Stop Rebooting Your Story!

via GIPHY

So, I got fat. Happens after your twenties, especially if you're a writer who sits in front of a laptop all day. I had to do something about it, and started walking in the evenings, which is terribly boring without something to listen to, and have you been listening to THE INSIDE PITCH podcast?

Boy, that sentence started and ended in entirely different places, didn't it? Imagine inflicting that sort of whiplash in a screenplay, which you don't have to imagine at all if you listen to THE INSIDE PITCH podcast. It's filled with fantastic examples of amateur screenwriters finding a good story hook, only to wander away from it as they try to fill the script with 100 pages. This is the terrible crime of rebooting your story. 

The last episode I listened to had a writer pitch the perfect example of reboot confusion, because somewhere in the morass are all the elements for a perfectly satisfactory logline. Let's sift through the muck to see the gold:

The pitch starts off with a news article, where ISIS was employing psychological warfare, sending threatening emails to family members of American soldiers in the middle east. The writer was inspired by this news to tell a story about a soldier's wife, targeted by ISIS, who must save her daughter from terrorists on American soil.

Hey! That sounds like a movie! You got an inciting incident (Terrorists kidnap daughter on American soil), a protagonist goal (save the daughter), and stakes for failure (dead daughter). Christopher Lockhart, the host of the podcast, got the pitch immediately, calling the story a twist on TAKEN.

But then the writer kept talking, and unsold everything with reboot after reboot.

You see, the writer only implied that the daughter was kidnapped. In his actual story, she's recruited to go to Afghanistan and BE a terrorist.

That's right: The threatening text that was inspired by the news article is a red herring. It has nothing to do with the real danger, the daughter's indoctrination. The mother's response, hiring a security company to protect the house, is meaningless. It has no consequence for failure. No terrorists are ever going to attack the house. Furthermore, the mother's entire plan is passive. Hire someone else, and wait to not be attacked. It's handing all the heavy lifting to the antagonist. 

But that's not the only reboot. In the pitch, the security company hired to protect the mom is a front for the NSA, who's turned the house into an ISIS trap, which, again, is pointless. The real threat is the indoctrination. This is all foam and no coffee.

Every time I see this happen, I can't believe it or understand it, until I remember how I used to reboot my stories in the same way. We all want to surprise the reader. But that can be hard! They always seem to predict what's going to happen! Oooh! I know how to REALLY keep them on their toes! I'll reboot the whole story! It's impossible to see THIS twist coming! That's what makes it so good!

This is why I personally work so hard to lock down a logline. It's a guide to keep myself from turning my protagonist into a background player in their own story, which is so easy to do when the antagonist walks in with his/her insurmountable power.

But that's the job of storyteller: Make the reader believe that the protagonist can rise to the occasion and confront the insurmountable obstacle, in spite of having everything to lose. That's what the reader needs in order to find the inspiration in his own life to get off the couch and lose that weight and be attractive once again to his wife. Metaphorically!

via GIPHY