Writing, Arts & Entertainment

Incorporating Research

Lesson time 09:22 min

You have pages of research—now what? Avoid clunky exposition and learn how to seamlessly weave research into your story.

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Topics include: Researching lines of dialogue

Aaron Sorkin

Teaches Screenwriting

Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.

Preview

How do you incorporate the research into the writing? You know, it depends on what you've discovered in the research. Like as I've mentioned as an example, the president's motorcade, which became a West Wing episode. That was a gift from the gods. That was too much-- that was too good to be true. The one piece of research that really got me going with the American president was I hired a researcher, and the researcher got me a whole bunch of what I call the president's daily diary. The president's daily diary is not, dear diary, today she looked at me in geometry. It is a minute by minute accounting of what the president did that day. From 7:00 AM to 7:03, he got his intelligence briefing. From 7:03 to 7:06, he took a picture with so-and-so. 7:08, he went back to the residence, he returned to the West Wing. It's that kind of thing. And it was for presidents going all the way back to Herbert Hoover. And I was just suddenly struck by the fact that it was a human person in the White House. Because next to a meeting with the Treasury Secretary or with a king, he would go back to the East Wing for a 20 minute nap. And then there would be something else. And so I just got really interested in the president as a person. Like when he runs out of toothpaste, what happens? If somebody tells you something where there is an inherent problem, for instance, again, with the West Wing, we did an episode very early on about the census. You wouldn't think that there'd be anything dramatic about the census. It's somebody with a clipboard knocking on your door and asking you 10 questions. But it turns out that there is. And so once you've located that problem, then you start writing about it. Screen says it's an unimplemented trap, but the error code is wrong. It's a system error. So what's the upshot? It's not going to say hello. It absolutely is going to say hello. It's nobody's fault. It's a system. You built the voice demo. The voice demo is flaky. I've been telling you-- Keep your voice down. -that for-- this thing is overbuilt. It worked last night. It worked the night before that. It worked three hours ago. It's not working now, so just skip over the voice demo. Fuck you. Everything else is working. Skip over the voice demo. We need it to say hello. The screen says it's an unimplemented trap, but the dialog box is wrong. It's a system error. I still don't know what that means, and I wrote the movie. I wrote many drafts of the movie, so I wrote that line many times. I've obviously seen the movie many, many times, working on it in the editing room, seeing it in theaters. I still don't know what that line means. What I know is that it's correct. It's what happened. That's what research gave me. There are a couple of things I'm looking for, depending on the situation...

About the Instructor

Aaron Sorkin wrote his first movie on cocktail napkins. Those napkins turned into A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson. Now, the Academy Award-winning writer of The West Wing and The Social Network is teaching screenwriting. In this class, you’ll learn his rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell. By the end, you’ll write screenplays that capture your audience’s attention.

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Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.

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