About 5 years ago, I managed to con my employer into sending me on a culinary tour of Mexico with celebrity chefs. I falsely thought that this was my talent. I could convince people to finance my whims, with a subsequent ill-advised foray into filmmaking.

During that tour, I sampled a lot of dishes whose complexity boggled and left me with a perpetual “wow” reaction which could only be cleared with some fine mezcal. And then I tried something that defined artistic perfection. I hailed it as the best thing ever.

Why?

Because I understood it.

It was butter, served with bread while the appetizer was being pulled out of the aquarium. I applied a chunk of the butter to a crusty baguette, and the following happened in bullet time –

A readily accessible caramelized sweetness that slowly built in intensity, surrounded by a refreshing citrus bloom with occasional flavor bursts, and out of nowhere came a searing heat, only to be salved by the comforting presence of the thick and reliable butter.

I asked the chef how he went about it, and he said his idea was to combine orange peel with the heat of a chili pepper. He knew that both orange oil and capsaicin (the hot chemical in chilly) were fat soluble. Using butter as a base, he could deliver the flavors in their purity without the noise of other elements.

Then followed a series of problems to be solved of what kinda orange, and chili pepper, consistency of the butter etc., to balance flavor delivery and harmony.

Something was still missing as it was taking too long to get to the essence of the idea. He used brown sugar to occupy you, since sweetness is one of the earliest tastes humans develop. The resulting experience was pitch perfect, with none of the machinery showing.

This sort of thinking appeals to me, and dare I say, is my strength. My way or Amway.

I have found that most artistic expression is an exercise in problem solving. Some do it intuitively, and others through the rigors of rationalization.

In a recent interview, Rushdie talked about creative writing being inherently antithetical to a rational process. Some sort of supernatural or alchemical phenomena was at work even if only at a subcutaneous level. What does he know? Just because he was bumping uglies with Padma doesn’t mean he has all the answers.

Reading a story or screenplay (or watching the finished film) is a bit like the quiz show Jeopardy. You are given the answers, and have to guess the question. Or not, and just enjoy the film.

I find this line of inquiry extremely helpful in my growth as a storyteller. The questions will vary of course as no two stories or their problems are ever the same (DVDchors are the exception).

In Adaptation, Kauffman’s protagonist is a screenwriter. Writers make lousy protagonists in the movies because there is nothing more boring than watching someone type on a screen. Texting is a close second. CK decides to give him someone to talk to.

He chooses to make it someone that lives with him (so he’s always around, and can be resorted to at will). It could have been a wife, girlfriend, or room mate. He makes it a brother; better yet, a twin; still better, a doofus twin that is also a screenwriter. He proceeded to use it as a meta statement on writing, but it is useful to understand where it came from.

This particular problem is one that comes up frequently in screenwriting. You have a character in an isolated situation.

The Host, one of my favorite films, offers several such Jeopardy questions.

There are several choices in this film, seemingly intuitive, that I suspect are a result of problem-solving thinking. The premise is “Dysfunctional family must work together to rescue child from monster.”

The first problem presents itself right there in the idea. You have a character central to the story, a child, which is kept captive by the monster. Of course, you have to deal with the attack, how she survives, how the family finds out and all that. But, those are trivial matters.

What do you do with a character that needs screen time to serve the rest of the story, but potentially does nothing? You give her a goal (escape), and because she is in isolation, someone to interact with.

Who is that someone? The obvious solution would be an adult. If you put an adult and a child in danger, the onus of heroism falls on the adult, and dilutes the cohesiveness of the film. It is about this family, and every scene is driven by the actions of one of the family members. To put the girl in charge, the screenwriter makes the additional character younger than her.

She is not a victim anymore. She becomes a hero too.

A few other Jeopardy answers from the film –
The family owns a snack shack on the river.
The girl is kidnapped by the monster.

The question – How do you minimize happenstance and tie things through causality?

The family could have been at the river on a picnic, when the monster attacks. By having them live in a shack by the river, there is a sense of inevitability to it.

Perhaps they had already decided the father character was dimwitted. The girl could have been just kidnapped randomly among all the people at the river. By making it a result of the father’s dimwittedness, you bring in causality again, which you can develop to increase the conflict in the family.

Many of you will scoff at this line of thinking, wondering how anyone can ever create storytelling magic with such a prescriptive or connect-the-dots approach.

Simple.

Lie, and tell people the story came to you fully formed in a moment of inspiration and you wrote it in a fevered dream in 3 days.

Have a Jeopardy answer to share?