Constellations

Applying family therapy to scripts: in reverse.

Which turned into Applying Adele’s Script to Investigating her Psyche.

All in another interesting afternoon at BAFTA…

I have a script which can be accurately described as stuck. Hell, I have two scripts and a book in various states of stuckedness, but Life in Me is categorically in a State of Stuck.

One of the reasons, as pointed out by a friend in several pages of notes and 20 minutes of protesting over the phone (I was blissfully unaware of all this, you see), might be that I’m warping the narrative of the story out of shape by assuming that it’s Sienna’s story… when maybe, just maybe, it belongs to Rael. The Batman comics and films sure as hell ain’t called ‘Bruce Wayne’ and for a damn good reason.

Am I telling the wrong story by using the wrong protagonist? Is that why I got through draft after draft and still can’t get the wretched thing right?

So I’ve had this dropped on me and while I commit an ongoing face-palm and wallow in creative despair (which is a place dark somewhere between self-loathing [I’m an idiot, I’ll never be able to do write anything worth a damn, you need actual talent for that, blah blah blah self surrender blah’] and self-doubt [maybe this is just rubbish, always has been, always will be, and perhaps I’m just wasting my whole life and will fail as miserably as a writer as I did as a dressage rider woe is me et cetera]) Pippa randomly sent me a link to a workshop called Scripts Unstuck.

That’s like, fate or something, right? You’ve got to sign up for something like that when writing has devolved from a work of genius into a car crash in front of your disbelieving eyes.

Scripts Unstuck was a Constellations workshop aimed at looking at stories and characters from a different – and more physical – perspective. Constellations is an innovative method for family and relationship therapy, where uninvolved people are used to represent the relatives/partners in conflicted relationships. It’s been adapted for script writing through Script Explorers and you can use it to explore story or character problems. I know: that doesn’t help. You still have no idea what it is. That’s how I arrived at the workshop: no idea what this method was.

Four hours later, I concluded that Constellations is only interesting if you’re taking part, either as the person whose story is being constellated or as a representative in the constellation.

A constellation is made with a question asked of a script or character. So the script we were first constellating was for a feature film isolating two young couples on an island. One person disappears. The question? What do the other three people do about it? We had four representatives for the couples and a representative for The Disappearances (and this is a powerful tool in this method: objects, places and concepts can be given physical representation and thus enabled to act on characters and story).

I was a representative in this constellation, and it was both challenging and fascinating. But I was sitting out the second one and it was first dull, and then frustrating, and then I pulled out my notebook to quietly start unsticking my own script myself before I went banonkers*.

You see, when you watch people take part in a constellation, they pretty much look like nutcases.  Can’t be avoided – you’ll turn into one too as soon as it’s your turn. You’re forming static tableaus based on small tidbits of information from the writer and directions from the constellator (fancy name for the facilitator), drawing on intuition and your own perceptions to respond to situations. The writer intuitively ‘guides’ the representatives into place in the room, and they talk about how they feel based on their relative locations.

There’s a lot of feeling and a lot of talking about those feelings. A bunch of reasonably sane folk (I use the term lightly, we were writers, after all) start talking about how they ‘feel threatened’ and ‘lost’ and ‘warm’ and ‘tingly’ and surrounded by force-fields and so on for up to an hour and that’s a very special kind of torture at four in the afternoon when everyone is either standing still or making ‘a quarter of the move you instinctively feel like you want to make right now.’ It’s slower than a bad run on a daytime soap.

Although don’t get me wrong, it’s not as nuts as it sounds. Constellations physicalises relationships and conflict. Because it’s based on static tableaus, it dramatically reminds us is that we’re unconsciously reading body language all the time. You turn someone around, or redirect their gaze, or cross their arms, or lay them on the ground, and you’re getting whole new messages coming through. In a static plateau of people, suddenly everything means something.

Now Constellations was developed for conflict resolution. It’s about moving all the representatives into a state of reduced conflict. In the first constellation we did, we (the representatives) moved ourselves into a natural position of reduced conflict – and suddenly we had no drama. There was no story. Script constellating is exactly the reverse of relationship constellating. In a script, you seek conflict. You seek to make everyone uncomfortable – and that was the second valuable lesson.  All writers know it, but it’s easy to forget when you have characters on a page and in your head and don’t always think of all the wonderful and simple ways you can bang them together.

So the big lessons?

No 1: small actions can equal big reactions, which means that conflict is so much easier to create than you think. You don’t have to crash a train or kill someone or snog your best friend’s partner to create conflict. You can use that as a catalyst, but it’s the smaller and escalating repercussions that equal big conflict. People being just people can be much more interesting than people being super/hyper-real people or people in dramatic crisis.

No 2: there are more ways to make someone uncomfortable than you think. Characters who may look like they have no relation at all can prove to effect significant influence over other one another once you see them physically manifested and acted out in relation to one another.

No 3: by externalising your situation and letting your characters play out against one another, you get options for conflict that you may not have been able to see in your head.

And then our constellators decided to take a different approach, and constellate my script, Life in Me, not as a dramatic story but as a story that reveals the psyche of the writer.

Here’s the brief synopsis I bought (which is not the one I always use):

Teenager Sienna spends her days wishing she could be special-awesome – but suspects she’s actually special-crazy.

Amnesiac Rael thinks she’s travelled 10 years into the future and spends her nights trawling London’s alien underground, trying to find herself and her past.

Problem is, they’re both in one body, and their worlds of the real and surreal are about to collide…

My question: Who does this story belong to, Sienna or Rael?

So obviously, the drawn conclusion was that this series is all an exploration of my own psyche where I am Sienna, but I want to be Rael. Instead of constellating Si and Rael and one or two other characters or forces, we constellated Adele, Si and Rael. Suddenly I was being represented by another person.

That is acutely uncomfortable. Hearing other people talk about how your characters feel is bad enough; hearing someone else be you is much, much worse. Fascinating, of course. As the writer whose story is being constellated, you get small amounts of interaction in return for huge degrees of surrender. You give a little information, and your representatives start talking based on their own instincts. Which is to say, their own experience, assumptions and prejudice.

This is where constellations can get stuck, really stuck – more stuck than the script you’re trying to unstick.

The second constellation proved this best: representatives got so bogged down in how they felt that they lost the characters they were supposed to be representing completely. Even the representative of the manifestation of Love became a rather loathsome, twisted and depressingly human excuse for a powerful and distinct emotion.

And people looked at my Life in Me and decided it was literally me – an explicit representation of Adele’s psyche – and started responding directly to that idea.  Therefore as a writer I had a God complex and I didn’t like Sienna because she’s who I see myself (and apparently I don’t like myself) as but I clearly love Rael because she’s my real secret alter-ego (so secret I’m writing a TV series about it) and blah blah blah.

Sienna meanwhile resents me because I’m like a school-mistress over her and Rael doesn’t give a toss about me because she wants to fly away and be somewhere else. We ended up with a constellation of Rael literally trying to leave the room, Sienna standing around being useless and Adele doing much the same. It was undynamic. The constellation was stuck.

Much like my script, in fact.

The problem, the constellation (and, in fairness, several friends previously) revealed to me is that Si is too static. By assuming she’s the weakness and poor self-image in me, the representative had nothing to do with her.

That’s not quite right. But by assuming she wants to be normal, I made her really quite boring. My mistake was wanting Si to want to be normal before she’d properly had normal taken away. I loathed ITV’s Demons because the idiot boy was turning away from Phillip Glenister trying to show him he’s actually an awesome demon hunter with powers and cool weapons and stuff. You moron! Who runs away from an adventure like that? We all want to be special, don’t we? To have someone say ‘guess what? You’re the slayer!’

Once you get into the crazy world, and there’s no turning back, then a character can say ‘actually, you know what, I’d like to be normal now, thanks ever so much.’ But if they start there, then you know what? They’re really super dull. Dull on an epic scale.

In the constellation, there was no conflict between Sienna and Rael. The reason it was represented so was wrong, but it was fascinating to see manifested. Rael wanted to leave, to relieve the tension – traditional Constellation work. In scripts though, you have to create more tension. So if Rael wants to leave, I have to put something concrete in her path to prevent her from doing so. The fact that they’re stuck in one body does that automatically (and the constellator should have represented that in the constellation) but instead I had to think about another character who I should have put straight in front of Rael and forced her back. I know who that character is now.

What the constellation really showed me is that Sienna is still the protagonist (Rael’s trying to piss off all the time, after all), but it’s her lack of action that makes hers uninteresting eyes through which to see the story. Sienna must not be static. Rael can’t do all the movement and force events on Si.

I have to rewrite this jolly pilot again. Ironically, the very first script I wrote for this story was in Uni years ago where Sienna followed the dreams she was having (of Rael’s experiences) and discovered her other life herself.

The first freaking draft had it right.

Years of feedback and re-writes and re-thinks and re-boots have taken me further and further from my start-point and further and further from the heart of the story.

I find this quite depressing.

But – and I know I say this every time, and I know I’m not the only one who does, and you have to approach this with a kind of insane optimism – the next one is going to be awesome.

Like, more awesome.

(I hope)

…cos I’m not sure I can take another round of Constellating just yet…

* Banonkers in a new word, one which I am right now teaching my laptop as well as your good self. It originates in the Isle of Sky from the sister of a friend, whose Labradoodle is so bananas and bonkers that she had no choice but to create a whole new word to accurately describe her dog. As someone very familiar with the explosive and exhaustive personality of the typical Labradoodle, I am quietly disappointed in myself for not making the conjugation myself.

Tags: BAFTA, Banonkers, Constellations, Face Palm, Life in Me, Script Writing, Sieren & Rael, Writing