Writing and Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, and Unknown Unknowns

Wherein I induct Donald Rumsfeld into the screenwriting ‘guru’ Hall of Fame.

One of my online students asked a great question today about whether it’s possible to over-analyze characters too much, to overthink them. What follows is my brain-dump response, slightly edited, that winds all around and incorporates the wit and wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld: Screenwriting Guru.

Note: Our study script in the current course has been Witness.

Each writer needs to answer how much they think about their characters and story before and during the writing process. If what I’m promoting sounds like it’s too much prep-writing, too much reflection, too much character development, you may well be right. However, I do that in these classes because a majority of the material I read from aspiring screenwriters demonstrates that they have not done enough work in advance of writing.

It’s not just about the number of hours spent living with characters, the amount of pages read in research, the time devoted to brainstorming, it’s about what you end up with: understanding the characters enough to write them well and bring them to life.

Bottom line: if the writer doesn’t understand the characters, how is an actor supposed to?

Now it would be foolish of me to claim that prep-writing work, reflection, digging, and so on is all there is. Because, as I’ve noted previously, our biggest hope is that our characters come to life, they get up off the printed page as flesh-and-blood individuals. At that point, it’s our duty to follow them because if you’ve done the work to bring them to life, trust me, they’ll take you and your story where it needs to go.

To the bigger question, let me refer back to former Secretary of Defense and great screenwriting guru Donald Rumsfeld who said this:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

When we type FADE IN, we have our notes, our outlines, all of that ‘stuff’ we’ve generated from the prep-writing phase. In that, we have the ‘known knowns,’ various plot points and character dynamics that we know work. We also have ‘known unknowns,’ that is story ‘stuff’ that will arise in the page-writing process that we can’t know in advance, but we are cognizant some of those surprises will emerge. And then there are the ‘unknown unknowns.’ That’s the magic. That’s the ‘stuff’ that happens where all of a sudden, a character will pop up and go over here, when we thought they were going to go over there. Complete surprises of the palm-slapping-forehead kind. Whoa! Where’d that come from?!?!

And then, of course, there’s the entire movie production and post process, which means another whole set of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. By the time the movie is locked, if by some miracle it turns out well, there will be these levels of meaning, symbolism, emotion, themes, which every individual can, if they so desire, dig into and access. Movies are amazing that way. And if we asked Earl Wallace, one of the screenwriters of Witness, “Hey, when you named him John Book, the use of ‘book’ meant something symbolic, right,” perhaps he’d say, “Hell no… it was just a name that popped into my head.” Fine. Perhaps he didn’t consciously mean anything by it. But I will choose to believe that at that moment, he tapped into a ‘collective unconscious’ of ideas that all artists tap into. That’s just the magic of creativity.

So circling back, each writer needs to sort out for him/herself how much prep-writing and reflection they need to do to write a good script. I don’t know what the tipping point is on that, but if you do do enough of it, you will excite a realm of unknown unknowns that dance around in that Jungian world of the ‘collective unconscious,’ and your fingers will type out words that you may not even know have the additional meaning you are imbuing your pages with.

But down the line, some viewer will catch it. And your story will be the better for it.

Some stuff you’ll know. Other stuff you won’t know. Still, other stuff you won’t even know you don’t know… until you know it.

That’s pretty much the process of a writing a script.

There you have it, my ruminations on the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld: Screenwriting Guru.

[Originally published July 23, 2008]