151 | Rethinking Screenplay Structure w/ The Nutshell Technique (ft. Jill Chamberlain)

Though it can sometimes feel like a prison, screenplay structure is actually a very freeing element of the story process. Jill Chamberlain, a veteran script consultant, is obsessive about structure, to the point where she has created a popular technique to re-consider how we approach our work. On her technique, producer Callum Greene (Star Wars Episode 9) offers “the Nutshell Technique is like the Rosetta Stone: it cracks the code behind why we love the movies that we love. It goes way beyond tired old beat sheet ‘formulas’ and instead guides you to organically write the story you want to tell.”

FOR MORE ON JILL (BUY BOOK/CLASSES): https://www.jillchamberlain.com/the-nutshell-technique

TO JOIN OUR PATREON: www.patreon.com/thescreenwritinglife

TRANSCRIPT:

Meg LeFauve: Hey, welcome back to The Screenwriting Life. I'm Meg LeFauve.

Lorien McKenna: I'm Lorien McKenna, and today we're thrilled to be joined by script consultant, screenwriter, and teacher Jill Chamberlain.

Meg LeFauve: Jill has consulted on projects for major studios, Oscar- nominated screenwriters, top showrunners, and many spec writers.

She created The Nutshell Technique to give us a new way to talk about structure in our screenplays. Her book on

Lorien McKenna: The Nutshell Technique is a manual a lot of professionals use and is taught in film programs. Hi Jill, welcome to the show.

Jill Chamberlain: Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

Meg LeFauve: We're really excited to dig in here and give our writers especially, not only, but especially our emerging writers, some new tools for their toolbox.

Sure. I know that my son read your book in film school and he was like, mom I thought I knew and I knew, but then all a sudden I could see it like, I've got it. So it's just such a wonderful thing to keep shining the light in different ways. Whoever, I just really another way to help people see it and get it.

So we're really thrilled to have you here. We're, but Jill, it's also is game for doing adventures in screenwriting or what happened this week to us. Lorien, how was your week?

Lorien McKenna: was good. I just. An hour ago, came back from Sinistory TV retreat up in Idyllwild, so I just drove down the hill and I have such a great time at Sinistory, it's such a wonderful community of writers and mentors and producers and managers, and it has this wonderful feeling of Camp for grownups.

We talk about story the whole time and it's equalizing in this really lovely way. Like so many of the writers that go there are, have projects in production or have made things. And so it's not just like I'm the mentor and then you're like this right, baby in writer. It's nah, we're all writers.

We're all in this together. We just have different experiences. And I feel so well taken care of when I'm there by the organization. They, the food is there. I don't really have to think about anything. Like here's your schedule. Here's where you have to go. Here's your free time. So I feel like, ah, I can relax.

There is a lot of nature, which I'm not a big fan of, but, a lot of people seem to respond that kind of thing. So many people there had heard about Sinistory through our podcast. A woman came from Germany, a woman came from Australia, and it was just really lovely. But I had such a hard time with it because people wanted to come up to me and be like, Oh my God, I love your podcast.

And what I did instead of taking the compliment was you want to take a picture? And then so I got to Being a part of a community without actually taking a compliment. So it was really

Meg LeFauve: lovely. Except they got to take your picture.

Lorien McKenna: Yeah, Jill,

Jill Chamberlain: how was your week? It was a mix of things as it often is.

I'm actually writing on something, which I haven't, my, I have not put my name on something in over 10 years and I am co writing a a spec. for a TV half hour and I have a very satisfying feeling of finishing everything I needed to do and handing it back to my co writer, which feels so good.

It's now her problem for a couple of days. Totally. And I'm also in the midst of classes and this is a kind of a fun period where people have finished their beat sheets and now are going to be moving on to script. So we're getting towards the end. That's exciting to see. And I had some good consultations, both like helping people.

I really like when people bring me early on and I helped with breaking story where they just dump all their ideas on me. And then hopefully we can walk out or they can walk out with a story afterwards. So that always feels really

Meg LeFauve: good. Okay. My week was one. I realized that it is true. You only have so much willpower every day.

So if you're trying to be on a diet and you're trying to actually exercise. You have, and you're dealing with your special needs son, who's having some sort of, I don't know, testosterone y transition, I don't know, teenager ness. There's not that much willpower left to sit your ass down and write. It's weird.

There's just not. I'm still So weird. So weird, Meg. Of all the things. And I know in my brain, it's you should do this first! first, but then I need to eat cookies. Like it just doesn't work. I have to figure it out. But the fun thing that happened was my son was home from college this weekend because he had to come up and do some stuff for school.

And we took a walk cause we like to take walks. Then he talks and talks and I listen. But he also was talking about making short films and an idea he had. And he is like most humans. often your ideas start with situations, right? And I'm excited to talk to Jill about this too, in her view of it, because he had all these kind of events and things he wanted to happen and possibly happen in a short film.

And I'm not saying they weren't cool events, by the way, like they were cool, but there's no character, there's no relationship, there's no but because he's just starting and I was like, okay let's just back up and let's, okay, something in your life, what was really emotional to you?

What was an emotional moment to you? Now he's 19, right? And he was talking, he talked about the time that He had already not been accepted onto one baseball team, and he had to go try out for the next one, and he couldn't get out of the car. Because he was so afraid they would pass, too. They would.

And how, we helped him get out of the car, and to try. And he goes, yeah, but I can't do that! It's just so simple! It's so sentimental! It's so sentimental! And I was like, okay I think it's simple, that's true. And we just, I just came to this thing that I wanted to share with everybody, which is, you can have a simple thematic, as long as it's emotional to you.

Which was... He had needed to get out and try, even if that meant failure, that was important to him. And he is right. The kid's version is more simple because it's really the parent who has the problem, which is you're going to convince this kid to get out of the car and go try and he might fail. So it's just, it's a little more fraught, not that much more fraught, but we came to this idea. That sometimes if the what is simple, then what I want to be more complex is the how, like what I'm going to love about the character and make this super specific and not just any parent and any kid going for a baseball game is how the parent gets the kid out of the car.

That suddenly becomes interesting and worth a short film. Or you can have a very complex how, like he thought about a time that an authority figure really did something completely not good, not cool, like injustice. And I was like, okay that's simple. What's more complex? Weren't you being an asshole?

And he was like, and I'm like, weren't you being a teenage jerk? When this person lost their temper? And he was like yeah, maybe. No, so part of this is lava, right? To get to the complex how. You gotta go into your lava. What really happened? And suddenly a much more complex how. Of two people who have a point of view, and yet they are not communicating, and it's much more complex, and nobody's right, nobody's wrong.

And now the what, in terms of what they're doing, can be quite simple, because there's so much going on in the how. So it's just an interesting thing that we came upon, and I don't think it's just for short films, in terms of, where is the complexity, right? Is it the com Is the how the complex, or the what complex?

And yes, you can have both complex, but that's super high story math, in my opinion. But Yes, Laurie, and I'm just gonna say,

Lorien McKenna: no, this is speak so much to exposition to write like a lot of emerging writers spent a lot of time setting up characters setting up behaviors, but the behaviors exposed in that conversation in that car, the specificity of how they're responding to each thing, because that exposition that you probably don't need is what's going to drive those behaviors right like the belief system and the patterns and all that so it's like when you're thinking about That scene or that short just

Jill Chamberlain: get to it start,

Meg LeFauve: Right now He seems simple to him still because it was basically a parent and authority figure in a child and that's just a role That's just those aren't characters yet.

Those are roles. And so I was like who is the parent? Who is the child and he's I don't even know the parent cuz I'm not a parent, but I'm a brother So maybe I could make it a brother And I'm like, okay, if it's a brother, then what if you also, just as a writing exercise, make the kid he's trying to get out of the car, your brother, which is a special needs kid.

And suddenly, the how has much more juice. Because, especially when kids won't, my son won't understand abstract thought. He's gonna get angry if he's over emotional. And you're only 19 and trying to be the authority. And yet you can't really be the authority. And you're trying to teach him something that he doesn't understand.

He just knows he can't get out of the car because he's going to fail. Like it just got much harder on the main character, who is the brother, to make this how happen. And the harder it is, the more interesting it is, the more complex that how is. Again, we're still going to get to a relatively simple what?

Which is you just have to try. But the how was such more specific and interesting because the characters became specific and interesting and all driven by which wrapping us back to Jill, their want and their flaws and they're like, that's all the stuff that suddenly we started talking about and not necessarily in those in that language.

But I think that's what we were starting to dig up by talking about his real life experiences with his brother. So just my little segue back to to Jill. So Jill, I'm so excited to talk to you about how your book and you outlay out these concepts of structure and character and creating structure from character.

But before we do you want to talk a little bit about your background as a screenwriter and maybe how it contributed to you creating this technique?

Jill Chamberlain: Yes, sure. Yes, I started as a screenwriter, a frustrated screenwriter. I was in New York City. I had a little bit of paid work, work for hire. It's not enough to live off of.

And I kept coming up against a note, which was akin to, this isn't a story. This is a situation. And I knew there was a problem. I knew something was missing. There was something missing. But no one could explain to me how to fix it. And so I stalled. I was unable to, I could tell this was definitely a problem for me and I couldn't go no further.

And so I had to stop writing. And let me say a couple other ways to say it is, if I can take your protagonist out of your script and your script works just as well and put it to put a different one in and it works just as well. You have a situation, my friend, not a story, right? A story is unique to the protagonist, but I had a hard time figuring out how to get plot and character arc to merge.

And in fact, I found they merge in very specific ways. I stopped work. I stopped working and I started analyzing movies and I should say I have very good training. I was privileged to study at Columbia University. I had a study privately with a mentor named screenwriter named Doug Pats and, but I needed a system.

I needed everything on a page basically. So that's what I created. And it's a one page. Schematic, where I link up the eight elements that are required to tell a story. And one thing that's really different about my method I want to put out there is it's not, most things that deal with structure are going to deal with a linear beat sheet kind of structure, right?

That you need to hit 15 or 22 or however many pre prescribed beats. And my method's not a beat sheet method. It is. We have. Yes, there are a few moments we need to dictate. We have you have a first scene. You have a last scene. We have something at 25%. We have something at 75%. But other than those four moments in time, I don't the other elements are not moments in time.

They're about the connection between those moments. Those are not for random moments. There's a connection. That's the emotional connection that is time. This character to this journey. And so and when it came together, it just all of a sudden, everything has makes sense. And it's been a wonderful lens to use both with teaching and also with my clients.

It's just helps me get to the core of the problem very quickly. Everything, almost everything seems to come back down to that to the structure.

Meg LeFauve: Now, when I was a consultant in Australia, if I said the word structure to most of the writers, not all of them to be fair, but to a lot of them, they would like, basically, I would be kicked out of the country.

I wasn't, but it was just a deal. Don't say the word structure to me. Don't, why are you prescribing? It's not just Australia. It's not just Australia, but yeah, no, I know. But it was it stood out more because they would say that's the way an American would do it. So it was very right.

But you can get that anywhere. And, where writers do consider this kind of word or system to be, that means you're going to get the same thing over and over. You're just, dumbing us down. And another guy said to me here in America once. So what is your response to that?

Jill Chamberlain: Oh, I've got responses to that.

I was at it. So I was at a party once where I rated to a student and she introduced me to a prominent documentary filmmaker, whose name I will not mention, and introduced me as her teacher who wrote a book on story structure. And he gave me this attitude that was. Structure smucture. And so I said to him, let me understand with your documentary films, or is it just, do you just stick a camera on one person and have them talk for 90 minutes with no cuts?

And he said, no, of course not. We cut to different things. We employ editing. And I said if you employ editing, you're employing structure. That is all structure means. Structure is the events that you are choosing to show in the order that you're choosing to show them in. That's all structure means.

So what, and I think what we've been, we've internalized structure so much, first of all, right? We've been watching, films as a culture for over a hundred years, and we've been telling stories for, early humanity, I imagine. That a lot of people don't even realize that there is a structure right to the stories.

You realize that when you're, great aunt Betty is, it's telling events in her life that lack structure and she goes on and on. Maybe right? It occurs to you. Oh, this person doesn't know how to tell a story. But most of us understand or internally we feel it. You just don't realize it's there.

It's not just an American movie. And ultimately I think structure is incredibly freeing if you find the right structure and my goal is not to, I don't want people to feel hampered in it is to identify a couple of things. It's not many things. A couple of things. And then it gives you enormous freedom to discover things on the page.

You've already thought the, underlying skeleton. And you can put it aside once you figure it out and you can live and breathe on the page and trust that you're not going to write yourself into a corner or write yourself to a scenario where you have absolutely no idea how to end it.

And it's like the concepts behind improv. Right? Improv comedy is not just people running around being goofy on stage. It may seem that way sometimes, but it's not what it's supposed to be. There's structure to it. Even if it's as simple as, I need a location from the audience, right?

That's giving you some structure that then their imagination could go off of. But without that structure, it's just chaos. It's not anything anybody's going to want to watch. So I find it very freeing, but yes, there can be resistance to it. I

Lorien McKenna: want to ask you so much about like your, what the next nutshell technique actually is.

Can you talk about what it is? But I want to. Bring up something a lot of new writers tend to write like. 40, 50 pages of act one. And for me, that's a symptom of not embracing this, the structure of storytelling. What, how would you diagnose that when you get a screenplay that's like just all act one and then some stuff happens and then it ends?

Jill Chamberlain: Yeah. First of all I don't like to put too many solid rules down, but one I have is. You gotta get us into act two by 25 pages or so. 25 to 30. There is something about us as an audience that we don't want. We've about a 25 minute attention span before that we can handle of set up introduction before something needs to happen.

That's what's that's, act two is ostensibly what the movie is about. That's the guts of it. The what it's really about is what they learn in the end. But ostensibly, that's where we feel that the story is really begun and that the characters are really being challenged. And. So you're definitely gonna have problems with that.

And and similarly, if you haven't figured out your structure, another common thing, but the 45 pages makes me think of is people who it's super common. Everyone's got a great idea. They haven't they haven't really gone beyond a premise and they think it's gonna give them enough, enough juice to get them through.

It's not if, we can start stories in lots of different places, but really you they only end, there's only one way to end a good story, typically, right? We find to find that inevitable, yet unexpected ending. There's one way. And so if you don't know your ending yet and by the way, I can't claim I'm, I've been perfect about always knowing and ending when I've gotten involved with something.

But if you don't know your ending you, or at least the, an idea of it, you don't really know your story. And that's what, one of the things with my method is it's, we're setting up things in act one and act three. There's almost nothing in act two, you'll notice. It's, but I believe if we set these things up properly.

It's going to maintain and we're going to be able to push through act two, even though it's twice as long. As long as you maintain conflict, you're going to be able to get through act two. And so if you're getting to so a more common scenario, as I see, is that someone who starts writing and they get to about page 4045 and they use steam.

Because they didn't figure it out. So if you had known if you figured that out, even though we're not predetermining what's happening, the second act, you're not going to lose that steam. That's why you're losing steam is you're guessing I'm maybe going to go there, but you don't really, you don't have confidence with that.

Lorien McKenna: Yeah. And I do want to just say that. I am the writer who will happily write 45 pages of act one because it's so fun. So I'm not sitting in judgment of people who do this. It's how I discover what it actually, where I'm trying to go. But you're absolutely right. At page 45, I'm like, Oh, wait, now something has to happen.

And I don't so I'm not sitting in judgment of emerging writers or any writer who I've read that's done this. It's me. I'm the problem. It's me.

Jill Chamberlain: Yeah, and nor am I, I understand everyone's got their process, but it is something I do force people and some in my classes to do this and they're not, some people are not used to it right at all.

I do definitely get resistance where people are used to just writing and discovering and it's okay, I want you to try it my way. I want you to try it my way, and we're just going to talk about it, but we're not going to read your script until your story elements are working. That's my rule.

We're not going to talk about it or read it. And the, we'll spend a couple of weeks just looking at this piece of paper until people get it right. And that's not the way a lot of people are used to working. And I do get some resistance, although pretty inevitably people are. Glad I forced them right that it made them realize I'm going to write less.

I'm going to write fewer drafts this way right that it forced me to discover those things in my head a little bit before I got on the page.

Savana Vagueiro da Fonseca: It's interesting as Savannah here. It's interesting as someone who has audited your class and, as an emerging writer myself, I think. One thing that this method gave me, and just talking about structure as discovering your character in this particular format and this method, it gave me some confidence too to actually just get to the page.

Like I, this might be a very like baby writer sort of observation, but having an idea of where, how low my protagonist is going to get and knowing where I want to take that, that the bottom of the bottom, really gave me that structure and that confidence to just get on the page.

So that's something I just wanted to add to as like another benefit of have

Jill Chamberlain: embracing a structure. Yeah, it's freeing, right? It's freeing. If you figure these things out, yes, you're going to have to deal with things along the way, but you are going to be pretty confident that you understand the story and yet can be free to discover things as you write on the page.

Meg LeFauve: Okay let's get to it because now I'm even more excited for people to hear so and obviously in one show we can't do a whole book and But and get into the details too deeply but in general what you know, I know in the book. There's a checklist We can go over the checklist. Like how can we explain your technique to our listeners?

Jill Chamberlain: The simplest metaphor for explaining it is something I call Fat Tootsie. So let me explain what Fat Tootsie is and then I'll walk through the nutshell for it. So imagine you, we have the movie Tootsie, right? So Michael Dorsey, out of work actor, can't get a acting job to save his life, and he gets a part on a soap.

And I'm going to change just two things. He gets a part on a soap, but instead of it being a part that's a female character it is a they have a character that's an obese man in the fictional Soap opera town and he really wants a part, so he's gonna pretend he's actually a fat guy. He's gonna get a costumer to make him a fat suit and a makeup artist to make prostheses for him.

He's gonna pretend he's actually a big guy and he is gonna get the part. The other change I'm gonna make is that he'll tell Julie the love interest, he's gay. So Julie feels just as comfortable with him as. She felt with the Dorothy persona and so she doesn't perceive any sexual tension between them and everything else I'm going to keep the same.

We tend to find it funny in movies when men are dressing up as women. It could also be funny having a little guy like Dustin Hoffman pretending to be a big guy, right? And so he's got to get in and out of his fat suit and he's hiding, trying to hide his identity. The very similar movie when you think about it.

He grows to where he can't stand it, and so then, live on the air, he's gonna pull off his fat suit and reveal he's little old Dustin Hoffman. That is Fat Tootsie. And why is my movie Fat Tootsie a situation, not a story? Does anyone want to?

Meg LeFauve: And I'm cheating because I know that Sidney Pollack said he didn't want to do the movie until he realized it's about a man learning to be a better man by being a woman.

So there's an emotional thematic that Sidney Pollack very much as the director wants to explore through this character. So thematically there's a deep theme that it has to be that he's dressing up as a woman and that he's learning to be a better man because of it. So that the emotional thematic, the character is going to go on aligns to the plot.

And the fat Tootsie, my question immediately is what does he, what is this about? What, why what is he learning? So suddenly that's where my brain goes. Yes,

Jill Chamberlain: exactly. And, and Sidney Pollack, I actually quote him in the book, said that he turned down Tootsie. 100 times because it was just a one joke movie about a guy in drag.

And it wasn't until he honed in on that, that idea of I was a better man as a woman than I ever was as a man with you. So what was missing was the flaw, what you're, the thematic element, but it boils down to me, the flaw that he is a guy who doesn't respect women. He doesn't, and by the way, it's not as egregious as his arrogance.

But I would argue at the end of the movie, I think he's going to be just as arrogant on his next movie job. The element that has changed is that he's gone from the flaw. This is the first of my eight elements, the flaw of someone who doesn't respect women to someone who does respect women. And so the other the other elements are the.

Start with the want. He wants an acting job at 25%. The point of no return is that he's offered the acting job again. I'm trying to externalize it. He could have. Yes, his choices were there were choices involved to get there. But there was part of it was outside of his control. There happened to be a female producer who liked what she saw.

And and so that moment when she says you've got the job, he's Gotten his one. So in the point of no return, the protagonist is going to get their want, but they're going to get their want with a big catch. Super important, a catch, right? It's this big thing has happened. You got what you want, but you're getting something.

Also, you don't want because that's what we're going to be exploring. That's the juice. That's going to get you through act two. That's what the movie ostensibly is about, right? So the catch being he has to pretend to be a woman, right? That's ostensibly what we think the movie's about. It's about an actor who gets a job and has to pretend to be a woman.

What it's really about is a guy who doesn't respect women, who has to literally walk in women's shoes to learn respect for them, right? But he doesn't know that yet. We don't know that yet. And then in I break down stories between Aristotelian comedies and tragedies, and that just means happy, just happy ending, sad ending.

So we're not talking haha, it doesn't have to be a haha comedy. Happy ending or sad ending. And so Tootsie is a comedy, and so that means they're gonna hit the at the 75 percent, they're gonna hit the crisis. Crisis is two things. It has to be their lowest place. We want them to hit rock bottom. And it is also the opposite of the want.

This part's tricky. It's not just vaguely the negative. It is the thing you want you now hate. So he wanted a job It's 75%. He wants out of the job. Literally the opposite. Now we're going to start act three and back three starts with the climax. The word I use in the nutshell technique is the climatic choice.

At the heart of a climax the protagonist is making a difficult choice. And so his climatic choice is to pull off his wig and reveal that he, on live television, that he's a man. This is the beginning of him stepping towards the strength that he's going to learn in the end, which is respect for women.

It's a halfway step. He still hasn't apologized. But telling the truth is better than lying. But he doesn't get his happy ending yet. He has to do more. So in the final step, he's going to tell Julie, the love interest that he's learned and that he's changed that he realizes that he only learn to be a better man by literally walking in a woman's shoes.

So those are the eight elements. Floss strength and then linear, we have the want pointed overturn, which has the catch attached to it. Crisis choice and final step. And I'll just say for a tragedy, we would have the same structure, but instead of hitting rock bottom at 75 percent, they're going to hit the triumph, which is the highest moment of achievement and the ultimate version of manifestation of their want.

And then they have a climatic choice and a final step, but those are going to be In a negative direction because they fail to move towards their strength.

Meg LeFauve: I think that, and again, the book is really super clear and again, or you can, guys can go download her the steps from off of her site.

I think in terms of what we can get across today, what I find powerful is flaw to strength. If we're not talking a tragedy that this, these are I call them character poles, right? That's how I define it. Different words, probably same thing. So can you talk about what you mean by a flaw and a strength and how that is creating these poles for the nutshell technique?

Jill Chamberlain: Yeah, the flaw is the story. It is the story. I always have to remind my emerging writers of that, right? Without a flaw, you don't have a story. You have a situation. The flaws, the whole reason why this character is being put on this journey is to face that in themselves. It's the DNA. So a flaw, by my definition, it needs to be something they can control.

It needs to be a fault, something we would blame them for. I like to think Seven Deadly Sins kind of flaws, although I think the Seven Deadly Sins needs an update. I don't, slovenliness? I don't know, that doesn't sound that bad to me. But, you want to think, we always, in, in my workshops, I always ask writers to dig deeper.

What is really the underlying flaw that all of this is stemming out of? Because if you don't have a flaw that, and I think this is really important, if you haven't identified the flaw, you are basically just having your protagonist be a victim of stuff happening to them. And even if your character is a victim in some senses of the word, if they're a protagonist, there needs to be something in themself that they, the reason why they're...

Being victimized that they're going to have to face in themselves, right? That's why we're torturing them and putting them through that. And if you make them flawless, then you're just saying that they're a victim of the world. And that's not really a story. If

Meg LeFauve: that makes sense. And totally, I say this constantly, like all the time, like just having shit happen to them and they're a victim of the world is not a story.

And again. People are victimized. It's not, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about that they are actively creating their own life. Whether we at the Act One understand that or not, we as a creator have to understand

Jill Chamberlain: that. Yes. And and then the strength is the direct opposite. And so it's important to finesse the wording of that.

I say, we have multiple flaws. And that's something in the workshop and with working with writers. We'll play around with a couple flaws because we have multiple flaws and they get to keep multiple flaws. You don't have to take away, Michael Dorsey is both doesn't respect women and he's Arabic.

He has lots of flaws. But the central flaw to the, that's key to the story, the nutshell flaw, I find typically in a comedy, a story with a happy ending. You may have lots of flaws, but you're probably only going to learn one thing. And so that's very often how I identify which is the primary flaw.

It's what are they really, what are we seeing in that climatic choice in the final step? What does that, what change is, does that represent? Are they, Asserting themselves when before they were meek, or are they humbling themselves when before they were full of themselves? What are they doing differently to solve the problem?

And once we identify that, I go and we want to make sure that the flaw is the 180 of that. The exact

Meg LeFauve: opposite. And the other important step of this that I, have been beating my drum about a lot lately is want. That want drives story, period. Yes, we need to have flaws and needs and all that under, and some writers are really good at that and then they've got no want.

And some people are really good at the want and they've got no... Emotional need and all the other stuff underneath. So can you talk a little bit about want because I think in the book, in my memory, you talk about set up want versus the actual want and what's the kind of difference and you talk about, fill in the set up want last in terms of your chart.

Can you just get into that a little bit?

Jill Chamberlain: Yes, and so first of all, I want to warn you, it's the surprisingly the most complicated part of the nutshell, because it surprises people because we, I think most writers do have an instinctual sense of what my character wants. And, but the thing that you think the characters wants.

May not be the best way to set up the story and because just like we have multiple flaws. We have multiple wants. So the one I'm talking about in this is that and I call it the setup want to distinguish it from it. It may not be the capital W want. It may not be their biggest want. It may not be the want that they say, it's just the want that they're going to get in the point of no return.

Because what we're setting up is be careful what you wish for. On some level they're not a victim on some level. They asked the universe for this and this is happening to them. And so

Meg LeFauve: it may or may not be an example of a setup want versus a big. W capital W. Yes.

Jill Chamberlain: So the classic example for me is Groundhog Day.

Great classic, important movie, I think. And I was watching that movie for the umpteenth time while reading three different versions of the script you can find as you do when you're obsessed with structure. And I noticed in the versions of the strip script that are out there, none of them contained the setup prompt, but it's in the movie.

It's actually in the movie. So at some point, and I was not a part of that process, I don't know it, but at some point, maybe on the late side, they realize we're missing the setup want. We're missing, even Phil, the jerk weatherman, doesn't deserve to simply be a victim of the universe playing this trick on him.

He actually asked for it. We look at his first scene, his big want. I would say he talks about a network that is scouting him, right? That's his big want. He wants a network job. He doesn't get that. So it's not the setup one. It's maybe important one. I'm not saying he doesn't want it.

He said he wanted it. I believe him. But it's not the want that set up sets up the story. And so that's why very often I say do it last because it often we need to figure out the shape of the story, and then go back and it's a little bit of, I like to think of it as irony icing on the cake that we're doing a clever thing with words here.

So the want that is in the movie, it's not in any of the versions of the script you'll find is they added a little bit where the weatherman who Is covering for him, says, he goes to Puccitani, there's a substitute weatherman, and he's saying take your time, Phil, spend an extra night there, because I'll be happy to cover it for you, because this guy wants more on screen time, and Phil says, please I want to spend an extra second in Puccitani, so his setup want, Is to spend no more than 24 hours in Paxitani.

Look at the wonderful irony of what happens to him at the point of no return. External event, he wakes up, it's Groundhog Day, the second day in the row. He got his want to spend only 24 hours in Paxatani, but the big catch is he's going to live the same 24 hours again and again, right? So it's not his big want, it's not any of the obvious wants, it's related to him, he's such a, and his attitude is Paxatani is such a horrible place I don't want to spend more than 24 hours there.

And the universe says to him Phil, you're such a horrible guy. We're going to grant you your wish, but we're going to make you spend the same 24 hours over and over again to get it right and learn how to be a good person.

Meg LeFauve: And now what, just so I'm clear, cause I'm, I think I'm following you, but I want to make sure.

So we have a setup want versus the actual want. So the setup want is I want to spend as little time in Puxitani as I can. And what's the actual want?

Jill Chamberlain: So I don't use, I don't define things

Meg LeFauve: that way. Okay. Maybe I don't define it. Good

Jill Chamberlain: thing I asked. Yeah, sometimes, it's sometimes the actual want and set up want are the same thing.

I like to use the Tootsie example because if he wants a job, he gets a job. That one's obvious. I'm just saying that the one that they actually get and that relates. At what happens at 75% as well with the crisis and triumph is can sometimes be a subtler one, right? As far as you know what they need, that's the strength they need to learn to be a better man or to not be so selfish, right?

In case of Phil that's what they need, but the want can be there can be different wants

Meg LeFauve: there. The other thing I want to talk about, and I know we have to go here soon in a minute is one of my favorite parts of the book, because I. And of course sometimes you read these things and you're like, I know this, but I didn't know I know it.

But I love seeing it in black and white. So there's a chart in the book that I love on page 126. Which is how the flaw colors the climactic choice and begins the downfall for a tragedy. And in my mind, when I hear the word tragedy, I think of Sunset Boulevard, it's going to be black and white, it's going to be noir I have such a connotation to that word.

But when I was reading through this list of movies that are tragedies, and you're very clear, super clear delineation. of the setup want and the flaw and where they end up in that choice. I'm like, oh, my God, of course, they are tragedies. So just one flew over the cuckoo's next Chinatown, the Shining, Annie Hall, the usual suspects, being John Malkovich, Memento, the social network.

Suddenly, I'm like, oh, my God, they all are tragedies. And I love those movies. And maybe this is what I haven't been doing. I just I keep thinking of the simple and yet profound idea of transformative characters who transform and wake up. Versus don't wake up. And I just love that. Let's just pick one here.

Memento, he is set up on as he wants to find his wife's killer. The triumph is Teddy gives him the name and location of the killer. The flaws, denial and the climactic choices Teddy's Polaroid don't believe his lies. Again, it's very specific to the movie. But seeing it so clearly, because I think also up in the air, like I didn't think of up in the air as a tragedy.

And yet in your book, it's solely clearly is because he didn't wake up in time. He didn't wake up in time and he was going for the wrong thing the whole time. So can you talk a little bit about this? I just took a long time because I was so excited because I was like, Oh, this is woke up my brain. Can you talk a little bit about the, how this works in the tragedies?

Jill Chamberlain: Yeah, and my subgenre I love are romantic comedies that are actually tragedies. It's an interesting, like up in the air and Annie Hall. Yeah, the idea is that so two important things about the tragedy. One is. Tragedy is not all down. Tragedy is actually up.

Their act two, unlike a comedy, things are going great because your flaw benefits you in the short run. So they're just going up up, king of the world when they get to the top. And tragedies are tricky to be, I think they could be great, but to be satisfying, first of all, they have to be up.

Up can't just be down. And then they need to make that choice that makes us say Oh, why did you do that? We were late. We were not. It's not shocking that did it because we know the character, but we're like, Oh, why'd you do that? If you'd made a different one, you could have had the happy ending.

Why'd you do that? And yeah, it's an opportunity where they could have changed, but they fail. And that's going to bring them, their, the flaw

Meg LeFauve: wins, the flaw wins, right? And and they pay for it and they pay for it. And there's so many movies that are this, and we don't even realize that that they are this, cause again, cause we're thinking of Oedipus and eyeballs coming out.

So I'm like, it's no, this is. So interesting. These characters are so interesting and the up up. You think of Godfather, right? Like he is just going up up. Like he's becoming the son. I just love these characters. I love them so much because what a hat trick. And the, and this book can help you do it.

What a hat trick to connect us emotionally to somebody who's going to have a tragic end, right? So powerful.

Jill Chamberlain: Yeah, they're tricky, right? There are, it's not, you do need to hit a couple of these things, right? Like I said, people think colloquially when you, we use the word tragedy, it just means down.

Nobody wants to see that. That's not satisfying. We want to see someone where we're rooting for them in a sick way, even though they're a, we know George Clooney doesn't deserve her because he's a cad, but we're we're charmed by him and we're enjoying it. But then when he makes that choice, we're like yeah, you do what

Meg LeFauve: like what a hat trick for the writer first and then the director and then the actors and everybody else to pull off that you have connected us to this person.

Again, we don't have to like them. I'm not talking like ability, you have somehow found a way for us to fucking love them and connect to them, even though we don't like them, or we know what they're going to do, or we're really worried about their tragic end. You're just so compelled. I think usually it's skill, but that's not always but no one's better at this than Michael Corleone.

That's why he is becoming this thing, because he's so much better than his brothers at thinking this through and the strategy. And it's just so fascinating to watch his strategy and how he's taking stuff on. Oh, I could talk about this forever. The book is really a great tool to put in your toolbox.

I you know, I pull things out after I have my lump. I know that Jill. Would encourage you to do it before the lump. I think it's whatever you need. Just it's just another great tool to, Put your story through its paces and illuminate your own self, right? That's how I always like to use these tools is you're illuminating what you're trying to say, not what Jill's trying to get you to say or Meg or Lauren are trying to get you to say, what are you trying to say, right?

What emotionally, thematically with this piece, why is it personal to you? You can use these tools to get away from that, or you can use them to dig deeper. Our wish for you is that you take Jill's book and have it in your arsenal to dig deeper and find out, illuminate what it is you're trying to do emotionally with your story.

And if you use it it should bring up some lava people. It should be like slightly uncomfortable to. force you to make choices as a storyteller and to force you to commit to things as a storyteller, even just for a version, even just for a writing exercise, yes, we are not prescriptive.

However, if you have a huge emotional pushback to the idea of starting a page on rewrite or just. Taking a worksheet and trying it out. My question is why? It's just a writing exercise. It might illuminate something for you. It might actually bring something up. So thank you so much for being here, Jill.

Just it was fun and it's a lot of information. It's poor Jill trying to get this out so fast. But her worksheet will be there. Her book.

Jill Chamberlain: First of all, thank you so much. You actually Summed it up really well that is the purpose of the book. It is about helping you figure out what is the story underneath all these plot details and character details that are flying around your head.

That's what I'm forcing people to do, is to think about what, and it is about helping you figure out what it is about and by boiling it down to these really essential elements. So thank you so much for summing that up. And I will say also, I do, we talked about it. Doing it beforehand. I know showrunner who actually uses it in post and people are using that way to shape and add things in ADR when they're like, Oh, we forgot the want, we forgot to make the full apparently.

Yeah.

Meg LeFauve: You use it in television too. Is it a different book or is it the same book?

Jill Chamberlain: Thank you for bringing that up. It is I do not have a book specifically for television. It works exactly the same. It works exactly the same, and it's per episode. Each episode is like a little mini feature film with a beginning, middle, and end.

I With a point and no return and a climax. I have a class on television and I work with a number of showrunners. Who use it for developing that. But I didn't, the book does not mention one word about television.

Meg LeFauve: It doesn't. That's why I'm so glad we brought it up because I'm actually working on it on on a feature, but I'm also working on a TV show and it's the TV show that I was like, Oh, I think it's a set up one that he's talking about.

So Jill, we ask everybody the same three questions. What brings you the most joy in your creative life? That could be as teaching and consulting, of course, is creative. It could be your own writing. What brings you the most joy?

Jill Chamberlain: But one of my favorite things is when I work with writers, whether it's through my class or individually and.

I'm able to help them crack their story, and I've had writers tell me, they've been working on something for 10 years, they couldn't figure out the right way, the right vehicle to make it work, or things, involved, I had a student who's gay, and is in Costa Rica, and grew up in a a Catholic family, and had to go through conversion therapy, and he was able to come out with a screenplay and it was incredibly satisfying and to see him be able to find a way to tell his story in a way that worked.

So it's very satisfying to me for that.

Lorien McKenna: So the second question is what pisses you off in your creative life?

Jill Chamberlain: What pisses me off when I see writers not putting in the work and particularly I see it when they're not, I think I'm particularly sensitive. It's one thing if you harm yourself, but I, in a workshop situation that they don't really pay attention when they are critiquing and helping other writers, because that's.

So important. And it's not only is it an obnoxious thing to do, it's also where you learn so much from critiquing and the importance of writing groups and working with other writers and people who are going to, you're going to come up with. And so that kind of selfish thinking that would probably piss me off the most.

Yeah, same. And

Savana Vagueiro da Fonseca: Jill if you could have a conversation with your younger self, what advice would you give yourself?

Jill Chamberlain: I think, I bet I'm probably not the only person to say this. I have no idea. But I love being in the no fucks left to give. phase of my life. And I've spent way too much time worrying about what other people thought and how I came across that it was incredibly unproductive.

In fact, can put you into therapy and set you back. So I, I'm so glad I don't worry about that anymore. Fame.

Lorien McKenna: I am in the land of no fucks, the fuckery less land. Like I, I have no time. So I hear you. And yes, it is. I'm thinking about this question too. What would I tell my younger self? And it's like all these things.

And it's Oh my God, let go of the burden of. Of caring what people I don't even know and actually don't care about that much, like, why would I care? So yes, that's brilliant. I'm

Savana Vagueiro da Fonseca: very much looking forward to the promised land.

Lorien McKenna: Go there now. Come cross the border. Come on over.

Jill Chamberlain: You're welcome. Anytime. Yeah. Thank

Lorien McKenna: you so much, Jill. It's been really wonderful talking with you and yeah, thanks for being on the show. We feel really honored. Oh,

Jill Chamberlain: my pleasure. I'm the one who's honored. Both of you, all of you do so much for the community with this podcast and I really admire your work as writers.

So it's really been a thrill and an honor. I'm so happy to talk with you today.

Lorien McKenna: Thank you so much to Jill for joining us today. And if you want to check out her technique, the nutshell technique, you can head over to her website at jillchamberlain. com. And of course, if you want to get more TSL love, you can go to our Patreon where we do workshops and there's a community over there.

And of course our Facebook group. The screenwriting life, which is just this wonderful place where it's all about community. And thank you so much to Jeff and Savannah for producing today. And remember you are not alone and keep writing.