it gives you extraordinary control. It gives the writers just amazing control of the story issues, and for my own part, as I say, having learned how to create and interweave storylines is, I'm sure, what permits me to explain multiple nonlinear and flashback story structure because I've learned how to create separate plots and interweave multiple plotlines. So if you're interested in nonlinear and flashback, you'll need to learn beat theory too, which is what this course is really about. Now, planning each episode this way is usually done by a group of writers, although if you're working on your own, you'll have to do it too. And time-wise, it can take as much as 10 days to two weeks. You know, on your own, it will take you longer. It's depending on how many episodes you do in the one sitting and so on. There are various ways of doing it, but essentially, this is what we do. If you look at the photo on the left, you can see the partially constructed episode being broken up using index cards on a notice board, each of which is listing a beat, which is a step in the story. Now, notice the gaps in the board and how scenes at the end have been put in while the start of the episode is still incomplete, but the shape of the episode is starting to come together. So the episode is being constructed from the outside in, going in from the big picture into the detail, which is how painters work. You know, they get a general shape and they go into the detail. Now, note this, because many people who teach script writing for films suggest starting at the beginning of the story and just making the story up in linear form as you go, essentially. To my mind, this is an ideal, since it locks you into a story before you really know where you're going. Much better, I think, is going from the big picture in to the detail. I think it's most productive. And in TV, it's usually what's done. It's usually what's done so that, well, really for the sake of the scene breakdown, which I'm going to explain later, the scene breakdown. So what's the big deal about this? Why is this being done? It's about professional survival. The reality is that if you want to write for TV, whether you're writing on your own show or creating your own material, but you don't know precisely what these writers in the video are doing, or you aren't confident that you can walk into that room and sit down and contribute along with everyone else, that you'd know everything that they're thinking about, everything that they're doing, well, you do need to learn and you need to do it as a matter of urgency. You know, TV is the realm of multiple protagonists and multiple storylines that must be created and interwoven at speed and within very, very specific parameters determined by budget, actor availability, and allocated screen time, and so on. I'll talk about that later in detail. Creating the story is really the essence of it. It's how you do it, and unfortunately, if your script writing training is all about creating one protagonist on a single linear journey, it's not going to help you. Speed plotting and interweaving is the job in TV. TV is a business, and if you can't do that job, sadly, you're liable to lose it. So the good news and the bad news. The good news about all of this is that learning how to break a story is a life changer. I've said this. I really want to say this because it gives you a degree of quality, control, and speed that is just extraordinary, and it permits you to write non-linear multi-films in TV, as I've said, and crucially, it permits you to take on last-minute gigs and do quality work, right, survival, so that you're sought after by producers and you can make a living as a pro. It's a survival skill. Now, the bad news is that breaking a story is difficult. It's counterintuitive, so you need to learn it, and I'll explain beats, and I'll give you practice, which is essential.