Writing Lessons From... Save Yourselves! aka When One Idea Inspires a Whole Story
Listen to the blogcast of this episode:
Endings are hard to write. If you’ve read many of these Writing Lessons From… you’ll have seen that pattern emerging.
And it turns out that endings are hard to write even if that’s where the inspiration for the whole story came from.
My husband wanted to watch Save Yourselves! because the title made him laugh. It’s a sci-fi comedy about an alien invasion, which is right up my street so I wasn’t going to say no.
We watched the film baffled as I tried to untangle it, work out where the plot was going, whether it was any good or not.
And then that ending happened…
Obviously, this is about the end of the film. Go watch it before reading this if you don’t want that ending ruined.
Ahead, there be spoilers.
(We watched Save Yourselves! on whatever Channel 4’s streaming service is now called, but it’s since disappeared from all the UK streaming services. Keep an eye out for it.)
I actually really enjoyed the story of Save Yourselves! It was clever and very well done. A young couple, addicted to their smartphones, decide they need to disconnect. They go to stay in a friend’s cabin in the middle of nowhere for a week or two with their phones turned off.
They’re both going through their own things, Su has just been fired, Jack is not feeling as manly as he would like, their relationship is strained, all that good, well-developed stuff.
Naturally, the moment they leave the city, aliens invade Earth.
It takes the aliens a while to reach the cabin, and it takes a while for our intrepid couple to realise something is off. Eventually, Su turns her phone on and is inundated with voice messages and texts from friends and family, and social media clips of the invasion.
That’s when they realise that the thing they thought was a footstool is in fact an alien.
Because the aliens look like this:
Isn’t that wonderful?
It’s original, unique and I bloody love it!
Even better, these aliens aren’t just killers, they feed off ethanol. Which includes Jack’s sourdough starter and the petrol in most available getaway vehicles.
Forced out of the cabin by encroaching aliens, they find an old, diesel car and drive off, hoping to meet up with family. In the middle of the woods, they witness a family being killed by an alien, leaving their baby alone in the world. Unable to leave the baby, our unskilled couple take everything they can from the parents’ car (now out of petrol), have their own car stolen by an evil hitchhiker, and head into the woods…where the alien zipped off to.
Of course, there’s a showdown with the alien, and they figure out how to kill it.
This is when I got excited.
How would they use this knowledge? How far was this going to go?
Would they save the world? Would they make it back to the city or their family? Or would they just survive long enough for other humans to figure it all out?
Maybe they wouldn’t survive.
I was not prepared for what happened.
They find a strange alien object in the woods which gives them phone reception. Lost in their screens, watching news footage of the invasion, the strange object encircles the three of them, trapping them in a bubble. This weird bubble then lifts into the air and keeps going up, until they can see other bubbles containing people. Off into space they go, far away from Earth.
The end.
WHAT?!
I obviously Googled this immediately
According to an interview with the two writers, they started with the end image and the concept of a young couple addicted to their phones. An addiction which leaves them alone during the alien invasion and oblivious when the strange bubble is growing around them.
Okay.
I get it.
I’ve had weird ideas, decided it would be a great premise for a story and started writing.
But, you know what? Nine times out of ten, I’ve had to lose the original scene or idea that sparked the whole thing. Because the story took on a life of its own and became more interesting than the original spark of inspiration.
Is that what happened here? But they forgot to remove the original spark of the idea? Because the ending was blunt, made little sense and offered no closure.
And those are the lessons
Of course, all creative writing is subjective. We’ve discussed this before.
Some people might have really enjoyed that ending.
Some might have even understood it.
This film, if anything, shows how subjective storytelling can be.
As for the ending, I’ve given this so much thought.
I honestly don’t know what I would have written instead. This is why I was so fascinated to see where it would go, because I couldn’t see how it would or should end.
This ending feels a bit like that polar bear in the first season of Lost. As if the writers didn’t know how it should end either, so just went a bit mad.
I was shocked when I read that this ending came first.
The writers talked about it being something of a subtextual and political message, which makes sense, but does that sort of ending work in a silly, apocalyptic comedy?
Perhaps it was the format that was wrong.
I’m not so sure. The comedy was lovely and subtle, the film was surprisingly gentle with genuine funny moments.
Perhaps it just ended too soon?
A good ending, to any story, requires closure.
And this is the real lesson.
It’s a vital lesson, as I’ve learned the hard way with one of my books (since unpublished, and I’m working on fixing it!).
Writers, especially in a silly, apocalyptic comedy, ask the reader/audience to suspend their belief while investing their time and emotion. The payoff should be a satisfactory story, resolution and closure.
Even if they’d just shown where the people in the bubbles ended up – was the baby okay? – that could have been enough.
Just one more scene. One more shot.
It could have made a world of difference and turned this film into a surprising delight.