Writing a Ghost Story

By Anna Laletina and Julia Gilichinskaya

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that writing a good story is the ultimate goal of every journalist. The basis of a good movie also is a good story. Roughly speaking, scriptwriters and journalists are both storytellers.

What comes out of this similarity is the possibility for a scriptwriter and a journalist to learn from one another.

On April 19, 2010, Paul Brown, an American scriptwriter, producer and movie director, met with the students of the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University. Having written scripts for such series as “The X Files” and “Quantum Leap,” he developed his own method of writing a story. Currently he teaches at The New York Film Academy and often shares his experience with the students who don’t necessarily major in filmmaking and scriptwriting.

Though obviously he gained experience through his own work, as an example of a really good story he chose “Little Miss Sunshine.” It’s hardly surprising, as the scriptwriter of this movie, Michael Arndt, won an Oscar for the best original screenplay.

Arndt strongly disagrees with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s expression, “There are two types of people: winners and losers, and I hate the losers.” Basically the script was written to prove to us that this attitude doesn’t make anyone happy.

Brown stated that in order to write a great story you have to find things that make you really angry, things you just can’t keep silent about. “A good storyteller attacks the false idea in the society,” Brown said.

You might remember the first scene of “Little Miss Sunshine:” a little girl named Olive watches “Miss America” on TV. She tries to imitate the facial expressions of a girl receiving the desired award. This scene shows us that Olive lives in a world where winning is the thing of the greatest value.

The writer thinks it's a sick system, but Olive’s dad doesn’t think so. He is possessed with the idea that achieving success and not losing should be the ultimate goal of every person. He hates losers, and that makes his whole family suffer. Olive’s grandfather tries to explain to her that life is not about winners and losers. Life is about having fun. There is a conflict between two ideas in the movie.

Brown notes that in many great films you have a theme and contra theme. And, if you have two things at war, they both have to have truth in them. If you are making your choice between one thing absolutely positive and one thing completely negative, that is no choice.

Brown picks out four plots that make a good story: internal goals, internal problems, love stories, and fatal flaws. In addition, there will be an external plot problem, but most of the time it turns out that it is really not important. For example, in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Olive didn’t win the beauty contest, which was her goal. What’s more important is that she and her family solved their internal conflict and gave up their ghosts.

Not in the sense of ghosts being something supernatural or the souls of the dead. “All great stories are love stories or ghost stories,” Brown noted.

Become conscious of your own ghost: something that haunts you, some event from the past that affected you. So, if you want to create a deep story your hero should have a trauma in the past, a ghost in the present and also a fatal flaw that will be his way to get rid of the ghost. “When you watch a movie, not only are there ghosts in the story, but a great movie evokes the ghosts in you,” Brown concluded.