Tuesday, September 3, 2019

The Nutshell Technique - the screenwriter's friend

So a couple weeks ago my writing group, League of Women Writers, had a guest speaker. Her name is Jill Chamberlain and she wrote a book called The Nutshell Technique. I didn't know what to expect, except one of the writers had heard her speak and raved about her, so that's why she came to speak to our group. I'm not usually one to buy a book with a guest speaker, but after her explaining her method, I was hooked and bought her book that night. She's also teaching a weekend seminar Sept 14 and 15 in Los Angeles, so if you like some of the tips I give here, I suggest you sign up. You won't be sorry! I'll include her website below to find out more.

So Jill started her presentation and told us that some of the things she learned from working with screenwriters were that 99% of most screenwriters were actually NOT telling stories. Oops! Not a good statistic. Most people were having one event, then another event, then another, etc. But what they were failing to do was have those events lead to the next, lead to the next, etc. It turned out there wasn't a connection between beats. She went on to explain that what's key about her technique is the connection between parts. It's not a formula, so stories don't become predictable using her technique. You can use it with other techniques, in fact.

She goes onto explain the basic principles behind dramatic storytelling are: drama, obstacles, choices.

That all stories have a beginning, middle, and end.

They all have a hero's journey, even if it's not the Hero's Journey we've read about in books, such as Luke Skywalker's journey. She just meant it's the one protagonist of the movie. Even if a story doesn't have one protagonist, the writer may know which one is the main protagonist, even in a buddy comedy.

And like many teachers, she explains the protagonist needs a good want.

She also goes into detail about which stories are comedic and which are tragedies, using Aristotle's definition. This means a comedy can be a tragedy and a drama could be a comedy, as far as storytelling goes. That in comedies the protagonist overcomes its flaws and has a happy ending. Tragedies don't overcome their flaw and have a sad ending. I'm not going to go too into detail to explain her technique, because really I can't do it justice in a blog post.

Her book is filled with diagrams that show movies she's used to diagram so you can start to learn what makes those movies strong and how to use them for your own stories. I think it would be nearly impossible to go into detail about the movies she diagrammed. So the best thing is to suggest either buying her book or going to her weekend seminar, or both. I'll include her website so you can find out about her book or her classes. https://www.jillchamberlain.com/ She also does consultations for 1 1/2 hrs or full script consultations. Her prices were really reasonable too.

I've already used it as I started to do my rewrite for my comedy script for the producers I'm working with now. And it really made it so simple! I'm finishing up another comedy and I've been stuck on, and I can tell it will help me with that too. Plus, some of her clients are really successful screenwriters. Because any story, no matter how professional a writer you are, can be tricky if done right. And that's what's great about her technique, is it really seems to be this secret weapon to writing any story correctly, and well.


No comments:

Post a Comment