In today’s edition of the Blue Cat Screenplay Competition Newsletter, one of the topics is the current trend in Hollywood to produce movie remakes of earlier successful films or TV shows. On a poster for the remake of The A Team , the tagline is “There is No Plan B.”
This is such a perfect example of drama-think. Of course, as every student of dramatic writing knows – be it screenwriting, novel writing, short story writing and even poetry writing — conflict is the essence of drama. And, for a movie about a group of vigilantes fighting the good fight to defeat crime and bad guys, this is a most appropriate tagline.
However, for your own daily life, to live hour after hour in this state of mind, defining your existence with the language of drama, is a guaranteed path to sustained hell and debilitating exhaustion. Even in the most dramatic movie frought with battles and bad guys, the hero fights the good fight for a mere 120 minutes, max, before the story is resolved and peace is regained. Even when the hero dies, he at least achieves the ultimate peace.
Yet, when you mistake the behavior and dialogue of dramatic structure for the language and behavior of an effective, successful and satisfying life, there is no respite from conflict. In the drama state of mind, wherever two or more of you are gathered together and one is the hero, can you guess what role the other person automatically must play? You guessed it; the bad guy. The mind that is locked into the language of drama cannot help but do this protagonist-antagonist casting. And, the person whose language patterns were predominantly learned from dramatic works — literature, fiction, TV, broadcast news, newspapers — will be most prone to apply those patterns to his or her own experience.
In STORY, Robert McKee’s book on screenwriting, McKee observes that 99% of the time, in real life, the outcome we seek to accomplish is acheived with a minimum of action and effort, and, more often than not, with the desired cooperation of other people. This is easy to test for yourself right now by simply reflecting on the last hour of your life.
Just notice how, when you last opened your mouth to speak, the words you wanted to say flowed out. When you wanted to walk across the room, your feet moved with minimal effort and probably without conscious thought on your part. And, right this instant, your last meal is being digested and its nutrients being distributed throughout your body with neither your conscious effort nor your intellectual comprehension of how it is doing this.
So, back to Plan B. In drama, there is no Plan B. However, in life, in your life, there is always a Plan B. For 99% of that 1% of times when success is not acheiveable with minimal effort, implementing Plan B only requires the addition of either a bit more energy or a minor shift in plans.
You want to say something and suddenly forget what it was. So, you scan your memory for another moment and the thought returns. You want to walk across the room and you trip on your laptop’s cord. So, you take a few stumbling steps, maybe bump against the table, then you recover and continue on. You eat a ton of hot peppers on your enchilada and your tummy swells up with gas. So, often even without your taking an antacid, your digestive system expells the resultant gas, one way or another, and you are ready to eat more Mexican food in no time.
For most of us, most of the time, the lion’s share of all we want to do at any given moment is magnificently accessible and doable. And, at rare moments, just a bit more effort or redirection is required in order to acheive the desired satisfaction. However, as McKee points out, although “This is the great mass of experience, hour by hour, in life,” it is “NEVER, EVER IN A STORY” [capitalization by McKee].
Therefore, when the language patterns of dramatic structure govern a person’s mode of thinking and speaking about his life, he will do one of two things. In order to conform to the rules of this language, the person will either edit out of memory the 99% of events that went as planned and only think about and share with others those moments when more effort or a change of plans was required. Or, the other tack that is taken is to perceive or create dramatic skirmishes in every encounter with other people and with events in the world. This is the birthplace of the drama queen.
A constant diet of watching and listening to famous, enviable people enacting dramatic roles and singing drama-infused songs combined with the high drama/conflict scenarios of broadcast news and “reality” programs only strengthens the illusion that conflict is essential and central to an exciting life. Nevertheless, life continues on in its 99% cooperation with our survival, requiring minimal effort of us to keep us alive and actually thriving from one day to the next. Yet, only when people incorporate additional language patterns – the patterns of cooperation, appreciation, fascination and awareness of what is actually occurring in the world about them — can they harvest the true fruits of Life itself.
When those patterns are available, deciding upon and implementing your Plan B becomes an opportunity to use the rich resources of your imagination and is guaranteed to result in a story of success truly worth writing about.