Pageturners 6: Step breakdowns and finales
Welcome to Pageturners, a book I’m writing in which I share what I’ve learnt – and am still learning – about comic writing, film writing, novel writing and how new writers can sell their stories. I’ll publish a chapter or a section per week, available for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below!
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Pageturners 6: Step breakdowns and finales
Step breakdowns
A one or two page step breakdown requires no effort for an editor to read and they can see at a glance where the problems lie and how valid the finale is – even though it may have taken you months to work it all out in comprehensive detail and then boil it down to almost nothing!
It’s also useful as a quick checklist to see your story at a glance. If you’re going to write such a summary it will be devoid of all the details that we writers love to include to bring our story alive.
The BBC do something similar: they wanted a three-page summary of a Doctor Who TV serial from me before they commissioned it. The script editor, Chris Bidmead, sent me his predecessor’s notes on summaries, and told me not to be put off by the editor’s angry tone. His predecessor was Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, who furiously proclaimed he really didn’t want to know about how a character got out of a cell using what monkey wrench on whoever; what the Doctor was doing with his sonic screwdriver and so on. He was after broad brushstrokes and nothing more. He cited past examples where his explicit instructions had been ignored and writers had sent in a synopsis that was the length of a novella. Adams had clearly had some bad experiences with writers! Quaking in my boots, I followed Chris’s excellent advice to the letter, and my three-page summary was commissioned into a full screenplay.
I’ve written step breakdowns since, including a one-page, one sentence-per-event breakdown for a film producer. He was already aware of the subject matter and protagonist, so it could afford to be very terse, and it was a really useful exercise for seeing a story ‘at a glance’.
The finale
Some finales seem obvious – Dredd reaching the end of the Cursed Earth, the t-rex Old One Eye leading her dinosaurs to victory over the hated humans in Flesh. Nemesis and Torquemada fighting to the death. But there’s still an emotional subtext to the finale. Things have to get worse and worse and worse, emotionally as well as physically, before the final pay-off, which, ideally, involves a profound twist that illuminates and resolves the theme of the story.
It’s fed by the theme of the story, played out over three acts, one side winning, then the other, until, by the end of the third act, the situation seems to have completely spiralled out of control so we’re on the edge of our seats, desperate to see the final outcome. Producers and editors would like the writer to work back from the ending. But sometimes you can only do this provisionally, with a placeholder ending, while you get deeper into the story and the characters and gain new insights which were not immediately apparent.
There are endless examples of this, such as in Chinatown, where the film director Polanski changed the writer’s ending to a tragic one during filming. Which is why that film is so powerful: evil triumphs. The truly hateful villain (played by John Huston) gets away with his crimes. And that’s a valid reflection of real life – villains of this ilk invariably do get away with their crimes. Polanski said if Chinatown had ended happily, ‘We wouldn’t be sitting round talking about it today.’ Even so, I’m still not happy about the bad guy winning, which is why I can’t say it’s my favourite finale.
Here are three of my favourite endings:
Flesh
This is an ending I’m particularly proud of. Humans and dinosaurs, led by the 120-year-old T. rex Old One Eye, have been battling it out in the Cretaceous. My theme was ‘Nature will always defeat humanity.’ This is the opposite of King Kong, where human technology defeats and kills Kong, the symbol of nature. Much as I love the film, this is a theme I don’t accept. So in Flesh, Old One Eye, after leading a massacre of the human invaders, staggers off to the tyrannosaurs’ graveyard. There she dies, not from the ‘superior’ guns of the humans, but from old age! Cut to 65 million years later. Her massive fossilised skeleton is now in a Museum. Based on a real-life incident, an arrogant palaeontologist decides to have a dinner inside her skeleton! After dinner, staring into her ferocious skull, he makes denigrating comments about T. rexes, concluding with, ‘this tyrannosaur could never kill a man.’. But one of the rods holding her jaws apart is jogged out of place and her teeth close on the palaeontologist, killing him. It’s pure comic book, but I love it. Especially my final caption: ‘Even after death… Old One Eye was triumphant.’
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Colin Smith, a borstal boy (played by Tom Courtenay), challenges authority, but the prison governor sees he has potential as a long distance runner. So he is groomed for stardom, which will bring prestige to the governor as well as Colin. In the final race he competes with privileged boys from a nearby public school. He easily outdistances the public school runners, but then throws the race, to the fury of the governor. It’s the ultimate ‘V’ sign to authority. Such a film is unlikely to be made today because those same public school boys now sadly control every aspect of the media and opportunities to tell working class truths – as opposed to parody, stereotype or portraying working class as scum – are limited. Thus I was keenly aware of middle-class friends watching Shameless just to laugh and sneer at the characters’ ‘gross’ behaviour. For them, it was like visiting a zoo. By contrast, there was an impressive dignity about the ending of Long Distance Runner.
It’s why I was always impressed by Ella on Easy Street – a girls’ comic serial in Tammy by radio scriptwriter Charles Herring and artist Casanovas. Ella’s family are determined to do better in life, go to night school, get better qualifications, find good white collar jobs and so on. But Ella realises they are actually far happier as they are now. So she sets out to sabotage her family’s efforts to ‘better themselves’ because she wants them all to remain on Easy Street. It’s a brilliant and seditious idea that challenges everything society stands for and asks us what we would really prefer: ambition or personal happiness? Its unique and powerful message must have had a profound effect on its young readers. I vaguely recall Ella eventually ‘came to her senses’ – an inevitable, reassuring cop-out.
Ella is a good example of where the ending does not have the power that it should because there is no truth behind it. Hence why I’ve forgotten it. This story wasn’t worked out from the ending. That’s hardly the writer’s fault – our serials had to have traditional, reassuring, ‘happy ever after’ endings. Ugh! There was a valid fear amongst editorial staff that the publishers, middle-class parents or the numerous enemies of comics, like Mary Whitehouse, would object to a ‘negative’ or challenging ending. I’d always say – let them. You’d really rather tell kids cosy establishment lies? It was an approach I fought with some limited success when I originated Misty.
Sláine: The Horned God
All the previous Sláine stories have been leading up to this momentous finale: the final battle between Sláine and Slough Feg, the new Horned God versus the old impotent Horned God. Feg laments, ‘This old man now feeble was not so in his youth. Many a carcass was usual from his hand. Vigorously young witches loved me… And now… I am…withered and decrepit.’ Powerfully visualised by Simon Bisley, Sláine throws the fearsome gae bolga spear with his foot. It embeds in Feg’s groin and thus represents a giant phallus. The demented Feg sees the cosmic joke and goes laughing to his death.
Although other aspects of the ending I’d worked out in advance, this wasn’t one of them. I had to get deeply inside the story for this appropriate twist to be revealed to me.
So many aspects of the story were tied up in this saga , including Sláine becoming the first King of Ireland. In a footnote on the final page it’s revealed that this was confirmed by the ancient Irish mythological records: ‘As time went on and fortune varied and, is her want, turned many things upside down in a short time, Sláine became the High King of the whole of Ireland.’
This was a very emotional moment for me as the proud bearer of an Irish passport. I’d taken those few lines from a dusty ancient chronicle and built a long running serial upon them. It was something I’d been planning since episode one, so I had worked backwards from that ending.
But then I hit a problem on future sagas. The finale of The Horned God was so complete and so satisfying, it was a hard act to follow, even with great artists. Primarily because the story couldn’t step up to even higher levels of drama. The theme had played itself out. So I tried moving sideways with equally epic time travel adventures as Sláine becomes involved with Boudicca, King Arthur, the Cathars and William Wallace. This, too, was set up from the beginning with references to time travel in Episode One. Plus Celtic warriors were established early on as time travellers: for example Sláine appears at the great Irish medieval Battle of Clontarf. But I don’t think all the readers were entirely persuaded.
All long running serials, novels and films have this problem. Eventually it was overcome – with Clint Langley’s The Books of Invasions. Sláine returns to Ireland and continues where The Horned God left off – and takes the story to even more epic heights.