Although seemingly incompatible, current personal productivity paradigms have a lot in common with modern screenwriting. Today there seems to be two major camps when it comes to planning out your day: those that advocate “getting things done” and those that advocate doing “first things first.” Diving into more detail on where these paradigms come from provides a screenwriter with some interesting tools.
I have to confess that I’ve always had a soft spot for personal productivity books. They probably fall in line somewhere just behind screenwriting books and far in front of financial planning tomes.
Years ago I was very much into Steven Covey’s paradigm of “First Things First.” The book of that name, and his original one that started it all, “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People,” fermented in me a desire to optimize my time to the best of my ability.
The Covey philosophy emphasized doing things that were more “important” rather than those that are “urgent.” When planning out your week, you were to drop the “big rocks” in first on your calendar. The big rocks were 3 or 4 things that were the most important for you to accomplish. If everything else falls through, and it usually does, at least you’d have done those personally important things.
In the last 2 years I have become quite addicted to all things “GTD.” Those who know, know that GTD stands for “Getting Things Done” - a philosophy of productivity espoused by David Allen. The followers of David Allen live in contexts, processing, and weekly reviews (if we’re good about it). Here, David provides a paradigm that is more focused on accomplishing the tasks you can get done “right now.” Depending on whatever context you are in (at home, on the phone, at the grocery store), you can look to your lists to see what the “next action” is to be accomplished. The GTD system focuses on the “runway” perspective of your life - a perspective that if followed properly will help lift you up to your higher goals.
So what does this have to do with screenwriting?
There is a fantastic article on the Dramatica website about Preference, Emphasis, Priorities and Importance. The Dramatica theory, while originally engineered to aid in storytelling, has a lot to say about how the human mind works. At its basest level, Dramatica believes that stories are simply analogies to the human mind’s problem solving process.
With that in mind, take a look at the opening paragraph of the aforementioned article. It should sound roughly familiar to mavens of personal productivity:
There are four kinds of decisions that can be made. Sometimes we have to choose if we want one thing OR another. To do this, we establish our Preferences. Sometimes we have to divide our resources among several uses. To do this we determine our Emphasis. Sometime we must determine the order in which things will occur. We do this by establishing Priorities. Finally, we sometimes must decide which of several things should get ANY of our resources and which should get none. We determine this by Importance.
Well, two of these sound like Covey and the other two sound like Allen. Anyone care to guess which is which?
The article goes on to describe the differences between binary choices and gray scale choices and how both can be made based on either spatial or temporal considerations. The article does a great job of explaining all four, but again, two of these fall in line with Covey and the other two GTD.
The summary provides an interesting insight into the structure of your screenplay.
These divisions create four categories of decisions: Binary Spatial, Binary Temporal, Balance Spatial, Balance Temporal. In more familiar terms, Binary Spatial decisions are described by Preferences. Binary Temporal decisions refer to Priorities. Balance Spatial decisions establish Emphasis. And Balance Temporal decisions determine Importance.
GTD is big on Priorities and Preference. Die-hards will argue that GTD espouses against priorities, but here we are looking at the word in a different context. Here, priorities happen when you pick one thing before another - when you have a long list in one context and you pick one over the other - in that instance, you are placing priorities on your action items. In this context, priorities and preference are summed up in your next action lists.
Covey, on the other hand, is way into Importance and Emphasis. Again, this can be seen in the concept of big rocks and planning based on your roles - those areas of your life you want to emphasize more.
Come on, Get to the Screenwriting Part!
If you realize that binary decisions are made by predominantly Logical Problem Solvers and balance decisions are made by predominantly Holistic Problem Solvers, you begin to see how an understanding of these productivity paradigms can aid you in your screenwriting.
For me personally, 99.9999% of all my characters are Logical Problem Solvers. Why? Because I’m predominantly a Rational person! Write what you know, right? When it comes to writing Holistic Problem Solving characters my brain always starts to freeze up a little…
Which is where the linked article and my familiarity with Covey’s paradigm can come in handy. This holistic way of seeing things - of seeing relationships between things and how to bring about proper life balance - is precisely the sort of mindset a Holistic Problem Solving character would have. If you have a character like this, but you suffer from the same blind spot I do, well, now you’ve got a tool.
Likewise, if you’re a predominantly Holistic Problem Solver, and you find it difficult imagining how anyone can live their life in such a rigid step-by-step fashion, now you’ve got something to help you out. If you’re into GTD, and you understand how the Next Action list concept works - how one action leads to the next action which then leads to the next and so on and so on until you achieve your goal (Completed Project) - then you understand the mind of a Logical Problem Solver.
Mental Sex
Dramatica used to refer to this concept as the Mental Sex of your Main Character. In the structure of your story you would choose either a Male Mental Sex Main Character (Logical) or a Female Mental Sex Main Character (Intuitive). The choice would have a significant impact on the order your story would precede in. If you think of your story as one human mind trying to solve a problem, then how it goes about solving that problem becomes a major force in how it proceeds.
The term was changed to Problem Solving Process in the latest version of the software because the latter term was perceived to be too ”controversial.”
If this concept interests you at all, a billion references to it can be found on the main Dramatica website. Just open Google, and type “mental sex site:dramatica.com” and you’ll learn more than you every thought possible!
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