Boring, necessary, and completely misunderstood

What’s up fellow writers.

Firstly, thank you to everyone who filled out last week’s poll. I’m extremely grateful, not to mention humbled by your kind words.

It was surreal and fascinating getting a glimpse into your specific interests - most of all it was insightful, and your responses will categorically shape the kind of topics I tackle from here on out.

If you want to have your voice heard - via four multiple choice questions, just click here.

Yesterday I was grappling with a scene. It’s a short scene in which the protagonist starts their first day at a new job.

I wanted the scene. The protagonist’s work is tactile, intriguing, interesting to watch. The protagonist is very good at it. Precise and meticulous. All this is important information.

What’s more I happen to know this scene will be played by a talented, charismatic Oscar-nominated actor - so his performance will make the scene a quietly compelling moment.

But there was something missing.

Last week I wrote about what makes good conflict.

Two characters (or, yes, sometimes a drawer) with competing goals crash into each other. One or both go flying off in a new direction. It’s dynamic, unpredictable. A little bit chaotic.

This is what generates the motion and momentum in your script. I described it as fuel in your story’s engine.

If I were a physicist I’d draw a much more elegant parallel involving atoms or electrons and how they all sort of smash together to release energy. And the energy then kind of pings off and makes other things smash together. And that’s how we went from being amorphous pond blobs to human beings.

I think. I’m not a physicist.

But is conflict literally the entire fabric of your story? Is it just people and tall fences and internal dilemmas smashing together from page 1 to 110?

What about the moments when things are going well? When everyone’s getting along?

What about my “first day at work” scene? Are you allowed to have one or two of those?

Luckily yes. You have a tool for that. It’s the montage.

And if the montage song from Team America: World Police isn’t playing in your head right now, stop reading this and go watch it.

Montages are a bit like voiceovers. They’re largely misunderstood. Everyone seems to acknowledge they they exist. A few people think they’re evil. But for the most part no one has a great deal to say about them.

In the spirit of the montage, here’s a selection of snippets I found on the internet of people trying to teach you what a montage is.

Respectfully, no.

Well, yes in a way. These people are describing what we see in a montage. They have correctly observed a montage. It’s the kind of “outside-in” story analysis you get from people who are primarily readers.

But they’re not grappling with how, why, and exactly when to write a montage.

It’s like me looking at a house and saying, “see, what they’ve done is they’ve laid a row of bricks down, then some cement, then another row of bricks, and every now and then they’ve stopped to put in a window, and they’ve carried on all the way to the top. Stick a roof on. Bingo-bongo: house.”

Fair enough. I’m technically not wrong. But you wouldn’t hire me to build you a house any more than you’d hire me to teach physics.

So a montage doesn’t exist solely to show the passage of time. Every cut from one scene to the next denotes the passage of time.

And it’s not about showing character growth, or incremental progress, or two contrasting characters, or a “mood”, or conveying information (good lord); you can achieve all this within scenes and across scenes and in between scenes. In fact, you should.

All of these elements belong in the montage bucket. The question is: what’s the bucket?

A montage is what you plug into your script when you have a plot point without meaningful conflict.

Either because everything is going great and your protagonist is moving forward without any serious obstacles in their path.

Or because things are going particularly badly, and your protagonist is hitting a series of walls that aren’t forcing a change of direction.

Think of the montage as the “blah blah blah, etc.” part of an anecdote. We need to know it happens. The issue is it’s lacking the crucial element that makes scenes and sequences worth watching in the first place.

In other words, the action is necessary, but not so interesting that we need to see it happening in real time. Because we are not witnessing true meaningful conflict - with tolls being paid, plans being derailed, and new pathways being created.

Let’s look at some archetypes.

THE TRAINING MONTAGE

Rocky, The Karate Kid, Whiplash, etc.

Your protagonist is getting stronger, they’re getting more adept at the skill they need to learn. They are generally becoming more competent, more up to the challenge.

There are obstacles - Rocky has to catch a chicken; Andrew Neiman gets a mean blister. But those obstacles aren’t creating serious conflict that impacts the story. It’s steady, smooth progress from point A to point B.

If all this played out in real time - if we had 25 full minutes of Rocky getting match fit - it would feel incredibly weird and baggy. You’d be thinking, “yeah, we get it.” Or “So we’re just going to watch him run up all those steps?”

Conversely if we skipped it all entirely, the whole story would feel somehow underwhelming or incomplete. “Huh, I guess he was good enough to go toe-to-toe with a champion after all.”

And if we’d just hard-cut to Rocky’s trainer Mickey saying, “well, champ, you sure worked hard over these last few weeks - and now you’re finally ready to face Apollo Creed.” That would feel like a clunky exposition dump bordering on parody.

To be honest it would feel like they’d lost a reel of film somewhere.

We want to see him put in the sweat. It’s gratifying to watch him improve. We need the story information. But there’s no real conflict.

Hence, training montage.

THEY’RE FALLING IN LOVE

La La Land, Crazy Stupid Love, Runaway Bride, etc.

Our protagonists aren’t progressing physically or in terms of skills, but they are progressing romantically and perhaps in various other knock-on ways.

Life is good! They’re happy. They’re feeling happier and more connected with each passing moment. We need them to fall in love so we can throw them into lots of awful situations when they’ve got it all to lose.

We just don’t want to spend too much time watching them fall in love. Why? Because being happy and in love is boring. It’s conflict-free.

In La La Land, the Mia and Sebastian are only ever truly happy and in love for a single montage at the midway point. Before that it’s all spiky flirtation, after that it’s downhill.

This is a common motif in romantic comedies. Ironically, we we only really want to see the couple happy and in love for a little bit in the middle, and then a final scene right at the end. The rest of the time we want what we always want: conflict.

You’ll even recognise the feeling as a viewer. A cool needle-drop plays. The montage begins. Then as soon as the music fades out and the first line of dialogue comes back in, we think “ah, now something interesting is about to happen.”

THE GLOW-UP

Pretty In Pink, Crazy Rich Asians, Clueless, etc.

They’re getting their hair done, choosing a new outfit, possibly deepening connections with their friends along the way. Generally having a ball.

By now you get the picture. We start at story point A, we arrive at point B relatively hassle-free. Not a huge amount of narrative interest occurs on the journey there.

But we need it, so why not make this little zone of nothingness fun and cinematic in a way that reflects the character’s experience.

But what if we don’t make it to point B. What if we’re stuck at Point A?

DOORS SLAMMED IN FACE

Wall-E; Ace Venture: Pet Detective; Cool Runnings (x2), etc.

Things are going badly in such a routine and repetitive way, it in itself lacks conflict.

There’s no point in watching full scenes of someone fail at the same task a dozen times over. We only need to know that this humiliating parade of failure happened.

THE DAILY ROUTINE

American Psycho; Groundhog Day; All That Jazz, etc.

Your character gets dressed, commutes, sits at their desk, returns home. Or some kind of equally mundane equivalent.

This is its own kind of repetitive failure. Usually representing a failure of courage, or nerve, or inspiration, or imagination, or hope.

It can come at the beginning, before the big exciting thing arrives to create massive upheaval. Or it could come at the low point, when our character has lost everything and is experiencing a kind of “death of the soul”. Or it can be both.

But again, the point is to show that a) here we are. And b) nothing majorly pertinent to the story is occurring right now. You need to know this; there’s no meaningful conflict (I’ll stop banging that drum now).

So why does everyone think the point of a montage is to show the passage of time? Because that’s an inevitable effect of the real purpose. Likewise incremental progress, character growth, and all the other outward signifiers people mention.

But if you’re a writer debating whether to add a montage, none of those are the core reason why you should write one. You only need ask yourself one question:

Does this necessary plot point contain any real conflict?

If the answer’s no, and assuming it is in fact a necessary plot point, then it might just be montage time.

Here’s a quick list of plot points I would choose to write as a montage:

And if you haven’t figured it out by now, that’s what I did with my scene yesterday. A half-page montage. A bullet pointed list of my protagonist going about his first working day.

So now you know when to write one, how should it look on the page?

There’s no hard answer to this. It can depend how long it is; whether you’re following one character or several; whether you’re in a single location or multiple; whether you’re tracking hours or years.

One way or another, it’s going to end up looking like a list of moments. Perhaps bullet-pointed. Perhaps italicised. Perhaps a series of sluglines. It’s all a matter of personal taste and circumstance.

I do have one fundamental rule, though. It’s one of my “three Cs of page layout”:

CLARITY.

Lay it out in a way that keeps the reader reading without any doubt in their mind as to what’s happening.

Everyone knows what a montage is. They’ll recognise the framework when they see it. Just make sure they know what it is they’re reading when they come to it.

If they have to skip back a page to figure out what you’re doing…well, that’s bad. That’s the kind of reason people put scripts down and never pick them up again.

Personally, I’m not above writing

MONTAGE

at the start, and

END OF MONTAGE

at the end.

Doesn’t get clearer than that.

Go and read some examples. See how the pros do it. Here’s an article with a whole load of them.

Find a version that feels good to you. Aim for clarity over everything.

Anything else on montages?

They’re extremely adaptable. Rarely absolutely necessary. Often the most buoyant and memorable part of a movie.

Sometimes montages can be used primarily to set a mood, introduce an environment, draw us into the world of the story, or ease us back out into our own. But even then they will always contain pertinent story information, and they’ll practically never contain meaningful conflict that belongs in a legitimate scene.

So that’s montages. A writing tool worth mastering. Put on your favourite song, practice writing them repeatedly over a period of time, improve incrementally, get really good—

You can see where I’m going with this.

To finish - a few weeks ago I wrote about the current so-called spec boom. Where it came from and how to capitalise from it.

Just last week Matthew Belloni dedicated an episode of his podcast The Town to the very same subject.

In his interview with talent manager Geoff Shaevitz, they elaborate on my personal take that Kevin Feige’s loss is our gain, and dig into what this surge in spec sales means for the industry.

That’s it for this week.

Thanks for reading. Go get after it.

Rob