Hand Waving & The Gun In the Drawer

ON THE PROJECT I'm deepest into now, we've reached a point where we have an overall arc for the episodes. We're still adjusting on the fly as we write outlines, because that's what you do, and also because good ideas keep coming and you want to integrate them.

The show has a complicated weave, and a lot of different things to track. One of the most challenging things about it is tracking what the audience knows when. In some cases, the audience is ahead of our characters, but there are some key facts that the audience doesn't know -- that they won't know (hopefully) until we reveal it to them.

That requires a deft touch, because the contstruction issues are daunting. There's a lot of choices you have to make just because of the demands of the form. For instance, you need to play time cuts, because you have anywhere from 41 to 47 minutes to tell your story. (We're writing for 47 and I think it's still tight.) You also have to play the story in such a way that you never see the conversation where the characters learn information that the audience already knows -- because that's dull for the audience and objectively you don't have the space.

Yet there's no getting around the fact that there's a whole lot of hand-waving in TV drama. People having conversations to convey exposition, people talking, talking, talking -- you try to make it as interesting as possible, but when you compare a standard TV show which shoots anywhere from 6 to 10 pages a day with a movie that shoots 1/2 to 1 1/2 pages, you can see that the scenes you pump out are just going to be different.

Right now one of the things we're working through is how you hide the solution, or hide the twist.

A lot of the hand waving that comes in tv writing is the writer's attempt to get you to pay attention to something here, while we try to slip something past you there.

There's an old theater saying, which I'll paraphrase, which basically amounts to, "If you put a gun in the drawer in the first act, it has to go off in the third."

That seems self-evident, but the truth behind it is this: you have to get that gun in the drawer in the first act, then get the audience to forget about it so that by the time someone goes for it in the third, it is a surprise on some level -- even though the audience supposedly knew it was there.

See? The game of chicken we play with viewers is this: we're going to show you stuff. And if you pay attention in the right places and make the right connections, you'll figure this out way before we show it to you. But we're betting you won't.

When, as writers, you win this game of chicken, people are entertained.

When you lose, people figure it out too early, and they say that your story was boring and predictable.

So why hide the shit at all? Why show the gun? Why not have it come as a total surprise?

Well, here's where it gets really nasty, chickens. If you just have the gun, or the murderer, or the secret rune or the letters of transit come out of nowhere, without setting them up, then it's a deus ex machina ending, and the audience will feel cheated and hate you -- way, way more than if you had crafted a predictable story.

Psychology is fun, isn't it?

Working back from your reveal, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to figure out how to leave clues that won't be obvious, but will add up to something meaningful. This is where throwing red herrings come in, too. You tease the audience, you lead them down a couple of paths, some false, some true. And hopefully, by the time you take the gun out, it's a surprise.

A lot of the time this is going to involve coincidence. All stories are based on coincidence in some way. Cinderella happens to drop the glass slipper on the stair as she leaves the ball, and it doesn't turn back into a rat or whatever so Prince Charming can find her. That's lucky, isn't it? Pretty coincidental.

In a romantic comedy, of COURSE the two characters run into each other after a year in the same cafe in New York. There are people I dated who live less than a kilometer from me and I never, ever run into them, but sure, why not. Cafe. New York. Sure.

The basic rule is that your story can weather some degree of coincidence, so long as that coincidence does not provide the solution to your story. (I think I wrote about this before once.)

What I'm finding now is, another way to think about it is: you have to get that coincidence as far away from your solution as possible.

If someone meets someone in passing who will become important in the end, that's coincidence, sure, but it's forgiveable. But the closer you get to the end, the less that coincidence will hold up to scrutiny, the more forced it will feel, and the more chance you have that the audience will reject it or figure you out too early.

You have to make peace with coincidence, and have a clear internal sense of how much is too much. (If you're like me, CRASH is too much. And yes, I know, that was the point.)

When you're giving notes on a friend's script, it's not enough to point out coincidence or a convenient story twist. You really have to drill down and ask yourself, "is this an acceptable coincidence, or are you asking the audience for so much here that it will threaten suspension of disbelief?"

I know writers who won't accept any coincidence in their stories, and almost universally, this results in flat storytelling that has way too much exposition, or much character histrionics that disguise the fact that there isn't a lot of forward plot momentum.

Unfortunately, coincidence and its proper use can often be the motor oil that keeps the gears of your story working. Remove it entirely, and you're left with an inert substance. To mix a metaphor, coincidence is like baking powder. A little goes a really long way.