WGA member and comedy writer John Vorhaus has been teaching writers for years across 37 countries. As a teacher, he's landed on a framework that's aggressively simple... which is great if you're mired in a tough draft right now. He says that every writer only needs to consider two questions to get started or keep momentum.
What happens to your character? And how does your character feel?
There’s your foundation. Everything else, like the setting, the dialogue, the wardrobe, the logistics, can fall into place, but you worry about it later.
Check out his explainer with Film Courage here.
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Details Are a Trap
I know I can fall into this trap, too. I can think of a cool premise, or an image or line of dialogue I want to play with, and then I figure out things around that. Who would say that thing? What would lead to that image? It’s fun, but it’s usually a pretty long and circuitous process. And if that’s how you work too, great—it works for both of us.
However, there are times when we meet the crunch, and we need to go faster.
Vorhaus uses a simple example. Imagine a character heading to a job interview. What's she wearing? Is a yellow dress too much? Should it be a suit? What kind of job is it, anyway? Suddenly, you've disappeared into a rabbit hole of logistics, and you're no closer to a story.
Details, as fun as they are, aren’t progress. We aren’t advancing the plot when we get stuck on those.
The Two Questions
If you know what's happening and how your characters feel about it, you have the raw material of a scene.
He illustrates this with a couple waiting for the result of a pregnancy test. They're nervous; they both secretly want it to be positive, but neither wants to admit it.
You don't know anything else about these people yet, but you don't really need to, because that's interesting on its own. The emotional stakes are already there. That's enough to build from.
Going back to character is always a good reminder. Who are the people in your story? How do they feel, and what do they want? And what’s happening to them?
'Knocked Up'Credit: Universal Pictures
Find the Pivot
Once you've established what's happening and how characters feel, the next thing you're looking for is what Vorhaus calls a “pivot.” This is a new piece of information that shifts the emotional state.
In the pregnancy example, the result itself is the pivot. It doesn't matter what the test looks like or where the scene takes place.
What matters is that the new information changes how everyone feels, and that change propels you into the next beat.
Plot without that emotional shift is just an event, and that’s how you end up with rote scenes or repetitive beats. You want your characters to feel ups and downs. That’s what makes a story compelling.
Map the Emotional Journey
When he's developing a sitcom story, Vorhaus sketches out what he calls an “attitude map,” meaning a beat-by-beat track of what happens and how each character feels at each turn. He focuses on what happens and how each character feels (back to those two questions).
The focus is on the beginning, middle, and end of the emotional journey—not the beginning, middle, and end of the event as plot beats.
His example involves a father, a teenage daughter, and a first date. He says yes. She goes. Something goes sideways. She needs help. By the end, both characters have arrived somewhere new in their understanding of each other.
The whole map takes about 15 minutes on a whiteboard, he says.
Critical Mass
Vorhaus describes a concept he calls critical mass, or the point in a project where it starts generating energy instead of just consuming it. As a writer, you feel like you’re riding a wave instead of paddling upstream.
The only way in is through. Try starting with what happens and how your characters feel, and trust that everything else will follow.
