Screenwriting 101
Following a reader’s suggestion, I added a 101 section to the sidebar to highlight some of the introductory how-to articles on screenwriting.
This site houses about 950 posts, of which more than 500 are of the non-expiring educational variety. I’d love to find a way to guide new visitors (and aspiring screenwriters) through them without annoying longtime readers. So consider this a call for advice. I’d especially welcome links to sites that do a great job walking readers through a lot of related articles.
Currently, archives are broken down by category, a listing of which can be found at the bottom of each page. It’s not a great way to browse. Adding tags could help (maybe a ‘101′ track, or ‘character’ track), but my hunch is that it’s going to take more human work than semantic upgrading to really be worthwhile.1
Don’t be shy with crazy suggestions. Even if it’s 100 hours worth of work, it’s no challenge to bring in a cadre of film students to implement it.
Time spent thinking
My post on the six-hour scene dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
Where this line of reasoning gets fascinating is when you factor in other ways people spend their surplus, such as television:
Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
I haven’t read Shirky’s book
(Thanks to John Gruber for the link.)
The six-hour scene
I spent the end of last week in Des Moines, where I had a trustees meeting for Drake University. It was also a good excuse for barricading myself in order to get some more pages written on my current project. (The thing I went to Maine to research.)
In How To Write a Scene, I explained my basic process for getting a scene on paper, which consists of looping it in my head, doing a “scribble version,” and then writing up the final thing. But like all workflows, there’s something a little best-case-scenario about the way I described it. So in the interest of myth-busting, I want to explain how some scenes are a lot more work.
(Note that I’m only promising to explain “how,” not explain “why.” After a decade doing this, I’m still sure not why some scenes are exponentially more difficult to write than others. Many times, you don’t see the monsters coming.)
In this case, it took six hours to get one scene written. And it wasn’t, on the surface, a particularly challenging scene: Two characters in a room, talking. A very clear in and out point, with the bookending scenes already written. But it was a beast to get on paper.
In general, when I reach a scene that seems unyielding, I’ll happily skip ahead to write another scene. 1 But in this case, I knew I needed to crack this scene before writing any others, because it introduced a major character’s primary goal, his cri de coeur that would set the tone for much of the movie. That’s something you don’t get in an outline — the emotional drive. I needed to feel it in order to write any of the major scenes later in the script.
So I needed to write it.
The scene looped in my head pretty well. I could see the basic action, and had a sense of what the characters were saying. But when I tried to do a scribble version, it refused to come together. I had a notepad full of dialogue, mostly just single lines, with arrows trying to arrange them into a meaningful sequence. I spent two hours on the flight to Des Moines trying to make the pieces fit before finally putting it aside.
After writing three comparatively easy scenes, I took another stab at it. I asked some obvious-but-necessary questions:
- Was I starting at the right place?
- Was I ending at the right place?
- Could another character drive the scene?
- Would changing the location help?
- Did it need to be two scenes, rather than one?
- Did the scene even need to exist?
The answers confirmed my frustration: it was the right scene. It was just a bitch to write.
I went back to looping it in my head, and tried to forget about the half-written dialogue. If you’ve ever watched a movie with the sound turned off, that’s basically the effect: you don’t know what they’re saying, but you know they’re saying something. And you can tell what the tone is.
Tone ended up being the variable that needed tweaking. By cranking one character up to a near-manic state, his leaps of thought made a lot more sense. I did a new scribble version on a clean sheet, this time with half the arrows.
On the flight back to Los Angeles, I finally wrote the scene itself. It was still tricky, but it hit all the points in an agreeable way. It felt like a scene you could see used as a clip on a TV review show, in that it embodied the tone and ambition of the story.
So now it’s done, and I can continue on the remaining 60-odd scenes left.
Why screenwriters have it so good
Here’s the thing: You don’t always have six hours to write a single scene. In television, that level of output would get you fired. Even on features, there is real time pressure. Spending six hours on two-and-a-half pages is a luxury problem.
So what do you do if you have to write the scene, and you only have an hour?
You muscle it. A good writer with enough experience can get a version of the scene on paper that will range from unobjectionable to pretty damn good. Particularly on production rewrites, I’ve had to muscle scenes that in a perfect world would have been handled more artfully. But the results aren’t terrible. Given the needs of the director, cast, production and studio, you do the best you can with resources you have. Time is finite. So is mental energy.
But when it’s your own script, you owe yourself the time and effort to let each scene be the best it can be. The first 10 pages of Big Fish took three solid weeks of work. I’m convinced that almost any lesser version would have significantly hurt the movie.
The six-hour scene is now typed up, and I’m happy with it. In the cold light of Courier, I know it still needs tweaking, but I’m pretty confident it will remain in the movie in largely the shape I wrote it. If I’d brute-forced it, I’d always wonder if it was the right scene.
- Actors and directors generally have to shoot the scene listed on the schedule, whether it suits their mood or not. The writer, working independently, can check his inner barometer and determine which scene would be most fun to write. “Fun” being relative. At some point, all the easy scenes are finished, and it’s only the sight of the finish line that gets those last scenes written. ↩
Grand Theft Auto
I offer this an explanation and apology for why there will be few blog posts in the coming weeks. Fewer hours spent with friends and family. And an increased number of times I reach for my weapon rather than discussing matters calmly.
Here’s the thing: I’ve never even played I-III. I’m more Tower Defense than blood-soaked crime epic. But through whatever subconscious memetic programming, I feel absolutely compelled to buy it and play it. Dude, check out the trailer
Because you’ll ask, I have a PS3
- The trailer is age-verified, but I’m not sure how or why. Considering I have Amazon Prime turned on, I obviously have a credit card, so it seems strange to ask for a birthdate. ↩
Uggh
On Friday afternoon, WGAw President Patric Verrone and WGAE President Michael Winship sent out an email to members that embarrassed themselves and both organizations. In it, they slammed the “puny few” who bailed on the WGA to take fi-core status, thus allowing them to write for pay during the strike. They provided a link to the list of names — seven in the East, 21 in the West.
The email felt like it had been stuck in the Out box for several months, and had suddenly and unexpectedly been sent to membership. Some readers have speculated that the timing was somehow related to the SAG negotiation, but I can’t fathom how it was supposed to help. It was badly conceived and badly executed.
There are two issues involved, and it’s best to look at them separately.
The first is the decision to list the names. It apparently came about by a vote of the board(s) during the strike. I’m not privy to what the discussion entailed, but I have to assume the memory of the Hollywood blacklist came up as a significant argument against releasing the names. It’s a painful and dark mark in screenwriter history, and not easily forgotten.
The best rationale I can think of for naming names would be to end speculation and mythologizing about how many writers walked out on the WGA during the strike: it was in fact a very small number, consisting almost entirely of daytime serial writers. There was no great insurrection or profiteering by writers for film or traditional television.
I think there is a discussion worth having — whether making those names public helps or hurts the writers, the Guild and the industry. I can’t fault strong opinions on either side.
The second issue is the email itself, and that’s the real flashpoint of this debacle.
[T]his handful of members who went financial core, resigning from the union yet continuing to receive the benefits of a union contract, must be held at arm’s length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are – strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk. [...]
Without concern for their colleagues, they turned their backs and tossed the burden of collective action onto the rest of us, taking jobs, reducing our leverage and damaging the guilds for their own advantage.
Clearly, de-mythologizing was not the goal here. If anything, it’s a call to unsheath swords once again, this time to fight enemies among us. As the archives will show, I supported the strike strongly, both in miles walked and moments blogged. But guys? It’s over. And trying to reignite the flames of guild fury over 28 names is ridiculous. It makes the guild look as crazy as the AMPTP tried to portray us.
Over the past two days, I’ve heard the term “tone-deaf” a few times in reference to the email. But I think that’s too soft a criticism. A tone-deaf singer at least has some idea what the melody is supposed to be — he can hear it in his head, even if it sounds like cat disembowelment to us.
This email, however, is the wrong song at the wrong time. It’s Sussudio at a funeral. It feels like it came from a parallel universe in which the strike was still happening and Spock had a beard.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s this: If you were ever going to blunder, now is the time. For the first moment in quite a while, nothing’s at stake. The WGA is not in war mode — at least, it shouldn’t be. A frank discussion of how the guild conducts itself, publicly and privately, should be embraced. And emails like this should be the first topic of discussion.
When friends read your script
What are your thoughts on choosing readers for first drafts? I’ve noticed that, for example, giving a Disney movie to a Fincher fan can turn a favor into a chore and leave the writer lacking in constructive feedback. Better to give it to someone who knows and enjoys the genre and is aware of that marketplace, past and present. You’re asking them to work for free, after all.
I’ve also made the mistake of allowing someone unfamiliar with screenwriting to read a script because they asked me to. You end up explaining everything to death and they still don’t get it which can feed your rampant first-draft-phase insecurity. Was there a strategy you followed back in the day to get the best feedback or did it just happen organically?
I looked but didn’t see anything on the site to help with this. May be helpful to myself and others.
- Matt
The screenplay format is so unlike traditional fiction that it’s hard for newcomers to offer much useful feedback. They often can’t distinguish between the strange experience of reading a movie on paper and the story they just read. You may feel a social obligation to let non-screenwriting friends read your work, but don’t plan your rewrite based on their reactions.
With friends and colleagues who are familiar with screenplays — by which I mean they’ve read at least a dozen, and can talk about them comfortably — you may still need to pick carefully. Certain people and certain genres just don’t mix.
A thoughtful reader, though, can often offer constructive feedback even when it’s not her type of movie.
Back when I was in the Stark Program, we all read each other’s scripts. Al Gough and Miles Millar made their first sale with a script about a cop and an orangutan — a very high-concept comedy. That’s not in my wheelhouse, but I went through two or three drafts with them, offering very specific notes about trims and clarifications. They did the same for me on my overwritten romantic tragedy. Regardless of the genre, a good reader can help a writer see problems and find solutions. More than anything, you want a second smart brain to bounce ideas off of. That’s why you ask people to read your work-in-progress.
And for the praise. You want people to tell you you’re great.
Another thing to keep in mind: Don’t burn out your readers. Unless they actively ask to read the next draft, give them a break. You may even want to keep one or two reader friends “fresh” for the inevitable rewrite.
Filed under: Education, Film Industry, QandA, Writing Process
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