Short answer sprint
Questions have been backing up in the inbox for a few weeks, so I thought I’d do a Short Answer Sprint to work through a few.
If a friend or co-worker tells you an anecdote, or describes a character eccentricity of one of her relatives, and you use it in a screenplay are there any legal ramifications? I have no intention of using the name of the friend’s relative (I don’t know it), but the story and the relative are so funny and eccentric, respectively, that a very amusing character could be made from them. Do I need to get my friend’s permission to use this information?
– Derek
Legally, no. Ethically, yes. Particularly if said friend is a writer who might be planning to use it herself. I borrowed an anecdote from a screenwriter friend in Go: the moment when Simon accidentally sets the hotel room on fire. I changed pretty much everything about it, but I checked with him first to make sure he wasn’t planning on using it.
I’m writing a scene between a Chinese immigrant woman and a man from Mexico. Both characters speak in broken English, and I’m wondering how to correctly write broken English with a Chinese accent and speaking pattern, as well as how to do it for other languages. Do you just write the dialogue in “good English” and then somehow note that the character has a thick Chinese accent? How would you tackle this challenge and could you an some example or two?
– Jules Hoffman
No time for examples in a Short Answer Sprint. But when writing non-standard English, you walk a fine line between “giving the flavor” and “annoying the reader.” So here’s the simple advice:
- Use the speaker’s words
- Use the speaker’s grammatical structure
- Don’t try to duplicate the exact speech pattern on paper
If you have more than two apostrophes in a line of dialogue, you’re probably overdoing it.
I’ve been building a bit of a gut. Too many years of balancing a day job with writing time and squeezing in food when I could led to some really bad eating habits. One of the perks, though, was that I became a “Shit Camel.” I could go for a week without taking a dump. Sure, it was a massive, hour-long endeavor that afforded plenty of reading time whenever I did take a crap, but it left the flow of work or writing largely undisturbed.
Now that I’m eating better and trying to work this fat off, I find that I’m visiting the john much more often and depositing much less when I leave. I hate that. This has been especially annoying in the past few days since I blocked them off for writing time only.
All this is to ask, what do you eat as a writer? Are you hunched in front of your Mac for hours on end like a crazy Korean gamer, with Red Bulls and candy wrappers scattered everywhere? Or do you have some kind of healthy eating regimen that keeps you energized? Just curious, because distractions of any kind really destroy my momentum.
РRen̩ Garcia
Writing is sedentary, and sedentary people tend to get fat. But most screenwriters — even the fat ones — defecate more than once a week. Yikes.
In terms of health, I eat pretty sensibly. If you’re trying to lose weight, South Beach is actually very easy and sane. Excercise-wise, I lift three times a week. (A lot of writers go to my gym, for reasons unclear.) I do less cardio than I should, but I’m walking 4+ miles per day picketing, so that kind of makes up for it.
I am a beginning screenwriter and I am very intimidated by plot design. I love reading good screenplays because the plots seem like clever puzzles where each piece fits snugly but unexpectedly into a grand scheme. When I try to construct plots on my own, however, I feel they seem contrived and unrealistic. It seems like a very intellectual process to me, even though the ultimate goal is an emotional one. Do you have any advice for someone struggling with this? I’ve read about three books on screenwriting, and they make plot structure seem so basic, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re creating from scratch. Any helpful words from you will probably do a lot for me.
– Jim
Screenwriting books make everything seem so tidy, when actual screenwriting is gory and difficult. Plot and structure are really just the answer to a single question: what happens when?
Look at your story from your main characters’ perspectives. What are they trying to do at each moment in the script? What do they know, and what do they learn?
Then look at it from the audience’s perspective. What do they know, and what do they expect will happen next?
A good plot keeps surprising both the main characters and your audience. Probably the reason your plots feel contrived is that you’re trying to drag your characters through some pre-determined series of structural benchmarks, rather than focusing on what’s interesting and surprising right now in this scene.
I read in your comments, some time ago, that you had a mix tape you listened when you wrote for “Go” to help you get in the right mood. Did any of that music find its way into the movie? If so, how did that happen? ex. did you suggest it to the music director? If not, why not? Wasn’t it a key factor in setting tone for you?
– Dan
None of those songs made it in the movie — and that’s fine. A playlist is a great way to help capture a certain tone while you’re writing, particularly when you need to get back into a mood. But it’s really just for your own preparation. Screenwriting is a lot like acting in that way, incidentally. Actors often have touchstones to help them get back into a role. Music is a great one.
Are you inspired to help new writers because you had the good fortune of a mentor when you were starting your career, or do you do it because you had to figure it out on your own?
– Annabel
I didn’t have a mentor, at least not for any significant period of time. I started this site because I remembered what it was like having 1,000 questions about screenwriting, and no good place to ask them.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but do you think the stop of “Ops” was related to the imminence of the somewhat similar secret-adventures-’round-the-world “The Unit”?
– Matt Waggoner
The Unit is a lot like Ops — but done as a CBS show. I don’t mean that as a slam. They figured out how to take a potentially risky premise and turn it into something embraceable by a mass audience. What’s funny is that we met with Scott Foley for Ops (at Susina, the coffee shop featured in The Nines). He read the script and really liked it. We liked him, and would have cast him in a second. He’s an undervalued actor, and a nice guy.
But no, I don’t think The Unit derailed Ops. Our project hung around longer than it should have largely based on my name and the quality of the writing. It really wasn’t a Fox-appropriate show, and it’s for the best we never shot the pilot. (The two Ops scripts are in Downloads section if you want to read them.)
I’m in early discussions with a producer about writing a biopic. One thing that has come up in these discussions is the producer’s insistence that the movie adhere to a traditional three act structure and not be ‘episodic’ – and I agree with him in principle (I’m frequently dissatisfied by biopics for this very reason), but I also feel that the complicating factor in this case is that lives simply don’t unfold in three acts – they are, by their very nature, episodic. I was curious as to how you might approach this kind of assignment in terms of finding a three-act story within an episodic sequence of ‘true’ events.
– M
History is history. Movies are stories, and good stories have forward momentum. Your challenge is finding the thread(s) that keep the main character working towards a goal, with obstacles, setbacks, and moments of success. And that may not be possible. There are many remarkable people whose lives are surprisingly resistant to dramatic staging. There hasn’t been a great biopic of Lincoln, Da Vinci, or Einstein. Amadeus succeeds because they elevated a fairly minor character in his life (Salieri) and told a largely fictionalized story through his eyes.
Don’t try to tell the story of a great person’s life. Tell a great story using the details of a person’s life.
This may be kind of a loaded question, but have you ever read Stephen King’s Dark Tower books? They’ve just been finished, thirty-some years after the first book was started, and are so old fashioned and evocative of Rod Serling — like some weird combination of The Lord of the Rings, Sergeo Leonne’s Spaghetti Westerns and The Twilight Zone — that a movie adaptation has to happen eventually. The fan base is much too huge. Could you ever see yourself considering adapting this?
– J.R. Flynn
This is an example of how long questions sit in the box sometimes. JJ Abrams is now adapting it.
But to answer your question: sure. I could see myself doing it. But JJ Abrams or not, I try not to dwell on the projects I’m not writing, because that can drive one mad with frustration. As busy as I am (when not on strike), barely a week goes by that I don’t see a project announced in Variety which causes that spike of envy. If that ever goes away, I’ll probably quit.
In the re-design of the site, I inadvertently got rid of the “Ask a Question” link. Until I find a good home for it, you can ask a question here.
Filed under: Adaptation, QandA, So-Called Experts, Television, Words on the page
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December 4th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Interesting answers. I particularly liked the one about plot development.
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your friend, Lost co-creator and showrunner Damon Lindelof, also writing the Dark Tower adaptation with JJ? That’s what I’ve heard at least.
I’m currently reading The Stand, my first Stephen King book, and am really liking it so I can’t wait to get my hands on The Dark Tower series!
December 4th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Good stuff, especially in a world of strike.
Shit camel sorta threw me though.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
In a seemingly unrelated question to this post, any idea when the Peter Hanson documentary (you’re in it) will be made public?
December 4th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Ya, I’m surprised you threw in the `shit-camel’ comment. I just can’t believe that was a serious question.
Since you might still be in that `sprint’-mode, maybe you could just answer a quick question. How many pages do you generally write in a dedicated hour of writing? I know this might be a difficult question, as in some hours you might write a couple of lines and in another hour you might be on a roll, but I’m just looking for a ballpark figure.
Thanks
December 4th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Yeah, the question re: defecation was pretty horrifying. Wow. For some reason I had to read it three times. That aside- nice job getting through so many at once! Very fun/enlightening to read.
December 5th, 2007 at 1:34 am
Now THAT’S a sprint!
December 5th, 2007 at 3:08 am
It is so frustrating to hear of all these incredible opportunities to rub shoulders with so many great screenwriters who are out picketing, and yet I live so far away it is impossible to partake of these opportunities!! Thank you for offering them though, and I hope those who can will make full use of them for those of us who cannot.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:05 am
To add to John’s comments on writing non-standard English dialogue, don’t write phonetically. I recently auditioned for a film with exceptionally rural Southern characters. This is an actual line of dialogue as written: “Ma God, how cin ya say a’ta me lik tha? ” The script itself was very good, but the phonetic writing was extremely distracting and created a lot of speed bumps for the reader. Even as a Southern actor who plays a lot of characters who talk this way, there were times where I would just stare at a line for a few minutes trying to figure out what the hell the writer was trying to say. Not just in the sense of the line, but also the words themselves — what real word the writer’s invented spelling represented.
And to be frank, phonetic writing can also be pretty insulting to the culture you’re trying to emulate. Imagine writing a period African-American character and giving him/her the line, “I sho’ do likes you, Miss Clarice!” If you describe the character adequately, the clearer, “I sure do like you, Miss Clarice,” will give the reader and performer the proper flavor of what you’re going for. But there’s nothing worse than a writer who is nothing like you saying, “This is how you people talk.”
In short, dialects are regional or cultural rhythms made up of slurs, word substitutions and words being dropped altogether: “Y’all, I walked down them stairs, nearly broke my neck.” You can give a very strong sense of a dialect without having to insert random vowels or even drop a lot of g’s. Trust the actor to do that for you. If they can do the dialect, they know where to adjust.
December 5th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
That’s some nice advice, Doug.
December 6th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Regarding M’s question on biopic structure, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (well, one of them) said in the audio commentary to Auto Focus that they like to focus on a defining period in the person’s life, the one that is the most exciting and exemplifies their characteristics, rather than trying to cover their entire life.
They have some experience on the matter, having written Ed Wood, Man on the Moon and The People Vs. Larry Flynt as well as producing Auto Focus. (Although I would argue that a different approach can work as well; Walk the Line comes to mind.)
December 6th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Re: Jim’s Question
Read Raymond Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” It doesn’t give any hints about how to create a good plot structure, but gives a lot of examples of what Chandler considered to be contrived mystery storylines.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
I liked the comment about the mix tape, and I also find it interesting. Often, when I’m writing, I turn to other media for inspiration, partly because when I turn to writers as inspiration for writing, I end up changing my own personal style and emulating what I’m reading.
I like music for writing inspiration b/c it’s so personal. Recently, I was writing a character for a class and the instructor, rightly, pointed out that I didn’t have a handle on who the character was, and so it wasn’t coming across. I struggled and struggled until, in an unrelated way, I picked up the most recent Scary Kids, Scaring Kids album, where I found that several of the songs matched the mental state I was trying to create in the character.
I can’t imagine, however, that those songs would ever get onto the soundtrack. They would be so obvious and uncomfortable, telling the story for me instead of creating a mood.
sorry that took so long.
January 22nd, 2008 at 3:48 am
Dear John I’m studying Dramatic Literature in University Of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. But my interest is writing screenplays. So far, I have written several screenplays but as you may know making films in Iran is not easy due to extreme censorship and I have not had any opportunities in selling my screenplays in Iran. I am writing to ask you about an agency (I can find them on the web but I do not know which one is trustworthy) or a good screenplay festival, in which I can present my screenplays. I have sent one of my screenplays to the Screenplay Festival ( http://www.screenplayfestival.com) and I have been chosen as one of the semi-finalists, but I do not know how much that festival is valid and well-respected. I would appreciate it if you can tell me a bit about that festival too. Thank you in advance, Ehsan