Screenwriter and author John August

Are writing groups a good idea?

March 17, 2009 Psych 101, QandA, Writing Process

I was wondering if you have ever had any experience with writing groups. I know it’s good to network and build more of a community of contacts, but in your experience, can they improve your writing? Do you think they can be advantageous? Or do you just end up getting ever more sets of conflicting notes?

— Jack
Burbank

I’ve never been in an official writing group, but I did rely on an informal circle of writer friends for my first few years after film school, getting feedback, suggestions and a healthy amount of peer pressure. Reading other people’s writing — even bad writing — makes you think more about the words you put on the page, so it can be a worthwhile exercise even if the notes you get back on your script are less than ideal.

I’d recommend finding people who are interested in doing the same general kinds of movies. If most of you want to write comedies, the woman writing the drama about a girl’s troubled relationship with her alcoholic father is going to be a drag on the group. Likewise, if most of the writers in the group have emotion-laden scripts, your hilarious spec about a farting monkey won’t get much love.

Another suggestion: Accept and embrace that the group won’t hold together long. People will flake out, drop out or move on. In fact, it might be a good idea to put an expiration date on the group at the start: “We’ll be meeting every Monday for the next six weeks. That’s it.”

Show your work, pt. 2

March 16, 2009 Follow Up, Geek Alert, Rant

geek alert Following up on [last night’s post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/show-your-work), it occurs to me that designing and programming for the web also has an aspect of showing your work. Nearly every browser lets you “View Source,” showing how the page was constructed…up to a point.

For example, if you View Source on the new [Answer Finder](http://johnaugust.com/answers) I built, you can see the JavaScript (and jQuery) that drives the menu and shows/hides the various sections.

What you can’t see is the PHP on the server that generated those sections. In my case, this is a good thing, because the PHP is so awful and kludgy that I can’t explain or defend why it works.

So to make that one page, I’m relying on a bunch of technologies with vastly different levels of transparency.

transparency The “transparent” technologies are available for anyone interested in looking. And that’s mostly good: Peeking beneath the hood is a great way to learn how a technology works. I often find myself opening the CSS for sites I like to see how they’re constructed. ((Keep in mind that you can learn bad habits this way.))

I’m classifying HTML as semi-transparent because so much of the HTML you see when you “View Source” for a site is generated by scripts running on the server, and it’s not automatically clear how or why. WordPress, for example, mixes in at least four parts (Header, Content, Footer and Sidebar) to make any given page. Someone familiar with WordPress might be able to deduce a basic structure, and figure out which parts were generated by The Loop. But in some cases it’s arbitrary. For example, the category links at the bottom of most pages on this site could be hard-coded or generated on the fly, and you wouldn’t be able to tell.

While you can find a lot of information about the images used on a site, including where they’re stored, you don’t necessarily know how they were generated. The chart above, for example, is a .png made from a snapshot of a Numbers document.

In the fully-opaque category are PHP and MySQL, who do most of the heavy lifting for the site but are completely insulated from the user.

Traditionally, programmers have been able to disappear behind the opacity of a compiler. Designers could hide behind the printing or manufacturing process. With the web, the process behind the product is much more visible.

(End of Geek Alert)
=====
The same thing is happening to movies. Not too long ago, a movie came into existence in popular culture just shortly before its release, when the first ads and trailers started running. I didn’t know anything about Die Hard before I saw a trailer. I saw The Blair Witch Project without any idea who made it or how.

Now, long before the marketing begins — before production even begins — details of projects spill across the internet for consumption and criticism. Scripts leak. Photographers sneak pictures of the set, or the costumes. The omission of a giant squid becomes the focal point of conversation for a movie that doesn’t yet exist.

For movies and television, I’m not sure we’re better off “showing the work” in advance.

I appreciate reading American Cinematographer to see how Robert Elswit lights There Will Be Blood, but I don’t read those articles before seeing the movie, lest I get too distracted by those details when I watch it. Likewise, I wish I didn’t know what I know about Terminator: Salvation or Dollhouse. It’s not insider knowledge, but rather the media reporting on the media.

This isn’t transparency, an invitation to come look inside. It’s forced exposure. It’s uncomfortable, and by nature we try to avoid uncomfortable things.

Show your work

March 15, 2009 Awards, Directors, Rant

For math and science exams, we were often required to “show our work” — not merely to prove we weren’t cheating, but to demonstrate we understood the underlying principles involved.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.

Cinematographers, production designers and editors can’t point to a product which is “theirs.” In the finished film, the light is lovely; the world is stunning; the pacing is tight. All wonderful accomplishments, but inextricably bound to the work of others. That wonderful light would go unnoticed if it didn’t highlight the sets, and the sets would be meaningless if the editor favored close-ups. And the contribution of directors, who marshall all these forces in addition to actors’ performances, is probably the most difficult to judge.

As a concise, pre-existing document, the screenplay is probably the only thing that can be judged independently of the finished film. Put another way, the screenwriter shows his work.

But the irony is, after the film is made, no one asks to see his work.

Indeed, we award “best screenplay” based on a viewing of the finished film. If the movie was good, we figure the screenplay was probably pretty good. We guess. Even though we don’t need to guess, because the screenplays for “award contender” movies are commonly available. But frankly, it would be a lot of work to read all those screenplays, so we don’t make that a requirement, even for the WGA Awards. The more honest award would be titled, “Best Film based on a Screenplay which was Probably Good, and Presumably Didn’t Get Messed Up by the Director or Others.”

Worse, we also presume that a bad movie came from a bad screenplay. At some point, I’ll fund a comprehensive study of film reviews from the past 10 years, tracking exactly how many times the film’s screenwriter’s name is mentioned. My gut tells me that the writer’s name is three-to-four times more likely to be mentioned in a negative review than a positive one. But I’d love to see data.

In the meantime, screenwriting will continue to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.

Alternate with water

March 13, 2009 Random Advice

A significant percentage of this blog’s readership is still in school, so my hunch and hope is that many of these readers are still novice drinkers. So as I close out this week of random advice, let me offer one bit of wisdom that can carry you through the next 80 years, or at least this coming weekend:

__For every alcoholic drink, drink a glass of water.__

Do this and you will avoid 65 percent of drinking idiocy and embarrassment. It will pace you. It will dilute you. It will save you at least five pounds of the dreaded [freshman fifteen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshman_fifteen), and lessen possible hangovers.

To be clear: I don’t mean drink a half-gallon of water before you go to bed. I mean that when the beer or cocktail you are holding is finished, you drink a glass of water. No glass? Then fill that beer can with water from the tap.

There is no magic here. Water doesn’t undo what you drank, so you’re still just as much a menace on the roads. But with less alcohol consumed over a longer period of time, you’re less likely to make dumb decisions about driving, dating and diet.

Two related notes:

* When asking for water at a bar, always tip the bartender.

* When someone says they don’t drink, leave it at that. There’s invariably a good reason, and it’s never your business.

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