Tom Vaughan, Screenwriter "Story & Plot"

 Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity. And, so much of our creativity relies on the development of stories and the development of plots. And so we're going to talk today to a guest who specializes in those two important aspects of creativity. He writes screenplays and he teaches others how to write them.

My guest is Tom Vaughan. Tom, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Mark. I'm pleased to be here. Yeah there you go. And you've got lots of stories and plots to share with us, so we're looking forward to our conversation. It is my favorite topic. Yeah, Tom doesn't just talk about this stuff.

He's a practitioner. His screenplay, The Queen Mary is set to be released in the States here right about now. It's already been released in Europe and Italy, and he's got a new screenplay, Daddy's Girl, who's set to be shot later this year. And, as we talk now there's a strike underway, so timing, notwithstanding, we hope to see it being shot this year.

But Tom, yeah, let's start with this idea of story and plot, and it is the name of your practice and teaching story and plot dot com. But why are these two things the drivers, of good creative content, especially in film and theater? It's a great question because I named my classes. I've been teaching about 20 years now.

I've been writing professionally about 27 years and teaching about 21 years. And for me, when I was learning this craft, one of the biggest breakthroughs for me was understanding the difference between story and plot. When I was just trying to write, trying to figure things out, I was very plot focused with my writing.

And it was when I discovered the power of story. That really blossomed my, my work. I named it after that because I come in with students immediately of there is a difference between story and plot. And I want you to worry about story. I want you to focus on story. And how I define story in my classes and how I work and how I've managed to stick around as long as I have is really defining story as the transformational journey of a human being.

Thank you. And it is a story is about change. It is about transformation and plot is really just about the events that make that happen. And so for us, our big decision as storytellers, as writers, however it may be, is what is the story you're telling? Because then plot just becomes tactics. Plot is just the things that happen to make that story happen.

But what we really want is to focus on the story because that's where the emotion comes from. That's all we really do. That's our job is to evoke emotion from the audience. And what about your background? Let's dial it back a little bit to think about how you develop this approach and telling stories an actor, director yourself.

Did I even see that you might have been an improviser somewhere back there? Yeah, this is a whole different way of telling story. But how did this experience contribute to your creative process now? I started out as an actor and I took it pretty seriously. I was a classically trained actor through my youth.

And then at some point, I felt like I wasn't getting the lead parts that I wanted. I thought I was Brad Pitt. The rest of the world disagreed and I thought there's not as many playwrights, there's not as many writers maybe there's something there. And what I discovered was that everything that interested me, whether it was acting, storytelling, politics, ideology, philosophy, human nature, all those things fell into writing.

And so it was a way to really express myself. And as I started to cast plays, I discovered that I was a character actor. And that I was being a pretty unrealistic 19 year old, like wanting to lead romantic roles. And, once you start casting, stuff yourself, you go, Oh yeah, I'm a character actor.

I could fit right in there. Yes. I should have been just happy with that. But it was something that I became very passionate about. And I tend to be very obsessive when I learn new things. And so I was able to really dive in. And my playwriting teacher was Edward Olby. And what Edward gave me was confidence.

That was his biggest gift to me was like the confidence that I could do this, which is huge. And to this day is still a real pillar of what I teach of how do we build confidence? How can we make. Decisions, decisively bold, courageous, confident decisions. And, we have to earn that. We can't be gifted that, like that has to be done.

And you only do it through work. But that, that, just having to make a living at this for a certain amount of time and having the pressure to keep getting better and to be competitive in this I was able to keep learning and have breakthroughs every few years where I would learn something new.

And really, when I started to teach, I was about six years a professional screenwriter when I started to teach and discovered I really loved it, discovered I was good at it. But man, did it make me a better writer too. It really, I encourage everyone, if you really want to learn a topic, teach it because as you teach it.

You take what was originally just instinct and talent and gut feeling, and you have to explain it. You have to explain why you did that. And then once you verbalize it, once you explain it, it then has... The capacity to be a tool and talent doesn't always show up every day. So you can't always rely on your talent.

But if you are able to take your talent and turn that into something that's accessible like a tool at any day, suddenly your work becomes much more consistent and you're not relying on being in the good mood. You're not relying on being in the zone. You're not relying on those things that when you first start writing is really all you have.

And you touch on something that, we've talked to many creatives who said, until I developed it as a tool, it was just instinct. But once I got to know this formula and an approach and, this sort of signature work but at the same time, Tom, I was curious, you've written for television networks from ABC to NBC and all these major film studios like Warner Brothers and Disney.

So it's an impressive range Of projects. You can't just say I have the Tom Vaughn, method. You have to adapt that to all the different projects. So how do you get? How do you keep true to the tool and yet adapted to all the different kinds of assignments that you might have? It's a great question because it comes back to story of having that system in place for this is the story I'm telling and that becomes your criterion for all the decisions you make that this is a story about this person who is this way who goes through this.

And ends up this way, and that is universal whether, I've, my, my last theatrical film was Winchester with Helen Mirren and Sarah Snook. That was a ghost story. I broke in writing action films. Most Wanted, which is the last script I sold, is an action comedy. And the reason why I can write in different genres.

is because I treat the story all the same, regardless. And then it becomes, what are the tactics by which you do it? What are the fun scenes? What are the great scenes? The really fun signature great scenes for an action comedy are going to be very different. Then the really fun signature scenes in a ghost story, but at the same time, the structure of the story itself of transformation of a human being remains the same and just turning that into what is essentially, for lack of a better word, like you do your 10, 000 hours, you get this mastery.

I, I had an experience with my students. I created this cheat sheet. And it's a scene to scene cheat sheet and it has basically 35, 40 things to think about while you're writing a scene. And I didn't even realize I thought about that much stuff when I write a scene. But when I list it out and I put it like this thing, it looks overwhelming.

And if you try to worry about all these things at once, it's going to freeze you up. But if you go through this list, eventually, you don't have to go through the list anymore. And that's the skill of mastery of, first, these things are a challenge. You have to think about them. They're conscious. And it's a struggle to get through.

But through, through repetition, through mastery, suddenly now, over years, You don't even think about this stuff anymore. It's very similar to a basketball player. When they first start learning how to play basketball, they have to think about dribbling. They have to think about how to pass, whether, it's a bounce pass.

They have to think about staying inside the lines. But as they get older, the last thing any professional basketball player is thinking about is how do I dribble? That has been so ingrained in them. They don't even think about it anymore. And so that, that's part of your process, whatever craft you're doing is take these things in the beginning that are challenging, but through repetition, You start to do them automatically and the new thing becomes the challenge.

All this other stuff you've already got down. It's what is the thing that takes you to that next step that becomes the challenge? You mentioned in a recent article, these questions become ingrained. So they're in the back of your mind. And that's where sometimes the inspiration might happen.

You say, walking to the park or walking your dog or driving down the street and you have the answer to one of those questions about the story. You've prepared your brain to come up with it. You get your mind in that mode. I have solved a great many stories in the shower. Yeah. Yes. And you are a prolific social media poster.

And yet you've also challenged us writers. If you're thinking about your next post and not thinking about your next scene you're off course. Yeah. Cause I've discovered that with myself. Yes. Cause I, like I said, I've solved so many problems in the shower, but like the other day I caught myself, what am I going to tweet?

I was like, this is not what I want to be thinking about. I need to save my brain power for the good stuff. Yeah. When you talk about the craftsmanship, I wanted to go back to one thing. And that is the story and the plot, your latest film, Queen Mary, it's really exploring the famously haunted ship.

But it's you're basing it. And it's. Quasi on real life events, but you're maintaining this balance between your creative story, your creative approach and some historical, truth and relevance. How do you find that balance? Yeah, Queen Mary's an interesting example because there was so many there.

Winchester was very similar where it was historical piece a landmark that people had their own relationship with. And so you come in with a story and how do you take these things that they already know about and put them into the story so those things make sense to them. And then you've got an entirely new audience that has no idea what this story is.

People have never even heard of Winchester. I've got, I teach at the University of Houston and my students at U of H do not know about the ship, the Queen Mary. They don't know anything about it. So you've got to introduce them to that. And then through that process. You then bring in the rest of the team, the director comes on board, and they have their vision.

And the Queen Mary was a great example of having, over a certain amount of years, this story being handed off to a new artist. And then a new craftsman. So there was the first writer and then I did a rewrite of his work and I stayed on the project the longest. But then when the director came on board, he wanted to do some other things and wanted to focus on some other things.

And so we handed the project to him. On to him and then he does rewrites and really the end project is really Gary's more than mine. I ended up with with a story credit and I'm a co producer because that is really Gary's movie. So good. Thinking about also how the film industry is constantly evolving, and yet you're also challenges to say, there are some basics in the craft, but new trends, technologies, all sorts of new channels are challenging that storytelling.

How do you stay constantly inspired, but also currently relevant? Yeah it's, I would say the probably the biggest change over the last 2, 000 years with storytelling is the patience of the audience. Like that's what I've seen the biggest. The fundamentals of storytelling remain the same, that there is something ingrained in us that has not changed.

But as the technologies change, now we, you'd go to a movie and you sat down at the movie theater for two hours. You made a commitment to sit down for two hours. Television created the new. Challenge of how do we get people to sit through commercials? That was the challenge of television.

So they have to change the story for that. And then with cable, it became how do we make sure they don't change the channel? Like now they're like, they're going to change the channel. And now with streaming, they've got video on demand. of any movie that they want to watch at any given time.

And so that pressure continues on to be immense. So the challenge there is narrative momentum. How do you keep it going at a faster pace that is always grabbing their attention always keeping them engaged to stay watching. And God knows this the people behind us in our generations, now they have YouTube and that was 30 seconds, but the fundamentals below that, below narrative momentum and below, the pacing is pretty much the same.

And structure hasn't changed that much. So at its most base, our job is emotion. I could give 10 different writers. The exact same story structure, and they would come back with 10 different scripts because what evokes their emotion is going to be different from the other writer. What they find funny is going to be different.

What breaks their heart is going to be different. Their experiences and their memories of their emotions and how they put that into the script is going to be different. One of our big challenges now is with AI and writers. We aren't really scared of AI itself. We tend to be more scared of people thinking AI is more than it is.

That's what scares us is an executive not knowing the difference and thinking they can have AI write a script and then just hire a writer to come in and rewrite it. Or reducing a writer's room on a TV show from eight writers down to one with an AI who is producing different structures. We know AI, because all AI does is take work from other writers, what's on the internet, it just takes, it trains, it's a plagiarism machine.

That's all it does, is it plagiarizes other artists, other craftsmen, other writers, and creates the illusion of creating something new. It can't really evoke the same emotion that an actual artist can. The fear is that. An MBA who's studying only marketing, who doesn't really understand what we do, doesn't understand the difference, but the audience will.

So true. Good insight. I guess that brings us to collaboration. And you mentioned the writer's room. I think sometimes we think about the lonely screenplay writer pecking away at the typewriter and pulling the sheet out. I'm done. Even as I look at the walls behind you, Tom, I see the index cards and the story and flow there.

But what about collaboration? Not only the. The producers and other writers or the other team and director and so forth. But the actors and the other contributors to the film where does collaboration come into play for us? It's everything. It's everything. It's I have had actors make me look so good.

Make me look so much better than I am. I've had directors do the same and then you have the opposite where you have something like isn't quite meshing with the other person and you feel like they may have not understood it or embraced it the way they should have and ends up looking like you didn't do a very good job.

But I have found the most rewarding experiences are when I work with other people and we make each other better. I love, I have a couple Other writers that I collaborate with a lot and they always make me look so much better than I am. They always up my game. I'm so much better. When I was in the improv community in L.

A. I live in, I'm back in Houston now. And I've split my time between here and L. A. the last 30 years. But I would gather friends comics. Comedians, sketch writers, improvisers, and we would sit down and do a joke punch up with scripts of mine for comedies. And we would just pitch different jokes and just make each other laugh and then figure out which ones that helped the story, which ones we were able to use.

But it, it was such a collaboration of people making each other better. It is one of the joys of the business and you're right as a feature writer, you can get pretty isolated because you're often working alone. I've always been jealous of TV writers who have writers rooms and those relationships that build over the years.

But when you get that. It's one reason why I love improv because improv is all collaboration. It's all collaboration. It's all teamwork. It's all, how do I make this other person look good? And it's just a joy when it works. That, that part of the collaboration is supportive, additive. It's let's all make each other look good.

It's not the competitive, I want to sell my play over your play. Yeah and just I'm a big fan of writers groups of, the support of having a writers group, the accountability of having a writers group. I think sometimes you can get five writers and you end up like five new writers and it's the blind leading the blind a little bit.

And that's, and then if you have insecure people, they can get down or they can be hard on themselves and you don't have supportive people around you. But if you find the right group. And preferably someone who's particularly more experienced, a coach of some sort. The the power of learning within a community environment is immense in so many reasons, just spiritual, emotional, and just also the quality of the work.

Before we close, I want to remind the listeners. My guest is Tom Vaughn. He has new work coming out, The Queen Mary, so watch for that on your favorite video service, and a new film to be filmed later this year, Daddy's Girl. And most of all, he's got a great screenwriting program called Story Flow.

Story and plot. com, but that's what I wanted to end on Tom, I think, other than maybe writers, other screenwriters, film professionals, all the other creative types who listened to this podcast, I'd like to draw, out. Let's expand the vision here of story and plot to music, to Broadway shows, to architecture, to all the other creative pursuits.

What does story and plot help inspire any kind of creative professional to really think about the work? It's about emotion. It is about emotion, like everything's you, everything you mentioned there is, has the physical craft of it, architecture, painting, music, screenwriting, playwriting, there is the physical craft behind it that you have to get proficient with.

But the goal for every single one of these, when it becomes an art form, the goal for each one is to evoke emotion. That is our job is to evoke an emotional response from the viewer, from the listener from the pedestrian, whatever it is. And when we stay focused on that, whether it's, within a certain structure or anything like that, when we stay focused on that, those are the two major values I teach, which is story and emotion.

We tend to lose, if we can stick with that. We'll stay on goal, we'll stay on point. But when we lose that, when we make it about ourselves, when we make it about intellectual ideas rather than emotional ideas, then we get away from the reason why art exists, which is the human spirit.

Like that's that's why we do what we do. And that's why I teach soap. So much of what I teach is focused on that, of what emotion are we trying to evoke? What is our role within the human condition that we're participating in? Yes. And it does remind us personally, when we're in a gallery or when we're looking at a great building or we're looking at a great work of sculpture, it's, what is the emotion that I really appreciate you underscoring that for us, Tom.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much. And thanks for being with me, Tom. Tom Vaughn screenwriter and teacher at story and plot. com Tom. Thanks so much. Thanks, Mark. And listeners, come back again next time. We'll continue our Around the World Travels, because this is a world of creativity. And we want to find it on all corners of the world.

As we think about how we get inspired, how we can organize ideas like we've talked about with Tom today, the tools and techniques to get our story written, but also then how to gain the confidence and the connections to launch our work out into the world. And that's what it's really all about, getting the work out.

So until next time, I'm Mark Stenson, and we'll be unlocking your world of creativity. We'll see you next time.