How do you respond when things don’t go as planned? Having your plans go awry can be troubling. Yet, there may be a more positive way to look at the experience.
I recently read a response by M Scott Veach, a producer and editor for TV series such as Leverage and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, to a question asking how professionals “break a script.”
Veach points out breaking the script is the process of taking an idea and breaking it into its component parts. Breaking the script involves the pieces of the story, the plot points, or narrative elements.
One way to think about that, is to consider breaking the script as a matter of putting the stepping stones in place in order for you to get from one side of the story stream to the other.
I’m reminded of watching one of my favorite shows, Hogan’s Heroes, growing up. Hogan’s Heroes is an award-winning television show that ran between 1965 and 1971. It is set in a German prisoner of war camp in World War Two.
Each episode pits prisoners Colonol Hogan, Corporal Newkirk, Carter, LeBeau, and Kinchloe in a secret mission pitted against the bumbling German officers Colonol Klink, Sergeant Schultz and General Burkhalter.
The interesting thing about this TV series, is that it didn’t start out in the same way that it ended up on the television screen. The script was broken. In the beginning, before the first episode of Hogan’s Heroes aired, this show was set in a jail in the United States.
Richard Dawson, who plays Corporal Newkirk, has a strong British accent. At the first audition, he tried to get the part with an American accent, but that didn’t work. Then he tried to convince the casting directors that he should use a Liverpudlian accent. The directors nixed that idea insisting he wouldn’t be understood, if he went without accent. He finally settled on a Cockney accent.
While Hogan’s Heroes was airing on television, the Beatles were skyrocketing to fame and fortune with their Liverpudlian accent. Dawson told his bosses, I told you so.
A key feature of Hogan’s Heroes are secret tunnels and secret rooms. Originally included among these secret places was an underground steam room. The directors, thought that that was a little bit too outlandish and removed that from the set.
As you can see, the story that I enjoyed watching as reruns years after the show had run was a very different story than the way it began. The script was broken.
Oftentimes, when we think of things being broken, we think of that breaking as a bad thing. We don’t want things to break. We want things to remain intact. We want things to be whole. We want them to make sense from the beginning.
The ironic thing is breaking the script enables us to improve the story.
If we had stuck with the original script, the story would be very different from the way the story appears after its been broken.
If the crew behind Hogan’s Heroes hadn’t broken the script, it likely would not have enjoyed the success it enjoyed.
When our script is broken, we also have the opportunity to put things back together in a way that is better than the original story.
When our script is broken., we can look beyond the negative experience and envision it as a creative experience. We can see it as an opportunity to create an even richer story.
Golden Word: script Latin scribere (to write) from the Proto-Indo-European *skribh (to cut, separate, sift). The final script has undergone a lot of sifting.
Golden Quote: Big budget movies can have big budget perks, and small budget movies have no perks, but what the driving force is, of course, is the script. – Morgan Freeman
Golden Read: Binge-watching the stories in your head in this article on Mindful.org writer Jay Vidyarthi talks about his struggle to come to terms with the stories playing on the screens of his mind.
Golden Question: How can you break your script so the end product improves on the original story?
This post is from the Golden Nuggets newsletter sent out each Tuesday morning to authors and speakers who want to enrich their story.