When I think about writing styles, there are two approaches I tend to divide them into.
The First, and probably the more common of the two, is the top down approach, which I tend to visualize as making a pizza. The second approach of writing from the bottom up I’ll get to later, but for now, let’s talk pizza.
Say you want to write a story. You have an idea for a romantic comedy about a blue collar fireman who falls in love with a wealthy socialite after rescuing her from a broken elevator. It’s a relatively sound beginning. We’ve all seen movies like that. So that’s your basic cheese pizza, the bare minimum you can have and still call it a story. So you look at your pizza and say to yourself, “I can do better. How can I make this more appealing to my audience?”
So you start in with the toppings. You start adding things that you know work well with this sort of story. You need conflict to make it interesting, so maybe her friends look down on him as low class, and his friends think she’s kind of a snob. Throw in a romantic rival of some sort. We’ll make him a rich investment banker with the Armani suits and the Harvard degree, that way we tap into that whole Occupy Wall street hatred. While we’re thinking about the rival, we decide to introduce him in a scene where she takes our fireman to a fancy restaurant and the banker shows up and joins them, then uses the fireman’s lack of culture and blue collar background to belittle him in front of the girl. Yeah, we hate this guy.
We’re getting there but it needs more. Our fireman needs a funny friend to say all the funny lines I’m planning to write, Picturing Kevin James from King of Queens.She'll get one too for symmetry. Also I decided just now that our love interest is kind of a daddy’s girl, and her father actually likes the fireman and is on his side, that way I can use a conversation between them to get her and the fireman together again in the third act after they break up in the second when they decided they were too different to work out. There should be some kind of scene where the banker gets his comeuppance, some sort of karmic retribution where treating someone like dirt comes back to haunt him.
I could go on, but that’s the basic gist of it. I started with the general idea, then I started piling things on that I have seen work in the past in other similar stories and know will probably increase the appeal of my story for most of the viewers. None of its particularly original, but then again neither are pizza toppings. Throw some ham, bacon and sausage on there, maybe a few veggies if that’s your thing, and it’s going to taste good. Sure, it’s almost the same as the pizza you had last month, but still satisfying.
The weakness in this approach is the difficulty in making it feel original, when this story has already been told. The story I’ve described above is about 40% Notting Hill mixed with some other romantic comedies to round it out. If you want your audience to feel anything you’re going to have to make it happen yourself, through good dialogue and scene descriptions and the atmosphere you create. Not every writer can pull it off. That’s where bad television comes from. I think in the long run, it’s the other approach; the “bottom up approach” that has the potential to create the stronger story, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
To be continued….
