Column: script.kitchen With Jeff Kitchen

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I LOVE THROWING HAND GRENADES INTO DEVELOPING STORIES

 

By Jeff Kitchen

Jeff Kitchen

I shake things up early and often when creating and developing a new story, challenging the ideas, the conflict, the ending, the scope of the story, characters, tone, energy, pace, genre, period, budget, setting, and key moments. Part of my job inventing great stories that work dramatically is to explore the extremes, just to see how far I can take it. What are its limits? And what if you go way beyond that? What is the single craziest possibility for your story? That extreme is usually well beyond what works for the story, but such fearless exploration and reckless abandon can sometimes catapult you into wildly unexpected realms. It will routinely make your story deeper, with more power, substance, and complexity. And as a bonus, the cascade of new possibilities often triggers ideas for entirely new scripts.

‘So when I throw hand grenades into a developing story, I’m making suggestions that deliberately torpedo aspects of the story, with the intention to add depth, complexity, color, unpredictability, adventure, entertainment value, danger, comedic aspects, thematic intensity, fun, magnitude, and more’

Not only does this kind of attack as a storyteller generally make your scripts better but it also makes you a more robust, imaginative, and versatile writer. The key word in the entertainment industry is Outrageousness. And that doesn’t necessarily mean to blow more things up or have bigger car chases. Look at the Best Picture Oscar winner in 1980, Ordinary People, a small drama that goes right for the jugular vein, digging deep into how our destructive patterns can cripple us. It pulls no punches, and it won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor, plus five Golden Globe awards in the same categories.

‘But I feel better as a creator knowing that I’m playing with dynamite instead of firecrackers because the audience wants a story to change their world’

So when I throw hand grenades into a developing story, I’m making suggestions that deliberately torpedo aspects of the story, with the intention to add depth, complexity, color, unpredictability, adventure, entertainment value, danger, comedic aspects, thematic intensity, fun, magnitude, and more. It’s just playing What If? I’m not trying to damage the story’s shape, I’m just challenging its trajectory, poking it, exploring cracks, seeing how fast it can go, monkeying with key elements, and experimenting with painting way outside the lines. Sometimes it changes everything, sometimes it warps the third act in a fascinating way or turns a forgettable character into an electrifying one, and sometimes it has no effect at all. But I feel better as a creator knowing that I’m playing with dynamite instead of firecrackers because the audience wants a story to change their world.

‘Never let anyone tell you that every story has been told. Shatter the perceived limits of your idea. Refuse to think small’

You can’t rail against the homogeneity of Hollywood while at the same time staying safely in your lane and making timid choices. Did you become a writer to be a domesticated animal, easily restrained and submissive? Be a wild animal and make explosively fearless choices. Make questionable choices. Hell, make disastrous choices, but take us somewhere we’ve never been, shake us up, turn us inside out, shock us to our core, make us fall madly in love, rewire our brains, and change our lives forever. We hunger for that.

Never let anyone tell you that every story has been told. Shatter the perceived limits of your idea. Refuse to think small. Violate your own rut as a storyteller. Don’t stick to what you know. Start at white heat and build from there. Play Mad Scientist with dangerous story chemicals. Go as deep and as far as an idea can take you, and then construct your script. Play Crazy What If and deliberately make your job as a writer harder. The more craft you have as a dramatist, the more fearlessly you can plunge off the deep end as a storyteller. They say that a writer is like a show horse, not happy unless they’re trying to jump over something that might kill them.

“Mania is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, the lack of follow through—these are the vices of the herd.” Dr. No (from the novel, Dr. No by Ian Fleming)

For more information about Jeff Kitchen and his digital apprenticeship program, please visit script.kitchen

 

Jeff Kitchen

Jeff Kitchen

Dramatist/Author/Founder/Consultant

Jeff has taught thousands of students from Broadway to Hollywood. Jeff was classically trained as a playwright in the works of Aristotle and the legendary Broadway script doctor, W.T. Price, who in the early 1900’s established the world’s foremost playwriting school. Price instructed twenty-eight students and twenty-four of them had hits on Broadway. So why wasn’t everyone studying him? Price’s complex techniques and thinking processes were not easily understood.

Determined to get to the bottom of Price’s technique, Jeff spent three years intensely studying his work. He had a major epiphany when he discovered a groundbreaking technique from Price, called Sequence, Proposition, Plot and that’s when it all clicked together. This tool was a giant leap forward in the craft of the dramatist, but somehow it went unnoticed by Price’s students. For Jeff, this technique was quite clear, but still incomplete. He combined this tool with insights gathered from Price’s students, then added to it himself, and it worked—saving this revolutionary tool from being lost. Jeff then integrated this tool and several others with Aristotle’s dilemma—and a new process of writing for the dramatist was born.

Jeff taught for thirty years in Hollywood and New York. He worked as a dramaturg in New York theater and taught playwriting on Broadway, presenting his innovative process to select groups of writers and executives, and did private script consultations. He was constantly refining his teaching and writing techniques, and then wrote the book, Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting.

Even as the process received significant praise, Jeff knew that it would take more than seminars and classes for these complex tools to be permanently integrated into his students’ writing habits. So for the past three years Jeff focused exclusively on adapting and modernizing the program into a comprehensive digital apprenticeship. Scriptwriting Mastery is the result.

Jeff’s entire adult life has been committed to one thing, teaching the craft of the dramatist to anyone serious about writing. More than ever now, people are looking for ways to fulfill their dreams, and for writers, Jeff Kitchen’s Scriptwriting Mastery is the answer. It’s Jeff’s dream that anyone who wants to write, can write well.