Interview (Part 3): Harris McCabe

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Harris McCabe wrote the original screenplay “Nat Cady’s Boys” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Harris about his creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 3 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Harris discusses the approach he used to break the story and the importance of developing characters.

Scott: You’ve got these two…They’re almost like surrogate father figures in a way to each of them. We’ll get into that in just a bit. I want to talk a bit more about chronologically through the story, some of the choices you made.

First of all, the structure of the story is very solid. It’s pretty conventional. I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just it feels like a movie. They have that incident that you talked about where they killed the guy in front of his wife and the kids. That’s basically the end of Act One.

Then along the way, they end up at this trading post, and being helped there. They actually are given a choice. She says, “You can stay here,” which I thought was a great call on your part to actually physicalize that, but then fate intervenes and they decided to keep going off. Then they’re split up at the end of Act Two, is basically the all is lost.

Structurally, let’s talk a bit about that. Was that always in the way? You may have changed the dynamics of who was going to get split up with or whatever, but did you always have that kind of flow, or was that something that emerged over rewriting the script?

Harris: No. The script is a little unique in that because we were starting our script a month thing and I didn’t have as much time to prepare as I usually do. I didn’t do a very specific outline. Normally, up until now, every script I’d written had been outlined meticulously with a pretty conventional act structure.

I would break down each scene that I was going to write, and write what each scene was and what its purpose was. I was so afraid of getting lost because I have a few abandoned screenplays where I got stuck at some point and I don’t know where to go next and just gave up. The one thing that I’ve learned is you’ve got to keep writing and get through that draft.

With this one, it was the vaguest outline I’d ever done. I knew where I wanted to start, I knew where I wanted to end, and I knew a few scenes along the way. I had a backbone of what I wanted it to be, but I was pretty much just playing it by ear.

The nature of the script lent itself to that, in that the story is literally a journey and there were going to be vignettes and there were going to be characters that came in and out of their lives, but it was mostly just going to be tracking these boy. I was reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy to get in the mindset. I reread the “Outer Dark” and “Child of God,” which are both journey stories and have these vignettes. Also, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” was a huge reference point for me, which is another one where these guys are progressing through a world and encountering different people along the way.

I couldn’t have done this in an earlier script though. When you’re starting out it’s very helpful to have a carefully planned structure, be it “Save the Cat!” or Syd Field, or whatever. Find some training wheels. Eventually, you internalize it enough that you get the freedom to make your own decisions and surprise yourself along the way, which is something I did in Nat Cady’s Boys, and something I’ve had a good experience with on a couple of things I’ve written since then.

When I’ve outlined too meticulously and felt like I had some fealty to that, sometimes there wasn’t an opportunity to be surprising. When I’m writing and I think, “Well, obviously, this needs to be the next scene.” That’s probably not a good thing because you shouldn’t be doing the obvious thing all the time.

With this script, I didn’t always know what the next scene was. I just knew I would get to a point and I’d be like, “Well, it feels like we’re breaking into Act Two, so I need a big moment. I need them to come out of this in a different place,” then I would write a scene that fit the bill.

I wrote a few scenes that I looked back on later, and was like, “No, that’s not working. Let’s get rid of that.” I think originally, the homesteader scene was going to be them finding a posse hanging a guy, much like the scene with Dodd later.

They were going to have an argument about whether or not they should save him, and then save him and he was going to journey with them. I wrote the scene and it was fine. It wasn’t the greatest scene, but it was a good action scene. When I got to the end of it, I was like, “This feels too early.”

I just knew that it was not the right time for them to have this guy riding with them because we didn’t even know them yet. Then I’d had the other idea of them going to the homesteader and having to pretend to be somebody else and leave their guns outside. That became the next scene.

Before then, it had never occurred to me for Heck to get injured. But I was always trying to put them in a difficult position for them. One thing I have learned is a lot of people tend to be too nice to their characters, and I was one of them.

Now I am constantly trying to put them in a position where I don’t know how they’re going to get out of it because I want to challenge them, and challenge myself, to figure out how to resolve their problems. That was one of those things where in the writing of the scene, I was like, “Well, he probably gets a shot off and Heck probably gets some birdshot in the hand.”

I never intended for Heck to lose his hand. That wasn’t in the original outline, and even after he was shot I still intended for him to recover. I’m pretty squeamish about dismemberment. Not a big fan. Grosses me out every time it’s in a movie. I really didn’t want him to lose his hand.

And when I realized how uncomfortable and complicated it was for me, I was like, “Yeah. You’re going to have to cut his hand off. That’s the thing you don’t want to do and it’s really going to be inconvenient. But just do it. Don’t write the bad version and have to go back and fix it. You know you’re going to need to do this. Just do it and work from there.”

Again, this came out really well as a first draft, but a lot of it was having made a lot of mistakes on previous scripts of being too nice to characters or being too rigid in my going down a road that I know isn’t working. I was able to course-correct in the moment a lot in this script, which was good. A sign of growth.

Scott: Once you were willing to give up the protecting aspect of it, it’s like that great quote from that writer who says, “As a writer, we’re sadists and masochists with our characters.” You got to put them in this…That you were trafficking with the characters. That interaction with them is what was fueling the decisions you were making. Is that a fair assessment?

Harris: Absolutely. If you write good characters and you understand your characters, they can surprise you.

If you really understand your characters and you’ve written compelling characters, who they are will inform so much of how you write them. They’ll tell you the answer. They will make decisions that if you’re doing an outline and it’s all abstract, you might not have come up with.

As you write and you understand the character better, you’re starting to get that they’re going to make decisions that you never would have expected. If you have the ability to go with the flow, sometimes that’s where the most interesting, best parts of the script come from. It certainly was the case in this one.

Scott: These guys, these boys, their father got strung up. They have found out who was responsible for it. These fellows by the name of Moss Clark, Ole Sorensen, Abbott, Marshal Hoyer, and then Joe Breen, who we meet in the opening incident. You think, “Oh, that’s just a throwaway thing.” Nope. [laughs] That was actually one of the guys, as we find out later.

That was another thing I was really impressed with, was the way you teased out things. We don’t know exactly why these boys are doing what they’re doing, but then we learn a bit more about the father. Then we learn more of the complexity of the father through these reading newspaper clippings and hearing people talk about his father.

I really appreciated the way that you were teasing that out. Was that intentional or were you just feeling your way through that? What’s your exposition?

Harris: That was very intentional. I’ve been in a lot of meetings where the note to a writer is, “We need to know more. We need more background. We need more information because I was lost here.”

It’s not a bad note because a lot of times, if somebody’s lost, there’s a reason, and the writing needs to fix that. But you don’t want to lay all your cards on the table upfront. People have to discover things.

You have to let your readers learn, discover, feel, and be able to pat themselves on the back when they figure something out. They feel like they’re solving a mystery. You have to leave those little breadcrumbs and hint at stuff.

What you can’t do is have them feel like they’re confused about something that they shouldn’t be confused about. You’ve got to be very judicious at what information you sprinkle out there.

Like that scene where they’re seeing their uncle and they’re trying to get information on these men that they’re hunting, and they name a bunch of guys. I was very worried about that because I’m just throwing out these weird names.

I would understand if a reader was like, “Wait, wait, am I supposed to remember all these guys? This is too much. I’m getting confused. I don’t like this,” which is why I threw it out there and then got on with the story because I didn’t want to dwell on it. I didn’t want to make a big thing about it.

I just wanted to be like, “We’re establishing this. Remember it, or don’t remember it, but it’ll come into play later.”

I wanted people to feel like we had forward momentum, that and that I was providing explanations soon enough that people felt like they could trust me to give them the information they needed at any given time, which is the biggest thing.

Once you gain people’s trust that you’re not screwing up and withholding something from them that they need to know, then they’re invested in being careful readers and getting that enjoyment of piecing the things together.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Harris goes deep in discussing the Nemesis character in his Nicholl-winning screenplay.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Harris is repped by Entertainment 360.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.