Welcome to the January edition of I HAVE SOME NOTES! I’m so grateful for your choice to subscribe to this newsletter to hear a bit of my in-depth musing on the 30-40 scripts I read per month. My hope is to keep this newsletter short and sweet, because you have a busy day and I am not Charles Dickens. But this edition might be a hair longer than usual, so I can give you a bit of scene setting for what I’m trying to do with this newsletter.

In my coverage work, I read scripts from first-time writers just learning the format, all the way up the ladder to Oscar-winning A-Listers. This gives me an enormous arena for notes, as the feedback I’m going to give to a first-timer will be a lot different than what I’d tell my bosses at Ford about the new Clint Eastwood script. Still, when you read more than a script per day (which I do, haphazardly and chaotically) patterns of notes start to emerge.

And that’s where this newsletter comes in.

Synthesizing my work over a month’s time will help me identify the most common notes I’m giving, new issues I’m seeing pop up, and ways I think these notes can be addressed. Because I want to protect the privacy of the writers, this will all be done without any specific descriptions of the scripts, writers, or platforms I’m working on - if I give an example, it will be a parallel one I’ve made up to help explain something, or taken from an existing film. The newsletter format will let me really dig deep into the roots of common screenplay problems, and hopefully help you stop these mistakes and missteps from ever showing up in your own work.

This month, we’re going to be talking about a particular issue I run into a lot when reading screenplays with a romance. So sip that last half-glass of champagne and let’s get going in the New Year!

The Unromantic Lead

A lot of screenplays work in romances as a way to humanize their lead and give us some good, tightly-compacted conflict. Romances, whether they are new, old, illicit, or just blooming, are a fantastic screenplay device for a number of reasons. For one, most of us have never been in a car chase or been accused of a murder we didn’t commit (and hopefully none we did commit), but we generally have encountered romantic situations in real life. This gives writers more direct experience with the subject, and gives the audience a familiar handle to grasp. Because of the pervasiveness of romance in real life, it’s not uncommon to throw in one or two romantic options for the lead character, regardless of genre.

However, the most common issue I see with romances in screenplays is this: the love interest has no reason to fall in love with the protagonist. When they meet, he snaps at her. When they go on their first date, he runs out of the room to take a phone call with his boss. In general, the protagonist is so preoccupied with the murder they’re solving or the football game they have to win, they barely pay attention to the love interest at all. And yet 40 pages in, she suddenly says “I’ve never met anyone like you…I think I’m falling in love!” And the audience rolls their eyes and your dear reader over here shuts her laptop for five minutes to play a round of Candy Crush, because this character has absolutely no reason to say any of that…yet.

You Gave Love A Bad Name

Let’s get into the functional underpinning of this problem. First of all, if you are schooled in the basics of character design, you know your protagonist must be flawed. And the bigger the flaw, the bigger the catharsis of their growth and change over the course of the story. That’s Screenwriting 101: stories about screwed-up people are compelling.

But while a flawed character is easy for the audience to identify with, they aren’t necessarily, at that moment, very easy to fall in love with. Someone who is working out their issues with their father, or realizing they have to change their career, is a person in crisis, and also a person who is very busy. If the scenario were happening in real life, romance would likely not be high on their list of priorities, certainly not on par with “burying my father,” or “escaping this tornado.” So even out of the gate, without careful consideration, you might be setting up a flat romance that is at cross-purposes with the goal of your protagonist.

Secondly, we have to get into the psychology of the writer. Especially early in our careers, we have a tendency to operate on instinct, and imitate what we’ve seen. This is a good learning tactic and tool to get you used to writing screenplays, but it can become a habit where we take the form of a thing - i.e. “this is an adventure movie like ROMANCING THE STONE and that had a great romance, so this should have a romance,” but don’t bother comprehending the function of the thing, i.e. “ROMANCING THE STONE was about a romance writer having to grapple with the reality of the fantasies she writes, and the romance helps teach her that lesson. I should find a way to incorporate the outcome of the romance into my larger theme.” In short, we understand what plot mechanics dictates we need, but not why.

As a result, you often get romances in screenplays that are there because the writer thinks a romance is expected, but hasn’t thought through how it fits into the larger theme, or how to make it work with, and not against, the protagonist’s journey. Learning to understand the function of the romance can help us diagnose the problem, and will eventually give us the tools to fix a flat romance.

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

So how do we make a main character romantically appealing when they are not? When they are too flawed or busy or kind of a dick to make any person conceivably drop what they’re doing in their own life to fall in love with them? And especially, I think some of you might want to ask, how do we do it without starting this whole fucking draft over?

I will give you the cheap prescription first. Please only take this medicine when you are not required to operate heavy machinery, and you have a draft due in 16 hours.

The Quick Fix

In the case of the flaccid romance, one of the fastest fixes is to add between one and three moments where your protagonist actually does something that is attractive to their love interest. These do not need to be big sweeping gestures, in fact, they often work better if they are small intimate moments that shows they are paying attention or interested in the love interest. She remembers his beloved Grandmother’s name that he only told her once. He hears his boyfriend’s dog is lost and goes sprinting down to the nearby dog park to check for him. In my experience, the express lane to viewers buying a romance (aside from the actors having natural chemistry, which is outside your mandate as a writer) is giving us a few of the things that make US fall in love in real life: attention to detail, compassion, and vulnerability. If you’re getting notes that readers can’t understand why the love interest sticks around the lead, start here.

The Deep Dive

If, however, you’re still getting that pesky note even after adding a few love drops (ew, no, let’s not call it that), the time may come to start tearing the script down to the foundations to find out how you managed to put a bidet in the kitchen. Here’s three deeper, more structural reasons why your romance may not be working:

-The Love Interest Isn’t a Person

First off, consider if the problem may not be your protagonist at all! One common note I give is that the love interest only seems to exist to provide love or solace or understanding, and has no needs, desires, or goals of their own. If you want your romance to feel like a real relationship, it has to involve two fully realized people. This doesn’t mean that you need to make your love interest a co-lead, but if we get the sense they have no life outside the protagonist, that they don’t have friends, or a passion, and especially if they don’t want anything back from the protagonist, it can flatten the dynamic.

-The Romance Isn’t Integrating with the Protagonist’s Journey

Pay attention to how your romance is playing into the protagonist’s arc. Is it simply happening on parallel - they are saving this dinosaur museum and also have met this nice guy in their extracurricular Spanish class who has nothing to do the museum? Or is it feeding their development in some way? Is the husband they’ve always taken for granted now looking a lot better after they’ve had an emotional affair at work? Does that male gazelle have a loving and stable gazelle family that makes the protagonist gazelle realize they haven’t just been looking for love, but for family (Yes, this is WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING re-imagined with gazelles, I haven’t worked out the train or the coma parts yet). If your romance feels vital to the development of the protagonist’s arc, it’s less likely to feel flat, because we will understand why it’s important to them.

Enormous Warning Sign:

This does not mean your love interest should teach them everything while getting nothing in return!

-The Couple Doesn’t Need Each Other

A good question I like to ask when a romance isn’t working is one you should absolutely not apply to romances in real life: what are these people FIXING in each other? What is the hole in their life that the other person fills? Does one partner give the other the validation they’ve always craved, while they can offer the sense of stability and family the other has yearned for? Love is a two-way street, and if you can answer what both people supply to each other, there’s a good chance your romance will start working.

Look at the recent film HIT MAN, for example. Glen Powell’s protagonist is embracing a new persona, and sees his new love interest as someone exciting, refreshing, and a little dangerous for him. Bored with his bland daily life, she provides the excitement he’s looking for. On her side, she’s gotten out of a controlling, abusive marriage, and sees the protagonist both as a fling that revives her feeling of independence, and someone who can be dangerous, but is not a threat to her. She feels like she has power in the relationship, for the first time in years. Even though their romance is twisted, you find yourself rooting for it, because it’s clear what both people are getting out of the relationship that they need. Asking how they fix each other (or conversely, in a romance that ends, how they break each other) can lead you to the deeper answers you need to rewrite.

What I’m Watching:

• Conclave (8/10)

• Juror #2 (6/10)

• Stranger Things, Season 3 (8/10)

• Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street (9/10)

• Shakespeare in Love (10/10 and I will fight you)

• Stranger Things, Season 4 (6/10)

• Shrinking, Season 2 (9/10)

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