Becoming a better storyteller by studying 100 movies, 50 screenplays, and 25 books in 2020.

To borrow the line from the Joni Mitchell song, I could drink a case of this movie, and I would still be on my feet. It’s charming and irreverent and smart and funny and bittersweet and poignant and perfect.

• Release: 2017
• Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Beanie Feldstein, Timothée Chalamet
• Director: Greta Gerwig
• Screenplay: Greta Gerwig

The story follows high school senior Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson as she explores her identity in her lower-middle-class family and among her all-girls’ Catholic high school. It’s that, but it’s so much more. This is a film I’ll come back to over and over, for as long as I’m trying to learn about storytelling.

What works?

Everything, really. Gerwig‘s script is genius, but I’ll cover that when I post about the screenplay.

The first thing that hits me about this film is that the story structure is sequential, but it’s not consequential. Instead, Gerwig tells the story like she’s sending the audience a series of postcards, or sharing a pile of snapshots.

Most narrative writing advice (famously from Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame) recommends that every scene should ask of the scene that follows it, and therefore what happened…? or but then what happened…? If each scene responds to the question established in the scene before it, the scenes daisy-chain together to make a logical, complete narrative.

This is good advice for 99.9% of us. But Gerwig is like a jazz musician who understands the rules perfectly in order that she can break them to create something new. In Lady Bird, each scene is a capsule unto itself, and yet together they form a logical, lyrical composition.

Okay, but how does it work?

What makes this work? Gerwig crafted each scene thoughtfully and with intention. Each scene has an arc of its own. Every word matters. To draw a comparison to the world of literature, each scene is like its own piece of flash fiction, or its own poem. The film becomes an anthology of carefully edited pieces, each of which tells an important story in Lady Bird’s life.

For a story to have an arc, something has to change. A character has to want something, and then either get it or not get it. What does Lady Bird want in this scene? She wants assurance she’s not destroying the family. What does Larry want? To experience some joy and celebrate his daughter. Lady Bird, ambitious and ashamed of her lower-middle-class station, has been accused of taking too much and it never being enough. Larry, unemployed and struggling with depression, can’t give his daughter much. This is a much more compelling scene than it seems on paper (I can’t find a clip, but I’ll keep searching). There’s so much tenderness balanced against the dry humor. Both characters get what they need: Lady Bird gets the assurance she craves, and Larry gains a moment of joy. He gives her a cupcake, symbolic of both celebration and of their relative poverty. In gratitude, she shares it with him; it’s more than enough.

What doesn’t work?

Nothing.

Tip for writing fiction

Break the rules, but do it carefully.

This is a film and a screenplay I’ll probably revisit a thousand times because it’s so rich and perfect. The first lesson I’ll take away is that storytelling rules can be broken, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. When you choose to break the rules, do it thoughtfully and with intention.