Report of the storytelling masterclass by Kate Leys
Text: Hugo Emmerzael
In a dynamic masterclass on scriptwriting and storytelling, British script and story editor Kate Leys keeps it deceptively simple. “If my story doesn’t fit on a post-it note, then I’ve done something wrong.”
“I’m not good at jokes,” says British script and story editor Kate Leys halfway through her smooth and personal masterclass on storytelling. The joke is: for more than two hours, she needs nothing more than a microphone and a pile of personal anecdotes to take the participating audience in MACA into her professional world of experience. And she does this with a good dose of humor. The golden tip “buy a bar of chocolate rather than a self-help book on scriptwriting,” for example, speaks volumes about the humor that Leys sprinkles in her intimate masterclass like to keep the audience engaged.
Because Leys is so good at telling stories and speaking to an audience, it is also easy to assume that she speaks from some authority within the world of film. After all, her entire life has been dedicated to texts and stories, to reading the work of others to try to understand the magic that goes into such a story. Her impressive career includes her role as ‘head of development’ at Film4, where she contributed to classics such as “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994, Mike Newell) and “Trainspotting” (1996, Danny Boyle). In addition, she has worked as a script editor on films such as “Baby Done” (2020, Curtis Vowell), “Brimstone” (2016, Martin Koolhoven) and “Slow West” (2015, John Maclean).
However, such titles were hardly discussed during this masterclass. Instead of a showcase PowerPoint presentation about her work on specific projects, Leys opted for a critical reflection on what storytelling is and what it means to tell a story, specifically in the form of a script. “If my story doesn’t fit on a post-it note, then I’ve done something wrong,” she jokes before the masterclass when I introduce myself as the writer who will be reporting on the masterclass. So here’s an attempt to summarize her entire two-hour masterclass in just a few points:
All stories have just a few things in common. It’s those common denominators that make them a story.
- Stories need to be organized so that they become understandable. A writer organizes and refines the material so that a person who has never heard the story before can immediately understand it.
- Stories are about change. You need to be able to identify within a script what has changed at the end of the story.
- Stories need characters to follow. They serve as our guides to get into the story.
- Stories need storytellers.
Leys even dares to go a step further and claim that almost every story can be summarized in one sentence that fits on a post-it note:
“A stranger comes to town.”
According to Leys, this sentence covers the entire load of literally every script and story that she has seen land on her desk during her career. She explains what she means by this suggestive sentence.
- The town is the literal and metaphorical place where the story lands. It can literally be a city, or a country, or a planet, or a galaxy, or a house, or a family, or a person, like you. It is the place where the story exists.
- Stranger represents the problem, something to react to. An alien, for example, or death, love, high school, growing older, a challenge, change. Because that is ultimately the thing: people claim to love change, but change is precisely the thing we fear most, the thing we most want to resist. So every story is about change.
These are all deceptively simple ideas, and that, according to Leys, is the point. After all her years of working in this industry, she has come to realize that much of the jargon, and many of the so-called conventions and secrets of how to write a good script, only get in the way of the writer’s personal and creative process. “Inciting incidents” are not useful concepts for Leys to get deeper into the script. By keeping it simple and concrete, she can do her job better. To arrive at these points, she has spent years searching for what the essence of a story is. All of this to ultimately be able to help the writers of stories (especially via scripts) in that sometimes impossible search.
Trust is a key word here. Producers and studios should have confidence in the screenwriters who are literally trained in telling the story of the film. In practice, however, she has seen how bad things can get in closed-door meetings, where the most absurd proposals are made about the script by people who have absolutely no idea what story should actually be told. In her own work, this has become a cardinal rule: “never just present an idea to a screenwriter.” Instead, Leys tries to get to the core of what exactly the story is that she wants to tell, together with the writers she works with, often through her actually quite simple and schematic main points. “Yet is the key word for me in these kinds of conversations,” says Leys. “The story does NOT work YET,” is a much better way to talk to a screenwriter about what they are working towards with their story. After all, it sends them in a direction, which allows them to get deeper into the essence of their story.
Again, it is about refining, because the goal is to organize a story as ideally as possible, so that the audience also begins to have confidence in the story that they are going to see in a film. Leys describes that completely recognizable feeling, when you put on a film or series and somehow know within the first ten minutes that you have made a good choice and are going to enjoy it. That is the trust that you have to win from an audience. And you can only gain that trust if you take that audience seriously, by not dismissing them as stupid or irresponsible, but by meeting them with a serious and well-ordered story. Too often, Leys sees that films and series no longer take their audience seriously, which by definition breaks the fragile bond of trust between narrator and audience. “The audience is smart and pays attention,” says Leys about that. “Always take that into account.”
Speaking of audience: ultimately, Leys also talks extensively with the audience about their own questions and doubts. It results in a dynamic masterclass, in which many ideas are exchanged, especially to ultimately return to the main points that Leys was able to write down on that proverbial post-it note. And that was precisely the strength of this masterclass, which took an incredible amount of time to emphasize again and again that everything is actually quite simple at its core. That is important, because even the most experienced screenwriters can get stuck on precisely those simple main issues.
“It is difficult work,” Leys concludes. “People always think that everyone wants to be a writer, but that is not true at all.” You really have to want it, this crazy profession of screenwriting, she emphasizes. And that means that you always have to get to that essence of yourself: your voice and your truth that will shape your stories. Developing and refining that until you get to the essence is the real work of the storyteller.
Photo credit: Amie Galbraith