The Movie Trailer School of Story (and Storytelling)

After graduating from Harvard College armed with an English degree, I moved to Los Angeles and landed a job in publishing. A couple of months into my employment, the imprint was disbanded—right after I’d signed lease agreements for both an apartment and a car.

(Why I Don’t Want to Quit My Day Job for Writing.)

I spent the next few weeks applying to every job posting I could find, but I wasn’t hearing back from anyone. As my bank account hit an all-time low, I remember staying up past 3am, just scrolling through postings, when I stumbled across an opening for a Jr Writer/Producer position at a boutique motion picture marketing company.

In other words, movie trailers.

I was instantly intrigued. As a frequent movie-goer, I was already a huge fan of trailers—in fact, I always made sure to get to the theater extra early so I wouldn’t miss a single one. Yet I had never thought about who actually created those mini-movies or what went into making them.

As I read through the requirements, I quickly realized I possessed none of the experience or technical knowledge being sought. Disappointed, I was about to X out of the page, when a wave of sleep-deprived defiance washed over me, and my mom’s favorite phrase ran through my mind: “El no ya lo tenés.”

You already have the no.

I was already unemployed—so what did I have to lose?

It was easily the most unhinged letter I’ve ever written. The post specified they wanted someone proficient in Avid editing systems, and I wrote: “I don’t know what Avid systems are, but I do know I’m an avid writer and editor.” It only got worse from there.

I fell asleep at my laptop, and when I woke up, I found an email from an assistant at the company. I expected to open it and find a referral to a therapist, but instead she said the CEO was so tickled by my letter that he asked to meet me in person.

I had somehow written my way to an interview despite being entirely unqualified.

That, I learned, was the power of interesting writing.

I worked for that company five-plus years, and it was an education that taught me so much about storytelling. My nights and weekends were spent drafting YA manuscripts in hopes of landing an agent, and I found that many of the skills I was learning at my job were transferable.

The following are the five biggest lessons on writing that came from my career in movie trailers:

1. DON’T BE FANCY; BE ACCESSIBLE

The first trailer I worked on was for an indie film starring Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood called King of California. I was trying to come up with a strong copy line, something about how there’s a bit of treasure in every family if you just delve deep enough.

The first thing my boss did was cross off “delve” and replace it with “dig.”

After more corrections like these (“ignite” became “start,” “fracture” became “break,” and so on) I started to feel that to excel at this job, I would have to deconstruct my English degree. In my college creative writing classes, we’d been trained to reach for the rarest word we could find, and it’s what I was also doing in my novels.

Only I wasn’t drafting literary fiction—I was writing high concept commercial stories for teens. This was the first lesson I incorporated into my books: If I wanted to reach the widest audience possible, I had to stop writing for other writers.

2. SOUND FIRST; PICTURE LAST

After learning how to write copy for trailers, I had to learn how to produce them.

The first thing an editor did was build a trailer’s soundbed—basically, its structure. The best way to watch the first pass was to sit in the edit bay and close my eyes: If I could follow the story through just the audio, then the structure was sound. (Pun intended.)

Even if we were planning to incorporate voiceover or written copy, the trailer first had to work without it. Otherwise, we would be using these devices as crutches to hold up a shaky structure.

The lesson from this process was that no number of gimmicks will make up for a faulty foundation. I had to figure out the core of my story first, then I could focus on stylizing it.

For example, if it doesn’t feel like my main romance has enough tension, the solution would not be to complicate it by tossing in a love triangle. Instead, I need to keep delving—I mean digging—until I reach a deeper understanding of my characters’ basic nature, then apply more pressure so they’ll spin their own twists.

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3. EVERY SHOT COUNTS

Once the dialogue and music are in place, the trailer is ready for its picture pass.

Visuals are all about showcasing a film’s production value. The goal is to try to include at least one shot from every set in the movie.

Ideally, a trailer won’t show the same setting twice. Even if most of the dialogue is sourced from a single location, an editor will play it over footage of other scenes to get across the production’s breadth and scope.

This tactic taught me to be intentional about the settings I employ in my books. Rather than having my characters return to the same space for serious conversations, I started moving them around, particularly for important plot points. It’s an easy way to broaden the world of a book and make it feel richer without having to travel to other planets or new dimensions.

Simply describing a room that the reader hasn’t entered yet can amplify their experience of the story.

4. WITHOUT HOOKING THE VIEWER, YOU CAN’T REEL THEM IN

Movie trailers are short, and so are people’s attention spans. We have literally seconds to reel in a viewer, or we’ve lost them.

It’s very similar with books. Readers are on the hunt for something that will make them turn the page. The title, cover design, and back cover copy are how a book makes its first impression—but it’s through the opening lines that a writer can reel in a reader.

In general, the best book openings don’t convey information; they offer us a taste of what’s to come. They allow us to sample a story’s voice and tone and texture.

I remember attending a writing workshop and listening to the late, great Richard Peck say, “Nothing gets better than the first line.” It made me think of movie trailers because in my experience, very few films live up to their trailers.

Something that goes hand-in-hand with opening lines are closing lines. Even when the reader is sucked in, they could still put the book down at any time. One way to keep them turning those pages is by making sure every chapter ends on a strong hook.

Often, we can write past that hook and tie up our chapters too neatly. Instead, I learned it’s best to end a chapter on a breathless note, thereby increasing the odds that the reader will flip the page to keep reading (and breathing).

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5. BUILD TO THE BEAT

There is an art to whittling down a two-hour film to a two-minute trailer. It’s not about telling the whole story; it’s about the story you can tell.

Movies are too complicated to summarize in such a short time frame, and even if that could be achieved, it might not be exciting enough to hook the viewer. The guiding question for crafting a 90-120 second trailer is: What story can you sell?

What’s most compelling about a story often isn’t the plot but the emotional journey. And the best way to get that across in a trailer is through its soundtrack.

Even if a trailer employs no dialogue or voiceover, its music should tell a story on its own. And if the music never shifts gears, then our emotions never heighten.

Books have their own music, too. Think of the three biggest plot twists in the story: the inciting incident (what kicks off our character’s journey), the midpoint reversal (the point of no return for our character), and the black moment (our character’s worst fears made tangible). In order for these moments to stand out, we must write scenes that build up to these climactic revelations, and then we must deflate the tension so that it can rise again when the next beat drops.

Put differently: If someone keeps screaming at you, eventually you will tune them out. Yet if someone builds to a shout, and then drops their voice to a whisper, it’s more likely to grip your attention.

I can’t close this piece without adding a note on love triangles: I personally love them, but I think they get a bad rap from stories that incorporate them as dramatic devices. For a love triangle to work, I think it must stem from character, not plot. I could go on…but I’ll save that for another essay!