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The Magic of Tone: Diary of a Teenage Girl

By Jacob Krueger

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Tone is one of those really challenging things for writers, particularly on a movie like Diary of a Teenage Girl, which touches on some extremely controversial, taboo and uncomfortable subjects. In lesser hands, rather than being the delightful (but disturbing) movie that we saw at the theatre, Diary of a Teenage Girl would be a Lifetime movie: yet another tear jerking melodrama about a child victimized by an unfair world.

So in this podcast, I’ll be talking about how to control tone in your writing, whether you’re writing an original script, adapting a book or novel to screenplay form, or writing from the experiences of your own life. (In fact Diary of a Teenage Girl was adapted from a novel inspired by author Phoebe's Gloeckner’s life experience as a child).

Jerry Perzigian who teaches our TV Comedy Writing class has a saying that I really adore. For those of you who know Jerry, he was the showrunner on The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls, Married With Children. If it was a hit show in the 80s or 90s he was probably on it. Jerry has this saying that I really love. He says: "First, write it true. Then make it funny."

And I think this is one of the greatest bits of wisdom that you can take when you're thinking about tone; it’s realizing that tone does not begin with trying to be funny or trying to be sad, or trying to be dramatic, or trying to be melodramatic, or trying to make the audience cry or trying to do anything.

Tone, in fact, is something that is layered on top of truth. So, our first step as writers is about getting our own personal truth on the page. In order to do that, sometimes we need to let go of our desire to control the tone. Sometimes we need to write the scene in our comedy that makes us cry, or makes us disturbed, or goes to that incredibly dark place that we don't want to go to. Sometimes we have to write the scene in our drama that gets experimental or playful, or oddly, inappropriately funny.

In acting there is actually a technique for this. If you've ever been in a play or in a film rehearsal there is often a period where the performance starts to get really tight. Usually at the first reading everything seems great: the actors haven't figured out the character yet and they're just playing. They're just having a good time. And everything is filled with energy and excitement and fun. They seem to be hitting all the right notes, flying free and using their instincts.

But there then comes a point where they've started to figure out the piece. They've started to figure out their character. They've started the figure out what's really going on, the structure of the character's arc, how things are changing, who the character really is and how to play them.

And at that time, a strange thing happens.

Oftentimes, the performance suddenly gets rigid or tight. Suddenly it feels less truthful, less compelling, less exciting than it did early on, before the actor had figured out anything intellectually. Usually the reason for that is, having figured out 90% of the character but not that full 100%, rather than focusing on their instincts, on their creative mind, on bringing themselves and their personal truth to the performance, the actor is now suddenly now focusing on getting it right, doing it correctly, making sure that everything they do fits with all their other choices and with their intellectual conception of who the character is.

This is a really normal thing in the rehearsal process, and if you've ever been in that phase of the reh...