Story Conferences

For the last several days, I've been very fortunate to participate in story conferences with writer/producer Ramy DuBrow and producer Karri Miles. I'm working with both of them to develop my next feature, a horror film (the details of which I'm not yet at liberty to divulge!)

The story conference process has been fun, but it has also taught me a lot about the process and discipline of creating a narrative. I've written some screenplays, but have never gone through as thorough a story-construction process as this, where every twist and turn of the narrative is vetted, tested, challenged and tempered. If I didn't enjoy it so much, it would be grueling!

We began on Monday at Ramy's office in Hollywood, sitting on the floor and bouncing ideas back and forth. Ramy, who leads this process, encouraged us to begin with the end of the story, which we're pretty clear on, and work our way back to the beginning. By beginning at the end, we discover not just who our characters are, but who they need to become, and we can use that to create contrasting starting-points for them, to give them a meaningful journey.

By the start of Tuesday's meeting, we pretty much knew where the story ended, and we had some ideas about where it would begin, but the middle (always the hardest part!) proved challenging. It took us roughly six hours (and a lot of sushi, delivered from the nearest Kosher joint) to wrestle the second act into some sort of coherence. Ramy introduced a technique that got us through several difficult situations: He asks a basic question for which we know the answer: "Why does our hero do this thing?" We answer that question, and Ramy follows up with "why is that?" We answer, and then, another "Why". It's like we're writing with a two-year-old, but the amazing thing is that the farther down these rabbit-holes we jumped, the more clearly we understood our characters, their motivations, and where the story had to begin.

With the story mostly assembled, we spent today's meeting ironing out some of the bigger details. Is the creature scary enough? Is the lead character's arc clear enough? How do we smooth out the transition from the first to the second act? There are loose ends to tie up, and plenty of details to flesh out, but much of that will happen when Ramy writes his draft of the script. The immensely satisfying thing is that after these three days, we have a really carefully-crafted, compelling, resonant story, outlined and ready to be scripted.

I know I won't be involved in the story-creation process on every film I direct, but I hope to repeat the experience as much as I can. It was really a joy, and reminded me a lot of another story conference, the transcript of which is available online: http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconference1978.pdf
I can imagine Spielberg, Lucas and Kasdan sitting in a room (perhaps even on the floor), hashing out the details of this story (a story that, at the time, only existed in their minds, or in the conscious space in that room, somewhere between the three of them).

-Arnon