You Must Have rules!

To learn a craft is to learn rules. It’s the spine of our education as children. We’re made to recite facts and follow rules, and the assumption is we will take this combination and create a productive adult. When mastering a craft we are either lucky enough to have facts and rules explained to us, or we must discover them through practice.

When I started out writing and creating movies, I went 100% on gut. I wrote pages upon pages of exciting, inspired screenplays. Were they any good? My English teachers would say no. A studio reader would have agreed. I could maybe have earned a pat on the back and a “hang in there, kid”.  I was on fire, but I didn’t know the rules. Then came the cavalcade of books. They all said the same things. Some of them made me feel better about my stories and some of were real head scratchers.  I started putting in arbitrary story beats and characters because I was told to by the evolution of Hollywood screenwriting, but I didn’t understand the philosophy behind them.

I’ve heard Charlie Kaufman blame the forgettable nature of modern cinema on rule following. He’s absolutely right. You can’t hope to make something exceptional by stepping perfectly into the footprints of everyone else. However, I do believe it’s important to understand why rules exist and what they mean. Hollywood movies are designed to make as many people like them as possible and result in an engaging trailer. Does that mean the structure and rules of Hollywood screenwriting are crap? Ye who assume lucrative work is crap do so at ye own peril. If there wasn’t something human and real about Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet, a formula seen in pretty much any movie it wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. Having said that, it’s never ok to do what I was doing in the wake of all my book lending and let rules tell a story.

Art by Brad McGinty
Art By Brad McGinty

The promise of my premise

So if we can agree that learning the philosophy of rules is important, even if we don’t plan to follow them, we should address the fact that rules have a place in any good story. If a character appears on screen for the first time and says, “Christmas is a Bah Humbug”, they’ve created a rule. They damn well better hate Christmas until the rule is changed in the narrative in plain view of the audience. If you’ve given half a thought to that characters arc, then this should be pretty easy. The catchy thing is that if minor characters come on screen and start rules or an aspect of the world and logic is established, it’s easier to forget why and let them slide. The audience feels it right away, even if they don’t consciously think it. These rules almost always get broken because something “needs to happen” for the next plot point that didn’t exactly fall into existing rules. The viewer feels it right away and it can either check them out instantly or slowly eat away at their confidence in the story.

Choose-your-own-rules

As always, it doesn’t matter if you’re writing a children’s book or designing a website. The first thing a consumer reads/hears/sees/smells/tastes/feels makes a promise. The more severely or often that promise is broken, the less the viewer feels confidence and safety in consuming the entity in front of them. If your house has perfectly matched furniture and art, fine. If there’s wallpaper and chairs from the 60s in the living room and the kitchen is filled with peeling faux gold from the early 90s, fine. What matters is to keep the promise.

It’s up to you whether you want to play it safe and follow everyone else’s rules. The thing is, if you don’t then you need to have a clear understanding of your own.

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