Happy March, my fellow writers! March is a strange and confusing month in Sonoma County, where I spend my days, mostly on the couch. The hills behind my house turn an eye-aching shamrock green, and daffodils burst out of every surface like those little party poppers. All you want to do is go outside and roll around in a patch of grass like a dog, under the fluffy clouds and sapphire skies. Then you actually step outside, and remember that despite all the promise of that greenery and sunshine, it is still colder than a Krampus’ ass crack. You spend a lot of time bounding back and forth to see if you’ve put on enough layers. Will a turtleneck do? No. How about a sweater? No. Fine, fine, BRING ME THE PUFFER JACKET. It is just not time to be swanning about in pastel dresses, even if it looks like it is. Sometimes, things simply aren’t ready yet.

I promise, all of this is going to seem DEEPLY insightful in a minute.

We’re going to talk today about memoir scripts, which I read pretty regularly. These are a staple starter-script among young writers, partially because -well, they’re young- and all they’ve got to interpret is their own experience of the world. And when they work, they can be poignant, intimate scripts. But when they go wrong….well, let’s dig into it.

The Way We Weren’t

There are several common problems I come across in memoir scripts, but they almost always relate back to the same issue: it’s very difficult to see your own stories from the objective perspective as a writer. Here’s some of the biggest weaknesses I see:

Lack of Narrative Thrust:

Life doesn’t have a set structure, but movies very much do. Bar none, the most common problem in memoir scripts is that the writer is so concerned with relating events as they happened, they’re not building a narrative story structure that has momentum and is pushing toward a climax and resolution. We’ll get into why this can be so difficult in the next section, but a key thing to remember is the moment you make your life story a screenplay, the rules of storytelling change dramatically from “what actually happened.”

Underdeveloped Main Character:

This sounds counterintuitive: you’re writing about yourself, so it seems like you’d know your protagonist pretty well. But often, in memoir scripts, screenwriters forget to externalize what the main character is going through or thinking, because it was all inside their head at the time. There’s going to be a lot that seems obvious to you, the autobiographic writer, that an audience will have absolutely no context for, because they aren’t in your head. We also all spend a lot more time observing the other people in our lives than we do on ourselves. This leads to scripts with a main character the reader just can’t invest in, because they never see below the surface of what the protagonist is doing, or why. They tend to feel bland or underdeveloped, often because the complex details of who they are are being assumed by the writer, rather than conveyed through action and dialogue.

Lack of Theme:

Theme is one of those tricky things to talk about, because writers have different definitions about it. For the purpose of this conversation, let’s say that it means: a reason that you think a broader audience than yourself and your friends needs to know about this story. Memoirs that lack theme are often tied to where the writer is on processing the real event, something we shall now move on to talk about, in a spectacular transition!

It’s Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

The events of your life are inherently dramatic. After all, you are the one having the emotional response to whatever happened, and you also never know what’s going to happen next. From a first-person perspective, your life is constantly full of big decisions, emotional realizations, life-changing relationships, events that deeply change you - all things we say are important to the best screenplays. So it’s natural to assume that your life or a story from it is the perfect template for a feature film. And in some cases, this is absolutely correct. But when you’re analyzing whether a story from your life would make a good screenplay, it’s good to run yourself through a few exercises to test the theory, before you put pen to paper.

Exercise 1: Zoom Out

You know how when you get a splinter, it feels like the most painful pain imaginable? It’s so immediate and intense it can bring tears to your eyes, and it’s impossible to focus on anything else until you get it out. This pain is very real, but because you’re experiencing it on the most intimate possible level - just you, your toe, and the splinter - you are in fact getting a myopic view of the experience. If I panned over from you and your splinter to the next hospital bed with someone who had, for example, just lost their leg to a land mine, I think you and I would both agree that what’s happening there is more consequential, a bigger situation, with more devastating consequences.

That’s why the first exercise to do when you’re considering a memoir script is to zoom out. You know your experience is relatable and meaningful to you, but what will it mean to others? Have you gone through something you think a lot of people experience and can relate to, but that people rarely talk in depth about? Or, alternatively, have you gone through something that is so singular in human experience - a 127 HOURS type-event - that it will amaze almost everyone else? If the answer to either of those is “yes,” you may be on the right track to writing a memoir that will connect with other people.

Zooming out is key to finding your theme, and avoiding the thematic issue above. If you can understand why your story might be meaningful to a broad audience, that’s your theme. What is a wider group of people going to glean from this experience? What will they learn or what catharsis will they gain from hearing this particular story?

Exercise 2: Reflex Test

Let’s imagine your story is about how you broke up with your girlfriend, went on a trip to Brazil, and had a life-changing experience learning Capoeria. Now imagine this: I am an Amazon executive, and I say, hey you, amazing script. We want to buy it, we will give you a check today, and make it this year, but the only thing is, we need to make it Japan and not Brazil, and Karate instead of Capoeria, that’s cool right? If applying this kind of big narrative change to your story makes your vision turn completely red and your blood pressure shoot into the stratosphere, it’s a very good sign that you aren’t ready to write a memoir script. The inevitable process of all screenplays is adapting your original idea, whether you’re starting from a true story or not. Money issues, casting issues, production issues - all of these can lead to changes you have to make if you want to get the movie made. If you don’t have enough distance from the material that you can adapt it as needed, you probably aren’t at a point where you can be objective about personal material. That spells enormous trouble for your project down the line.

The reflex test is key to counteracting both the plot and character issues mentioned above. Chances are, the events that made up your story did not escalate over three acts to lead to a climax, and if you’re writing a traditional narrative feature, that means some furniture rearranging is going to need to be done to make it fit the general structure of the format. It also requires an analysis of your protagonist as a movie character, and not as yourself. That requires some level of separation between you and the persona you’re building. For either of these areas to work, you have to have distance from your material to be able to do that without flipping out. In other words

(PREPARE FOR PROMISED CALLBACK!)

You can’t be in March! You’ve got to be at a place where you can roll around on the grass like a dog, where you aren’t protective of the original story simply because it’s factual. Narrative film-making isn’t primarily concerned with the facts, it’s concerned with building an emotional experience. If you feel genuinely nervous or upset at the idea of making changes to the real story, you may simply not be ready to go out with it yet.

Exercise 3: Transformational Storytelling

Another way to approach memoir storytelling entirely is to not be interested in conveying the factual events at all, but instead use them as the basis or jumping off point for a different story. This can be a great way to numb that raw nerve of personal attachment to the truth, because you aren’t telling the story directly. PAST LIVES is a fantastic example of using something that did happen to inspire, rather than dictate, the movie you’re writing. In Moviemaker Magazine, writer/director Celine Song spoke about the reality behind her story:

Because Song was transforming the story into something else, she was able to incorporate true details as needed, as opposed to being required to relate the exact truth. And the result got nominated for Oscars, so this seems to a be a workable approach (side gossipy note her husband wrote CHALLENGERS and you’ve got to assume their friends have a group chat trying to figure out who their third is, right??)

In the transformational storytelling exercise, a good way to approach it is to ask yourself if you can imagine your personal memoir story in another genre. If your story is a romance, imagine what elements you’d take to a sci-fi version instead. If your story is a war story about a platoon, imagine it as a family drama. Pick whatever feels like the most opposite genre to where you’re starting, and see what happens when you brainstorm how the story would need to shift and change as you adapt it. This can be another great way to test your reflexes, and see if you have the distance from the events needed to turn them into a compelling screenplay.

Killing Me Softly

“But Jessica,” you may now be saying, “I just need to get this story out!” Then by all means, write it. It can be very helpful for writers to process things that happen in their lives by rewriting real conversations, real moments. It can help us understand other perspectives, and even get a deeper perspective on what we were thinking at a particular moment. Not to get too deep into writer psychology here, but we tend to think in words and scenes, and there’s a lot of power and understanding to be gained by pushing real events through the writing machine in our brains. I’d never discourage that. And there are absolutely occasions where writing in a very raw emotional state can click together and produce something extraordinary.

However.

HOWEVER…

If you sit down in a blaze of tequila and kleenex and inspiration and bang out a memoir screenplay in four days and it is phenomenal, it will also be phenomenal two months from now. Once you’ve poured your life onto the page, and maybe given it to a trusted friend so they can read it and really understand how you’re feeling (NOT YOUR EX, DO NOT GIVE YOUR EX THE SCREENPLAY YOU JUST WROTE ABOUT THEM), then I would highly advise sticking it in a drawer for at least a month or two. There’s nothing to be lost by giving yourself that additional distance from the material - no one is going to burgle your house, steal your screenplay, and give it to Ari Aster - and quite a bit to gain. Anything that is great now will still be great when your analytical writer’s brain has a bit more of the lead than your emotional raw human brain. And anything that isn’t great, you’ll now be in a place to tidy up, rather than chuck the whole thing in a bin and set it on fire.