The Secret of Life... In Every Story Resides a Bit of Truth

Allow me to get a bit philosophical on two strands here.

1. Much like the secret of life presents itself in its own time and piece by piece, scripts also need to present themselves one bit at a time.

Structure is the key word here since the reveal of an important piece of information needs to be meticulously prepared for. Much like in real life, if you are missing a key experience or other - more basic information - you will not understand a crucial piece of information (aka reveal in scriptwriting terms) when its time has come.

So as a scriptwriter, you should make sure to pave the way in a way that the audience is capable of understanding not only your script, but eventually also your film.

So in order to facilitate the understanding of an idea, reveal, and script, the script needs to be formatted according to industry standards. This allows to communicate the story and all its important elements in the most concise way and easily understandable for the professionals. This does not mean that you cannot use a red herring or two to mislead the audience. But the rest of the information given should eventually lead your audience to understand the bigger picture in the end.

2. But the secret of life also lies in research. Thorough research on your story and its background creates accurate data and as such, validity and plausibility. One cannot write a fully convincing story if they have not done their proper research. And one needs to be aware that there is more than one perspective on life. What you present on screen can be read differently by everyone else, even though all a given the same clue.

Ultimately, like the infamous wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics, where the very onlooker of an experiments defines whether quantum-sized objects behave rather like a particle or a wave, the secret to life lies in the fact that we ourselves create our reality around us. And much like in reality, this applies especially to the world of storytelling.

But as esoteric as that might sound at first, it also means, that you as a storytelling person move along a continuum with every piece of information you gather as well. Every new piece of information will change you in one way or another. You will learn new things, and understand old things differently. And before you know it, your perspective will eventually change. As your stories will with you.

The other day, I read an introspective book by Alejandro González Iñárritu about his film Babel, where he writes about the particulars of its production. What I found interesting about that was the fact, that the message of the very film changed continuously throughout production.

Reason for this was him and the whole crew travelling around the world for the whole year of production. Since the plot combines four different strands of story into one, it was a given that some sort of culture hopping would occur.

But what the director did not anticipate was the fact that his own perspective and thus the idea of his film changed due to the impressions he gained in these different cultures and by working with a crew speaking at least six different languages.

The people and the cultures he encountered firsthand deepened his understanding of the reality he lives in and the truthfulness of his story. His initial idea of a film about failed communication changed into something more profound and closer to reality: The question of what replaces the silence when communication has already failed.

References:

Iñárritu, A. G. (2006) Babel [viewed on DVD] Tokyo et al.: Paramount Pictures

Hagerman, M. (ed.) (2006) Babel. A Film by Alejándro González Iñárritu Hongkong et al. Taschen