Because of my work on Band of Brothers and other projects that involved adapting true stories, writers in my IDEA course or consulting clients often come to me for feedback on scripts or ideas pulled from history.

And that’s no wonder, as so many of the best and most acclaimed series and films fit this category. “Stuff that really happened” is one of the richest wells of source material to draw from, for big producers as well as individual writers trying to break in.

Also these should make the writer’s job easier in some ways. Right?

Yes, in that you’re not starting with a complete blank page and the insecurity of wondering if your fictional idea will interest anyone or seem authentic and believable.

But they’re also much harder in some respects.

And I see the same challenges (and recommend the same tips) so frequently that I thought I’d share them publicly here. There are 5 in all…

Common problem #1:

You’re strongly personally interested in the material.

Wait a minute, that’s a good thing, right? You have to be, to write a good script. Don’t you?

Yes, you do, and yes it is. To a point.

The challenge arises when you are so personally fascinated by a particular subject and all of the details and can no longer put yourself in the shoes of the average potential viewer you’re writing for, who usually are not.

Solution:

Zoom out and focus on hooking a general audience.

I put so much attention on getting the basic approach to a story right before jumping in because I think that’s the most important part. My book and course are designed to help people do that.

This is no less important when adapting true stories. In fact it might be more important, as we’ll see in Problem #2. Our job as writers is to manipulate average people into caring about our story, which is harder than it looks. Maybe the diehard fans of your particular topic will be interested regardless, but that’s not a big enough audience. So it’s about finding the central hook to your story that would have a chance at grabbing millions. And the bad news is that it’s probably not just sitting there in plain sight, all set to go. You have to find it/create it.

Common problem #2:

You believe the true facts add up to a compelling story, if you can just depict the right ones in the right way.

I’m sorry but no, they won’t. Almost never. Chances are you chose your subject because it has certain elements that you think could make it a movie/series for the masses. And maybe it does. But what it probably has are only some of those. Certain character qualities. Certain isolated events or scenes. Certain elements about the situation. But it probably doesn’t have the thing we audiences most look for (subconsciously) and need in any compelling story:

A focused ongoing challenge that takes the whole story to solve, with a particular main character focused on solving it, in an active way, in every scene — and they’re mostly failing as the problem builds and complicates in the middle.

Solution:

Apply all the rigor of story principles you’d apply to fiction.

The challenge with this is that the true story often doesn’t contain what you need, but you’re trying to stick to what really happened. This is the #1 reason why adapting true stories can be harder to do successfully than writing fictional projects. You can’t just make up whatever you want to create a good story. But to some extent, you have to. Which leads us to:

Common problem #3:

You think you can only write “the truth,” and are tied to what the real people said happened. You rely on research to provide all the material you need.

At the end of the day, your script won’t work (and advance you as a writer) because of the source material and true facts you’re depicting, but because of your “take” on them. It’s imperative that you find that take, and serve it.

When I first worked on true story adaptations I obsessed over the research and facts throughout the process and tried to get every detail of history from them, afraid of making things up. This resulted in not-great scripts.

Graham Yost, a fellow writer-producer on Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon (and later, Justified and The Americans) told me his approach was to read all the main research ahead of time — maybe not every single detailed fact but the overview — and then put it aside while he came up with his take on the story and then went off and wrote that, all the way to a first draft. While resisting the urge to constantly go back to the research (or the real people, if available) to try to get facts or justify what you’re writing.

Later one can always vet what they’ve come up with against the facts and adjust somewhat as needed. But hopefully they’ll be adjusting a solid story with a strong writer’s take — not a compendium of research. Which is what too many true story scripts end up seeming like.

Solution:

Accept the need to fictionalize and embrace that — put the research aside to find your take and make it yours.

Here’s the thing: the research including interviews with the real people will never give you what you need. You’ll always be making up every line of dialogue and other detailed scene-level actions. Almost all of that is “fake.” It’s an approximation of what you think might have happened or could’ve happened, but no one really knows.

Beyond that, the structure of the story and the use of characters also usually needs a lot of modification to make it a compelling coherent emotional journey for an audience. I once wrote an article for Script Magazine about Best Picture Academy Award winner Argo’s significant use of creative license and what this says about the need for such things. Some might think they went too far in changing history in order to tell a great story, but if they hadn’t, the movie might have suffered. This is a tension every true story writer grapples with.

Nobody starts a historical project thinking, “I’m going to change as much as I can and fictionalize this.” They pick it because they think it has a lot of the elements needed for a great script already. But often times it’s also lacking many of them. And there are big decisions to be made — and very often bigger adjustments than one might be comfortable with. There’s no universal answer to where the line is that shouldn’t be crossed, but if the goal is a great script, that might mean being true to the spirit of events and the story and people involved, but somewhat more loose on the details.

Common problem #4:

Your “story” is an overview of many years and situations.

If it is, it’s not really a “story” as I would define it. It’s a sequence of re-created events that might not really add up to much for your target (general) audience. It’s really hard to make a story feel like one ongoing problem/goal being pursued and fought over, like most of the best stories, if it covers many years and experiences in someone’s life. This approach tends to dilute the drama and make it seem episodic, like a series of small stories but not one big one that justifies the project and is its core hook.

Solution:

Find a particular focused challenge as the spine of the story.

This often means dramatizing a specific, shorter period of time with one unique and telling important challenge and zooming in on that as your whole story, rather than trying to chronicle a longer period and larger history. That’s why seeming biopics like Lincoln and Capote are really about one specific important mission in the character’s life. It’s much easier to make a story work that way than trying to cover a whole career or a whole life — or even a substantial portion of one.

Common problem #5:

You’re depicting a variety of people from the “outside looking in.”

This approach has a hard time getting an audience invested, because what they need to really care is a single character they emotionally identify with in a strong way, and a subjective telling of a story that’s important to that character.

Some movies and series intertwine several such stories, each of which has a specific main character pursuing their own desires, where the audience goes back and forth between whose “story” or “scene” it is, at any given time. But at all times, they’re focused on the subjective emotional experience for a particular person who is pursuing something important and difficult that’s part of a coherent story. That’s the key.

What’s to be avoided are group scenes with various people talking or doing things where the audience doesn’t have a character they’re supposed to take on the perspective of, and experience it “through” them. Or shifting focus from scene to scene to different people, many or all of which don’t quite have a “story” as I define it here. This is a problem in fictional screenwriting as well but it seems to be especially common in adapting true stories. One wants to present all the people and show what they did or say, to document things. But this tends to not be compelling for audiences.

We definitely grappled with this in Band of Brothers. There were so many characters and events to potentially include, but to do so could feel like skimming the surface with various anecdotes happening to people the audience doesn’t know that well. We had to focus it so that each episode had one or more distinct main characters with a clear story for that episode.

Solution:

Choose a main character point-of-view and stick with it.

Or, as I said, choose more than one “main character” and more than one story, but stick to writing only scenes that are the subjective experience of one of those “main characters” grappling with a “story problem” you’ve gotten the audience invested in, that will take the whole story to resolve, and which only builds and gets harder/worse in the middle.

One helpful tip with this is to not imagine the real historical figure when writing scenes. Instead imagine your ideal actor who would portray them if this project got made. And imagine that actor speaking your lines and doing what you write for them to do.

Remember this: you’re not depicting what happened and describing it, in the end, with any true story adaption. You’re creating something new, where you decide what happens and what people do and say, in order to tell a story based on things that really happened. That’s a key difference.

I know it can seem like a big responsibility, to do history justice and not stray too far from the truth. To be accurate and serve its potential dramatically. And you’re right, it is. But it will only work if you somehow go beyond that sense of responsibility to become an author of your own story about it that only you could write, and make it an emotionally involving experience for millions of people who don’t come to it knowing or caring about your specific subject that much, if at all.

But when they see or read your version of how that subject could be the centerpiece of a movie or series, they will hopefully feel “inside” it and like they’re part of it, feeling what the main character feels, wanting what they want, and caring deeply about how things get resolved.