The Note that Kills

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE I'm in the middle of the second complete re-draft of an outline, and I've only seen the four feet around my computer for about two days, but I was thinking a lot about notes. From other writers, from network execs, from whoever might be reading.

There are notes that are good and bad, as we've heard before. The one truly excruciating, where is my .22 note that writers get is the truly evil "DB" (for "Do Better." Wow. Thanks Brainiac.)

But there's another kind of note (and here I want to stress that I'm not talking about my current outline or circumstances, merely that the process calls back all the evil notes of outlines past -- kind of how the smell of cooling tollhouse chocolate chip cookies makes one think of random gunplay, the smell of sulphur, burning chlorine in the nose and the salty taste of children's tears. Wait. What? Really? Wow, that day camp I went to as a kid sucked, dude. For reals.) that kind of powers them all in terms of determining if you have a good story or not.

First of all -- everyone is bad at reading outlines. If it was up to me, you wouldn't send em. Networks would approve a verbal pitch and then see an early draft. Outlines would be for internal use only. They're hard, because they're neither fish nor fowl. If a script is a blueprint for a finished TV show, then what the mighty F is an outline? A napkin? A notional approximation in prose of the final script? So, like, a scale model of the skyscraper built of spam rather than concrete and steel?

Yeah, not getting the aesthetics off that one, dude.

Anyway, in script, in life, in outline, clarity is important. You will often get notes asking for something to be made more clear. And nine times out of ten that's the right note.

But here's the thing...

There's clear, and then there's clear. Sometimes, the point of the scene is to get the audience to the point where you are confused. You don't know what's going on, necessarily. Or what you thought was happening, isn't. This is good. This confusion breeds curiosity. It might seem troubling on the page, but the question to ask is, "is it the kind of confusion that will cause someone to turn off the show, or keep watching to see what happens next?"

Too often, in this damnable tenth instance, clarity is the enemy of storytelling. I've seen outlines and scripts that were 'fixed' so that you always knew what was happening as you went along, where everything was totally clear and understandable...

...and the story was as boring as a dog's ass.

Remember -- clarity is great -- but only so far. Confusion that breeds curiosity equals momentum -- for the viewer to keep watching, and for you to keep spinning your story. When clarity is a threat to that, you need to defend your material, and push back, and say, "yes it's not clear, but it's the good kind of 'not clear.'"

Of course, sometimes that's hard to see in an outline.

Then again, what isn't?