Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/getting-stuff-written).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 321 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Last week, I was in London. This week, Craig is in London. We were literally flying through the air at the same time in opposite directions. But luckily, I found someone in the Pacific Time Zone to help us out.

Grant Faulkner joins us from Berkeley where he is Executive Director of the National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo. He is a writer and novelist himself, but the reason I mostly wanted him on the show this week is his great new book about writing. Grant, welcome to the show.

**Grant Faulkner:** Thank you for having me, John. I’m really looking forward to talking creativity today.

**John:** So, I said you were in Berkeley. Is that actually accurate? Because last time I met you, you were in San Francisco.

**Grant:** I am in Berkeley, and the NaNoWriMo headquarters is in Berkeley as well.

**John:** Can you talk us through what NaNoWriMo is for folks who don’t know the program?

**Grant:** Yeah. NaNoWriMo is many, many things, but I won’t go into the whole hour-long description of it, which is really kind of what it requires. But just to go through the rudiments, it is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days during the month of November. And so, it was developed really around the premise that everyone has a story to tell and that everyone’s story matters. But sometimes, so many people say, “I’m going to write my novel or my script some day,” you know, like that mythical “someday” when life is just easy and beautiful and you have money and a beautiful office and expanses of time.

But someday just rarely happens. In fact, I just read this in The New York Times, they did a survey and 81% of Americans say they want to write a book someday, but most of them of course don’t. And so, we exist to say “Make your creativity a priority for a month, in the month of November” and we want to ignite people’s creativity and help them realize their creative dreams.

**John:** So, I was aware of NaNoWriMo for a lot of years, and I’d never actually considered pursuing it until two years ago. I found myself at the end of October and realizing like, “Well, I don’t have a script that I have to write next, and I think I will actually just start writing a book and I will do that in November.”

So, I sat down at my computer. I was in Austin. I was there for the Austin Film Festival. And I started writing this book and it became Arlo Finch. So, my first book is actually a NaNoWriMo book.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Thank you to the program and also for the impetus. Most of our listeners are screenwriters. And so, 50,000 words, that doesn’t necessarily track to sort of what screenwriters do, but that’s sort of like — it’s a script. Maybe it’s sort of a script and a half. It’s a lot of words. So in order to hit 50,000 words, I think it’s 1,650 words per day that you’re supposed to be writing?

**Grant:** Yeah, 1,677 to be precise. And I was so impressed because you not only wrote Arlo Finch during NaNoWriMo, but you sold it, right?

**John:** So, that’s not entirely fair because I wrote about 15,000 words. I got nowhere near the 50,000 words.

**Grant:** Wow.

**John:** But I wrote the first six or seven chapters of it and that’s what actually became the book that we went out and sold. So, I sold Arlo Finch off the initial chapters, the outline for the whole book and that’s what’s got the whole thing started. So, it was a great sort of framework for getting me to sit down and actually just do the work of getting just started. So, I really, really enjoy it.

But since the time I did it, I talked to a lot of other people who have written during NaNoWriMo, and some of those people have sold books, but a lot of people just like, you know, actually sat down and like strung words together for the first time in a year. So I think you’re doing an incredible service to people who are curious about writing, who aspire to write, who wouldn’t otherwise have the motivation to do it.

**Grant:** Yeah. And it’s interesting to me because I think sometimes people think that NaNoWriMo is all about, you know, helping people not only write their novels but publish their novels, as if that’s always the end goal. And I’m really actually impressed by the number of people who sign up every year just to write a novel and to do it in a community of other writers. So, that whole notion of creativity for creativity’s sake I think is really valuable, even if your aspiration is to publish, just kind of keeping that notion, that sort of childlike approach, being playful with your words.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think the childlike focus comes into some of the other programs you guys do. You have the Young Writers Program which we help out with, with our Writer Emergency Packs but you’re in–

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Like, 2,000 classrooms every year to sort of help young writers sort of get started in the process. There’s programs designed for really little kids and for middle grade kids. But I think it’s great that you’re sort of getting people thinking about writing as a thing you do even if you don’t intend to become a professional paid writer.

**Grant:** Yeah. And our Young Writers Program, what is remarkable about it for me, since I was a teen of course before NaNoWriMo was founded in 1999, and I’ll talk to 17-year-olds who have written five, six, seven novels during our Young Writers Program and they might have published some of them with a self-publishing company. And I never — when I was a teen, no one wrote novels. I was a geeky reader, writer and I wrote a long short story at most.

And so, I think like this year, we will have 80,000 teens sign up for our Young Writers Program and close to 350,000 writers for the NaNoWriMo main site. And then, with our Young Writers, we provide Common Core-aligned curriculum for teachers, free workbooks that can be downloaded. We send out novel writing kits and resources to 2,500 classrooms which include your Writer Emergency Pack which is actually good for any age of writer, I think. I like pulling out a card every once in a while.

So, yeah, our premise is just the world is a better place with more creators in it, and our approach to igniting people’s creativity is through writing.

**John:** So, for anybody who has questions about NaNoWriMo, they should go to nanowrimo.org and check out all the great work you do. But I want to focus today on the other great work you do which is this new book that I have in my hands. It’s a handsome little book called, Pep Talks for Writers — 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo. It’s published by Chronicle Books here in the US. It is about an inch thick. If you threw it at somebody, it would hurt them, which I think is a good measure for a book.

What was the impetus behind writing this?

**Grant:** Yeah. And for what I said earlier, one of the, you know, kind of breakthrough successes we have every year is when people find themselves as writers and creators during November and find themselves in our NaNoWriMo community. And they want to — they so often want to keep that creative momentum going all year long, but it can be really tough. I mean, you can’t do NaNoWriMo every month and I wouldn’t advise that. But I would like people to stay creative year-round and to finish those novels they wrote or just make creativity a priority in their lives.

And so, I wrote these 52 insights. The insights are really kind of short essays. Each essay is about two or three pages, I think. And then, each essay ends with an action that you can take within a one-week period. It’s not meant to be like a five-year plan or something like that. So, yeah, that was the purpose. And so, each essay is really just taking a different angle of creativity and help people reflect on being creative with their lives in a variety of different ways, whether it’s setting goals and deadlines to finish that novel or whether it’s going out in the world and practicing becoming a better observer, so just a range of topics.

**John:** Yeah. What I like about it so much is that so often these books are kind of “Yay, writing,” like, “Writing is fantastic. Writing is the best thing ever and just like follow these steps and you’ll be so happy.” And what I liked about your book is that, while I think overall it’s going towards a positive place, you’re really acknowledging some of the pitfalls and problems that sort of keep people from writing — either from starting to write or keep people from continuing to write. It’s a very challenging thing to sort of really dig in on. And even 20 years into this, I found myself nodding at a lot of the things that you point out about part of the reasons why it can kind of suck to write.

And so, I want to dig in to some of those today while I have you on the show to see sort of what insights you have and sort of what advice you can have to people no matter what they’re writing, be it a book, be it a short story, be it a screenplay, sort of get them through to that next step and that next draft.

So, if you’re ready, I just wanted to kind of dig in if we can.

Craig: Yeah.

**John:** Great.

**Grant:** That sounds great.

**John:** One thing you identify, something you call in one of the early chapters, “the Other Syndrome”, that writing is something that other people do. Like, can you talk to me about what you mean by other syndrome and I think we can probably tie it into something we’ve talked about in the podcast before, “Impostor Syndrome,” in a sense that I’m not really a writer. Where did that come from for you?

**Grant:** Yeah. I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t struggle with this. “I am not a writer” is one way to put it or “I am not a real writer.” And so, I think, you know, for instance like me, I grew up in a small town in Iowa. And so, when I was growing up, real writers — they lived in New York City or Paris. They were adults. They just weren’t me. I didn’t have access to that writing world. And so, I think everybody can probably find a reason of how they feel other than what they determine a real writer is.

And I think if you don’t claim the “I am a writer” with some boldness, it will show with the words you write on the page. You won’t be able to write as bravely if you don’t claim it. If you say “I’m aspiring to write or be a writer. I want to be a writer –” I mean, the definition of being a writer is that you write. And I think the real part is even perhaps more inhibiting because I think what people mean by real is that they’ve been — you’re not a real writer until you’re published. And one publication can, you know, whatever, boost your confidence and make you feel like you are a real writer, it’s a really kind of flimsy and transitory feeling.

I find it like just kind of strange how I’ll wake up in the morning to write and open up my laptop and have a new assignment and I will just really struggle with those first words. It would be like the last thing I want to do is to write. Even though I’ve done it hundreds or thousands of times before and done it with success, each new project is like a totally new thing. And you can go back into all those sort of low moments of self-esteem or lack of belief in yourself no matter where you are in your writing journey.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s dig into psychologically why people have this sense that other people are writers but what I’m doing is not writing. And so, you were talking about growing up in a small town in Iowa. I think there is a sense that when we see writers portrayed in media, they’re always these people who live in big cities, off by themselves and who, like, they cloister themselves in their little rooms and they type these brilliant things and the editors love them. And if they do go out, it’s to mingle with other writers who wear little ascots. Like, it’s a very fancy kind of thing.

**Grant:** Exactly.

**John:** Writing is a really invisible process. It’s like just a person sitting there, doing something. You don’t see them on a daily basis. You don’t see people who are creative writers out there in the world so much. You might pass that person at the coffee shop who’s working, but like you’re not seeing them doing their work as much as you’re seeing an athlete practicing or playing the game.

**Grant:** Right.

**John:** You don’t see them the way you see musicians. Writing is just a thing that happens.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Last week on the podcast, we answered a question from a listener who asked like, “Is it okay to call myself a screenwriter versus an aspiring screenwriter?”

**Grant:** Exactly.

**John:** And I think our basic answer was a lot like what you said, is that identify yourself by the verb, not the noun. And if you are a person who writes, then you are a writer and that’s absolutely fair to say. And so, I think your idea of the “Other Syndrome” though also ties into I think we talked about it in the show before, which is the “Impostor Syndrome,” which is even when you’re doing it, even when you’re getting paid for it, you always have that sense of like “Oh, no. At some point, they’re going to figure out that I’m not really the person they should be trusting to do this work.”

I love that you included this quote that I’d never seen before. I’ll read the quote here. “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out that I’ve run a game on everybody. They’re going to find me out.’” It’s a quote by Maya Angelou. And so, here’s a woman who’s remarkably successful as a writer and yet she still says that each time she sets out to do a new project, she’s like, “This is the one they’re going to realize that I’m not that good, that I didn’t deserve that praise before.”

And in your book, you talked through some of the reasons why even really successful writers have that sense. Like, what do you think that is?

**Grant:** Per what you were saying earlier, I think one reason that people don’t feel like they’re writers or that they aren’t real writers is that they’re only reading the final draft of their favorite writers, right? The novels they love have been through, who knows, five or ten edits and had professional editors look at them. Whereas, like most of us are sitting with our rough draft and it’s so easy to see how it might not measure up to what we want it to be.

So, writing is so crazily difficult and challenging and I think that that flows into what Maya Angelou was saying as well is that it’s an activity of self-doubt. It has like so many masochistic components to it. The joy and the meaning one finds from the kind of painful exercises is just such a different type of joy than you might find in other activities. And so, I think a writer is just constantly wrestling with that self-doubt no matter where they are in their writing career.

And I think if you feel, depending on the degree that you feel the “Other Syndrome,’ I actually think there are whole different layers. I mean, I’ve done an exercise where I’ll write “I am a writer” in the middle of a circle and then draw concentric circles going out to the perimeter. And I think some people are on the out, like the very edge of the first concentric circle and some people are really close to that middle, I am a writer. And so, I’m imagining Maya Angelou might have been on that closer to the perimeter. So, her natural self-doubt as a writer might really rear an ugly head from time to time.

But, yeah, I think the thing is, is that publishing also doesn’t solve these things. Fame doesn’t solve these things. Awards don’t solve these things. As a writer, you’re always struggling with yourself and your ability to put the right words on the page.

**John:** You talk in your book about the inner editor and how the inner editor is that force inside you that is constantly pushing you and it can be pushing you in a good way or pushing you in a bad way. It’s like that coach who sort of calls you out on all your mistakes and good coaches can sort of push you to your best work and bad coaches can make you quit the team.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** I think that’s an aspect of this “Impostor Syndrome” as well. You have this inner critic who is saying, “You are not good enough. Look at how brilliant that other writer’s work is and how bad your work is.” But of course, as you point out, you’re only comparing this crappy first thing you’ve written, this crappy first draft you’ve written to the finished masterpieces of that other thing. So, naturally, it’s not going to be as good.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re always thinking about the worst of your stuff versus the best of theirs.

**Grant:** Exactly. And we’re not even the best judge of our own stuff, you know. I mean, I think writers just because of that inner editor, which can be — your inner editor has its place and you might banish it during the first draft, but you need it later on because your inner editor wants you to succeed, but it can have a harsh voice. And I think sometimes writers — I mean, we internalize that inner editor and it helps us refine and revise our novels but it can also, you know, I think add to our self-doubt sometimes.

And so, you know, I think when you’re comparing your draft to a published author’s, your eyes probably aren’t the best at that point to judge it.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about process because the classic NaNoWriMo process is basically a quantity kind of goal. Like, you basically just like turn off your inner critic, like, don’t listen to that voice that says, “This isn’t good enough,” just like keep generating pages and go through it.

Do you find that that needs to switch at any point? Can people keep writing at that pace and that speed? There’s a screenwriter who’s out there today who does a lot of work who famously can write zillions and zillions and zillions of words and yet the people will call them out on quality. Do you find that people who go through NaNoWriMo process, what happens in those other 11 months? Like, what is the next step for them after all those words?

**Grant:** Yeah. We definitely — I think I do know one person in the world who did NaNoWriMo every month for an entire year. She wrote 12 novels, 50,000 words a month and she’s a rarity and we don’t advise people to do that. After NaNoWriMo is over — you know, 50,000 words, a lot of people aren’t finished to start. They might need to write another 25,000 or 50,000 words to finish. So, I recommend that they finish because I think there’s just something so rewarding about, you know, writing The End after writing a whole rough draft and then revise of course, you know, and revise, you know, multiple times.

So, sometimes I think people think that we think that you can write a novel in a month and publish it in a month and that’s certainly not the case.

**John:** Yeah. One of the numbers you point out in your book is that if you wrote just 250 words a day, you’d get to 80,000 words in a year. 80,000 words is a pretty good sized book.

**Grant:** It is.

**John:** That’s a book to be proud of. It may not be the best book ever, but it would be about an inch thick and that’s sort of a way to measure sort of what you’ve done. So, you know, consistency even at smaller amounts can be a huge help as well. But how do you then sort of reengage the inner critique, that inner editor, after you sort of try to ignore him or her during that initial process? Like, what’s the way of sort of inviting that creature back in?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think writing a rough draft and banishing the inner editor, it takes practice especially for someone like me because I wrote with an inner editor very present in my writing life until I discovered NaNoWriMo. So, I still — I write pretty slowly because my editor is always somewhere whispering in my ear, “You can refine that sentence a little bit more before going on.”

I think editing and revising takes a lot of practice. I think a lot of people — I’ll see writers revise for the first time and they’ll really kind of only revise on the sentence level. You know, they’ll brush up their grammar and stuff, and revision is such a deeper process. One of my favorite quotes about revision comes from the author, Karen Russell, who said that 90% of her rough draft doesn’t make it into her final draft. I mean, I think you have to open to totally, dramatically changing what you wrote in that first draft, you know, and I always advise people not to attach themselves too much to the plotline or whatever it is in that rough draft because it’s just going to change so much.

And I think Karen Russell is not an anomaly. Most writers I talk to or most novelists, so they say the same thing. The rough draft sometimes as a story just changes so dramatically. It’s barely recognizable. In fact, I just talked with a NaNoWriMo writer who, she did NaNoWriMo I think like 9 or 10 years ago and that 50,000 words that she wrote, she just published her book, but most of those words she said it was kind of a seed of the idea.

So, the rough draft, you’re really exploring. You’re really trying to take different pathways and not be too attached to them. You’re really just trying to open up and find your story. And if I can impart one more quote, I just heard of this as well, Barbara Kingsolver says she starts on negative page 100. So, she’s writing 100 pages just to get to the beginning, just to figure out what she’s really saying. I think the rough draft can even be like a kind of like planning stage. You know, it doesn’t get talked about like that, but, you know, call it zero draft. You can write a rough draft and then outline it afterwards and then, you know, almost write a whole new story.

So, yeah, there are so many different ways to go about it and even though we do have this framework for NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo is a creative experiment from its beginnings and I try to experiment with my own creative process every year because that was the gift that NaNoWriMo gave me. The reason I did it back in 2009 was because I felt like I was in a — my creative process was in a rut. And so, I just want to shake it up and it led me to, you know, take these risks on the page that I wouldn’t have ordinarily if I’ve been writing in my kind of ponderous, precious mode.

**John:** Let’s go back a little bit there because you went to a masters writing program, didn’t you?

**Grant:** Yeah. I did. Yeah.

**John:** So, talk us through it. So, a small town in Iowa, and then, what was the process that got you started as a writer and also that led you to NaNoWriMo?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think there was something in me that was kind of predetermined to be a writer. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to be a writer. So, even when I was going down other possible, you know, career paths, it was always an idea writing some way.

I went to a study abroad program when I was 20 and basically sat in France and read novels in cafes and said, “This is the life for me.” So, I decided to be a writer and never looked back, never had Plan B. And so, yeah, in my mid-20s, I went and got my masters at San Francisco State. But then, that’s when the writing got really tough. It was when I was in my 20s, I was totally broke and needed to make a living and I worked as a journalist and worked in corporate communications and then finally found my way to the National Writing Project which is a wonderful nonprofit in Berkeley dedicated to helping teachers teach writing better. And then, that led me to the NaNoWriMo board.

Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, invited me on and I’ve been here for six years. So, I feel blessed that I’ve managed to find a job in writing that speaks to — you know, I’m a very mission-driven person. So, I really love that this organization helps so many people become creators and, you know, it’s like I get to think of creativity and talk with people who are engaged in writing every day. So, I’m always learning something.

**John:** But, let’s circle back to this Masters of Creative Writing Program that you took at San Francisco State.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** So, what was that like because that sounds like kind of the fantasy, like, “Well, of course, he’s a writer because he went to that amazing program.” So, what were you actually doing during your time there and what was the process of like dealing with other students in the program?

**Grant:** Yeah. I went there somewhat casually. A lot of people are very directed and they choose, you know, very prestigious writing programs, but I was living in San Francisco and I enjoyed my life and just wanted to stay here. And I was reading and writing every moment I could when I wasn’t working, and I just thought I should get a degree for it.

So, I wasn’t really driven purposefully. You know, I didn’t have grand visions of learning things, in particular. But I think the things that I learned were the value of developing a writing community. It provided that, and I think a writing community can serve you in so many different ways, whether it’s getting feedback from your peers and friends or whether you’re getting inspiration from them or wisdom from their experience or networking opportunities.

Some of the professors definitely introduced me to new ways to write, Robert Gluck in particular. He taught experimental fiction. But, yeah, I can’t say that I had — you know, I think a lot of people go to programs and they want to find this mentor who will love them and that mentor will then, you know, open every door in the world for them to get published. And I think that does happen but it’s very rare. And so, I think you have to really think — I mean, if I were going to go back and do it, I would really think about what do I want out of this. I wouldn’t be so casual.

**John:** One of the questions we get most often on the podcast is, “Should I go to film school?” And I think our answers tend to be very much what you describe is that film schools are a great place to be surrounded by people who are trying to do the same things you’re trying to do and get that community, but you can’t go into it expecting “I’m going to go through this program and suddenly I will have the success in this field,” especially in something as esoteric and strange as writing. It’s hard to anticipate that you’re going to be able to graduate from that program and suddenly, you know, all the gates will be open to you.

**Grant:** It’s really true and what’s interesting to me is the number of people who go to MFA programs and they don’t write now, and they’ll quit writing soon afterwards. And I’m always like, “Why did you do it? That was a huge investment of time and money.” And I think it speaks to like what really makes a writer or a screenwriter is that inner passion. It doesn’t matter whether you have a degree in it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve taken any classes in writing at all.

You know, in fact, Chris Baty who founded NaNoWriMo, he hadn’t taken any writing workshops or anything like that. And I think especially with the novel, I don’t know if this applies to scriptwriting so much, but I imagine it does to a large part, is that the best way to learn to write a novel is by writing one, you know. You can’t really read about how to write a novel or just listen to someone lecture on it. You have to experience it in tandem with a larger conversation around it and you can find the conversation in books and in writing communities like NaNoWriMo, of course.

**John:** One of the things you talked about quite a bit in the book is sort of the virtue of being a beginner and sort of like how to sort of remember what it’s like to be a beginner so that you can, you know, approach things with an openness and interactiveness. There’s a quote you used by Matsuo Basho, “Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.” And which is basically a great way of expressing to sort of be able to retain that sense of openness and curiosity that you have as a beginner.

And I think that may have been one of the main reasons I wanted to do NaNoWriMo is because I’m really good at screenwriting. I sort of think I know how screenwriting works. I really didn’t know how writing books worked. And it was so thrilling to be a beginner again at something and I think part of the reason why I keep trying new things is that I’m sort of a dilettante and hopping in between things is because it’s so much more fun to explore something new than to sort of than to sort of keep trudging over the same terrain again and again.

**Grant:** Yeah. And I think the more you stay in one field and kind of specialize in it, the more your sort of expert rigidity just keeps getting more and more rigid. It’s even hard for me sometimes to go back to my beginning stages of why I wrote to begin with. And NaNoWriMo provides that in the sense of the community. I get to talk to a lot of beginning writers and they help me remember that sort of — you know, it’s just so strange. It’s like traveling to a new city that you’ve never been to before. You’re just experiencing the world in such freshness.

And I do think that we lose that kind of childlike appreciation of storytelling the longer that we write. And so, the more that we can do to go back and remind ourselves about it and you mentioned one — I mean, the one thing that I love is like learn something new. Like, when I started playing the guitar five years ago, it was such an interesting experience to be a total beginner in another art form. And so, I think people should like embrace that really as a new year’s resolution. Learn one thing new every year because it brings you back to that beginner’s mind, and then you can apply that to your writing.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things, a truism that we hear again and again about writing, we hear about screenplays but I think even more so about books is to write what you know.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** And I like what you were sort of going into about that idea because so often it will be brought up, and it will be sort of immediately dismissed because like, well, that’s stupid because I don’t know anything about, you know, space travel, but I love to write about space. And, you know, there’s so many examples that people writing things that they couldn’t possibly have firsthand knowledge of it, yet it really works.

Where I think you do a good job of sort of digging deeper is looking at what you’re really trying to get out with writing, what you know, which is sort of the emotional memory, the stuff underneath the experience that is so crucial about writing what you know. What things should people be looking for when someone says, “Write what you know”?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think “write what you know” is funny. That’s like one of the top three probably maxims of writing, right? Like, people are always saying, “Write what you know.” And I remember when I first heard that. I was like, “What does that mean?” You know, because, if I take it at its literal face value, I think that I have to write about only those things I’ve experienced in my life like my small town in Iowa. But it’s not really about that.

I think like just what you said, you should never limit yourself. Like, if I — I don’t know, if I want to write about aliens on another planet, if I want to write about a region I’ve never been to in the world which I’ve done, you know, if I want to write about characters, whatever they are, like neuroscientists, so, I don’t know any neuroscientists, but we should give ourselves that permission because it’s part of the reason we write is to see the world through people’s eyes and to explore the world in different ways.

And so, I like the method acting or method writing approach that you’re really applying your own personal emotional experience to the characters you’re creating. Actually, there’s a Shelley Winters quote where she says, “Act with your scars.” And so, you can apply your scars to any character. But I do think that, you know, that requires, like method acting, a lot of introspection and not just like tossing yourself into characters willy-nilly but really thinking about the purpose of what scar and what experience of that scar is appropriate for certain characters.

**John:** When I read writing that feels very real, when the characters seem like they have flesh and blood, I do think it’s because the author has invested a bit of him or herself into their experience. And so, that, you know, author has a very clear sense of that character’s inner emotional life because he or she is using some things from their own life to sort of proxy for it.

When I was doing the script for Big Fish, there’s a sequence at the end where Will is sort of going through the story of his father’s death and I knew this is going to be an incredibly emotional thing for the character but also for the audience watching it. And so, I would — this incredibly method writing where I would bring myself to tears and then start writing.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** And it seems crazy and why would you do it that way, but I’m pretty sure the only reason why I got to those specific words and those images was because I was at that emotional state as I was writing it. And that’s a, you know, it was an incredibly valuable exercise for me is to sort of let myself feel those feelings and then let those characters express themselves while I was feeling those feelings. And, you know, I would just encourage people to try those things because really what’s the harm of trying those things? And there’s something sort of embarrassing about feeling strong emotions or to psych yourself up into a place. But you do it for other things. You’ll rev yourself up before giving a speech. You’ll do other things to sort of get you into the emotional state. Get yourself into the right emotional state for the writing that you’re doing.

And that’s really what we’re talking about in terms of write what you know. Write those feelings that you know. Use the things that are specific and unique to you to help create some specific and unique moments for your story.

**Grant:** Yeah, that’s a great point. I think the stories that I connect with most I think, I agree with you, the writer or the creator has done something that is just so personal. He or she has made themselves vulnerable in a way that, you know, they’ve gone deeper. And so, I really think vulnerability on the page is more important than any craft advice, you know, or craft tips that you might write with.

And that’s where — with Shelley Winters, like act with your scars, it’s really going deep, you know. Like, be willing to reveal your scars on the page and go there.

**John:** You also bring up the idea of using a pseudonym to sort of give yourself permission to write something that you yourself wouldn’t feel personally comfortable writing. So, J.K. Rowling with her Robert Galbraith books, like she basically created a whole other character who is the person who is writing those books. And it’s a nice way of like, you know, giving herself some arm’s distance so she felt safe to have this other guy be writing those books, but also so she could write herself more into it.

It seems like it’s sort of an impossible sort of, you know, double twist. But by creating somebody, a proxy for herself, she could, you know, more personally invest in what she was writing. Have you had any experience with that personally?

**Grant:** I have, yeah. I know some somewhat renowned writers who have written what with a pseudonym or through a persona and they’ve done it to be more vulnerable on the page. You know, to be more powerful and write more bravely. Like just that shield, I guess, that the persona gives them helps them do that.

I mean, I think really, in the end, every time we sit down to write, we’re doing it through a filter of some persona, you know. Like I might think I’m writing with my natural self, but I think like there are ways to shift that, you know. What is your natural self, really? I sometimes like to pretend I’m somebody else just to try to access a different voice.

**John:** For me, you know, John August is the person I became sort of when I was 21, so I ended up switching from my born last name to use my dad’s last, middle and full name.

**Grant:** Oh.

**John:** And so, like it really was a process like, well, John August is the person who could do this. But the other John maybe couldn’t do this, but John August could do this. Like I was literally a different person who could do these things that were, you know, terrifying to the other John.

Whether I had to legally change my name or not, I think if I had given myself a pen name or permission to do those things, it might have been easier. I feel like the people who write fanfiction and slash fiction and do all that amazing work in that space. I think some of the reason why they’re able to do so much and sometimes do such great work is because they are writing under not their real names. And so, they can expose themselves more, because there’s no way to trace it back to them.

Like, the fact that they are 17 years old and living in Missoula, Montana is not an issue because they are just some avatar on a forum and some name they made up. I think that may be one of the things that’s giving them permission to write as much as they’re writing.

**Grant:** Yeah. And I think in some ways it’s interesting. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, that statement I am a writer or I am a real writer. You know, do whatever it takes to do that. And if it takes using a pseudonym or a persona or an avatar, you know, that’s a perfectly legitimate way to claim that identity.

**John:** For NaNoWriMo, has fanfiction or slash fiction become an issue in terms of like the kinds of work that people are doing? Do you guys talk about that at all as an organization or as part of your mission statement?

**Grant:** Yeah. I mean, our premise is we want people to tell their stories and we don’t really care what those stories are. We don’t judge the quality or the topics of people’s stories. So we do get a lot of fanfic writers and I think that’s great, actually. I mean, in some ways, I think all writing is a variation of fanfiction. We’re all writing through the voices and the stories that we’ve experienced. I love the metaphor of Odysseus, you know, being handed down from one oral storyteller to the next. And that is a kind of process of fanfiction, too. We’re always building on the original story.

So I think fanfiction actually is a wonderful way to learn to write because you’re taking these known characters and known plot lines and then going crazy with them.

**John:** It takes the pressure off of like, oh, I have to create something brand new, or I couldn’t create something brand new, I can use these things that already exist out there in the world. And of course we’ve seen that like, yes, you can do that but if you do that well enough, you can basically change the characters’ names and suddenly you have “Fifty Shades of Grey,” you have one of the biggest books of all time.

So, you know, I think it’s a way of giving yourself permission to be creative that you might not feel that you’re entitled to otherwise.

**Grant:** Yeah. And it may be similar to using a pseudonym or a persona, maybe writing through this known world is a way to feel safe and express yourself, you know, and be vulnerable on the page.

**John:** In your section on writer’s block, you talk about throw-away writing or basically the writing you might do at the start of your day so that, you know, it takes the pressure off of things that you don’t expect they have to be good so that it can — you know, there’s less consequence for it. And I think fanfiction could be one of those examples.

You talk about some exercises like Ray Bradbury’s list of nouns. Can you describe that to us?

**Grant:** Yeah. Ray Bradbury, I think he was the one actually, like his phrase throw-away writing, I think that came from him maybe. He says that every writer needs to write — I can’t remember if he says every writer needs to write thousands or hundreds of thousands of throwaway words. But I think that that’s a good way to view it because you’re essentially practicing writing through those words.

And when he first started becoming a writer and just in that kind of moment of like, “What do I write about?” Maybe instead of going to write what I know, he did this approach, he wrote down 20 nouns and he just made a list and they were totally random. And then he would write these very tiny little essays, like 100 or 200 words which he called pensays. And he would write them about each noun.

And within that sort of meditation on these words, he would piece together, like kind of the interaction of his subconscious and these real words, a story. And that’s how he wrote many of his most famous novels and stories, including “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

**John:** In the book you go through a list of like these are the nouns that were interesting to him and he sort of looks for the factions between them and that became the basis of the story.

I always find it real interesting when people describe writer’s block as if they like, “I have no idea what to write.” And so rarely in my life has that actually been a factor. It’s more the factor of like, “Man, I just really don’t feel like writing,” or, “I really don’t feel like writing this next thing.”

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** And I kind of wish everyone would agree on a different set of words for describing those two different phenomena because they’re not really the same thing.

**Grant:** Not at all.

**John:** So, often I know exactly what I want to write, what I need to write, what I’m compelled to write. It’s just like it’s just torture to actually sit down and get into that next thing. And yet, through books and through movies, we have sort of romanticized this kind of ritualistic idea of writer’s block where it’s like this shrine to which we sacrifice ourselves. And it’s just rarely like that in my daily experience, and yet, you know, we as writers still talk about it.

**Grant:** Yeah. I think shrine is the word. Too many people sort of worship at that shrine almost. They’ll go years without writing and claim it’s just because they have writer’s block. And I think even when sort of famous writers have had it, it’s been overly mythologized.

I oftentimes think it can be just an excuse. Or as you put it, it’s more like it refers to other things like “I don’t feel like writing today” or “I have too many things happening in my life to be creative.” And I think there are so many ways to get around it, whether you’re using Ray Bradbury’s list of nouns, or a photo, or any kind of prompt. There’s a million prompt books out there that you can buy.

But just putting down one sentence on the page, I’ve never experienced a moment when that one sentence didn’t lead to a second and a third sentence. Writing is largely about beginning and establishing or creating some creative momentum. And, you know, there are throwaway words — you know, Julia Cameron, she has the technique, morning notes, where she says it advises people just to sit down and write anything, wither it’s like a list of 20 nouns or like a diary journal or diary entry, or whatever it is. Just to put the pen on the paper, write a couple of pages, throw them away and then begin on your real writing.

So there’s just so many ways to start writing that I think I would just banish the notion of writer’s block from your mind.

**John:** You have an interesting notion of muse. And so we talked about like the muse comes and like the muse sort of whispers in your ear and tells you the brilliant things to write. And like the fear for a writer is that like, oh, the muse won’t show up today. But you described it as a very different thing. You described it sort of more as a group of tiny pixies.

**Grant:** [laughs] Yeah. Well, I think, you know, the classic notion of the muse comes from Greece where they’re — you know, if you go into a museum, you’ll see a lot of, especially with old paintings, these paintings with the muse, you know, strumming her harp near the writer. And the idea with the muse is like whispering the story into the writer.

I mean, I don’t think that’s really the way the muse works. I think too often we’re waiting for that thunderbolt of inspiration to strike from the sky. And at least in my life, that kind of huge moment of inspiration, it happens just so rarely there’s no way I could build a creative process around it.

And so, yeah, per your comment about pixies, I think just putting the words down on the page and focusing on them, and I call them like little sprites that are whispering to you. Yeah, you’ll find the inspiration more likely on the page than you will from the thunderbolt in the sky.

**John:** Yeah. For me, I find it’s the combined momentum of like “Those words fit well together, okay, the whole sentence works well together, okay, that thing he’s saying leads to this thing leads to that thing.” Eventually, you know, there’s flow that happens and it’s just the right things are stacking up in the right way. But to wait for some great muse to strike you with either amazing inspiration or exactly the right words to express those ideas is rarely sort of what the real experience is like.

And, yeah, again, it’s one of those things like writer’s block where we’ve romanticized it to the degree that there is like, you know, this profound lightning bolt that comes out of nowhere that tells you what to do. And maybe you’ll get a few of those in your life where things really do happen that way, where if you’re Kevin Williamson, suddenly you go off and like in three days you write Scream because you just had like this vision for what it’s going to be.

But most writing isn’t that way. And I think we need to sort of really focus on the day-to-day of what most writing is like.

**Grant:** Yeah. And, you know, back at when you were saying like our movies always present writer’s block and contribute to that mythology, growing up, I thought that that’s all that writers did. They sat there by their typewriter with a, you know, shot of Scotch and a cup of coffee and a bunch of cigarettes and they’re wadding up paper constantly and throwing it at the waste basket. But that, for me, is more a metaphor of experimenting on the page. That’s the way I would like to interpret it instead of writer’s block.

And the fact is even when you’re having those moments where like, I don’t feel like writing today, like you mentioned, I mean we all have those moments, but so many times we have to sit down and write. And the fact that we do it in those sort of bad moments, I mean the next day, I’m always like, “Woo, thank God I wrote yesterday.” My present self thanks my past self so much because now I can like sit down and edit these words no matter how crappy they are.

**John:** There’s a movie from 2015, Trumbo, which talks about sort of this writer’s process and sort of the blacklist and like there’s all these wonderful novel things. But I see the scenes of him like, you know, in the bathtub typing with his Scotch. And even if it’s true, it’s frustrating because I just feel like there’s going to be another generation of people watching that movie thinking like, “Oh, that’s what screenwriting is. It’s sitting in a bathtub being cruel to your family while you smoke and drink Scotch.”

And maybe two or three of those things are accurate for most screenwriters, but the bathtub thing, no, most writers are not in bathtubs their whole life.

**Grant:** [laughs] Yeah. I haven’t tried the writing in the bathtub. Maybe that’ll be my next book.

**John:** Yeah. Craig and I are both big advocates of the shower, so there’s the shower for those moments where like you can’t figure out what to write next.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Something about the shower drops your inhibitions and you start being able to make stuff happen.

**Grant:** I think if you’re looking for an a-ha moment, yeah, go to the shower. They haven’t done research on this, but I’m pretty sure more big ideas have come in the shower than anyplace else.

**John:** I’ll tell you that one of the things I found most interesting about writing prose after writing screenplays for so long is the process of writing a scene for me in a screenplay is I can just sort of sit quietly and sort of loop through the scenes so they can sort of see like, okay, this is what’s happening in the scene and I think it’s of course very rough blocks and then as they sort of keep looping through the scene, I could that, okay, like this is the personalities of people in the scene, they’re moving through the scene. There’s a few things from like this. And I can basically visualize it here as the whole scene because scenes are short, they are mostly about three minutes long. So I can visualize and hear what it’s like. And once I have that, I can sort of quickly scribble it down and then just do the better version of it.

What I found so fascinating about doing prose by comparison is like you can’t do that. A person’s buffer is not big enough to hold a whole chapter or even, you know, a page. And so I have to really tie it down to sort of like paragraph by paragraph. Like I can’t sort of build it all in my head and then put it on the paper. I actually have to create the whole thing on the paper sort of line by line. That’s been one of the biggest and most interesting changes and challenges I found switching over to prose fiction after doing screenplays for so long.

**Grant:** Yeah. Like the three-minute scene you’re writing, so much of the work of that is happening with the camera, right?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

**Grant:** And so in a novel like the — all the camera work has to happen on the page, is that right? Is that difference?

**John:** I think there’s a lot of it because screenplays are so minimalist, it’s just going to be like there’s a dialogue and enough scene description to let us feel what is specific and unique about that scene in those moments. So there’s such an economy to screenwriting, that to get to that prose section you have like, “Oh, I can use all the words I want. I can describe all the sentences, I can do all these things.” But it’s also all those words tend to be sort of necessary to do certain things. And so finding your way through that sentence that feels good and that it will feel good next to that next sentence and the sentence after that. Those things are just such different challenges than what I normally deal with as a screenwriter.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean a lot of you take scene description really seriously, so I will slave over those sentences for a long time. But, you know, books are basically entirely scene description, and that’s just a lot of words and a lot of really precise details to these words to make things make sense. That’s I think — to the degree to which my inner editor was kicking in as I was writing for Arlo Finch, was like I can’t use the word because I used that word two paragraphs ago. And so I’m going to find different words so that I’m not repeating myself. Those are the challenges that you just don’t face as a screenwriter.

**Grant:** Yeah. And I think what — as a novelist, too, you’ve got to find that right balance, you know. You got to keep the narrative moving or the suspension, the tension of it. So you just can’t go off too deeply into description, at least depending on what you’re writing, you know. It’s a tough balance to strike sometimes.

And I do things that’s being — like writing scripts is good for novelists. I think a lot of novelists have a tough time moving the action forward. And, you know, by writing a script, you’re just naturally more focused on keeping the story moving. And so going — you know, and I mean because novels in some ways, they don’t have any boundaries.

**John:** Yeah.

**Grant:** So you can go into backstory for 50 or 100 pages and some people — some writers like William Faulkner have been successful in that, but most of the time you’re not contributing to the suspense and tension of the forward moving narrative.

**John:** Agreed. I thought we’d wrap up this discussion of your book by talking about envy because you do a nice job describing it. You have a quote here. “Envy is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” And so I was looking that up online to see who the person was who said that and it turns that you can find baically that same quote with almost every other negative word stuck into the word of the place of envy. So a grudge or revenge. And so basically any negative emotion is sort of like that drinking of poison, but it’s really kind of what it feels like. I remember early in my career being really envious of David Benioff. And then I got to know him, and like he’s a great guy so I thought it was ridiculous for me to be envious of him.

And yet, I also do wonder if just a tiny bit of envy can be good motivation for a writer starting out. Like it’s somebody that helps convince them to sit down to work because if I’m not working, that other person is working because — do you feel that? Or is it only a negative thing?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think envy can be a real creativity killer. I think comparing yourself to another — you’re setting yourself up, you know, as I put it in the book. Like Jonathan Franzen was my version of your David Benioff, you know. And when I encountered him on Time Magazine as the great American novelist, you know, I did — I was deeply envious, but later I did sort of my — you know, I realized, okay, I’m projecting this on him. He doesn’t know who I am, for one. And no one is keeping score, you know. No matter if it’s Jonathan Franzen or one of my best friends down the street who’s a writer having more success, I would be the only one keeping score. So Jonathan Franzen might have 100 points, right? I have two. But no one else is keeping score, so it’s totally negative energy that I’m putting into the world and mostly on myself. I’m the one drinking the poison.

But I actually do agree with you. I think there is a type of envy that can be motivating and can make you work harder and strive for more and try to get, you know, better and practice more and more determined. I’m trying to remember the author. I think it was Harold Bloom, the literary critic that wrote a book called — where I took this idea of the anxiety of influence. And his working premise was that every generation of writers is competing against all of history. So everyone is in their way trying to rise to the top. And I think that can be a healthy type of envy, at least if you kind of keep it in balance.

**John:** Yeah. I can definitely see that. And you’re always — for me, it was that I was able to look at other writers like Kevin Williamson, you know, as I started off. I could look at them and sort of see like they have a template. I could use that as like a — I could imagine myself getting to their place because they existed and so I was grateful for them to have been out there.

And then sometimes when people are more at a peer level, I could look at sort of like, oh, David wants to go down on this path. Well, I’m going this path. I could ask myself, have I chosen the right path? And both cases, like, yeah, you know what I chose a good reasonable path. And, you know, I think it was useful to see that there are other people out there doing different things. And I could sort of compare what they were doing versus what I was doing, and eventually stopped worrying about whether they were having more fun than I was having.

**Grant:** Yeah. I gotta say, one of the main benefits of growing older as a writer is that my envy decreases. And, again, it goes back to I think some of what we said earlier. It’s like why did we get into this in the first place, you know? I mean I started writing, you know, for many different reasons especially when I was a kid. I just wanted to tell a story just for the sake of it. I didn’t get into writing to compare myself to other people and to try to one up them or do better. So again I say it is that beginner’s mind moment where I think you’ve got to go back and think about the source of your creativity and what you were — why you write and why, you know, why — because it’s a tough profession, right? Instead of like — and envy is not going to get you through the tough spots of your writing journey, you know. You’re — the source, the real reason you do it is the thing that’s going to keep you going. In the end, that’s what success is always for me. It’s not the number of books that I sell or publish. It’s about sitting down every day and making meaning of the world through my stories.

**John:** That’s a great place to leave that on. So on our podcast, every week, we give a One Cool Thing. So do you have a One Cool Thing you could share with us? Something you’ve liked. It could be a book, a movie, something out there that you want people to know about.

**Grant:** Yeah. There’s something because I’ve been so absorbed in my book and National Novel Writing Month that I’ve barely been doing anything else, so I haven’t gone to many movies or plays or listened to much new music lately. But I do want to mention I’ve been reading Leonard Cohen’s biography since he died about a year ago. And he’s influenced me a lot since I was very young. And part of the reason I’m reading it is that I decided that I’m the type of person who — I experienced a lot of different things that may be only mainly on the top surface level. And so one of the things I wanted to do more in life is go deeper.

And so this biography is called I’m Your Man. It was written just before he died or published maybe a year before. And I’m reading it and one quote that came out that I thought I’d share with people is form Leonard Cohen’s mentor and older poet called Irving Layton and he would say like, “Leonard, are you making sure you’re doing it wrong?” And I thought that that was like actually great. Like I think every once in a while artists and writers should think, maybe I should do the wrong thing here, not the right thing, because sometimes the wrong thing leads to a more interesting story.

So I’m just going to mention Leonard Cohen’s biography, I’m Your Man. And another reason I’m reading it actually is because I love his voice, like his singing voice, but also his poetic voice. And when I have a writing hero like that, I really like to sort of live in their voice. So sometimes when I’m writing something it’s almost like the persona of conversation we’re having. Like I might write something kind of through his voice.

**John:** Very cool. My One Cool Thing is called “The Last Invention of Man: How AI Might Take over the World.” It is by Max Tegmark from MIT. And so it’s not quite a short story. It’s not quite an article. It’s more sort of an imagination of sort of how a group of motivated people could use AI or the ability for AI to keep improving upon itself to, you know, becoming incredibly powerful. So I don’t agree with a lot of what’s in here and particularly like Tegmark speculates that one of the first things that this AI would do would be to basically generate a bunch of like really good CG movies and sort of basically take over Hollywood and take over the entertainment industry with computer-generated movies that made a lot of money to help fund all the rest of the innovation that they’re going to do.

I think he is underestimating sort of how challenging it is to do the creative work we’re doing and also how long the feedback cycle is to know sort of like whether that creative decision was the right one, that sort of propels you forward in time. But I still think it’s a really interesting thought experiment, so I’ll point people to “The Last Invention of Man” and you could tell what you think of that.

That is our show for this week. Grant, thank you so much for being on the episode. It was great to talk through with you. If people want to find your book, where should they buy your book?

**Grant:** Yeah. It’s in all the usual places. So, you know, online, you can go to your favorite online book retailer. I won’t recommend one. But it is published by Chronicle Books if you want to buy it there. And then yeah, it should be most bookstores I believe.

**John:** And if people want to do NaNoWriMo this year, what advice would you give them?

**Grant:** I would advise them to sign up on nanowrimo.org. I would advise them to tell themselves, I’m a writer. I would tell them to believe that you can write the 50,000 words in a month. And before you do so, though, have a strategy. Go on a time hunt and think about where you can find time in your days because that’s the number excuse I hear, I’m too busy. So all of us are too busy, but if you cut out social media, if you cut out some binge watching, if you don’t go a couple of dinner parties, if you wake up an hour early sometimes or write on your lunch break, you can write a novel in November and that’s a gift.

**John:** That’s awesome. All right. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us to listen to, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. It’s also a place you can send longer questions. But short questions, I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Grant, you’re on Twitter, are you not?

**Grant:** I am. @grantfaulkner. F-A-U-L-K-N-E-R. Some people spell it F-A-L-K. But F-A-U-L-K.

**John:** Fantastic. That’s also a place where you can tweet at him to tell him how much you liked him on the show and that you’d purchased his book. You can find us on Apple Podcast. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Leave us your review. We’d love that. Craig just — he stays up every night just reading reviews. It’s the only thing that keeps him going. You can find the notes for this episode at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts that goes about a week after the episode airs. We have all the back episodes of Scriptnotes. Now available at scriptnotes.net. And the first 300 episodes on the Scriptnotes USB drive so that you can click a link in the show notes to get to those. Grant Faulkner, thank you so much for being on the podcast this week.

**Grant:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Good luck with your book. Good luck with the month of November which you now own. So it’s going to be busy for you.

**Grant:** I hope you’re going to write a novel with us again this year, John.

**John:** I’m not going to write a whole novel, but I’m going to finish the second Arlo Finch in November.

**Grant:** Cool.

**John:** So that’s my goal and mission.

**Grant:** Great. Well, thanks too much for having me.

**John:** Okay. Thanks, Grant. Bye.

**Grant:** Bye.

Links:

* Grant Faulkner’s [website](http://www.grantfaulkner.com) and [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Faulkner).
* Pep Talks for Writers by Grant Faulkner is available [here](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1452161089/?tag=johnaugustcom-20).
* You can participate in [NaNoWriMo](https://nanowrimo.org/), too!
* [I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061994987/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Sylvie Simmons
* [The Last Invention of Man: How AI might take over the world](http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man#comm) by Max Tegmark
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Grant Faulkner](https://twitter.com/grantfaulkner) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_321.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/should-you-give-up).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So Craig and I recorded this episode almost a week ago. And a few things have happened since then. For starters, Harvey Weinstein. You know Craig has opinions about that so we’ll talk about that in a future episode.

Another thing that happened is that if you’re a screenwriter in the WGA West, you may have got an email from me and the WGA Board inviting you to a lunch to talk over screenwriter issues and this current state of the studio system.

There are five lunches conveniently located all over town, all happening this next month. So if you’ve got the email, please RSVP for one. I’ll be at two of the lunches, will even try to get Craig to come to one of them. So you can ask him in person for his Harvey Weinstein umbrage. Now, on with the episode.

Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 320 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode consist entirely of listener questions. We’ll be talking about Bulgaria, Netflix and the quote-unquote, “growth mind set.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But I thought today, we’d start with the giant question we’ve never actually addressed. Craig, do you want to tackle this big question?

**Craig:** So we’re going to present to you this question as if somebody wrote it in, but really it’s an amalgam of the question we’ve been asked a million times. And it goes a little something like this:

“ Dear John and Craig, over the past few years I’ve written a couple of scripts, I think they’re pretty good. Some folks have read them but no one is busting down my door to make them.

“My question is, at what point do I throw in the towel and decide that maybe screenwriting isn’t going to work out for me. I always think back to my high school coach saying, ‘winners never quit and quitters never win.’ But that can’t be right, can’t it? At what point am I allowed to say, ‘enough’ and move on?”

Oof, heavy one.

**John:** Oh, this is a heavy one. And I think the question kind of underlying a lot of the conversations I have, you know throughout the time we’ve been doing this, even back when I first started answering questions on IMDb for, you know, about screenwriting. It’s like I’m doing this thing but it’s not really working or doesn’t seem to be working, can I stop doing it?

The first time actually I heard it’s actually asked of me were sort of like, you know, come back to me was we did a live show and I remember being at the WGA Theater and it’s afterwards that this guy came up and it’s like, “Hey, I just want to let you know that like I listened to your podcast says, that it be okay for me like to stop screenwriting?” And at first I was just like, “Oh that’s horrible.”

[laughs]

**John:** And he said no, no, no, it’s good. Like, you know, maybe realized that like screenwriting is not a thing I actually really want to do and I feel like talking about it but I don’t actually enjoy it. And he was happy and so it made me happy. And so I thought we’d dig into this sort of all of the issues bundled up here about, you know, this aspiration of screenwriting and when you’re allowed to give up that aspiration.

**Craig:** And in doing so, we are not just standing on but embracing, hugging this third rail especially in our culture today. David Zucker, his answer to this one is always when someone says, “Should I quit?” He should say, “Yes, you should quit.” And if you ignore that advice, you’re halfway there to making it. And that’s clever but it is essentially a spin on the kind of advice you get all the time which is non-advice, apologies to David.

Because really what people are saying is, you should definitely not quit if you’re going to make it, eventually. And if you do quit, we know for sure you’re not going to make it. So the real trick is can you tell if you’re going to make it or not? Well, no. Generally speaking, you can’t. However, I think that for a lot of people, they can probably tell if they’re not going to make it.

And so part of the trick here is to have a very honest self-appraisal of the work you’re doing and the kind of response it gets and ask yourself, “Okay, if this just landed in front of me in a mix of scripts that eventually got turned into movies, would it even feel like it belonged in the same world of these other scripts? Or do I have enough evidence that actually this is not something that I can do at that level?”

**John:** Yeah, there’s a quality of self-delusion, which is so crucial to you know any new endeavor. And so whether you’re doing a startup, you’re like you’re launching a new business, a new venture, you’re some sort of tech product that you’re going to put out there, there has to be some level of self-delusion where like, “I know there’s a way I can do this.”

And at a certain point, you have to sort of stop and assess like, “Am I just still doing this because of sort of the sunk cost fallacy, like, I’ve invested this much into it emotionally and sometimes financially that I just have to keep doing it? Or can I step back and take an honest assessment of this is how far I’ve gotten, this is not where I want to be.

The hardest I think to appreciate when you’re in the middle of something is the opportunity cost of the things you’re not doing because you keep trying to do this one thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s one of the things where like, you know, if you are pursuing a career you don’t like, you’re just like, “Oh, but I could go off and do this other thing.” And okay, that’s great. You know, I can make that natural change. But with something like screenwriting, like, you might kind of like it. I mean, you might feel like it’s hard to sit down and write but like I feel like I’m doing something each time but all the time you’re spending trying to make it as a screenwriter or as an actor or a musician, there’s a lot of other careers which are so similar, that’s time could’ve been doing something else, something else you generally would enjoy and be good at.

I sat down for dinner this last week with CGP Grey who’s a great YouTuber and podcaster and he had a video out recently and one of the things he sort of touched on was this toxic idea of “follow your bliss” and basically, you know, that idea you should be delightfully happy doing whatever it is that you’re doing and it creates this system where you feel like, “Well, if I’m not doing the thing that I love most in the world, I’m a failure,” and this is sort of self-perpetuating cycle of like nothing will ever be good enough. And so–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It might be worth an assessment of like what is it that you actually enjoy? What are the sort of goals you have in your life and is screenwriting high on that list? Great, but if it’s not high on that list then maybe you do need to stop and really think about where you’re spending your hours of your day.

**Craig:** I agree. I have some practical advice for folks who are starting out or maybe are early on in their journey, and it’s to ask yourself a critical question. What is it that you are fantasizing about? If you’re fantasizing about being a writer, that is dangerous. What you should be fantasizing about is writing. The amount of times in any given year that I experienced, let’s just call it the nowness of being a screenwriter is very limited. Here and there we have a meeting where you’re a screenwriter or somebody who refers to you as a screenwriter or you get a call from somebody, but most of the time, the vast majority of the time, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, we’re writing.

It’s actually a life of action not of being a thing and I think that people think because of what they see which is the final product that you’re a thing. I am a writer. If your identity is invested in that, then it’s going to be very, very hard for you to, A, honestly asses your own work and, B, let it go if it’s not working. Because now you’ve entwined who you are with this imaginary position in the world. I don’t really feel like I have any position. What I do is write movies, but I don’t think about a position that I occupy. I think about the work I’m doing every day. So if you make it about the doing as opposed to the being, I think you’re already better off.

And the second thing I would suggest to people is that you remove any notion of romance from what it means to be a screenwriter. In reality, it is terribly unromantic. I would argue everything that we think of is being romantic, every occupation. If you actually do it, is not romantic. The joy you get from writing television scripts or movie scripts, day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, is like the joy of being married for a long time which is something that you and I both know.

It is not the heady excitement of an early romance. It is not intoxication. It is that more subtle, calm satisfaction. It’s hard to describe, but it is not exciting in this fireworksy kind of way. And I think sometimes people are chasing that. If you’re comfortable with “I am writing and I don’t need it to be romantic, I just like writing” then you keep writing. And make sure that you’re supporting yourself or anyone that’s relying on you while you’re doing it however you need to, and then you’re fine and either it will or will not happen, but, for you, you’re writing and so you’re okay.

**John:** Craig, I think that noun versus verb distinction is crucial and when I see people who are so obsessed with the status or the image, the idea of themselves as a writer as opposed to the person who’s doing the writing, it’s very clear sort of where they’re at in their process. In talking about, though, that the verb is what it matters that the writing is what matters, I don’t want to, you know, have people give up on their business because writing is really hard and writing isn’t fun. It’s not fun. It is hard.

And so the day-to-day process of sitting down at the computer isn’t always a joy, and in fact it is often really difficult. Even the stuff that should be fun can be really difficult. So I’m here in London and we’re doing Big Fish and so we’re in the studio, we’re preparing to get to the stage and there are things you see as like, “Oh , I actually need to write something new here because that isn’t going to work the way we’re trying to do it now.” And so, you know, I’ll move from, like, being the writer or sitting at the table. I feel like, “Crap, I need to figure out how to write something here that’s going to make this all make sense.” And that’s — it’s pressure and it’s sort of exciting that’s also sort — it’s work and it’s not easy and so I don’t want anyone to decide like, “Well, I’m going to abandon this because I don’t like sitting down at the computer everyday to work.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s probably most writers — most working writers you’re going to talk to are going to have similar experiences there.

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t necessarily have a thrill when you start writing. However, if you can’t find a certain deep sense of, I don’t want to call it joy, but I think satisfaction is the right word.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you can’t find the deep satisfaction once you’re going —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then that’s a problem because I think that being a writer is a symptom of writing and a lot of people think that writing is a symptom of being a writer. I hear a lot of things like, “Well, I’m a writer so I have to write.”

No. No. No. I mean, look, if they killed my job tomorrow and I had to do something else, I wouldn’t eat a gun, you know? I would be bummed out because I do love writing on some sort of deep, non-romantic, satisfying level but it is not the only thing in the world. There are other things I love. There are other things you love. So it’s really about the process and finding your satisfaction with the process. No one can take that from you and in fact there are people that go to karaoke once a week without fail and they have the best time. They cannot sing at all. No one ever says, “You’re an idiot for enjoying that,” because they’re not. They’re enjoying it.

Maybe you love the process or, again, you find that deep satisfaction and you’re just not very good at it but it still gives you something good inside, keep doing it. The world will let you know one way or another if money is coming, but if it’s not and you’re enjoying it fine. If there is something else you can do that is as satisfying where you will be rewarded more, then it’s okay to go do that.

**John:** I completely agree. So there’s a bunch of little questions that came in that are about the same topics, so I thought we’d fold them into this discussion. Let’s start with Michael from LA who writes, “What’s your opinion on aspiring screenwriters who are not yet getting paid as a writer saying, quote, ‘I’m a writer or I’m a screenwriter,’ in conversation with a person not familiar with their occupation, without the aspiring modifiers/disclaimer?”

Craig, what do you think of aspiring writers saying I’m a screenwriter?

**Craig:** It’s a tough one. I remember never doing that. If somebody would say “What are you doing?” then I’d say, “Well, this is my job but I’m working on a screenplay.” I would say that because I felt like it was a little pretentious in the most specific form of that word like “I was pretending” in that sense. You know, you can say you’re a painter but if you’re just painting on your own and no one is asking you to paint anything for them, you’re kind of a painter, but not the way people think of painters.

And so it’s a little bit — I mean, look, in the end it really is all about intent. If you are humble and you acknowledge where you are and you’re not trying to impress somebody or put one over on them or puff yourself up, then it’s okay. But if you feel like you need to say this to impress other people or to impress yourself, then I think you have a noun-verb problem.

**John:** Yeah, the noun-verb is the great distinction there, so I would always say identify yourself by your day job and then you can talk about that you’re also writing and then it’s fine to sort of transition the conversation about the writing that you’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When I talk to people at conferences and stuff, I will often ask like what are you writing because I’ll assume like if they’re here they’re probably a screenwriter and like it’s a natural thing to start talking about the work rather than sort of like “What have you actually gotten produced?”

**Craig:** I remember when I was first out in Los Angeles. I was 21 and you remember the 21 parties, John, when you were 21 in Los Angeles?

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** You’d end up in like someone’s bad apartment, like, jammed onto their balcony. Everyone drinking cheap beer and everyone is 21 and everyone is just reeking of desperation. Everyone is trying to get into this business and we’re all feeling each other out and everything. It’s a weird time. And I met this guy, I was just chitchatting with him and, you know, I didn’t know what he did. I don’t know — he didn’t know what I did and then someone else came over and then they asked this guy, “So what do you do?” And he said, “I’m a successful screenwriter.”

And I mean, I couldn’t believe it and I thought “If he is a successful screenwriter, what’s wrong with him? How do you become a successful screenwriter if you’re so bad at words that you would think that would be a good answer to that question?” [laughs] So then later I looked him up and no, he wasn’t. And, you know, it took me a while to kind of get over the 21-year-old umbrage into the more mellow middle age umbrage which was — not even umbrage, more, honestly, pity. You’re scared, you’re insecure, and you’re desperate for people to know that once somebody paid you 10 grand to do something, but it’s not a good look.

**John:** No. Not a good look at all. Ryan has a question which is “I have one issue that grinds my ears. Several times Craig has talked about the potential success of aspiring screenwriters in terms of quote, ‘having it or not having it.’ I think this is a toxic idea. I think the skills that have made you and Craig successful screenwriters can be learned. This is the difference between the growth mindset that says that skills, traits, intelligence are not fixed but are instead subject to be learned through effort, experience and training versus the fixed mindset which suggest that skills and traits are innate, we are just born with them. Craig, do you want to tackle the growth mindset?

**Craig:** Yeah, I feel like Ryan is script-splaining to us here. [laughs] You know, he’s explaining to us why we’re successful like your theory of why you’re successful is not at all correct actually. Oh, John, you know, I’m so woke.

**John:** Yeah, I’m very woke. Yeah.

**Craig:** John, I’m so woke. Oh my god, I’m the wokest. Right, so Ryan, I think actually what you’re suggesting is the toxic idea. Now, this should not be shocking to you. You probably knew this was coming, but it’s okay that we disagree. Here’s where I think you’re going wrong. You’re kind of engaging in the either-or fallacy. You’re saying, “Look, it’s not that you have it or don’t have it. It’s then you — and that the skills, traits and talent aren’t fixed, instead you learn them through effort and experience in training.” And so it’s that or the fixed mindset, and what I say is you have to have both. This is the worst news of all really. I believe that, of course, there is an innate talent to any form of artistic expression. I can’t necessarily prove this to you other than to say that if you’ve ever sat in a class in 3rd grade and everyone is asked to draw a picture of a clown, one kid’s clown is going to be fricking awesome and then one kind’s clown is going to, and mine, is going to look like this pathetic collection of squiggles to the extent that people might wonder if perhaps this 9-year-old child had suffered a stroke in the middle of it, okay?

There is a talent to artistic expression. It is innate. It is not in of itself enough. And when it comes to writing which is something that is influenced repeatedly by an expanding vocabulary and an expanding philosophy and an expansion of your human experience, absolutely you begin to grow as a writer. Effort and training and learning lessons and falling down and getting up and avoiding pitfalls because you’ve fallen into the pits, all part of it. But writing apparently is the one area where people say, “Unlike athletes or painters or singers, you folks, you just — you can grind your way to this,” and no, not even remotely.

Why — John, do you think it’s because everyone can write something so is that the confusion?

**John:** I think that is, because if you look at the other examples you listed so a singer and athlete, there’s a physical quality to them that is different than other people. So, you know, singers may have these remarkable vocal abilities that could be sort of how they are born and this is the reason why singing can run in the families. There’s — if you look at, you know, athletes, sometimes if it’s a case like basketball like height is a true advantage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there’s also marathon runners or sprinters. They’re just built in a certain way that is incredibly helpful for the sport that they’re trying to do, but at no point are we ever expecting like, oh, that person is always going to be that fast. He doesn’t need coaching. He doesn’t need any sort of training. He doesn’t any sort of —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Practice to do that stuff like, in fact, all we do if we talk about athletes is practice and training. And so while, yes, I think, you know, the practice of writing and the constant feedback can improve a person’s writing, and I’ve seen it time and time again. There’s also a reality check of, like, there are some people who are not going to be fantastic writers, and that doesn’t mean we should give up on them or sort of, you know, move away from them but to acknowledge that like there are some people for whom writing comes naturally and they can become better. And these people for whom writing is really a struggle and they can get better, but they’re probably not going to ever get up to the level of the people who is really great for. One of the other–

**Craig:** Terrible. You know, it’s okay to say these things.

**John:** Yeah, one of the things that I think is interesting about screenwriting as opposed to writing novels or other works is that because screenwriting is just this intermediate step towards making a movie, it’s conceivable to be a person who is, like, pretty good at throwing things on the page that will ultimately become a movie. There’s a lot of sort of writer-directors who are kind of really directors who are not fantastic writers and they made stuff happen and so there’s — you see like a whole class of people who are moving into screenwriting not really with the goals of, you know, writing the best thing on the page possible but just do like “I want to make a movie” and that that weird transitional thing is what’s odd about the career that we’ve chosen.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that there is a flipside to what Ryan is suggesting, and I find it a little troubling, and that is that if what he’s saying is true then to all the thousands of people that are working very, very hard to try and sell screenplays and become professional screenwriters, well, they’re just not working hard enough apparently or they haven’t taken the right class or they haven’t read the right book. The point is there’s a thing to do and when they do that thing then they too will be like you, John. I think that that’s a rough thing to say to those people, because I think they’re trying incredibly hard.

I think that there is an industry of people who want them to believe what Ryan is saying: that they’re one book away, they’re one seminar away and there are quite a lot of film schools that are peddling the same thing. But the fact is that you and I, both, and honestly, anyone that’s every read any screenplays has certainly come across a screenplay where you think, right, this person should not be doing this at all. And there is no version where someone can come along like Henry Higgins and get this Eliza Doolittle to suddenly be something that she wasn’t in the beginning, because it’s not about learning how to pronounce your Hs and not go “aw.” It’s talent. Talent is a thing. It’s okay.

People — it’s one of the best parts of life. I am fascinated when I meet people who have these talents for things. I mean, you and I both worked with musicians. When I sit with Jeanine Tesori and I watch what she does on the piano, and I watch how her mind works, and I watch how she is doing a different kind of — a different kind of writing in her mind with a different grammar and when she does these things, I just think what a gift that I get to be here and watch it because in a million years I couldn’t do it. And I’m a musical person, but she’s got something else and it was certainly there from the start. How could it not have been?

**John:** But saying that it was there from the start does not negate that she’s not spent years of doing this and–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Learning this and teaching herself, and so it is both but there was something there to start with, I fundamentally believe.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**John:** A question from Nate in LA. He writes, I moved to LA two years ago. In that time, I’ve managed to form genuine friendships with a handful of professional writers whose work I respect and whose careers I admire. So my question is, is there a reasonable way to ask them to read my work? These people know that I hope to write for TV, but so far none of them have offered to read my scripts or pass them along to agents or managers. I don’t want to soil the friendships by asking them point blank to do this, but, at the same time, I realized it’s a business of who you know and I actually know people who are situated where I would like to be someday. Do you have any suggestions for tactful and non-friendship risking ways of asking them for help with my career, or should I just keep things casual and wait for it to happen organically?

**Craig:** Well, this is a good question. When you’re talking about writers — so most writers aren’t going to be able to hire you to write something because they’re writing things, you know, so it’s a slightly different thing than if you were to say, you know, ask somebody whose job is to hire people or represent writers and so on and so forth. I think if you’re going to ask a writer, one way you could always say is, “Hey, I would love for you to read this, but I know what that means and I know nobody wants to read anything and I respect that because I don’t either.”

“So I’ll tell you what? I’d love to give you five pages, and you are allowed to just — that’s it. I’m not going to bother you about it. I’m literally going to give you five pages and I will never mention it again. Either you are going to come back to me and say “I want to read the rest of it” or you are going to come back to me and say “I’m not — I don’t want to read the rest of it but here’s what I think about the five pages” or you’ll never mention it again or you’ll never read it. I’m okay with that, but would you be okay with that deal?” I think most people would say, “Yeah, I’d be okay with that.”

**John:** There’s an episode in the bonus episodes of scriptnotes.net where I sit down and talk to Drew Goddard and talk through sort of how he kind of got started and it sounds sort of like what Nate was doing. And so Drew had been working as a PA on films shooting in New Mexico. He moved to Los Angeles. He didn’t really know anybody, but sort of started sort of picking up friendships with people, started hosting game nights with other writers and eventually people started reading him and eventually said like, “Hey, why don’t you come in and we can see if we can get you staffed on this show.”

It organically did happen, but it felt like what was crucial was he was never pushing it. And I think Nate has a good sense of like not wanting to push it or ruin it, but at the same time you can’t sit back forever and like not–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, not put it out there as a thing that could happen. The way you described it, Craig, is a term we coined around the lunch table — you’re sort of doing a pre-traction where like in saying — you’re actually retracting it as you’re saying it like, you know, “I know this is really a bad idea but” — or “I know it’s weird for me to be putting this out there but if you would ever like to read something I’d love to hear your feedback on it.” That’s totally fine and fair and natural to do.

So Nate, I think you’re right in the right spot in terms of figuring out how much to push and how much to sit back.

**Craig:** Certainly the tenor of Nate’s question is a good sign.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So he seems to be aware of what other people might be thinking or feeling, which is it turns out as one of the talents of being a writer. And I would say also, Nate, that when you have a relationship with somebody that is based on more than you want something or they want something or what they do for a job or what you do for a job but rather you’ve worked on something together or you have helped them or anything, then in that context things are different, because most people are decent. I believe that. And most people want to help somebody, and if you’ve been a good guy then I think there is — you know, there is a reason that people might go, “Yeah, you know what? You’re a good guy. Sure. Sure.” Not always but I think, yeah, sure.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Do you want to take this last question from this batch? This is Chaz from Glasgow.

**Craig:** Right, so Chaz from Glasgow says, “I’ve recently started writing everyday for the first time in a number of years. I’ve got a degree in scriptwriting and filmmaking, but in the six years since I completed my course I’ve bouncing from job to job and can’t seem to hold one down. I also have a criminal record so I can’t enter the United States. But anyway” — this is a great transition. But anyway enough about that.

“Is there much of a point in continuing screenwriting with my limited experience and general F-ed upness? I can imagine why no studio would want anything to do with me.” Well, Chaz is in a little bit of a bind here. What do you think, John?

**John:** Chaz shouldn’t sell himself short in terms of like “No studio would want to deal with me.” I think some people might find it fascinating that you have a criminal record. But I think he raises a good point overall. It’s like, if he’s in Glasgow, it sounds like it’s going to be hard for him to travel to the US. If he’s serious about filmmaking, he needs to be looking for stuff he can do in Scotland and stuff he can do in Europe so that it’s actually a possible thing.

I would also just say though, if he’s writing every day and he seems to generally enjoy writing, write some things that are not movies so you can actually see those things come to light. Like, write a book. Write short stories. Write something else that’s not movies if you’re really concerned that movies or TV are not going to be a thing that’s going to be possible for you based on what’s happened in your life and the challenge of trying to get outside of Scotland.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all great advice. I mean, look, here’s the good news, Chaz, writing is writing, right? So, your script can enter the United States and a good script is a good script. People will want it. Here’s what concerns me a little bit. You say that you’ve been bouncing from job to job and can’t seem to hold one down. And it doesn’t sound like you’re saying you’re bouncing from screenwriting job to screenwriting job. You’re bouncing from regular job to regular job, and can’t seem to hold one down.

Now, there may be other things going on in your life here that are causing some distress or keeping you kind of on a stable path. As it turns out, the only way to be a consistent, successful writer is to live a very — well, just kind of a rigid life. It requires a certain stable, patterned, consistent nose to the grindstone, disciplined life. And if you have trouble living that way, it’s going to be difficult to be a screenwriter at the very least. There are other kinds of writing that can be done by people who aren’t quite as patterned and disciplined in their daily work. But screenwriting, a bit tougher. Because unlike novels where it’s just you and your mind and you go as you wish, in screenwriting, you’re constantly being held accountable to what will ultimately be a crew of many hundreds of people as well as a studio chockfull of employees and then, ultimately, audiences.

So, I’m not sure, based on what you’re saying here, that screenwriting is necessarily the most compatible thing for you. But if you’re really good at it, you should just keep doing it. That’s the thing. The only other thing I’d mention to you is you don’t say what the crime is, just that you have a criminal record. Some crimes are — you know, you’ve paid your debt to society, you have a record, people understand and they evaluate your script without putting it in the context of your past.

There are other crimes that are a little more difficult. There are certain crimes that people consider, I think rightly, to be horrible. And if you have committed one of those, then people may be very reluctant to get into business with you. The thing about show business is it’s a very public business. So they don’t necessarily want, you know, a murderer. I’m not suggesting that that’s what you’ve done, Chaz. But I think, Chaz, I think you know what I’m talking about, the kind of crimes I’m talking about. I think you get it. But, no, if you were involved in a breaking and entering 10 years ago, I don’t think that’s an issue.

**John:** I agree with you. Craig, I do want to push back about sort of like “Writers have to have a stable life so they can have sort of a steady way of getting those words done every week.” I feel like I know a fair number of writers who don’t have a particularly stable life, who are the sort of like catch-as-catch-canning and like they will bunker down and get a bunch of stuff done and then they’ll just sort of go off the reservation for some weeks.

And I would say, yes, it’s more challenging to be a screenwriter that way because people are kind of counting on you a little bit more. But there’s a lot of kind of not particularly stable people who do the kinds of jobs that we do. So, I would try and figure out sort of what percentage of the writers I know I would say like, “Oh, their life is really well put together.”

**Craig:** Well, maybe I’ll shape it a little bit here and I don’t know if this will bring you closer to where I’m thinking or not, but it’s not so much their lives have to be stable, in a sense that they have healthy, stable relationships with another person like a partner in their home, or that they’re well dressed, or that they don’t drink too much, none of that. What I’m really saying is the writing part of their life is somewhat stable, that they get the writing done.

**John:** Yeah. Okay. That’s fair. And probably more so in screenwriting than in like sort of the classic person who goes off and — the songwriter can have a very chaotic life because there’s not that expectation of like, every day, I have to generate like this many verses. That can be just you can get a bunch of stuff done and then not do it again for a year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The screenwriting is — I guess because you’re going to be writing such long documents that if you are not able to actually sit down and finish a long document, it won’t ever happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s kind of what I’m getting at.

**John:** Cool. All right, some other questions that came in that we might tackle.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Josh from Albuquerque writes, “I have a question regarding the Paramount Decree which has been discussed a few times in recent episodes. How can Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon act as producers, distributors, and exhibitors while major Hollywood studios cannot? I understand the simple legal answer is that they are not, quote-unquote, ‘theaters.’ However, could you see a time in the next decade when streaming services become so dominant that the Supreme Court rules as an antitrust sort of Netflix Decree, or is the current entertainment landscape so broad, from movies to TV, videogames, YouTube, that we’ll never see another monopolization like there was during the Golden Age?”

**Craig:** Well, Josh, I don’t think that this is going to happen with, say, an antitrust Netflix Decree kind of thing, and here’s why. The whole point of the Paramount Decree was there are a bunch of theaters in the United States, they are physical spaces. And if the studios own those theaters, then no other studio can really come into be because a studio requires a theater to show its product and all the theaters are owned by these companies. A theater can’t exist just by showing a new company’s films because there won’t be enough. So, essentially, it was an anti-competitive practice.

None of that really applies to the internet, because there is an unlimited distribution space. Netflix is incredibly popular because people like their shows and certainly, there are a number of large players out there, all of which are owned by multinational conglomerates. But, someone can come along and start showing other movies on their platform if they can afford to license them and distribute them, and there is no physical space that they’re being locked out of.

Where it gets a little dicey is if, say, Warner Bros. which owns HBO said, “The only place we’re ever going to put any Warner Bros. movies is on HBO.” Then you could say, “Well, HBO has an unfair advantage.” The problem though is that other movie studios are going to put all their movies on these other things and Warner Bros. is going to start losing money because other people want Warner Bros. movies on platforms other than HBO.

So it does seem like right now, the kind of vibe is that things get spread around. The original content on Netflix just being on Netflix I don’t think is enough, frankly, for an antitrust Netflix Decree.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s worth stepping back and taking a look at — so the Paramount Decree, you had limited physical spaces where those movies could be shown and that kind of vertical integration made it impossible for some — for a movie to break in to those spaces.

If you look at sort of how FinCEN worked in television where studios could not own networks and so that there had to be some difference of relationship, that all broke down — there was a sense of, like, there was limited space out there because we were on the airwaves, and so there could only be a certain number of channels. That sort of all fell away as cable rose.

And Josh’s question points out like, you know, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon act as producers, distributors, and exhibitors, well, really, so does Disney. I mean, Disney has its own channels that it’s putting stuff through. It’s already murkier than that. Where I think the interesting thing that’s going to happen down the road is the question of our antitrust laws, our ideas of monopolies just are from a very different era.

And so, if you look at the Amazons and sort of like how powerful they are and how much they can sort of use their incredible dominance in one area just to sort of move into another area into another area, that could become a factor as we look at media things down the road. But I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen anytime soon.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the test basically is not whether or not you’re a monopoly. Antitrust laws do not proscribe monopolies as far as I understand them. What they do is say “You cannot be anti-competitive.” So, if you’re a monopoly but you’re doing nothing to stifle the natural birth of new competition, I think you’re okay.

So, Microsoft, for instance, was a monopoly. They were the operating system monopoly, essentially. They vanquished Apple. And so, now, Windows was by far the dominant operating system. And that was okay until they created a new product that was a browser. And they weren’t the first browser. There was an incredibly popular browser out there called Mozilla which became Firefox and that was the dominant browser in the market. And then, Microsoft said, “You know what? Let’s leverage the monopoly we have on operating systems and force people — not really force them, but basically channel them towards our new browser called Explorer.” And that’s called bundling. And that got them into hot water.

If Amazon starts doing things like that or if Netflix starts doing things like that, then, yeah, definitely they’ll catch the eye of the Feds. Maybe not in this administration, but, you know, in a reasonable one. [laughs]

**John:** And the other thing to look for is classically in the US, antitrust concerns come over like whether prices are rising for consumers, and which seem to be a very natural way to sort of look at it. A weird thing that happened though is you look at Amazon’s dominance in e-books, and so, Amazon with the Kindle and controlling a vast percentage of the digital market there. When Apple came in with iBooks, really, it was Apple who was the one who got slammed by unfair —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — business practices because they cut deals with the publishers. Zooming out, it looks like the energy was misplaced by our regulators because you actually want competition and they were slammed for basically trying to create competition. So, that’s another kind of situation where I could see down the road these giant media companies jockeying for space, that kind of friction could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, price-fixing is another big part of this sort of thing. But, I think, Josh, I think they’re kind of in safe — they’re in safe places right now.

We’ve got something here from Mike in London who writes, “I’m working on a script at the moment where there are lots of characters who feature more prominently later on in the film, but I also want to make sure that they are in earlier scenes. These earlier scenes include lots of people like weddings or other mass gatherings, but I find that putting them all in action lines pulls focus a little bit. There are only so many times I can write ‘Bob and Julie are also here. You’ll hear more about them later.’ And then, Bob and Julie are also present. So, for times like this, would it be acceptable to include some kind of note that simply says, ‘X character is present in scenes X, Y, and Z’? I just feel it would make it a little clearer.”

“Also, there are some specific notes I have regarding costumes and how they should deteriorate as the play goes on. Would something like this be okay to write in some kind of note section at the start of the script? I guess my questions both revolve around notes and whether it’s okay to include them or whether it steps on too many toes and I should just assume they’re unnecessary.”

John?

**John:** It’s a very good question and I’ve definitely been in a situation where there’s characters who become important later on but they would have been in earlier scenes. I don’t have sort of one great blanket answer for you. I would say most movies do not find that they need to do this kind of thing where there’s sort of a meta note outside of the script that sort of says like, “These characters are in these things.”

But, if what you’re trying to do, it is just really clunky and sort of like include them in every scene or like call them out in every scene, then I have done it in my own scripts. Like, a little sort of bracketed note to sort of say like, “This is a meta note. Like, these characters are in the next seven scenes or like they’re in all the scenes that take place here, but I’m not going to single them out each time.” I would never say the “I’m”. But like, “The viewer will see these people and they’re going to become important later on.” That’s entirely fair.

This thing about costumes deteriorating, my instinct would be to just clock it along the way so that three scenes in, have some reason to say that his thing has gotten worse.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That his jacket is falling apart. But I wouldn’t sort of bring it out because that does feel too much like you’re just having a sidebar with the wardrobe department.

**Craig:** Correct. You don’t want to feel like you are having sidebars really mostly because it’s taking people out of the world of the movie, and you’re trying to show them a movie with your words. I wonder how frequently these characters need to be in these scenes.

What’s catching me a little bit is that you’re saying they’re in these scenes, but they feature prominently later on. Well, what are they doing in these scenes exactly? If they’re just passing by in the background, then, I think it’s fair to just say, “In the first time, in the background we’ll see so and so. We will see them later or we’ll hear more about them later,” like you say, and then just not mention them again because if you’re not making a point of looking at them in these subsequent scenes, do they even need to be there at all?

If you are going to put the camera on them, then there should be a reason that the camera is on them. If they’re literally just moving like background artists — and I’m just kind of wondering if we’ll even notice them at all. So I would suggest to you that maybe for some of these areas, you may have a decision to make about whether you really need them there or not. And if you do and you want the camera on them, give me a purpose for that camera there.

Lastly, I would say the one thing you should never worry about is stepping on too many toes. It’s your script, step away.

**John:** Yeah. I think one of the things we’re hitting on here is that Mike is looking at his script as being the blueprint. And like, if this were a blueprint for building a building, you cannot leave out those incredibly important like rafters and girders. But this is still like a reading document. So, make sure that it reads naturally and cleanly.

And so, in doing so, you may leave out some details that will become important for the AD later on, but you have to have trust and faith that, like, those other professionals who are going to be working on actually making this movie, they’ll have those conversations and figure out like, “Oh, do we want those characters in that scene?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, you don’t have to sort of worry about like everything being incredibly logic’d out at this stage.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you’re right. If you have this note that you think is important, save it, wait for the green light, then send it to the production staff.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And then they’ll know.

**John:** Ben in Colorado writes, “A question for John. In the writing and editing Scriptnotes, Craig mentions the dangers of auteurism in modern filmmaking. As someone who’s worked successfully with one of the great modern auteurs in Tim Burton, what is your experience with auteurism as a very successful screenwriter?” And I would say you also have worked with some filmmakers who have a very distinct style, so like, you know, working on the Zucker brothers movies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like that’s a person who has a very distinct style.

**Craig:** Or Todd Phillips, same thing.

**John:** Todd Phillips, another great choice. I would say one of the remarkable advantages of coming in, working with somebody who has a very distinct style and a very distinct cannon of work is that you can come in with a sense of like “These are the things that are going to be interesting to him, and these are the things where I know he can sort of knock this stuff out of the park.” And so that is a great luxury to sort of come in with a set of expectations that you can sort of push beyond. And so, you know, the first time I’m sitting down to write I guess Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the first new thing I’ve written for Tim, I can approach that meeting with like, “Okay, these are some things I think he’s going to really respond to just based on like all the other movies of his that I’ve seen.” And that is really, really helpful.

Auteursim as a general concept, for me, is just — it can be frustrating to see people write about auteurs as if everything they’ve done is entirely through their work and that there really were no other people involved in those things. That sense of like it’s just of this one sole creator behind stuff. And yet, I would say the process, at least for me working with Tim Burton movies, has been really great because you have a director who knows very much what he wants.

**Craig:** It feels sometimes that people confuse auteurism as it was originally imagined, meaning the director is the single creative authorship voice behind a movie with directors who have distinct styles.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Having a distinct style doesn’t necessarily make you an auteur, particularly when you’re a director that’s not writing at all. Now, if you’re a director that writes and directs your own material, I think you can start to make arguments about this. But if you have a distinct style, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an auteur per se.

But in talking about directors who do have a specific style, I couldn’t agree more with John. There is such a relief, a burden lifted, when you’re sitting with a director whose style is unique to that person enough that when they say “That’s not going to work but this will” you don’t have to wonder if they’re right or not. They’re right because they’re making — because Todd Phillips is making a Todd Phillips movie and David Zucker is making a David Zucker movie.

There are directors that make all sorts of different kinds of movies and they don’t have this really clear distinct sharp style which is perfectly fine. Some of my favorite directors are like that. But then when they say, well, I’m not sure about this, I’m not sure about that, well, okay, let’s discuss it. But when somebody with a distinct style like Tim Burton says, “That is not — I don’t think that’s good for me at all,” there’s really no argument because what he’s saying is that’s not part of the Tim Burton thing. So then you’d be Tim Burton-splaining to Tim Burton which is just what’s the point, right? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then the greatest part is when they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s going to work.” You think to yourself, “It’s going to work.”

**John:** One of the greatest moments in any pre-production I’ve done with Tim is I’ll go into his office and I’ll see like tacked upon on all the walls are watercolors of like different characters and the different stuff, the, you know, different sets. And it’s like, oh, okay, this has been processed through his brain. He knows how to do all this. This is going to be great. This is — there’s a plan for this. Like this is all making sense.

And I agree with you that sometimes you talk with an author who has a whole bunch different styles and those first, you know, three weeks of meetings with them is basically them figuring out sort of like what kind of movie they’re making in general.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s great. That’s can be a part of the process, but, you know, when you have somebody who has a very distinctive voice and style, you can skip past along that and that’s incredibly helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean the flipside of course is that directors like that often as much as you love them and love working with them, you know that okay, well, this material — no, like you write things and you will, okay, the one person I know I cannot give this to is Tim Burton, he’ll hate it and it’s not at all what he does. Whereas I know some directors who I think “I bet you could probably direct anything assuming you wanted to, there’s nothing I would limit from you.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s — so I — you know, I never want to feel like I’m over praising the stylist, the unique stylist in any way that diminishes the other directors because I think I just — anybody that does a good job directing is a little miracle for me and so I’m just happy to know them all.

**John:** I agree. All right, last question comes from Andreas in Norway. He writes, “I’ve seen quite a lot of different takes about how a car chase is written especially in terms of formatting choices and the layout of the structure. For example, keeping the exterior to simply read ‘road’ and using terms of like ‘on a Land Rover’ or ‘on the Ford’ to shift the focus of the reader. I’d like to hear your guys’ takes on writing car chases.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean look — and car chases are like any other action sequence in that what you’re describing ultimately needs to be focused through the lens of humans making decisions and the world impacting them. So you’re making a chase and you’re trying to define it by what the character behind each wheel is thinking and doing. And then if a boulder rolls into the road, obviously you need to call that out as well. But “on the Land Rover,” “on the Ford,” “behind this,” “inside of this,” all that punchy kind of vibrant kinetic language I think is a perfectly good way to move around. You certainly don’t want to be languid. Your writing kind of needs to match the vibe of the score you would imagine playing under your scene.

**John:** One of the questions Andreas is trying to ask there is like, “Do I have to go INT/EXT for every time I go inside and outside of the car?” And that will kill you if you try to do that too much.

**Craig:** Oh god, the worst. The worst.

**John:** And so if every other line is a new INT or EXT, then people stop reading. So that’s where you use — getting down to single lines, getting to the “on the Ford”s. You know, let it feel like just the flow of what it would actually look like on the screen, but don’t get trapped inside of where we’re at in cars. It’s going to be intercut anyways. So just feel that energy as you’re writing the scene.

**Craig:** Well, that’s exactly the point. Look, the whole purpose of interior and exterior is not to satisfy some sort of format god in the sky. It’s there to help production understand what kind of lights are we using, because is it night or is it day, are we inside or are we outside, all that stuff, right? Once you establish the car chase, which is certainly going to occur in real time. You know, it’s not like — people don’t montage a car chase over the course of a day and a night. It would be kind of cool, I suppose, if they did. But typical car chase takes place in roughly real time in a movie. So once you establish “exterior,” so we’re not car chasing inside, which has happened for instance in the Blues Brothers, and what time of day it is, you’re done. You gave them the information they need. And now, what they really need to know is, “Okay, what car am I looking at and am I inside of it or outside of it while you’re describing things so that I get a sense of the geography and the movement?” Simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I said the last thing was the last question, but in this setup, I said Bulgaria, so I wanted to get to this–

**Craig:** You promised us Bulgaria, John. So Peter in Bulgaria did write in to say, I’m a white male from Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU. Am I a diverse writer?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I mean, look, this whole diverse writer thing, no, on one hand, if you’re talking about programs that are targeted to diverse writers in the United States, we’re not talking about white men from Bulgaria. That’s not to say that being in white man in Bulgaria is easy or that, frankly, being a human being anywhere isn’t easy because everybody’s got their own story and some people have it great and some people don’t. But specifically speaking for those programs, no. They’re not talking about white men from Bulgaria.

However, in the larger sense of things, obviously, your unique situation helps inform who you are and makes you interesting, certainly more interesting than a white male from Sherman Oaks, California. Lastly, I would say to you, Peter, don’t worry about that because the deal is this: people get wrapped up in this stuff and they forget that the reason that these programs exist is because the numbers are stark and clear. More white males are working at these jobs than not white males. So if you’re worried about the statistics, well, they’re still in your favor I guess is how I would put it as a white male. They’re still out of whack. I think people get really hung up on this stuff.

And I understand it, we’ve talked about it before from an emotional level. You never want to feel like you’re being judged for your race. Ironically, that’s exactly what’s going on regardless and that’s what some of these programs are trying to combat. So don’t get hung up on it, Peter in Bulgaria. The thing that you should be hung up on is writing something terrific. There is nothing that will stop a wonderful script, nothing. It continues to be, and I believe always has been, the single best way to get into the entertainment business.

**John:** Absolutely. Last bit is just actually follow-up. So in the previous episode, we talked about Exposition News as Craig called it. This is where you turn — there’s a cliché of turning on the TV to find it playing exactly the news story you needed at the moment. And so I was pretty sure that other shows had — or maybe said call it out as a thing and of course they did and of course our listeners are the best listeners. So they point to at least four examples of this being done. So we’re going to slice in at the end of the episode some examples of this. So, from Arrested Development, from Community, from The Simpsons, and from Shaun of the Dead. So you’ll hear snippets of how other shows have tackled that trope.

**Craig:** I think my favorite of them was the Arrested Development one because it was so awkward. [laughs] Loved it.

**John:** It goes on and on, yeah.

**Craig:** I just loved it.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a thing that has actually been out for a while, but I had not known about it until I listened and clicked through a different story. So the BBC added Nigerian Pidgin as one of the languages that they have stories in on their website. And so, then I fell down a deep rabbit hole of like figuring out, like, what is Nigerian Pidgin.

And so, Nigerian Pidgin is a form of English but it’s not quite English, that’s spoken in that portion of Africa and linguists could argue whether it’s a Creole or a Pidgin because there are second generations that are speaking it. It’s still sort of this being formed kind of language. But it’s really fascinating, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to the BBC site for Pidgin.

And you can see the stories and like, you look at it, it’s like, “Oh, that’s English,” and then you’re like, “Wait, no, that’s not quite English.” You can sort of understand it, but some verbs are just working very differently. I thought it was fantastic and I thought it was, you know — as you read more about sort of like how they figured out how they were going to do it and how to sort of formalize and standardize some things that are still very nascent, just hats off to the BBC for this sort of new venture into Pidgin.

**Craig:** I love that word. I’ve always loved that word, Pidgin. When I was a kid, I had a little paperback book — I think I might have even gotten it from the Scholastic Book Club — that would teach you Hawaiian Pidgin. That was the first Pidgin I had heard about and the first time someone had said that to me, of course I thought it was pigeon like the bird. And in my mind still, it’s sort of pigeon like the bird.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they–

**John:** Two different words.

**Craig:** And it eternally shall be.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I have a related One Cool Thing. How odd. My One Cool Thing is a real-life Babel fish. So, if you’re a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you should be, then you know about Douglas Adams’ famous science fiction fantasy invention, the Babel fish, which solved this really annoying problem that Star Trek and other shows have solved by simply ignoring which is, why does everybody talk English across the galaxy? And his solution was this tiny little fish that you would stick in your ear and it would just automatically translate things back and forth. Wonderful.

Well, Google — you’ve heard of this small company — they have come up with these things — well, I mean, they kind of ripped them off from the Apple ear buds, you know, the new AirPod things where, okay, they’ve taken the headphone jack out of their new Pixel phone. But their little ear bud things connect to it and they flawlessly use Google Translate. So the idea is you hold your phone up, right, and someone is speaking in Spanish, your phone hears it, does a Google Translate on the fly and pipes that into your ear.

And as we have discussed before, Google Translate has sort of taken these huge leaps because of the new way that they’re processing it with the neural net. And right now, they have 40 different languages. It’s pretty bananas. And you can presume that if this works even okay, that means in 10 years, it’s going to be fricking awesome and everywhere, and then, then the world gets really interesting.

**John:** Yeah. That really will make a huge difference, because there definitely — like, you know, this last year, that I was living in Europe. You know, so in France, we can speak French and it was fine and it was easy. And then, you know, Germany, everybody speaks English okay. Even Athens, everyone speaks English. But then as we made our way out of central Greece and into the mountains, there were definitely some times where it’s like, wow, we were just having to communicate on really basic levels.

I remember going into a restaurant and trying to sort of start and they’re like, “No, no. Stop, stop, stop,” and then they hold up their phone and like they’re calling the one guy in town who can speak English, who then runs in and is like, “Oh, hi. Let me help you.” To be able to move past that I think will be fantastic. And there’s definitely, you know, amazing opportunities for letting people venture deeper into places where there’s not going to be anybody who could speak the same language.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, that’s the key. It’s when we get rid of the language barrier finally, then a lot, I think, of the misery of separation begins to go away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not all of it, mind you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I still hear people speaking English and saying insanely awful things.

**John:** Yeah. Weirdly, on a daily basis we’re hearing that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, sometimes at the highest levels. But I think it would help a lot and it would — look, more communication is only a good thing, I think. So this is an exciting thing. And, you know, unfortunately, it looks like it is only available on their phone, which, mind you, could be a possible antitrust thing if it gets big enough. Like, no, it’s going to be everywhere, pal. So let’s see what happens.

**John:** That sounds very exciting. Before we wrap up, I want to make sure that we’ve drawn a good enough bow around the — the fundamental question of the episode is, should you give up? And I hope that in talking about that question, we have not sort of inspired people to, you know, give up on their dreams, but to maybe like set themselves free of this vision of like, “Oh, I have to be a screenwriter or I’m going to be unhappy in my life.”

It was interesting. This last week, I was here in London talking at the London Screenwriters’ Festival and they had this special coffee thing. And I spoke to a couple of people who were like, they just like the show. Like, they were Scriptnotes fans who like the show and they like listening to us talk about stuff, who was like, “Yeah, I have no aspiration of actually writing a screenplay.” And that’s fine, too. It’s okay to not be a screenwriter, I guess, is what I’ve come back to.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s okay also to write screenplays without necessarily insisting upon yourself that they must sell. Those things are going to happen, or they’re not going to happen. And while you can help it with a certain amount of effort, at some point, the script is going to have to speak and do the work for you, right, once you’re done with it.

So if you can find joy in the writing, then do find joy in that writing. I don’t think you should ever define your life by any vocation, at all. I think that we are all so much more interesting than some dream we imagine. Remember, if you’re not yet a professional screenwriter, your understanding of what it means to be a professional screenwriter is a massive guess. It’s just a huge guess. Even if you sat with me or John or any other professional screenwriter every day for a year, all you’d really find out is what it’s like for us to be screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what we know is, because we talk to each other, we’re all special little snowflakes. So you don’t know what it’ll be like for you. And that is true for all these things. So dreams are great, but just remember that they are dreams. The real thing on the other side is something else. So don’t define yourself by some dream that you are imagining. Let that be a motivation for you, but not your definition.

**John:** That sounds great. All right, that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro to send us, you can send that link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for the Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcast, look for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps us a lot.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at scriptnotes.net and we now have the USB drives back in stock.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** So right before I came to London, Megan was busy, like, bundling them and putting labels on them, so they’re now back at the warehouse and they are shipping out to people. So if you want those first 300 episodes, you can get them now on your little USB drive.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice. Papa’s going to get a pair of brand new shoes. [laughs]

**John:** So looking forward to those shoes. They’re the fanciest shoes in the world.

**Craig:** Whoo.

**John:** Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

**John:** All right, bye.

Links:

* [CPG Grey’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGP_Grey) [video,](https://youtu.be/QC-cMv0e3Dc) [channel,](https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey) and [website](http://www.cgpgrey.com/)
* Exposition News on [Arrested Development](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjqbiMFonR8), [Community](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGg8Cddkocw), [The Simpsons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VueRO6xot8), and [Shaun of the Dead](https://youtu.be/d8A254PJjWc)
* The BBC adds [Nigerian Pidgin](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bbc-digital-pidgin-language-service)
* Google’s [Pixel Buds,](https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/04/google-pixel-buds-translation-change-the-world/) or the real-life [Babel Fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_320.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/movies-dodged-a-bullet).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 319 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at samples sent in by our listeners to see what’s working and what’s not. Then we answer perhaps the most important question of all, is how do we number our files.

But first there’s exciting news. This past Monday, or actually a week ago now that the podcast comes out, I got elected to the WGA board.

**Craig:** You didn’t just get elected, John. You got more votes than anyone, which actually does matter. It means that when you go into the boardroom as a new board member everybody is going to know that you’re for real. You’re the real deal, buddy. And I couldn’t be happier. Obviously I voted for you and endorsed you wholeheartedly. We are in desperate need of you on our board of our union.

And so I wish you the greatest of luck.

**John:** Well thank you very much. I want to thank everybody who voted. These elections are always sort of low turnout because they end up being sort of low turnout, but I’m really grateful to everybody who did go out and vote. Also, the other candidates are terrific. And so most of them will be joining me on the board this next year, so I’m looking forward to that.

So, by the time this episode comes out I will have been through my first WGA board meeting. I will have gone through the gauntlet and all of the hazing rituals. And will hopefully have come out the other side.

**Craig:** Yeah. The hazing rituals is really a hazing ritual and it never stops. The nature of the ritual is to bore you to death. I’m telling you, man, those board meetings, the homophone is appropriate.

**John:** Mm-hmm. I will post a link to two things that I have written about the WGA experience. First is on the site johnaugust.com there is a link now for WGA. So, if you are a WGA member who has something you need to tell me about what’s going on, that is a link you can click. Also on the blog I just did a post sort of outlining general objectives for what I hope to be able to look at these next two years. The short version is that there’s a lot of stuff that’s affecting writers on a day-to-day basis, and I want to look and see what we can do on just an enforcement basis. That’s not a negotiation. That’s not a big fight, but it’s just sort of getting people to honor the contract we already have.

Secondly, I want to be able to spend these two years looking at what’s down the road. And making sure that we’re prepared for big changes in the industry and the impact they could have on writers like you and me and the brand new writers who are just now joining the guild.

**Craig:** Music to my ears. We are always in a state of looking forward these days. I think this is a problem that our generation has far more than the generations that preceded us. The business basically was the business for many decades, but with the advent of technology it’s been a little nuts. So, we do have to look forward constantly. But even more important I think is that E-word you mentioned — enforcement. Because we have been locked in a cycle for a long time now where we fight very, very hard and occasionally even strike to get terms in our contract. And then we don’t really seem to do a fantastic job of enforcing those terms when they are violated by the companies.

So, excellent news. You know what? I do not regret voting for you as of this point.

**John:** As of yet. So join us next week to see how I’ve disappointed Craig.

**Craig:** The regret will kick in. And just the fact that you’re the cohost of this podcast will not save you.

**John:** No. Not a bit. I will take the full wrath and umbrage of Craig Mazin for my role in the WGA.

**Craig:** Gonna be good.

**John:** Revisiting past umbrage and confusion, MoviePass was something we’ve talked about twice on the show before. The first time it was sort of a head scratch and a “huh,” like how could this possibly work. And then in the second bit of follow up we said like, oh, I guess I can see sort of a way that it could work. And now there’s more follow up. So, for people who forget what MoviePass is, this is a service you sign up for for now $9.95 a month. You can see unlimited movies in the US. And that seems impossible. Like theatrical movies, in the movie theater.

It turns out it’s actually a credit card you are getting. With that credit card, when you buy your tickets, the money is refunded to you. So, we have more information. This week an interview by Rob Cain for Forbes, in which he talks to the CEO of MoviePass about sort of what the actual plan is.

And, Craig, I don’t know about your experience with this, but I felt like, oh you know what, I could see a way this could actually work for MoviePass. What’s your take on this new information?

**Craig:** Yeah. Now that I look at it, I do think, “OK, there’s a possibility here.” I mean, first and foremost what Mr. Lowe says, this is — what’s his first name?

**John:** Mitch.

**Craig:** Mitch Lowe. What Mitch Lowe says is that he expects that in time most users of MoviePass will settle into what they believe is a fairly predictable rate of usage, which is essentially one movie a month, or I guess he says a pattern of just over a movie ticket per month. Because, you know, you could do digital fractions of things. But so, OK, if the average cost of a ticket is $9 and he’s charging about $10 a month for MoviePass, he’s breaking even on that. That’s his expectation over time.

So you’d say, OK, well, fine, you broke even. But how do you make money? And the way he’s making money it seems is that he’s creating essentially a targeted advertisement platform, as far as I can tell.

**John:** Yeah. That seems to be part of it. I guess originally our concern was how do you make money if people are going to three movies per month and it’s costing you all that money and they’re only paying $9 a month. And I have some increased belief that he actually knows what he’s talking about because he comes from Netflix, he comes from Redbox, so he does have a lot of background in sort of customer behavior when it comes to movies.

And the case that he makes in this interview with Cain, he says that, “We found that at $40 per month, subscribers would attend an average of 3.8 times per month. At a higher price they would attend more frequently. At a lower price, a lot less. So at $9.95 a month we expect the average subscriber to settle into a pattern of just over one movie ticket per month.”

So he’s targeting sort of the reluctant moviegoers. And he describes it as basically bad movie insurance. So the people who don’t go to movies all that often, people might go once or twice or three times a year, there’s a fear of loss, of what if I buy a ticket and I don’t like the movie. Well this sort of psychologically gets them out of that fear because the ticket was essentially free for them for that month.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can see in some ways it could increase movie-going if the people who are actually subscribing to MoviePass are in that sort of reluctant filmgoer mindset.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s also talking about perhaps capturing a small commission on concession sales. Not quite sure how that works and we’ll see if the large movie theater chains want to go along with it. But what is interesting about what he’s doing is he’s capturing information that nobody else is capturing. The point of sale other than MoviePass is of course the movie theater ticket box office. There are some other ticket purchasing outfits out there, you know, if you buy online through Fandango or something like that. But I think a lot of people they go up to the box office window and they say I want a ticket and they sell you a ticket. And the theater isn’t collecting any information on you.

And so here he is going to collect an enormous amount of information on the kinds of people who go to certain kinds of movies and how frequently they go. And he’ll be able to sell that information to studios and say, by the way, here’s a group of people that are going many, many times to the movies each month. Here is a kind of movie that gets a lot of repeat business. Here’s this. Here’s that.

So, you know, I can see how this could work. It really is all based essentially on the guess that people will not overeat at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

**John:** Yeah. This was the most intriguing part of the whole article to me. “When we get to ten million subscribers, we’ll be able to generate $7 million in additional box office for an independent film. At that point, it makes sense for us to get into the distribution business.” And so circling back to our conversation about how theatrical exhibition works, movie theaters like Loews, like AMC, they cannot make movies themselves. That is part of the consent decree. They cannot become movie producers.

But this guy, MoviePass, he can totally make movies if he wants to make movies. And at a certain point if this is successful enough, if it becomes like a Netflix, it will make sense for them to make movies because they’ll have tremendous information about who could buy their movies and could offer discounts on their movies. I could see it becoming a thing.

Will it become a thing? I don’t know. But I can see a way that it could evolve into something that is good, and new, and exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah. If he gets to his 10 million subscribers and he wants to go ahead and get into the distribution business, at that point he will almost certainly face a gauntlet of legal challenges that will either be initiated by the government or by large movie chains lobbying the government. That will be a fight. No question about it. They’re going to want to–

**John:** Why do you think there will be a fight? Because he’s not an exhibitor. He’s just a distributor the same way that a studio is a distributor.

**Craig:** I think there is an argument to be made that he is selling movie tickets, and therefore is directly selling movie tickets to people through MoviePass and therefore he is kind of an exhibitor.

You know, like Paramount Pictures can’t sell you movie tickets that you then go and bring to a theater. That’s kind of part and parcel with the whole split up of the producers and the exhibitors.

It’s not to say that what I’m saying is determinative or that he won’t get there. There’s no question that if he’s thinking about it, it means plenty of lawyers have said we can make the argument that this will work. But it’s going to be a fight. The AMCs of the world are not going to lay down and let this guy start basically playing by rules that — new rules or not having to play by the rules that they played by.

So, you know, let’s see what happens. It will be interesting.

**John:** It will be interesting. I agree. Last bit of follow up, listener Matt wrote in to say, “I was wondering if you could elaborate more on Episode 315 in which you touched on how the music industry was crippled by the digital age, but movies did not suffer the same fate. Being a former musician, I know this better than most, but I was wondering if you could go into more detail on how exactly film managed to survive. I know the midrange movies took a big hit as DVD sales declined, but what else happened, and why?”

So I threw this on the outline without doing any additional research, so this is just going to be speculation and opinion.

**Craig:** We’ll wing it.

**John:** We’re totally winging this. Some things which occur to me that are different about movies versus music. Theatrical I’ll say is sort of like our live performance. And so the same way that recording artists took a giant hit when their songs became downloads rather than CDs that were purchased, and they were then making their money sort of going out on tour, our movies in movie theaters are sort of like being out on tour. They are that public performance where everyone is going to buy a ticket and see the thing live in front of them on the big screen.

And that’s been surprisingly resilient, even in the face of new challenges, because it’s a chance to get out of your house. It’s a chance to go on a date, or hang out with your friends. It’s an excuse to get together with people. So I think that has helped the movie business buck up a bit.

I think a difference between movies and music, which was important at the time but is much less important now, is that the files are huge. And so it was easier to schlep around music files. It was much harder to schlep around giant movie files. And so torrents made that easier, but still they were much bigger files and as bandwidth increased it became easier to send around giant movie files. But they weren’t happening as much as early.

Once you have those files, it’s harder to get them onto your TV. Clever people can always find a way to do that, or they’ll be willing to watch them on their laptops, but it’s harder to get them on the screen. And if you’re watching these movies overseas and it’s a western movie in English and you want to watch it with your subtitles, solutions have sort of come up for like how to pirate movies and slap on the subtitles, but it’s not easy. It’s not simple to do that. And I think that’s another thing that has slowed down some piracy of movies or at least let movies sort of get some — it gave them some time to get ahead of piracy.

**Craig:** Well that all sounds accurate to me. I would add on a couple of other things. When Napster happened, and started to change the way that people were paying — or in this case not paying — for audio, and for music, the radio business continued as it continues. You know, the radio business plays music for free. I’m talking about not the satellite subscription, sort of terrestrial radio. You listen to music for free and then they pump ads at you. And that’s how they make their money.

Well that’s exactly how broadcast television and a lot of cable television works. Right? So the difference being that that was how you got the product in television, broadcast television, and cable television. It’s not like you were going to a store to buy this product before it was running on television. You had to go to the television to get it in the first place, which meant you were getting the ads on you right off the bat.

If I buy an album, if I buy a whole bunch of albums and music that I want to listen to, I don’t have to go listen to the radio station to hear that music because I own it. And in fact that directional issue is I think a lot of why music suffered and the movie business didn’t.

In general, like you said, movies are like concerts, right? And then the DVDs are like the albums. Well, notice that in movies and in television the performance comes first. That is the main product. And then the album equivalent comes after. That’s something that the fans then buy afterwards because they want to see it or experience it again.

Not the case with music. In music, you buy it first. If you like it, then you go to the concert. So, if the first option is free, that’s what people are going to want. And in movies, they’re not free. The first option is you’ve got to go to the theater. And television a lot of times the first option is free, or there’s a monthly subscription that they’ve already gotten used to, going to HBO and so on and so forth. And then if they liked it, yeah, you know, most people who go and see a movie and they love that movie and they want to see it again, they would go — they were used to renting it. They would go to Blockbuster and rent it. So they’re in the pattern of paying for that. No big deal.

The excitement of short-circuiting the entire thing and getting something new for free by stealing it was, I think, the problem with the music business. Because the free part, the change part, happened at the front of the experience. Not at the middle or end of the experience the way it did in television and in movies.

**John:** I think you are hitting on a key point here. And if you look back historically, the movie business existed long before there was home video. So for many, many years there really was no way to watch Gone with the Wind if it wasn’t playing at the theater down the street. And yet the movie business was completely viable.

And so as home video arose, that was a whole bunch of new money. And it was fantastic. And we made a lot more stuff and it benefitted writers tremendously because residuals became a more meaningful thing. So the rise of digital downloads, legal and illegal downloads, did hit home video in a really hard way. But there was still a way for movies to make money. And that’s I think why they were able to survive.

When you look at music, yes, there had been that tradition of live performance, but we’d had recorded music for so long. It had been so expected that you go out and buy an album and that was your primary way of consuming music. That when that got disrupted the whole business model did collapse.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is fascinating. The other aspect of music that’s so interesting to me is that there isn’t a work-for-hire in the music business the way that there is in movies and television. So, part of the problem with the music business was that all the album sales, the first part of the experience, almost all of that money went to the companies. And then the — I mean, some money went to the artist, but a lot of it went to the companies. And then the performance, going out and touring, that was all about the artist.

But then they would have to send back money if the company promoted it and stuff like that. Or the company fronted them money for videos and so on and so forth. And so when you chop that thing in half, then I think for a moment maybe artists thought this is good because that side of the business, the album sales side, I was always getting screwed on anyway. But, you know, the performance side is going to be great and I’m still going to sell t-shirts and make my money.

Except that they kind of forgot that no one goes to a concert for an act they don’t know. And that all the promotion was coming from the companies and the album sales. So there was a symbiotic relationship that got really disrupted there. And so you do have this strange thing now where we have these acts, the most successful touring acts, are old. With rare exception.

You know, The Rolling Stones still, you know. It’s hard to break new bands that then make a ton of money on tour. At this point now, a lot of them are I guess manufactured bands that are literally created for the purpose of this sort of thing. But when I look at the list of the highest grossing concerts, I’m like, oh my god, everyone is old.

**John:** Yeah. I do think it’s worth going through the thought experiment of like what if there had been more bandwidth earlier. If a few variables had changed, I do think we would be in bigger trouble. I do think if there had been tremendous bandwidth and it had been easier to get pirated movies onto your TV, I think home video would have collapsed more fully, more quickly. I think the economics would have changed. I still think the theatrical experience would remain. I think all the doomsdayers are saying like, oh, your TV at home is going to be so great and people are going to want to stay home rather than go out and suffer through the movie theater experience. Those are old people. Those are old people who don’t want to be around teenagers. Teenagers want to get out of the house and movies are a good excuse for doing that.

**Craig:** Yep. As long as kids want to make out in a dark room, there will be movies.

**John:** And there will be a MoviePass or something like that to try to get them to do more of it.

**Craig:** Naughty children. Well, that probably — that should get us to our Three Page Challenge, don’t you think?

**John:** We absolutely should tackle these three pages.

**Craig:** What should we start with here?

**John:** Let’s start with Steven Wood, a script called This is Absurd. Now, if you want to read along the three pages as we go through them, you can find them on the show notes. Just go to johnaugust.com and look for this episode. We’ll also have them up in Weekend Read so if you’re on Weekend Read you can read along with us.

So here’s a synopsis for this first one. A dapper middle-aged gentleman works the front desk at a motel. He stands perfectly still, with his hands clasped. A single room key hangs on a peg behind him. Joey enters, tired. He waits to be greeted by the manager. He rings the bell, but still no acknowledgment. Finally, Joey speaks, only to be cut off by the manager.

The answers do not quite feel stock, but the conversation is disjointed and unnatural. The manager accepts Joey’s payment without knowing the amount and sends him to his room. Joey and Dale, with whom Joey arrived, share a smoke outside their room. Joey mentions that the manager didn’t even count the money.

In the dingy motel room, Dale clicks the TV to a new station. Joey warns that “They’re going to find the car.” Dale is not worried. He wiped it down for prints. He goes to the bathroom just as the news anchor announces these two men as fugitives.

Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. So we talk a lot about confusion versus mystery. I think these three pages do a very good job of creating mystery as opposed to confusion. The manager and the nature of this motel are a mystery. You and I don’t know what it is, but if it turned out that the manager is the devil that would make sense to me. If it turned out the manager was an alien that would make sense to me. If it turned out the manager was a robot that would make sense to me. There’s all sorts of possibilities about what’s going on here.

The way it plays out and the scene craft is quite good, I think. The first scene here between Joey and the manager. Mostly good because I think the manager is created really interestingly. It’s a smart thing to have the manager say nothing until the bell rings. It makes us wonder what was it about the bell. See, they’re all like little hints.

I also like the way it was set up visually. And the part I liked was it says, “A leather-bound ledger is atop the counter along with a fingerprint-free brass bell.” That’s interesting. It’s almost as if this motel has been waiting. It’s like it popped up out of nowhere and is just waiting for these two guys like a Venus fly trap or something.

So, I liked that. And the fact that Joey has to sign his name and his room number felt very, I don’t know, hell-like to me. So, all that was good.

If I have any criticisms, it’s that the introduction of Joey is kind of a whiff. So, the manager gets MAN in all capitals, Joey doesn’t get anything. The description of Joey is as follows: Joey. That’s it. That’s all I get. Joey. I don’t know his age, I don’t know his height, his appearance. I don’t know anything. Until it says he, I didn’t even know if Joey was a man or a woman.

So, that’s not good. I want to know more about Joey. Similarly, when Joey does enter through the front door, it says tired. He slams his forearms on the counter. I don’t think anybody has ever done that. I don’t know what that means. How do you slam your forearms on a counter? That’s a very odd motion.

**John:** Yeah. So I think it’s throwing your weight down on the counter. So I got what he was going for, but I had read it twice or three times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wasn’t quite sure about that. And then following that it says, “Dale waits outside.” Um, who? Dale? Oh, OK. I don’t know who Dale is either. And also how do I see him. Is there a window? Is the door–

**John:** Glass?

**Craig:** Yeah. What’s going on here? So, the descriptions were really scant. Joey I don’t think is quite interacting with the manager the way I would expect somebody normal to. And it’s not that Joey has to be normal. But when you have a character in a scene who is so wildly abnormal, isn’t that the title of this? This is Abnormal?

**John:** Yeah. This is Absurd.

**Craig:** This is Absurd. So we have an absurd character in the manager, which means we in the audience sort of need to be anchored in a non-absurd character opposing him in this back and forth conflicted scene. And Joey doesn’t quite get there. I wasn’t really with him on this. But, you know, it wasn’t bad. The line that sort of stopped me was when Joey says, “I’m going to wait” — ”I’m gonna to wait,” so let’s fix those typos. “I’m gonna wait and let you finish with your little spiel so you can stop interrupting me.”

It didn’t really seem like the manager was, I don’t know, interrupting him that aggressively. They’ve done bad things, Joey and Dale, and now they’re in a deadly motel of some kind, where they will receive some sort of punishment. That’s my prediction. But overall good.

**John:** Yeah. I enjoyed it as well. So, I have exactly your same criticisms in the sense that the manager is so well described, the environment is so well described, and Joey is just nothing. He’s just a name. And so giving us some specificity on who he is so we can relate to him and relate to his experience interacting with this manager is crucial. So even if you don’t want to tip us off that Joey is a bad guy, just give us some sense of who he is so we can get a sense of what his voice is going to be as he starts talking.

I also agree with you that I felt — it’s not that the manager was too pushed, it’s just that Joey’s reaction to his being pushed didn’t seem reasonable. And I flagged the same moment at the end of page one that you did.

I think if I had a bigger concern is that I’ve seen The Twilight Zone. I’ve seen Tales from the Dark Side. I was thinking back to that sci-fi series, The Lost Room, that I liked a lot. The idea of a haunted motel is a bit stock. But it’s still delightful. And it harkens back to almost like an Edgar Allan Poe kind of sense of like “this is the place where your sins are going to be punished.“

I just needed — I wish I got a sense after these three pages that our screenwriter sort of knew the tropes and could push past the tropes, or could at least know that he had a plan for sort of going past those easy things. Because by the time I got to the end of page three I was like, “OK, yeah, they’re criminal on the run,” but I’m not confident that this is going to be the subversion of this kind of story I’ve seen a lot.

And an example of something of where I thought we were missing an opportunity is at the start of page three. We have our only exterior. So “EXT – MOTEL – OUTSIDE ROOM FIFTEEN — NIGHT. Dale and Joey take a few drags off a smoke before going inside.”

That action is great. So, that they’re sharing a cigarette is also great. But where are we? If we’re exterior someplace, we have to be someplace. And so is there a rain storm? Are we in a desert? Are we in the middle of a city? We’re nowhere. And I think it’s absolutely a valid choice to start in a place where you don’t have any sense of what’s outside this room, but once we are outside this room you’ve got to give us some environment. And that’s where I felt like, OK, we’re on a sound stage someplace in Toronto and it’s going to be one of those sort of incredibly teeny tiny budget things that doesn’t really add up to anything.

**Craig:** Unless these three pages are not the first three pages. You know, if — and I would imagine people would probably let us know, but if these aren’t the first three, because we’ve never said that people have to send the first three. If it were in the middle then, OK, I would understand why Joey isn’t described and why Dale isn’t described and why the general area isn’t described.

But, some other things to consider. And certainly if this is the first three, no question about what you’re saying. When they’re standing outside Dale and Joey take a few drags off a smoke before going inside. “He didn’t even count the money.” What’s Dale thinking? Does Dale even know what he’s talking about? I feel like I’m missing something there. It’s like Joey is presuming that Dale is watching the movie with us. He wasn’t in there. He didn’t even hear any of that.

So, what is Joey trying to impart to Dale there exactly?

**John:** There’s a sense of which this could be the end of a conversation. So if you wanted to signal that like this was the last part of a conversation you’d say like, “Yeah and it’s weird, he didn’t even count the money.” Crushes the cigarette. Goes in the room. Like the sense that this was the end of a longer thing. But I agree, it just hangs there in a weird way.

**Craig:** It’s sort of a naked line because there’s no action inspiring it. It’s unmotivated. So what you end up happening is — you have two actors and they’re out there and you say, “Action,” and they’re smoking, and then one says, “He didn’t even count the money.” And the other one looks at him. Shrugs. And then they both go inside. But then why did you say that? It will seem like an odd cut.

You can certainly do what you’re suggesting, which is you get there and they’re smoking and then Dale says, “Really?” And Joey says, “Yeah, he didn’t even count the money.” And then you go, OK, I get it. I’m at the end of a conversation.

Lastly, I want to point out that trope-wise the news anchor, the helpful expository news anchor working for Exposition News Nightly, needs to be driven from the planet, ejected into deep, deep space. The news anchor helpfully informs us, “The two men have been identified as Dale Shelton and Joseph Williams, both should be considered…”

You know what? No. First of all, news anchors, when was the last time you heard a local news anchor say, “Both should be considered armed and dangerous?” Oh please. So, anyway, there’s so many better ways of doing this. If this happens in the middle, then we don’t need to know. But if it doesn’t happen in the middle and I don’t think it does, I think these are the first three pages, then he says, OK, “You know they’re going to find the car, right?” “Who cares, I wiped it down.” Good. Not expository. Just intriguing. Fine.

And then show me casually one of them putting his clothing in the drawer and as he’s moving his underwear in there’s the gun. Or show me that he wipes his hair back and we see that there’s a blood stain. Show me something else that makes me go, OK, these guys are bad guys and they’ve done a bad thing. The news anchor has got to go.

**John:** It’s got to go. That to me is the new air vent. It’s just the convenient thing that’s there which would almost never happen in real life.

**Craig:** And also it’s amazing. Every time they turn on the news that’s what they’re always talking about.

**John:** Isn’t that great? Yeah.

**Craig:** How cool is that?

**John:** I’m sure there are shows that have hung a lantern on that idea of like that trope and so if people who are listening to the show can point me to things where they point out the absurdity of that, we will maybe run those on a future episode, because it has to be just called out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think somewhere somebody must have done Exposition News Network, because… — All right. Well let’s see, which one should we do next?

**John:** Before we go on to the next one, there’s one last thing I want to signal. Five paragraphs in, “An awkward moment passes, no one speaks, Joey waits to be greeted by the Manager, who only stares, not making eye contact.”

So, that’s a lot of commas in a row. And there’s ways in which that could be great. It just wasn’t great for me there. So breaking that up into some sentences would help you out.

**Craig:** No question. And also they’re not used properly. “An awkward moment passes. Period. No one speaks. Period. Joey waits to be greeted by the manager, who only stares, not making eye contact.” Grammatically speaking, that’s how you would do that.

**John:** There’s no stylistic reason why those commas are helping him out there.

**Craig:** No. None at all. They just sort of mush up your sentence there.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to do the next one, Craig?

**Craig:** Sure. How to Make Friends by Elizabeth Boston. OK, so a beautifully lit garden party is filled with happy guests and Bon Voyage balloons. We follow a partygoer to the restroom. She knocks, but inside the restroom is Tula, 30, who politely calls back through the door and says, “It’s occupied.” After a second knock, she claims to be pooping but she is not.

She gets a text from her friend that says she’s running late, but that Tula should socialize. Instead, we see a quick montage of Tula killing time in the bathroom. Painting her toes. Plucking a stray hair. And then actually pooping.

We then cut to Pam and Katie, both 30, who are skipping arm-in-arm down the street a la the Laverne & Shirley opening, for those of you old enough to know what that is. And then we smash cut to reality. Oh, that’s not really what was happening. What’s really happening is Kate is super-duper drunk and attempting the Laverne & Shirley routine. She pukes. Then tells Pam that Pam will miss her when Katie is in New York.

Pam says they are late to her, meaning Pam’s, goodbye party. Katie kneels down near a sleeping homeless man to tie her shoelaces, but is actually doing it to steal money from his collection can.

And that is How to Make Friends. John, dig in.

**John:** I shall dig in. So, my guess after these three pages is that this is a story about the three women. So, it sort of looks like it’s a Tula story, but I believe that the weight is probably going to be shared between the three women, or at least Katie who is such a drunk in this thing, maybe she becomes more of a thing that is carried around through the course of the story. So maybe it’s more Katie and Tula.

I was frustrated because I was happy to see these women sort of having their individual moments, but it wasn’t adding up to a lot for me. And I didn’t feel like I was seeing anything remarkable that was intriguing me to read more down the road. And some of it was — I’m going to say that horrible word again — specificity. From the very start, “EXT. PHILADELPHIA STREET — NIGHT.” Night.

Then “EXT. BACKYARD PARTY — NIGHT.” So the Philadelphia Street gets no scene description at all. So it should just not be there if you’re not going to tell us anything about that Philadelphia Street, because a Philadelphia Street could be a giant boulevard. It could be a tiny back alley. It could be in a posh neighborhood. It could be somewhere else.

I just don’t know what this is. And so then we go to this backyard party. I still have no sense of where are we. Are we at some sort of row house? Are we at a mansion? You’ve got to anchor us in a place or anchor us with a character in those first shots so we can really see what’s happening.

Then we follow a partygoer toward the house. Well, partygoer, so I see the kind of shot we’re trying to describe here, which is where we’re sort of floating behind somebody who is leading us into the house to get to a place. But is that partygoer a man, a woman? Who are the people at this party? And without any of those details, I have a hard time getting into Tula’s point of view or any of these other women’s point of view, because I just don’t know what situation I’m in.

**Craig:** Mm. Yeah. I’m right there with you on this. I think that we appear to have a Girl’s Trip/Hangover-y sort of thing going on. This looks like three crazy characters who love to party. I know a little something about this. It’s not really breaking any ground. I want to talk a little bit about tone. We’ve got pooping on page one and we’ve got puking on page two. There is something that we call the cumulative effect in comedy. We know that certain transgressive things get big laughs. And sometimes pooping gets a big laugh. And sometimes puking gets a big laugh. But the more you do it, the more it sort of collects. And there is a cumulative effect.

It starts to make people angry. There’s a fine, fine line. And, granted, it’s different for different people. But to go one-two punch on page one and page two like that is signaling the wrong thing. I think it’s telling people you’re going to be in the toilet for a while.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it’s actually not a one-two punch, but it’s a two-three punch maybe? A number two and a number three punch?

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** What do you call — is vomit number three? Like in terms of bodily fluids being expelled?

**Craig:** Now this podcast has a cumulative effect.

**John:** It does. So, I think that’s a very important point that I never really sort of thought about before. But you look at Melissa McCarthy’s moment in Bridesmaids where she’s in the dress and she has diarrhea and uses the sink. I mean, it’s all those things on top of each other that make the diarrhea so funny. Because if she’s not in the big dress, if she’s not doing it in the sink, then it’s not funny. But it’s the specificity — I’m sorry, again — that makes it so funny. And it’s Melissa McCarthy and she’s amazing.

Anything that Melissa McCarthy does that involves a fluid is hysterical. Like her salad dressing sketch from Saturday Night Live is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** Amazing. It’s amazing. Well, that scene, you know, the other thing about that scene in Bridesmaids is it’s a set piece. So when we talk about comedic set pieces, what we’re talking about are extended sequences that are built around large comic actions. They are usually physical in nature. And they are motivated. So they’re carefully set up like little machines, like little Rube Goldberg machines, or like imagine one of those little Domino things. And then something flicks the Domino and then there is a cascade. And so it escalates into insanity.

The Hangover movies do this, of course. And most mainstream comedies will have the big set piece, or two, or three. That one is a good example. There really isn’t bathroom humor in that movie until you get to that point. So that set piece is motivated by Kristen Wiig’s character and her desire to one-up her competition to be the bride’s best friend. And who insists that everybody go to this Brazilian all-you-can-eat buffet. And they all get food poisoning. They are all now very, very sick. And we understand why. And it’s not like, oh, you’re very, very sick because you’re just kind of a pig that drinks too much. You’re very, very sick through no fault of your own and now it’s funny.

And then we watch it all kind of come apart. And what do they do? They’re brilliant. They put it in an all-white room. And everything is pristine. And then it all just goes to hell.

That’s a set piece. This is just casually I’m going to puke. And I’m going to poop. So it’s just, meh, look at me. I’m pooping. Ha-ha. And that’s — you know, you can do it. And you can do it once. Like if all that had happened here was, OK, she’s pooping, I’d go, oh, OK. I get it. It’s this kind of movie. But then one page later to have another thing like that right off the bat, it starts to make me think that this is just going to be dopey.

And unfortunately I’m kind of with you, nothing else really got me out of the dopey. What we’re dealing with aren’t really characters. We’re dealing with caricatures. So Tula is kind of just singing a little hip-hop to herself. Having some fun. Being sort of selfish. Not letting other people come into the bathroom.

And I’m not really sure frankly why she’s doing all this.

**John:** That was my frustration. If there’s a reason why she barricaded herself, because she just didn’t want to talk to these people because she was nervous around them, because she wanted to smoke a joint, because she just wanted some me time, I could get that. But I wasn’t getting that out of any of those reasons out of these scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s just sort of motivationlessly grooming herself. So, not really sure what the deal is there. I enjoyed the contrast between the kind of fantasy imagining of these two women, seeing themselves as Laverne and Shirley, and then, OK, here’s the reality, they’re not. Except I don’t know who they are. Also, whose dream is this? Because the two of them are in the dream. And then when we come out of the dream, not really the dream but the fantasy I guess, one of them is doing it and the other one isn’t.

So, that was sort of confusing to me. Also don’t know who they are. It takes a while for me to figure out that the party that Tula is at is supposed to be for Pam. And then you’ve got kind of a — Katie appears to be just, you know, train wreck. She is the train wreck. She is drunk. And she’s stealing money from homeless people. Wow.

**John:** So, the second half of these three pages, the stuff with Pam and Katie, it reminded me of Broad City, which I think is a phenomenal show. And it made me think more about sort of why Broad City works and sort of the central sort of premise of how those two characters work together. So you have Abbi and Ilana. Abbi is the wrecking ball who keeps knocking everything down and couldn’t care about offending anybody, but is completely obsessed with Ilana and sort of making Ilana happy. Ilana is mortified by everything and so she’s the one who like terrible things will always happen to. She’s the one who would have food poisoning and have to try to find a place to deal with it.

And you have to have those two competing interests — people who are aligned with each other, but are also going to push each other’s buttons. And maybe that can be — maybe Pam and Katie can have those similar dynamics, but we’re seeing them in a moment where we don’t have any sense of what their real relationship is, or sort of why they’re together.

And so stealing the money from the homeless man is like, “Oh, that’s shocking and transgressive,” but I don’t know anything about Katie or Pam to know why that moment should land or not land.

**Craig:** Well, right. And to confuse matters, Katie is really, really drunk. So like at the beginning of The Hangover, we see Bradley Cooper’s character, Phil, collecting money from his students. He’s a teacher and he’s collecting money for a class trip, which we then realize he’s just stealing to use in Vegas. He’s not drunk. He’s — we learn a lot about who is right there.

But she’s drunk here, so when she’s stealing the money from the homeless man’s tin can, I’m not even sure if she knows what she’s doing, so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** I just want to be really clear for Elizabeth’s sake, I don’t have a problem with lowbrow humor. God knows I don’t. Just go ahead and check my IMDb page out. I love it. But there is a science to it. And I think we’ve all made all the mistakes that I think Elizabeth is making here. We’ve all made. But the problem is that she’s making all of them kind of in these three pages all at once.

We need clarity. We need specificity about who these characters are and what they want and what their problem is. And if we’re going to be transgressive, we have to set it up. We have to understand why. You have to let me know that I’m supposed to be learning something and I need to know what I’m learning. In a very annoying and craft-based way, comedy requires the most care and attention. Because it’s always a soufflé. Even the dumb ones are soufflés. In fact, the dumb ones are the most soufflé-ish of soufflés. The slightest little thing and it all just collapses. It’s science.

So you have to be scientific about it, and unfortunately these three pages, they have a lot of sloppiness in them. And so we’re not quite sure how to feel or think. And I agree with you, I think that they need to be reworked or people aren’t going to keep going.

**John:** Something I do want to highlight, “TULA ANDERS, Black, 30, with the outfit of a fifty year-old middle school teacher.” I like the outfit of a 50-year-old middle school teacher. Give me more like that. Let that inform what I’m going to see next, because I don’t have any action or dialogue from her that reinforces that idea of the good character description you gave me there.

So, reading that I think maybe she has tremendous social anxiety disorder. There’s something about her that would help explain why she’s barricaded herself in the bathroom. So I’d just say like maybe look for — find little details and build out from those to create your characters and you’ll maybe get to a good place.

Last little things I want to point out on the page. Let’s talk about the ellipsis, dot-dot-dot.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It’s just three periods. There’s no spaces between the periods. And so they’re used all the time in screenwriting to sense a trailing off or connecting two things. So don’t be afraid to use them, but it needs to just literally be dot-dot-dot. So, in this case we have extra spaces between them. It looks weird. Please don’t do that.

The other thing you have to watch out for, on the Macintosh, sometimes the Mac will try to substitute the ellipsis character — which is like three dots really close together — don’t use that either. You just literally want period-period-period.

**Craig:** Yeah. The biggest issue I think with the same way that Elizabeth is doing the dot-dot-dot is that it just eats up a lot of space. And so we try and limit that. Just a suggestion, Elizabeth, for you if you do want to re-approach these pages and think about a different way of getting into them, you have the partygoer, Anonymous Partygoer approaching closed door, knocking. Maybe you should start with Tula. And start with presenting us with somebody. And so here is this 30-year-old woman, she’s black but she’s British, so that’s an interesting combination for Americans. But she’s got this frumpy, old way of dressing. So we’re kind of getting this interesting sense of who she is. And then she excuses herself to go to the bathroom and then shows us a totally different person inside that bathroom. Maybe that’s just a way to kind of be intentional about all of this, because right now it just sort of feels haphazard.

**John:** There’s nothing more relatable I can imagine than showing up at a party for a friend and that friend isn’t there and sort of how mortifying it is. Like, I don’t have any anchor at this party. I don’t know any of these people. And then I completely understand the instinct to just barricade yourself in a bathroom. Like that is a start that — and it doesn’t have to be a lot. Like you could just start on her face and then — or one of those sort of locked off cameras where you’re just moving through this party with her and she’s like “There’s no one here I know.” And then stop, and cut to in the bathroom locking the door, and she’s just going to bunker down until her friends get here.

That is a completely relatable experience and that tells me a lot about Tula that helps me so much in the scene that you have there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. You know, what’s interesting about that notion is that it’s actually short-circuited by the way Elizabeth has done this here. Because we start with Tula in the bathroom. She’s already decided not to come out. Then the phone says Pam, meaning Pam — this is the other thing. If Pam is sending the message, it’s weird to have the message say, Pam, be there in 10. Because now I’m thinking Tula’s name is Pam. But let’s put that aside.

Pam is telling her I’ll be there in ten minutes. Sorry. Got held up. So, she’d already decided to put herself in the bathroom. If she’s walking around this party, she clearly doesn’t know anybody, and then she gets a text, “Sorry, meant to be there. I’m running 30 minutes behind.” At that point I understand the panic and the “What do I do, what do I do.” So get out and socialize or go around and socialize. And Tula decides I know exactly what I’m going to do. The opposite of that. I’m going to lock myself in the bathroom.

Now I understand what’s going on. I just need motivations. Motivation.

**John:** Motivation is a crucial, crucial thing. All right, let’s get to our third and final Three Page Challenge. This is Shaker Heights by Dan Pavlik.

We start at a community pool, bustling with the excitement of a youth swim meet. RJ, 38, attempts to give his son, Hudson, 8, a pep talk as he gets ready for his race. RJ is not so good at pep talks and says things that would only make a kid more nervous. Rondell, the starter, who wears a sweet baby blue sweat suit, calls the swimmers to the pool. The other boys are wearing Speedos, besides Tyler, 8, who wears a full torso high tech suit. Hudson, meanwhile, wears trunks.

On the other side of the pool, RJ dismisses his son’s ability to Tyler’s dad, Stefan. It appears that they have placed bets on this race. The race begins. Tyler and Hudson are neck and neck, but Tyler barely pulls through for the win. RJ shouts in celebration. The pool goes silent seeing RJ celebrate his kid’s loss.

Hudson is disappointed. RJ tries to recover.

So, in reading this synopsis I would say I did not the first time reading through it know that they were betting on the race until quite late. Craig, what was your take on the betting or not betting?

**Craig:** I just found out that they were betting on the race from that summary. I didn’t see any — I mean, I didn’t understand the hustle line. But I also didn’t see any indication that these guys were betting. So I don’t get it.

**John:** All right. So, what did you get from these three pages?

**Craig:** Well, let’s start with some simple crafty, format-y stuff. And these pages are again by Dan Pavlik. So, Dan, I see you, and I see what you’re doing, which is expanding your dialogue lines to be way longer than a dialogue line should be. So there’s margins, right? Now, we can all fudge margins here and there. You know, if I’m writing dialogue and the whole thing spills over so that the fourth line of dialogue is the word “all” or “you,” OK, I’ll cheat the margins to pull that up. That’s no big deal. It’s not going to deform the script. It’s not going to make that paragraph look bizarre.

But here’s all one line: “Next up, event 32, boys 8 & under backstroke.” No. And to make it even worse, to shove that all in one line, you also used “8,” the number eight, for eight when generally the rule is ten and under you spell you out. And then you ampersanded the word “and.” What? We don’t do that.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Just don’t do it. You can put “&” in dialogue if the person is referring to the title of something that has an ampersand in it. Other than that, nope.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Just we don’t do it. So there’s some cheaty stuff going on here. And it carries throughout. I just saw a number of dialogue lines where I thought, “OK, these margins are way too loose.” But that aside, we start off — I can see the room, I can hear the room, which I like. And I have no problem with things like “A drone shot, high & wide shows a packed pool deck.” I’m fine, you know me. I think we’re allowed to direct things.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then we have this pep talk between a dad and a son. And it’s cute. I mean, we get the idea which is, OK, I’m nervous and I’m going to use my nervousness by telling you not to be nervous. And that I really don’t care if you win or you lose, but obviously I do or else I wouldn’t keep talking about it. And the kid seems to be well onto his own father and just like “Leave me alone, I want to go swim.”

So that was all fine. I was good with that. By the way, we have a couple of issues with default whiteness I noticed in two of these, where we mention that someone is black but we don’t mention when people are white. You know, if you want to mention race, mention race, but then mention race.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We have — and maybe an indication of something, I wasn’t quite sure on page two. There’s certain bits of description that I think are important, but then they kind of fell in between the “Is this important or is it not important” zone, and I need to know.

So, it says, “At the far side of the pool, we see RONDELL RI’CHARD (48). Rondell is a black man, wearing a sweet, baby blue sweatsuit.” OK, he is the race starter. He calls for the race to begin. Hudson, along with five other boys, step up to the edge of the pool. Next to Hudson is Tyler Kim, a wirey” — spelled wrong, I believe.

**John:** I looked it up. Yeah, that is incorrect.

**Craig:** Yep. Korean kid. Now here’s the part where I got, huh. Four of the boys wear baby blue Speedos. Tyler wears a full torso, high tech baby blue suit. Hudson wears regular swim trunks. So, on the one hand I get what’s happening here, which is that these other kids are advanced swimmers who are geared up and ready to go. And Hudson is wearing the wrong kind of bathing suit, so he’s not. But baby blue Speedos. So, are they on like a team that the guy that’s the starter is the coach of? Because he’s got the baby blue sweat suit? Or is that just random?

**John:** I agree with you. I was confused as well. It felt like they’re all on a team and he’s the guy competing against them. But that doesn’t actually make sense. So if it’s a meet, they’re not all going to be on the same team. So, that was just weird. I just feel like “baby blue” trickled in in places where it did not need to be there. It would also just make more sense — the point is that most of the kids are in Speedos, this one kid has an amazing full body suit, and the joke is that Hudson is in just regular swim trunks. That’s the point. Not the colors.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. So you want to just be clear. You don’t want to muddy these things up, because now I’m just confused about what I’m supposed to be paying attention to here. When we get across the pool, so the race is about to begin, and we go across to where Dad is, RJ. And he’s standing with Stefan, “a tall, athletically built Korean-American man.”

So we’re going to presume, I guess, that he is Tyler Kim’s dad, because Tyler is a wirey Korean kid. Interestingly Tyler is from Korea, whereas his dad is Korean-American, so we got to figure out what’s going on here. But RJ says to Stefan, “He doesn’t stand a chance.” Who doesn’t stand a chance? Is he talking about his own kid? Probably. But then tell me that he’s nervous. Tell me that he’s embarrassed.

Obviously he knows Stefan, right, because you wouldn’t just start saying that to some guy you don’t know. But then Stefan says, “The board shorts don’t fool me. He’s got the eye of the tiger.”

**John:** Can I pitch a fix here?

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** This is what I would say. So, first off my daughter competed in swim team last year, so I actually learned a lot about swim team, and I would say most of the details here feel kind of correct. Except for the board shorts. That would just not happen. It’s not a thing. Like a kid who competes on swim team is not going to be in board shorts, unless — and this would be your opportunity — if RJ’s line of dialogue here is like, “Man, I can’t believe I packed his board shorts rather than his Speedos. What an idiot I am.”

If he were to say something like that, it would take the curse off of the board shorts and make us believe that he’s an incompetent father. And then the overall joke that basically he’d been rooting against his son would make more sense in the end. That he’s basically trying to sabotage his son so that his son wouldn’t win this race.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll get to that part, because I really got confused about that. But I think you’re right. We need to explain this one way or the other. Either the dad forgot and screwed up, or the kid forgot and screwed up, or they’ve never done this before and this is his first time. And so they didn’t know. And he’s embarrassed.

But either way, the problem is his relationship with Stefan implies that they know each other, so it’s weird to have Stefan making comments like this as if he’s never met Hudson, the kid, before. And then RJ says, “My boy doesn’t possess the intensity gene.” So he’s sort of apologizing for him. And then Stefan says, “Maybe so, but at least this isn’t his first backstroke event ever.”

OK, now, so OK, I guess he has been doing this for a while, so then he shouldn’t have the board shorts. Why would he have the board shorts if he has done it before? And Stefan seems to be implying that his son, Tyler, has never done the backstroke before. And then RJ says, “Did you just hustle me?” So they did bet on it? But if they bet on it, then why would RJ bet on it because he says that his kid doesn’t stand a chance and he doesn’t possess the intensity gene. And he doesn’t.

So, I don’t understand what’s going on I guess is my point. And at the end when he roots — he’s happy that his son loses. Is it because he bet on Tyler?

**John:** Yes. He bet on Tyler. He bet against his own son in the race. That I think is meant to be the overall point of this scene. Like here’s a dad who bet against his own son in a race. And was trying to sabotage his son in the race. So I think if you read through what’s there, I think it supports that thesis. I just don’t think that it does the best job of supporting that thesis.

**Craig:** OK, if that’s what’s going on, first of all, “Did you just hustle me?” when Stefan says, “At least this isn’t his first backstroke event ever,” why is Stefan talking down his kid if RJ has bet on Tyler? Hustling him would mean talking Tyler up.

So I don’t understand exactly what’s going on. But regardless of that, if you’re going to do something in a script that is as extreme, and frankly interesting, as a father betting against his own kid, I need to see it happen. That’s the interesting part. Not this other nonsense.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk and say nonsense.

**John:** Yeah, I get it.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? That’s the moment I want to see. So the scene is you have these two guys and one of them is like I’ll put $30 on Tyler. And he’s like, you sure? He’s never done this before. I’m putting $30 on him, don’t worry. And then he’s going to win. And you’re like, OK, this guy is betting on, I don’t know, what? Don’t know. Then they walk out of the locker room or parents’ area into this school thing and the kid — and this guy who has just bet on Tyler walks up to his kid and says, “Listen, you can do it, blah, blah, blah. Go get him, Hudson. Oh, hey Tyler.” And you’re like, oh my god, whoa.

Right? There’s a way to do this that is exciting and pays something off and makes people gasp. This isn’t it.

**John:** I agree. So, I think what you’re describing is the scene as written right now, there’s probably not a version of like this is all happening in one real time thing that could do the best job of it. The way I would pitch for it is if they get up to the starting block and you’re starting to see that these guys have the conversation. You could do the flash cut back to like their betting in the parking lot, or some moment beforehand where they said like my kid is worse than your kid. My kid is going to tank. No, no, my kid is the worst. That could have been the thing basically before this thing started, so you’re recontextualizing what just happened and then you start the race is another way you could do it.

But I agree, it’s going to be challenging to — the fact that you got confused in these three pages and being able to go through this a couple times on the page, it’s probably not going to work especially well even if you shot it just like this.

**Craig:** No. This one definitely is not in the mystery zone. It’s not trying to be a mystery. It’s confusion.

**John:** Great. Let’s talk about an interesting choice that Dan has made with bold face. So bold face is a thing that exists in computers and you will see bold faced in scripts. Dan is choosing interesting things to bold face, like Lane Markers. Starting Blocks. Goggles. Sort of some random things seem to be boldfaced. I don’t think it works in this. I think it’s fine to sort of experiment with the form and bold face things that would not normally be boldfaced, but the choices he’s making here don’t seem to merit that.

Usually you’ll find in screenplays when boldfaced is used it’s because you got to really call out something to make sure that someone who is skimming does not miss this thing. Goggles does not deserve bold-facing, in my opinion.

**Craig:** I’m with you. In general if there are key props, I might put them in all caps. Boldface in action is for — I think I would probably just reserve it for some enormous reveal. Something that’s supposed to shock people. In dialogue, boldface always looks better onscreen, and then you print it out and you’re like, oh god. It just, you know, if I really need to emphasize something in dialogue, I’ll use italics or an underline, but almost never boldface.

**John:** A few other things that are just confusing for the read. Rondell Ri’chard wears a “sweet, baby blue sweatsuit.” I think it’s a “sweet baby blue sweatsuit.” I think it’s all one thing. Because breaking off that sweet just confusing the read.

In American English we put commas inside quotes, which is just how we do it here. If you’re British, don’t have to do that. But we do that here. So I see that on page two.

We tend to do uppercase for things like “the crowd cheers.” We tend to do uppercase for when we introduce groups of people as well. So like “the crowd.” It’s not the end of the world if you don’t do that, but just to know that it’s a convention.

And reaching back to our first Three Page Challenge, one of the arguments for those were not the first three pages is that the manager got uppercased but the other two guys walking in did not get uppercased. And they wouldn’t be uppercased if it was not their first scene. So that could be an argument that they actually had a scene before the three pages you sent through.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** I would use PA Announcer (OS) rather than (OC). OC is off-camera, OS is off-screen. I just don’t use OC really at all and I just don’t see it being used at all. Do you use OC?

**Craig:** No, I use OS.

**John:** OS. I think OC just has kind of gone away. I think OC would kind of make sense just in the sense of the character is just past the eye line. Like one character is talking to an off-camera character, but OS is general purpose and is better used here I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s not–

**John:** Not a big deal.

**Craig:** Not a big deal. But yeah, generally speaking I don’t see OC.

**John:** Last bit of grammar thing I’m going to point out. Page three, “We hear victorious shouts; YES, YES!” No. That’s not a semicolon. That’s a colon.

**Craig:** Sure is.

**John:** It is. Any time you use a semicolon your first question should be like is this really supposed to be a semicolon? And I would say 75% of the time the answer is no.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, basically unless you are using it to separate a series of items that include commas within the items, semicolons should be completely interchangeable with periods.

**John:** That is correct. So it’s a way of joining together two sentences that could exist separately but by fusing them together with a semicolon they ascribe meaning to each other, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah. The sentence, I guess second independent clause, is in some way explaining or illuminating the first.

**John:** Yeah. And just the nature of what screenplays are, we’re not going to use that a lot.

**Craig:** No. I don’t think I’ve ever used a semicolon in a screenplay.

**John:** I know I’ve used one or two, but it’s just for very random small things like that. All right, those are our Three Page Challenges. Thank you, guys, for sending them in. You guys are incredibly brave to share these with us. We pick them because they have valuable lessons for hopefully our listeners at home, so you guys are awesome for doing that.

If you have three pages you would like to send in to have us look at on the air, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s a little form. And you attach a PDF and you click a button and it gets whisked away to Megan’s special little inbox where she looks through all of the Three Page Challenges. She read like 40 yesterday to help pick these. She’ll be reading even more because we’re going to do a live Three Page Challenge in Austin. So if you have three pages you would like us to look at at the Austin Film Festival and you will actually be there, there is a special little checkbox to say I will be at the Austin Film Festival. And if we choose your three pages, we may invite you up to talk about your three pages so we can actually ask, “Hey, are these actually the first three pages” or “Hhat happens to these characters after page three?”

**Craig:** And we’re nice. We’re not mean. And we will also — by the time this episode airs, so you’re listening to this now, and the Austin Film Festival has put up their official schedule. So you will see on that official schedule that I am doing some events in addition to the Three Page Challenge, but most notably John and I will be doing another live show. This will be on Friday night at 9pm.

Last year we did it Friday night at 10pm which was amazing because everybody was kind of toasted and was a good, fun time. But this year they moved it up to nine because I guess, well, what they said was it’s overlapping with some parties. And I think we actually impacted the attendance of some parties because this was a very popular event. They put it in the big, big ballroom at the Driskill Hotel. It was a great time. So please do make that a part of your schedule.

We will show up slightly inebriated. It will be a fun time. Last year the format was stand up and ask us questions. Because that’s why you’re here. And we had a great, great group of people. We had Tess Morris. We had Malcolm Spellman. We had Katie Dippold. We had a great group of people. And I expect that this year we will have a similarly fantastic group of people. I think we’ll have Megan Amram and Scott Frank and Dana Fox, or somebody. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.

**John:** And you’ll have me. That will be a key change to the lineup, because I was not there last year. And there will probably be little bit more order. Just the nature of things.

**Craig:** There’s going to be an adult. It won’t be as much fun.

**John:** I’ll be the Ilana to your Abbi.

**Craig:** It will not be as much as last year, because dad will be there. But still it will be fun.

**John:** It should be a good time. All right, let’s get to one question here. This comes from Clive, which is apparently a fake name, in Los Angeles. He writes, “I have what is possibly the most boring question in the history of the show. What filing and or naming conventions do you use for your script files? And do you distinguish between drafts or major changes, polishes in your file names? I don’t mean for production revisions, but just for your own internal purposes. Also, how do you guys collate all your notes on a draft and file them so they make sense? I’ve been putting them in the same folder for whatever draft they were for, but it’s quickly become quite messy.”

Craig, I have known you for years, I have no idea how you number your files.

**Craig:** I’m pretty simple. The first draft is Draft 1. And then I work on that. And then when I send it in, I put the date in parenthesis along with the name, so then if there are some little notes before I’m sending in an official draft one, then it will Draft 1 with a new date. And then when the official one is designated, I’ll just say Official Draft 1. So, you know, I have multiple versions of it.

All the while, I’m generating PDFs, which I’m handing back and forth between myself and Jack Lesko, who is my editor. And so that’s roughly how I do it. And then I go to Draft 2. I don’t distinguish between drafts, polishes, rewrites. Everything is a draft. Draft 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Doesn’t matter to me. And in terms of notes, yeah, I mean, I don’t really write down a bunch of notes. I mean, they give you a bunch of notes, or in a meeting I’ll take notes of the notes. And then I just print it out and look at it.

But I don’t really collect the notes per se. I just do the thing. So I just have folders. You know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. That kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah. So on Dropbox, I have everything on Dropbox. I’ll have a folder for a project. So I’ll have a folder for Aladdin. In that folder I’ll have — once I start assembling a script, I’ll just give it a date. So whatever date I’m turning in that script — so whatever date I’m putting on the title page, that will be the number at the end of it. So it will say Aladdin 2.28.17, because I like dots in my dates, because I’m that guy. And that will be the draft.

And so that will the draft for both my Highland file and also for my PDF. I’ll use that same convention for numbering, for putting the date on things. And then everything for me is just the date on it. So the file just shows what the date would be on the title page of that script. I don’t say first draft, second draft, whatever draft. It’s just that–

**Craig:** Just the date.

**John:** Just the date.

**Craig:** I had to figure out a slightly new system because Chernobyl was in episodes. I’ve never written anything in episodes before. But I just made folders. Each episode got a folder. Episode One. Episode Two. And it worked out just fine.

It’s a little annoying, actually, because in movies we’re on the draft we’re on. So I just know like, OK, I’m on the second draft. I can live in that folder for a while and not have to worry about going in between folders. But to keep things neat for Chernobyl, I did divide it up by episode or else it would have gotten out of control.

And the other thing I do is when a movie goes into production, then there are other folders that get made. And then I’ll make a production draft folder. And that’s when you do get into your revisions and I’ll have a folder for casting, and a folder for storyboards, and a folder for this, and a folder for that.

**John:** Once we get into color revisions, then I will sort of label the script, like Blue Revisions, and stuff like that. Which is natural for this.

The other thing I’ll say is that there are going to be times where you’re cutting stuff out of your script, like there’s a scene that you want to hold on to that’s not part of it. What I used to do was create a separate scratch file of things that got cut out of it, so I could go back to those things if I needed them. In the new Highland, there’s bins. So there’s a place you can just drag stuff over and it will just keep it there. And so I just tend to use the bins that are sort of part of the file itself. And so I don’t ever lose those little pieces.

**Craig:** That’s smart. Yeah. In Fade In there is a function where you can also bin large chunks of stuff within the file without it showing. But I still will — just as force of habit, I’ll just make it, you know, cut–

**John:** Cut and paste. Yeah.

**Craig:** Command N for a new file. Paste. Save it as, you know, and just write a description of it. Maybe three or four times every project there will be three or four of those that get shoved off to the side.

**John:** Cool. All right, one of the most important questions of the history of Scriptnotes has been answered today.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. I’m going to cheat. The first is a book I am reading right now called Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. It’s delightful and it’s one of those rare cases where I’m trying to read the book before everybody else in the world has read the book because I usually read things like a year or two late, and all the conversation has past. So, there’s going to be Slate Book Club stuff talking about this book and so I wanted to read it now.

It’s quite good. She’s an Irish author. It revolves around two college students in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi with an I. It’s their relationship with a married couple named Melissa and Nick. It’s good and it reminds me so much of my early 20s and how obsessed I was about studying very tiny interactions and my paranoia of what people were doing around me and my social status. It’s a very well observed thing.

And your early 20s are a fascinating time. I think this author really nails it, so I would recommend that. I’m only halfway through, though, so maybe it completely falls apart at the end and I’ll retract my observation.

**Craig:** That would be awesome.

**John:** A thing I have watched to the end is a short called Meet Cute. It is written by Ben Smith. It is directed by Ben Smith and Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell. And just this past week it went up online. It’s delightful. So I will send you to IndieWire where you can watch it. It stars Jon Bass and Juno Temple. And I don’t want to spoil what happens in it, but you think you know what’s going to happen and something very different happens. So it’s a quite well done little short film. So I recommend you guys take a look.

**Craig:** Well, you did two, so I don’t have to do any. Phew.

**John:** Craig escapes once again.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send questions like the one we answered today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your little short questions on Twitter. So hit us up there. We are on Facebook. Just search for the Scriptnotes podcast. Megan actually kind of uses Facebook, so maybe she’ll answer questions there, too. Who knows?

You can find us Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. That’s also where you can leave a review for us. That’s always delightful. Helps people find the show.

Pretty soon we’re going to have actual information about who listens to episodes because they’re going to release all the download — beyond sort of downloads, they’ll have very specific granular information about who listens to shows all the way to the end. And we will know so much more about who tunes out halfway through the Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** That’s going to be awesome. I love it. We can call them up and let them know we know.

**John:** That would be Mike. Mike does not listen to the Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** I don’t think Melissa listens to any of these. You know what? Let’s find out. Let’s see if she does. Melissa, if you listen to the podcast, then I want you to say the word Umbrella to me really loudly and, if you do, I will do all of the laundry for a week.

**John:** That is a hell of a deal. That’s good. You’re betting on yourself, and that’s what I like.

**Craig:** I think I’m going to win.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges we just did. You’ll find transcripts. Within a week of the show airing we’ll have the transcripts up.

We have all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We used to have USB drives and we ran out of USB drives. We actually had to refund some money to people who bought USB drives and we didn’t have, so sorry about that. We’ve ordered more, but it could be a couple weeks before we get more of the first 300 episodes on USB drives. We’ll let you know when those are back available. But there will always be back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

And, just this last week I was at your party and I was talking to a young writer/director, a woman who has been a guest on the show before but I don’t want to spoil who she is at this moment, but she said that after being a guest on our show she paid for the premium subscription and has gone back and started listening to key episodes and she loves the back episodes.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So yet another person who is paying us $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** Paying you $1.99 a month.

**John:** Oh, me, us, it’s all the same.

**Craig:** No it’s not!

**John:** No it’s not.

**Craig:** I get nothing.

**John:** Craig, thanks for another fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Section of johnaugust.com](http://johnaugust.com/wga-board)
* [I’m Joining the WGA Board](http://johnaugust.com/2017/im-joining-the-wga-board)
* [CEO Mitch Lowe Pulls Back The Curtain On MoviePass And Explains Its Economics](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/09/18/ceo-mitch-lowe-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-moviepass-and-explains-its-economics/) from Forbes, by Rob Cain
* Three Pages by [Steven Wood](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Wood_3pgs.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Elizabeth Boston](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Boston_3pgs.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Dan Pavlik](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Pavlik_3pgs.pdf)
* [Submit](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) for the Three Page Challenge
* [Austin Film Festival 2017 Film Slate](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festival-and-conference-aff/festival/film-slate/)
* [Conversations with Friends](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451499050/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Sally Rooney
* [Meet Cute](http://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/juno-temple-jon-bass-meet-cute-short-film-1201878128/) – Short Film on Indiewire
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive) will be available again in a few days!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_319.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/writing-other-things).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 318 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we won’t be talking much about screenwriting at all. Instead, we’re going to be looking at writing books and songs and other things with some advice for collaborating with folks outside of our normal expertise. To help us do that we have Aline Brosh McKenna back to join us. Welcome Aline.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I am back in black.

**John:** So Aline Brosh McKenna is the Joan Rivers of our podcast in the sense that she is a frequent visitor, but also special in a way that Joan Rivers was special to us all.

**Craig:** Yep.

**Aline:** Everyone tells me that all the time.

**Craig:** All day long.

**John:** Before we get into the meat of the episode we have some reminders. Craig and I will be at the Austin Film Festival at the end of October. We’re going to be doing a live show. We’re also going to be doing a live Three Page Challenge. So for the Three Page Challenge we’re doing at Austin, we have a special little checkbox you can mark if you are submitting a script to the Three Page Challenge that says I will be at Austin and will be in the audience.

So if you’re going to go to Austin and you would like us to consider your Three Page Challenge, you need to go to johnaugust.com/threepage. Attach your script like normal, but then also check the little box that says I will be at the Austin Film Festival.

And so our producer, Megan, will be going through those scripts and picking some great ones for us to talk about live on stage and to invite those screenwriters up on stage with us to discuss what they wrote.

**Craig:** And we’re pretty nice to them. I mean, we don’t soft pedal anything when we do those in Austin. I don’t think we are any more or less discriminating about our comments, but I don’t want anyone to think that we beat you up or humiliate you in front of anyone. That’s never happened. We’re very nice.

**Aline:** Have any of those turned into movies or sold screenplays?

**John:** So, yes. Some of the Three Page Challenges we have looked at have sort of moved up through the ranks. I don’t know if anything has actually been produced yet, but they’ve placed well on Black List things. They’ve gotten people started. So, every once and awhile we’ll get — actually, the last episode somebody wrote in saying the three pages we looked at were instrumental in the rewrite and so therefore they were thanking us for helping out down the road.

**Aline:** And have you guys ever thought of sending in three pages of your own to see how it went?

**Craig:** We did it.

**John:** Craig and I on an early episode we took a look at our first scripts.

**Craig:** The very first ones.

**Aline:** But I mean sending it in randomly.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely. The other one wouldn’t know that it was one of us.

**Aline:** I think you should just to see if it made it past your producer.

**Craig:** I think they will. I think they will. Yeah. Not to put down our pool of applicants, but yeah, I think we would make it through. I got to be honest with you.

**Aline:** I just found an old script from 2000. I mean, I went into the garage and I looked at the titles on the side and I was like, oh my god, I forgot that one. But I found an unsold spec from 2000. And the first 15 pages I was like this is pretty cute, and then it was just shame spiral.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Have you gone back to redo any of your old scripts? Have you tried to dust anything off?

**Aline:** You know what? A producer called me like a couple months ago and wanted to some of my old stuff. So most of it wasn’t on a computer anywhere. So, I had to scan it. That was pretty funny. And it had my notes in it. And a couple of those were pretty good. Those were two that had sold and I don’t think he’s going to do anything with them, but you know when people ask me if I have anything, I point them towards things.

**John:** Well you were so busy writing new things, so tell us about the new things. First off, you have a new season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend happening.

**Aline:** Indeed.

**John:** This is season three. So when do we start to see the new episodes?

**Aline:** Friday, October 13. Friday the 13 we start airing.

**Craig:** Right around the corner.

**Aline:** So we’re midway through shooting the season and so I’m pretty tired. But yeah it’s exciting. I can make an announcement here.

**John:** We’re so excited.

**Craig:** Oh! God!

**Aline:** Your friend and our friend, John Gatins, is going to be appearing on our television program.

**John:** Is he playing a high school quarterback?

**Aline:** He is not. He is playing somebody really handsome and memorable. And someone sings a song about him.

**Craig:** Huh. OK.

**John:** That sounds great. So John Gatins was also in my movie The Nines. I don’t know if that was his last acting credit, but he’s a very talented screenwriter but also a person who can be put in front of a lens without breaking a camera.

**Aline:** Yes. He has another thing coming up that he’s acting in, but I’m not at liberty to disclose. But I think this is a burgeoning little area for him. I think we should all as we retire look towards these like cottage industries. This leads naturally to what we’re saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no surprise here. I mean, John Gatins is an A-list screenwriter who would at any given point swap out whatever he is working on as a screenwriter to do one day on a show with three lines. That’s a fact. He is a — I guess the most frustrated actor. He was an actor. He should have been an actor. He’s a pretty good actor, you know.

**Aline:** He still seems like a movie star.

**Craig:** He does. But the problem is he’s got skills. Like he’s got skills — his skill as a writer is extraordinary. His skill as an actor, forgive me John, is not extraordinary. It is good. But it’s not–

**Aline:** Well he was smart enough to figure that out.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. But, man, he’s got the bug. You can tell.

**John:** All right. So we have Aline here not to talk about John Gatins, but to talk about and really to plug her new project. So this is Jane. This is a graphic novel that is the retelling of the story of Jane Eyre. How did this come to be? So first off, we should say — full disclosure — this book is available today as this podcast comes out.

**Aline:** September 19.

**John:** That should be the day this episode drops.

**Aline:** Great.

**Craig:** Drops.

**John:** September 19, they’re buying your book. Everybody who is listening to this podcast should pause and buy the book and then listen to the rest of this podcast so we can talk about this book.

**Aline:** Yes please.

**John:** What is it and how did it come to be?

**Aline:** So about six years ago I signed on to adapt a graphic novel called Rust, which I loved, which was published by a company named Archaia. And in adapting that graphic novel I kind of fell in love with graphic novels in general and started just devouring them. And I got infatuated with this artist named Ramón Pérez who did a book called Tale of Sand. And I had had an idea that I thought could be a movie but wasn’t necessarily a movie. And so I started talking to the folks at Archaia, including Stephen Christy who now runs their — Archaia was later bought by BOOM! And Stephen runs BOOM!’s movie department.

So I started talking to them about doing a book. And I really wanted to do it with Ramón. And I was always obsessed with the Bronte sisters’ novels as a kid, particularly Jane Eyre. And what I loved about Jane Eyre was the kind of sensual relationship that the books kind of in three parts, her growing up, her being with Rochester, and after Rochester. And I was always kind of infatuated with — and would go back and reread the Rochester section.

And I realized that was sort of my love template was the sort of remote kind of emotionally constipated difficult dark man. Love stories that I like. I think people who like Wuthering Heights are more into those stories where the love interest is like your sibling, like twinning. But I was always interested in men who were very other.

So I always wanted to do kind of an updated version of that. So I pitched that to Archaia and we got Ramón on board. And then–

**John:** Can I stop you for a second?

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** To talk about what a pitch is like to a comic book or a graphic novel house. So, how are you describing it? Was it sort of like going on a movie pitch? This is what it’s going to be and these are the beats of the story? What were you describing it as?

**Aline:** I don’t know if I can have the most representative experience, because I was working with Stephen and Archaia every single day. So Steve and I talked about it a ton and I wrote an outline for it and I gave it to him. Maybe I wrote like a five or ten-page outline that I gave to him. But, we were sort of dying to work together, so it was like — I think I had less of a screening process than you might normally have.

I will say that every single piece of it took forever. Sending in the outline. Them deciding to do the book. Finding Ramón. Getting Ramón. Making Ramón’s deal. Then waiting for him to be available, because he’s like one of the premier comic book illustrators and he’s always booked back to back to back.

So we had to wait for him, so in the meanwhile what we did was Ramón did a first series of drawings. And basically the book is like the sensual part of Jane Eyre, the Rochester part, in contemporary New York. And it’s a young girl who goes to be a nanny for a rich powerful man who is sort of Bruce Wayne like and gets pulled into his world. And at first it was going to be a little bit more genre spy and have more action in it. And so as we started working on it we thought, hey, this could be a movie. And so we sold it to Fox 2000 with Kinberg attached to produce it five years ago.

**John:** This is Simon Kinberg?

**Aline:** Simon Kinberg, yeah. So Simon Kinberg and Genre, his company, we pitched it around. Fox 2000 was the one who bought it. And I worked on it as a screenplay for maybe two years. And I had many different versions of it. As a movie, it was very hard to crack because as you guys know when you put any action intrigue thriller stuff into your script, it’s one of those things, it’s like dropping a tiny spore in a glass and then you come back a couple days later and it’s just covered in mold. Any little bit of action or intrigue that you build to — that you put in the beginning of a script really has to lead to something kind of monumental.

And that collision of that genre with the romance was always very difficult to calibrate. And at some point it seemed like the studio was looking for really just an updated version of Jane Eyre and I had wanted to add this overlay of kind of intrigue and corporate plotting. So, I developed it with them for a couple years. They had an option on the book. And then they fell out of option. And so Ramón and I started working on the book with three or four different drafts that I had written for Fox 2000, all of which were a little bit different.

**John:** So, to back up here, you have this idea for a book.

**Aline:** Yes.

**John:** And you make the deal for the book. But before you actually write the book you’re selling the rights to Fox 2000 and developing the screenplay and there’s still no book?

**Aline:** No, my god, we’re so far from a book. So we had sample drawings that I brought around with me and I met with everybody. And it’s actually, as you know, great to walk in holding something. So I had these beautiful drawings from Ramón. And so that was part of the sales pitch of it. And in working on the screenplay was sort of developing the book at the same time. And I was waiting for Ramón to be ready, also.

And so there was no book for a really long time and I think the studio started to believe there never was going to be a book. And I have never waited for a man more than I have waited for Ramón. I mean, I was like metaphorically waiting outside his doorstep for a very long time. And then he — when he finally turned his attention to it we kind of sat down, looked to what I had done with the screenplay, and then kind of formulated a story which was actually quite different from the screenplays. Because I had become convinced overtime that the kind of Hitchcocky plot needed to be very streamlined. And it could for a book.

And that’s what was great was like for a movie, especially in the moment that we’re in right now, you can’t really have — I mean, if you look at a lot of the Hitchcock movies they crescendo to a moment of great tension, but not action and not things blowing up, and not nuclear briefcases. And maybe you guys can think of one, but I can’t really think of a movie that has that sort of like Hitchcockian thriller thing but doesn’t build to a big genre — doesn’t then owe a third act where people are shooting each other in armor tanks.

**Craig:** Well, Get Out sort of I think is a kind of neo-Hitchcock kind of thing.

**Aline:** Yeah, horror. But that really is like, yeah for sure. And horror is definitely — like Get Out is horror but not very gory. But it’s a little bit more in the world of jump scares and Jane is a little bit more in the world of like Rebecca.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**Aline:** Where it’s a romantic drama with thriller elements — suspicion, those kinds of things.

**John:** What you’re describing sounds more like what we do in television now, or what you do on limited run television, like a Netflix show can have that sustained build but doesn’t have the expectation of giant set pieces all the time.

**Aline:** Right. And so as a movie I started to understand why they were nervous about it and what was good about that was having explored that then when we got a chance to go full boar on the book we just were able to throw that aside and really go for the simplicity of the romance. There is an intrigue plot and there is a big twist in the book that I came up with after I saw the first schematic that Ramón did.

Ramón did a book that had partly finished art and then partly kind of sketches. And it’s really beautiful. I have it in my house. It’s gorgeous.

**John:** So, Aline, what were you actually writing? What was the document that you created that then Ramón would use as he went off to do art? Like what were you handing him?

**Aline:** Well, in our case because we had so many scripts we kind of started with that. And then he would do like a sketch book that was sort of taking certain bits and pieces of it and then I would respond to him with notes about the story. And then we had a couple of meetings where we went through and at that point you’re kind of — you’re kind of outside of text in a way because you’re in — you’re just in pictures, so you’re kind of making a silent movie in a way, like Ramón is.

You know, he’s really looking to boil down the pictures and it takes a while before you get back to the dialogue part. Because we were just talking about kind of purely visual storytelling. And this was — a lot of the stuff I did before I was working on the TV show. And a lot of what was driving me was before I did the TV show, I think I’ve talked about this here, I had really reached a point with movies where answering to directors is really challenging, especially when you’ve been doing it for twenty some years, and not having control over your finished product. Whether you love the director or don’t like the director, at the end of the day not having final say gets to be excruciating.

And so the book was someplace where Ramón and I were collaborating but his skills are different from mine. But I had final say over the story, so it was kind of like directing in a sense. But like sitting with your DP and they’re coming up with amazing visuals to translate the story. So there was a whole period time where it was really just pictures that were going back and forth. And I would look at the sequence.

And so because Ramón is so busy and because we had taken so long, Ramón finally gave me a pass that had all the images in it and kind of temped dialogue, you know, which you can imagine what that’s like. It was sort of temp dialogue. Some of which had been in the screenplay, but not a lot of it. Some from the beginning had. But then a bunch of it was just like stuff that had been slugged in there to kind of reflect what was happening.

So then I did two or three giant passes where I went through the book and I did dialogue. And what was funny is no one ever gave me a script. I kept asking them, “do you have all of the dialogue in one editable document?” And I probably could have had somebody do it. Instead, what I did was I kind of drew pictures and wrote notes and scribbled on it and drew bubbles. And so we ended up doing that all the way through two or three times to make sure that all the dialogue matched the action. And then there’s a little bit of, you know, at a certain point when we had this deadline Ramón had drawn some things and I wanted to tweak the story a little bit, but the art was already done. So it reminded me a lot of editing where you just got what you got, and then you’ve got to make it make sense, which is always kind of fun and challenging.

So we did a lot of passes through the dialogue once the images were all in there. And he’s very innovative in terms of the way he chooses to tell story. And it’s way, way sparer than a movie is. And there is some voiceover in there. You know, at the end really scrambling and getting drafts back was really fun, and the letterer is incredibly talented. It’s very beautiful. And the woman who did the color with Ramon is very talented. I can give you their names and their Twitter handles.

And so he’s a true artist in a sense that — as writers and directors like, yeah, you know, he’s an artist, she’s an artist. Meh. But like an artist-artist that you think of as a kid. You know, like somebody who picks up pen and ink and makes art. I think he’s a magician.

**John:** Let’s talk about your use of time. Because this was five years of your life. And so it wasn’t continuous, but it was a lot of your time. And every time there was a new draft there was more stuff to do. And I don’t know the economics of all it, but I’m 90% sure that this was not profitable to you in any useful way.

**Aline:** It was not, no.

**John:** But so why do it? Why — was it worth it?

**Aline:** I really wanted to have a finished product that I could hold in my hand that was mine. As I was saying, I just had had a lot of experiences with movies where I could kind of see my work in the movie if I squinted my eyes and didn’t look too closely and it had been changed so much by the time the movie got made and that’s a tough thing. So I really wanted to do something that I could have the final say over.

And then the other element of it was I always thought I was going to be a novelist as a kid. At a certain point it became clear to me that I was not really like a prose person, like a person who lives to sort of polish prose. And I remember being at a point thinking, god, what am I going to do if I want to be a writer but I’m not like somebody who wants to describe a forest for half a page.

So when I found graphic novels it was kind of similar to when I discovered movies. I mean, obviously I knew movies existed. But when I started looking at them as something I could do, it’s a format I really love because it’s also visual storytelling. But you don’t have to have a director tell you you can’t do what you want.

**John:** It sounds like you made it through the whole process without ever sort of hitting a graphic novel or comic book script. Because there is–

**Aline:** There is a more official format for graphic novels and I’m sure you can find samples of it. And they look like treatments and they’re very dense treatments and they’re like for a whole book they’re probably 60 pages. But because I had written multiple versions of the script we kind of started in conversation about that. And the other thing was it gave Ramón a lot more leeway.

And because I hadn’t written a lot of graphic novels, I wasn’t like panel six is this, panel nine is that, panel 12 is this. And I don’t think he would have enjoyed that. I think one of the reasons that he wanted to work with me was because there was a lot of room for him to invent in the storytelling and sort of come up with visual ways to translate the story beats.

**John:** Craig, you know, you’re going off now to do your TV show for HBO, and is there any part of your experience that is similar to Aline’s in the sense of like you want to do something that is actually just yours, that’s new territory? It’s not something that you’ve done before?

**Craig:** Well I suppose I would say that foolishly every time I start anything I think of it as mine. The difference here is that it’ll stay mine. And in movies they take it away. So, I just never learned the lesson. I don’t know how else really to write anything anyway unless I just think, well, this is mine. It’ll be mine as long as it’s mine.

But I think the major difference is going to come down the line. I mean, I have had the experience a number of times in movies where I have not worked like a typical screenwriter. You and I have talked about the Screenwriter Plus. So, I end up in editing rooms. And I end up in lots of meetings and talking about budget and planning and all the rest of it. So, I’ve had the experience there, but ultimately in film, yeah, at some point–

**Aline:** Yeah, I have, too. And I know John has, too. But when you’re in a room and you know somebody else can — you know, ultimately someone else has final say, you will really enjoy being in a situation where you’re the commander of the writing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I’m definitely the commander of the writing. There’s no question about that. And I think the good news is that our little family that we’re putting together is pretty great. And we’re all very respectful of each other and I think we all want to hear from each other. And so I’m not really actually dwelling that much, frankly, on the specifics of the authority fact, you know? I’m just kind of going about trying to make the best thing I can with these people.

**John:** I got to visit Aline on set this season to watch them filming a musical number, which was fantastic. And there’s still glitter that I find in my shoes. And one of the things that really impressed me about it is you had sort of a quiet authority as we were sort of sitting in video village watching things. And you would sort of ask me a question or you would sort of make an observation and the director, you were totally respectful to the director and to the choreographer and to Rachel who is doing stuff, but you were mindful of things that they might not otherwise have seen.

And I think that can be a crucial role for a writer on any set, but particularly when it’s your thing. You have a vision of what the overall thing is you’re trying to achieve. I didn’t hear you saying do this, don’t do this, but you were sort of reminding people of what your priorities were.

**Aline:** The three of us have often talked about how strange it is that there isn’t an onset writer on every project. Because we know the story. We’ve imagined the world before anyone else. So the only reason to cast that person aside is an ego reason. I can’t see any other reason to do it. And the directors that I worked with that welcomed me into the process where I was that Screenwriter Plus were the most confident ones.

So, you know, and a TV show, it emanates from the writing. And that is a cultural — I actually found as a screenwriter I thought a lot more about, hey, how can I get my point across in a tactful way? And in TV you don’t really need to. You just are the person that they’ll go to to ask which pants should they be wearing and what source music should be playing. And what color should this character’s hair be? And you know all those things.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the weirdness of the delineation in movies is such that they think that the writer is just responsible for whatever they consider to be writing. But the problem is what they consider to be writing is a very narrow view. It’s certainly an incomplete view. And in television, somehow magically, they all understand that writing encompasses everything. We don’t go into these things not thinking about all of this stuff. It is a bizarre business we work in because I think that for everybody else it comes down to questions of title.

Literally. I don’t know why they are so sheep-like in their need for titles and authority that is rigidly defined by titles. But it is why when you are making a television show if you’re the head person on that television show, you need to be called Executive Producer. That’s it. If you’re not, you’re not. Because they need it. It’s the weirdest thing.

And really it should just be writer like in charge.

**Aline:** Well, because it’s a military operation, you know. It is. And so in those situations they need to know and it really is for practical purposes. You know, on our show from the beginning Rachel and I and Erin Ehrlich, we had three executive producers, but I’m the showrunner which is an extra designation. And you need to have that also because if there’s multiple executive producers, really for all practical purposes, the people on the crew need to know who they can go to to get the fastest answer that won’t change. Because you waste money and time if you’re going to this person and then they change and then it changes and then it changes.

So, having one person who is answering that shirt should be blue; the watch should be black. He should have blond hair. You want to make that one person for practical purposes as much as anything else. And in television that’s the writer.

**Craig:** Yep.

**Aline:** And, you know, I just wanted to say movies are in a desperate place creatively right now. I mean, I’ve left my house to go to the movies I think four times this year. And I think one of them is Get Out. We’ve all seen Get Out. Kind of a cut above. And TV is so good right now because it belongs to writers. It’s run by writers. I firmly believe that. And through whatever accident of circumstance made that happen, I’m really hoping that the movie business learns from like if you let the people who create the stories manage the stories, your stuff will be better.

**Craig:** Although, I have to say if you look at the historical context of these things, you could also point to the ‘70s and say that in the ‘70s, at the height of auteurism, movies were vastly superior to television. There was still the same delineation. The directors were in charge of movies. Writers were in charge of television. And an enormous amount of television was horrendous. Nothing like what it is now.

It seems to me that one of the keys to all of this is what’s happening on the other side of the creative line between us — all of us, directors and writers — and the companies that are asking us to make things. In television right now, because of the multiplicity of formats and the delivery system, I think that the people on the other side are adventuresome and also craving content. They are content hungry. Which means people are getting a chance to try things. And on the movie side, on the other side of this line, the people making movies are frightened. They are very restricted in how much content they want. And they are very limited in the kind of content that they’re willing to pay for.

So, all of that is a squeeze down. It is tempting to say, well, if we put the writers in charge, as opposed to putting the directors in charge, everything would change in film. I think it’s just as easy for people to point to this weekend with It and say, well, there is a director who is in charge and a different person who wrote the script.

Mostly I wish I could just say to the people running the movie studios, the movie parts, the feature parts, that writers don’t need to be in charge of movies any more than directors need to be in charge of movies. Writers and directors together should be in charge of movies. At any given moment on a set, if they decide that the director needs to have the ultimate authority there in that moment. That’s fine. But it’s the philosophy of auteurism that’s the stupidest thing and I think does rot away at a lot of what would have been otherwise been good films.

**John:** I can definitely see that. And circling back to what Aline was saying about sort of having to have one person in charge, having a militaristic operation, I think the reason why we get to that point is that the stakes are so high. Time is limited. Money is limited. Someone has to make those decisions and there’s all this pressure on it. And I wonder if part of the reason why you wanted to go off and do this graphic novel is because there was no pressure. There were not stakes. It was just basically — for you it was kind of a lark. And if it turned out great, fantastic. If it didn’t turn out great, there’s no skin off your back.

And to me like the Big Fish musical was to some degree that, at least in the early stages. Once it became — we were headed to Broadway, then the stakes were incredibly high. But for years as we were developing that show, the stakes were just like, well, we wrote a song. Like we made a thing. That song was delightful. And it’s a thing that didn’t exist otherwise.

Some of the stuff I do with apps is a similar kind of thing where the stakes just aren’t as high. I don’t have to get somebody’s permission.

**Aline:** And also you get to derive that beginning, middle, and end of a process of a product, of having something you can hold in your hand. And, you know, the writer girl that I was at 12 years old would be super thrilled to see this graphic novel about Jane Eyre. And rather quite confused by the giant pile of unproduced scripts in my garage. So, you know, you don’t set out to generate a bunch of printed out pieces of paper. You generate to make things. And I think now more than ever people want to make things. And screenwriters who are in a more frustrating circumstance, kind of everyone I know is making some thing.

**John:** Yeah. We always talk to these aspiring writers who say like, oh, it’s so frustrating as I do these things, and we always try to remind them unlike an actor or unlike a director a writer can just go off and write something, which is fantastic. But I think sometimes we forget that lesson ourselves is that we end up sort of seeking permission to write the things or we might go off and spec our own thing down the road, but usually we’re busy enough writing the stuff for the studios and we’re sort of in that grind.

**Aline:** But Craig, same thing for you. Or Chernobyl was like, yeah, I’ll do this. And it was sort of a sideline during many years of doing busy screenwriting stuff.

**Craig:** No, no, not really.

**Aline:** No?

**Craig:** No.

**Aline:** I mean, not on a sideline, but it’s certainly not making you as much money as the other stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, no, financially it’s nothing at all like that. No. There’s no question about that. But the amount of time that I have devoted to it and the amount of time I’m going to devote to it will probably make it the thing that I have worked the longest and hardest on, actually. I mean, because it’s five scripts. They’re each 60 — well, the last one is a little bit longer. So, think of it as like basically three movies. So it’s three movies worth of scripts and then there’s, you know, all of the prep and then the production and the post. It’s going to be a lot. And then just an enormous amount of research, also.

The nice thing about writing some kinds of movies, and I did about two weeks of research for Identity Thief. You know, I’ve done years of research for this. So, no, this is a pretty serious endeavor for me.

**Aline:** Can I say you have one of the most eclectic, delightfully eclectic filmographies of anyone I know.

**Craig:** It’s about to get more. I’m about to achieve levels of, yeah, strange eclecticism. No one would…

**Aline:** IMDb head scratcher.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s great.

**Aline:** Oh, I think it’s great, too. I mean, listen, a lot of the writers and directors that we love from like the ‘30s and ‘40s in particular, it’s like they did everything. They made every kind of movie. George Cukor. They made every kind of movie. William Wyler.

**John:** As I always say in interviews, my favorite genre of movies are movies that get made. So I will happily write anything that can possibly exist.

**Craig:** Pretty much. But I think that there is a nice thing that does happen after a while. If you do spend a lot of time doing what you are asked to do, and what you’re being paid well to do, then eventually you do arrive at a moment where you have the luxury of saying I’m going to spend a lot of time now on something that I’m not going to make a lot of money on, but I just care about. I couldn’t have done that before. I just, you know, this is where when people do talk a little bit about the economic realities of starting out in Hollywood now, I am incredibly sympathetic to people who are like, look, this whole business now seems to be designed to be a place where independently wealthy children can begin to work. Because–

**Aline:** Boy, I really agree with that.

**Craig:** You know, I couldn’t have done — I had nothing. I don’t think any of us came here with a big bunch of money. And so, you know, I’m certainly grateful to all — I think all of the things that you do prior to something were necessary for one reason or another to get you to what you’re doing at this moment, just as whatever you do now will be necessary for what comes next.

**John:** Yep. So one of the things I did this last year was just a lark. And so a friend of mine, Sam Davis, was the dance arrangement composer for Big Fish. And so he’s one of these people who can hear a melody and then make it a thousand different versions which is what you have to do for a Broadway musical because you have to be able to fit things to the choreography. It’s a really unique skill and he’s just remarkably good at it.

But he’s also a composer himself. And so I was having lunch with him and I said like, you know, Sam, we should just try to write a song together sometime. That would be really fun to do. And it wasn’t to like be part of anything else, it was just to have something to do.

So he sent me a folder on Dropbox with a bunch of little things he’d written, and just little snippets of melodies. And so if there’s anything here you want to do, take a shot at it. And so this last year I did that.

And so I want to talk through sort of this project I did, and you guys both heard the final version of this, but I don’t think you’ve heard any of how this all came to be. So, I’m going to play a couple little clips to hear what the original stuff sounded like.

So, this is what Sam originally sent me.

[Clip plays]

So that was the original melody he sent me. It’s a waltz. It’s lovely. It feels very emotional, but as I listened to that I felt like, oh, there’s words that can go with those plunking. Does that — Aline, you’re writing songs all the time now. Could you hear where words could go?

**Aline:** No. My version of songwriting is I get in the room with songwriters and I throw out a bunch of lines and I hope some of them get in so I can get five or ten percent of the songwriting. But I am no more capable of hearing a melody and writing words to it than a child.

**John:** Craig, you’ve done quite a bit of this recently, too. So, do you hear–?

**Craig:** Yeah, with Jeanine Tesori, the great, great, great Jeanine Tesori. Yeah, no, for sure. Well, it sounds like he’s not just playing an accompaniment there. He is giving you the melody. He’s giving you the vocals, which is actually a remarkable thing that these people — these musicians — can do.

So, you know, when you sing a song you would never play the melody along with the vocalist, right? You’re accompanying them. But they can just sort of adjust to play it. So, [hums], you can just hear it coming out. And you can hear the way the sentences would be structured. And then the little sort of wistful part as it kind of comes down and hits that funky little minor thing. Yeah. No for sure. It’s begging for it.

**John:** It’s begging for it. So, what I heard in that main melody was “I want … I want…” And so it felt like an I Want song to me. And so that was my sort of initial instinct is that this feels like it wants to be an I Want song. It probably needs to speed up a little bit, because it’s a little slow for an I Want song. But imagine the faster version of this. Like, OK, “I want … I want bop-bop-bop-bop.” And so like, well, I started with I Want and who is the character who wants something? What do I want to do?

So, a thing which occurred to me as we were auditioning people for Big Fish is that there aren’t a lot of great I Want songs for boys. In the Disney canon you have all the princess I Want songs, so you have “Part of Your World” and that aspirational kind of I Want song is really common for women, but not for boys. So, like, well I want the song with which a guy will audition for a prince role, for prince charming, in a Broadway show.

And so that was my inspiration. And so I said like, OK, well, what is that character — what does the prince — the aspirational prince kind of character like? And so I wrote out all the lyrics and sort of tried to match them to the melody, including a lot of stuff that wasn’t part of that main melody line. So I just had sort of blank stanzas to sort of get us up before we got to that melody.

And so I’ll talk through the next part of that. So I sent this long document through to Sam and he’s like I don’t know what to do with this. I can see where the chorus is, but I don’t know what to do with this. So the next thing I sent through is what I call the Snap Track. And so I just snapped along to the words to sort of give him a sense of like what the meter of it would be. So, we’ll take a listen to that.

[Clip plays — But at night I have dreams that seem more like a calling. Where this lonely apprentice can end this appalling excuse for a nothing life, common life, lesser life, not a life. I want to live. But dreams are for night, and nights are not long when you wake to bake before dawn].

So with that I wanted to give a sense that like, OK, there’s some triplets in there–

**Aline:** Wake to bake? Oh why, because it’s a baker? Got it. Got it. Because I only think of pot when you say that. Keep going. Ignore me.

**John:** So I wanted to be able to communicate to him like, OK, there’s triplets here, but we’re still sticking in three. But I didn’t want to sort of poison him with the music I heard in my head, because I definitely had my own melody, but I didn’t want that melody to bleed over to him. So that’s why I kept it snapping.

Craig, you probably — when you’re working with Jeanine, do you have that same situation?

**Craig:** We did a slightly different kind of thing. The basic way we would start is we would have a long discussion about what we wanted a song to be about. And we were working off of a script I had already written. So we had characters. We had situations. We had the general sense of it, but then we were like, OK, but let’s get to the meat of what this is really about and how this is going to work, particularly because two of the three songs we did are duets.

After we figure out what the song is really about, then I thought what would happen is Jeanine, being the Tony award-winning composer that she is, would write some brilliant music and then I would attempt to just clumsily put words in. But she was like, no, you send me words first. So I would write these poems.

Now, I have no melody or music, but I would kind of form a little bit of a melody in my head, but I would never sing it or anything like that for the same reason that you wouldn’t do it either. You don’t want to unduly get into the head of your composer.

So, I would write these poems basically, lyrical poems out of what the song would be, and then she would read those and then she would then send over kind of like a here’s a thing. And then she would fill in nonsense lyrics sometimes. You know, and da-da-das and just whatever. Just fake words and things like that.

And then by going back and forth, we would find the shape of the song, the A, and the B, and the C. And then I would start really dialing in on the lyrics. But sometimes I would write lyrics and I would send them to her and she’s like I don’t know if this fits. And I would say it does. Let me send it with stress. And so I wouldn’t do the snap thing. What I would do is I would just underline where the stresses were of the words on the beats and stuff. And then she would go, OK, I got it, I got it, I got.

Because sometimes it would get kind of complicated. You know, what we were doing. And she’s very — and thank god for this — she is a stickler about consistency and true rhyming. She’s like no half-rhymes, no slant rhymes. Full rhymes. And if you pull some sort of wordplay in the first verse, I want a similar version of that wordplay with new words in the second verse. She’s rough. But it forced me, it really forced me to concentrate and work as hard as I could to try and machine these things so that they’re nice and tight.

I loved it. I just loved the process of it.

**John:** I loved this process, too. What was so different about this than any of the stuff I did with Danny Elfman, because I have like seven songs with Danny Elfman, is in all those cases I wrote lyrics and they were in the script and then they went off and Danny just made the song. And so in some cases he would tweak the lyrics. In some cases he sort of left the lyrics as they were. But there was very little collaboration between us.

Like, you know, we might have a dinner where we talk over what the songs were basically about, but there was no sort of direct working together.

**Aline:** I think our show is different, because there are jokes, there are sketches. So a lot of the songs I have credit on were things where I came up with the joke and the title and a couple lines. So like the concept of it and sort of — but one time there’s a song in last season where I said to Rachel and Jack, oh, they could sing a song called something like “we should definitely not have sex right now.” I went to the bathroom, I went to get something to eat, I came back and they had written almost all of the song. That’s usually more of what happens.

And then when I hear it I’ll contribute some jokes. But I would never — I mean, with comedy songs it’s really — they’re very, very conceptual. They’re like sketches. And they have to have very clean games.

So, I don’t actually — I rarely set lyrics down to paper and send it to them.

**John:** But a crucial part of your process though is the demo. So once you have the idea of the song, you have to record a demo so that everyone can sort of sign off on it and so people can plan how they’re going to build the episode.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** So what is the demo process like for–?

**Aline:** Adam, Jack, and Rachel, who are the songwriters, often sing their own demos into an iPhone. And then they send them to Adam, and Adam turns them into real demos with demo singers or often Adam. And what I love is Adam was in Fountains of Wayne, so we have numerous, numerous, numerous Adam demos for like Adam singing “Where’s the Bathroom?” which is a Tovah Feldshuh song, and Adam singing Rachel’s songs. And Adam singing everybody’s songs if he can’t get a demo singer in and we’re going really quickly.

And then we listen to the demos and I give notes on the demos. And a lot of times, you guys are more kind of it sounds like immersed in the technical. I refer to it as “I’m the monkey” and it has to make sense to the monkey. Because they’re much more steeped in music, so sometimes the jokes are abstruse or the lyrics are confusing. Or it needs to make sense to me. And then a lot of times my notes are like this needs to be a little bit more visceral, or this needs to be more joyful. Or its adjectival input.

**John:** Well that goes back to sort of what your discussion was with the artist for Jane, because you’re not drawing yourself. So you have to find a way — metaphors or similes to describe what it is you’re going for, because you don’t want to tell them how to do his job. It’s the same working with a composer. You find you end up describing a tone, a feeling. It’s in this world rather than that world.

**Aline:** Well, that’s actually a great thing for all writers to learn. It’s going to be applicable to what Craig is about to do. You know, I have multiple department heads. You have to describe what you want to someone and you don’t do what they do. So, you are going to say to the costume person, you know, we need something that looks like this, that evokes this. And they’re going to come back to you with choices. And part of being a good collaborator is letting people do what they’re great at and understanding what they’re great at. And sometimes when we have directors show up on our show, it makes me giggly that they get super camera talkie and they want to talk a lot about–

**John:** The crane?

**Aline:** Yes. And technical stuff. And that’s important and that’s wonderful. And I’m going to say that men do that a little bit more, because they want to show you that they know their lenses. It’s as important to be able to express what you’re trying to get emotionally and what’s the story you’re trying to tell. And that’s the same with songs and that’s the same with the book. That’s the same with, you know, if you’re trying to get a story across, it matters what color the mug is. But you don’t need to choose the mug. You need to be able to extract the salient detail and say to the person who is the artisan to say it’s important to me that it’s this.

And I think it’s good to collaborate on things that get made so that you have practice. So even if that’s just taking your iPhone and going to the yard with your friend and figuring out this needs to be blue. It doesn’t matter what color this is, but this needs to be that. And that’s really the key to — because a lot of what drowns artistic endeavors is unnecessary amounts of — confusing amounts of detail. So, you know, learning how to be really specific about what you want out of any process, a song, a book, a movie, a play, a bedtime story, is important. And learning how to communicate that is really important for writers.

**John:** Yeah. So for the case of this song, the case for “Rise,” what was great is we were able to finally record a real good true demo. So we got in–

**Aline:** When did you get the rise-rise pun baking idea?

**John:** Oh, the rise-rise pun came pretty early on. Actually–

**Aline:** How did it come to mind?

**John:** So I envisioned that this guy was a baker. So this kid was–

**Aline:** Why?

**John:** I’m not quite sure why baker was the initial sort of instinct behind it. So, I did envision like this is a guy who was toiling, but had sort of this fantastical notion of what it would be like to be a prince. And, again, you don’t see people aspiring to be princes. And this is about what it would be like to aspire to be a prince.

So, I saw him as like — I think originally he worked as a blacksmith, but then a baker felt better. And once I was in baker, then it’s like “Rise” became natural. And “Rise” felt like a very sing-able word for where he was going to.

**Aline:** Are you writing a play to go with this?

**John:** So I could write a play to go with this. And that’s what’s actually so interesting, so once we got the whole song together and once we recorded a demo, so we recorded a demo with a great Broadway guy named Curt Hansen who is in Wicked and could really do it. Like it was so surprising to hear the song. We only heard ourselves singing it poorly and like the aspirational notes we couldn’t quite get to, and this guy could actually belt it and sort of do the real good version of it.

Once we actually had it, then we had our sheet music, this is from the baker prince. So, eventually somewhere down the road it could become a thing, but I also just want it to be its own thing. I want it to have sort of value in and of itself. It’s a kind of song that people can download and sing or use for auditions. It felt good on those terms, too.

**Aline:** Can I ask you a question which I may already know the answer to and you can cut this out, but it is a same-sex love story thing possibly?

**John:** Not intended to be.

**Aline:** Because there’s not enough of those. There’s not enough of those that are in the genre of like longing wish-fulfillment romance. There seems to be more that are tragic, you know, tragic stories. And I think it would be awesome to have more fairytales about that.

One of my best friend’s husband is the same-sex Pasodoble Gay Games national champion.

**John:** Fantastic, yes.

**Aline:** And I’m waiting eagerly for the day that they have same-sex ballroom dancing on Dancing with the Stars. But having same-sex narratives in more kind of traditional “straight” genres I think is a great thing. And if that’s what that was, I’ve already bought my ticket.

**John:** Yeah. I think you and Craig both asked that question when I sent you the song months ago is like, oh, is this where it’s going to go to? And Rachel I think sort of fell in the same place, too.

**Aline:** Were we all stereotyping?

**Craig:** I think inside John’s — he goes, oh, yeah, you all thought that’s where this was going.

**Aline:** But I think, by the way, I think that could be a very important and compelling thing.

**Craig:** You know what? Here’s the thing. I don’t like those stories that much. I’m just going to say, because I haven’t had any–

**Aline:** Fairytale love stories?

**Craig:** I just find them so boring and cliché at this point. Now, granted, I’m older now. So children really do like them. But I like the tragic crazy stories. You know what’s a great song, to give Jeanine Tesori some credit, but she gets plenty of anyway, she’s a genius, is “I’m Changing my Major to Joan” from Fun Home.

**Aline:** Of course.

**Craig:** Which is a great same-sex love song that isn’t tragic. It’s joyous. But it’s not–

**Aline:** Well, “Keys,” forget it. “Keys.”

**Craig:** Well, “Keys,” that’s not a love song as much as like an aspirational kid seeing acceptance. But also an amazing song. But I don’t, like I don’t necessarily–

**Aline:** But I’m saying Frozen, Tangled, you know, I’m saying a fairytale. It’s just a genre that — one of the reasons you may perceive it as being a little tired is because it’s inhabited by the same types of characters all the time.

**John:** I think my other frustration, so people should go back and listen to our great episode with Jennifer Lee talking about Frozen because there was always such an instinct originally in Frozen that we have to have sort of classic love interests and Elsa has to be a villain and all these things. And once they actually figured out like, oh, it’s about sisters. Oh, they could actually build the whole thing out.

To me, it’s that we never see princess romances from the boy’s point of view. It’s always from the girl’s point of view.

**Aline:** Totally.

**John:** And so even if it remains sort of–

**Aline:** Hetero.

**John:** Mixed sex, hetero, then to see it from his point of view and sort of what it’s like — we don’t give young men good instruction on how to be noble heroes towards women.

**Aline:** Well, like the boy Cinderella stories tend to have a lot more genre, Harry Potter, Star Wars stuff going on, as opposed to romantic stakes.

**Craig:** But there are some. I mean, “Agony” is a great, great song written from the point of view.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But it’s also a satire. It’s kind of making fun of those songs.

**John:** It’s spoofing the idea of those things. Yeah.

**Craig:** Right. It’s true. I think in the old days, in the old classic musicals you would have songs where men would sing these sort of moony love songs.

**John:** Oh, absolutely.

**Aline:** Well, Aladdin is–

**John:** “A Whole New World,” yes.

**Aline:** Right. But they tend to be a little bit more jaunty and adventure-based rather than romantic and yearning, although that has lots of stuff in it.

**John:** And it also becomes a duet though. And if it was just Aladdin’s solo, “let me share this whole new world with you,” it would be — it wouldn’t quite land the same way.

**Craig:** You know what else just came to mind is Andrew Lippa’s “The Moon and Me,” right? Which is a beautiful song and is the most non-traditional romance between a man and an orbiting celestial body. But it is a love song. And it is solo. It’s not a duet. And it’s gorgeous.

So, they’re there. I don’t like them that way. I like them non-traditional.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** That’s my jam.

**John:** This might ultimately become that thing, but until then it is a song, so if people want to check it out you can look at the lyrics and there will be links to video things so you can see for it at johnaugust.com/rise. I’ll also put the full track at the end of this episode instead of an outro, so if you want to hear the whole thing you’ll know what we’re talking about.

**Craig:** It’s a good song.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** So, let’s try to answer one or two listener questions while we have Aline here. Let’s start with a question from Niraj in Allahabad, India. He writes, “I’m an author based out of Allahabad and have been in discussions with a Hollywood production company for optioning the movie and TV writes for my historical fiction novel, Daggers of Treason.”

**Craig:** Daggers of Treason!

**John:** “While they’re offering 2% of the starting budget for theatrical releases, their stated rates for episodic serials is abysmally low. 1/5th of the WGA rates. Can you please guide me to how much a non-US or WGA author should expect for a 60-minute serial? And who would help me in procuring a fair deal? I understand I cannot become a WGA member being based in India but would appreciate your help. Regards, Niraj.”

So, where do we start here? I think one of the places we can start is we can be so frustrated with the WGA, but when you’re outside of the US and you look in, it’s like, oh, having the WGA to set minimums is a really nice thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you don’t necessarily not have to have a WGA deal here, Niraj. So, the deal is if you’re writing in India but you’re working with a Hollywood company. Question number one is are they signatory to the Writers Guild or do they have a subsidiary that’s signatory to the Writers Guild? Still doesn’t mean that they have to employ you under a Writers Guild contract. However, what you can ask is that they employ you under the equivalent of a Writers Guild contract.

Now, all these things come down to leverage. How much do they want what you have and how much are they willing to spend on it? Sometimes I think companies will look to places that have burgeoning talent but aren’t covered by the WGA so that they can get better deals. And if these folks there are asking for more money, then suddenly it’s not as attractive a proposition. So you have to kind of gauge the interest level here.

Who can help you in procuring a fair deal? A lawyer. I don’t know where you live, oh, you said Allahabad. I don’t know Allahabad. I don’t know how large of a town that is. But I think if you reached out to a law firm in one of the many enormously large cities in India you will find an entertainment lawyer. India has a massive entertainment industry as we all know.

And the fact that you already have interest from a Hollywood production company I think would certainly mean that somebody would be willing to take your call and talk to you and perhaps represent you. Once that happens, that’s the person you’re going to be asking these questions of. That would be my first move.

**Aline:** Me too.

**John:** That’s a great idea. And the other place I might point you to is it could make sense for you to get an LA-based law firm to supervise the contract. You just need to figure out who has been doing this for other projects sort of like yours. And you end up paying them to do that work as well. But I wish you good luck with this.

The next question comes from Mack who writes, “I usually read my scripts on the screen in the screenwriting software, but I’ve heard the printing one’s script and reading it on the physical page offers a new perspective that may help with the rewriting process. So now my script is printed and ready for me to read, but before I undertake reading it for the 15th time I was hoping you could offer some insight on best practices for reading for rewrites.”

Aline, I saw you nodding, so you agree that people should print out scripts?

**Aline:** Yeah. I don’t do it as much as I used to. I think I’ve developed my skill at looking at a screen as critically as I do at a page, and in TV we’re just moving so quickly that having that extra paper step sometimes is a pain.

But, you know, get your pen out. It depends on what you’re reading it for. But sometimes if you just like change the size of the font on your screen or make it look a little bit different. If I’m proofreading, I read it backwards. Just anything that makes it look new to you. Reading it in a new environment sometimes will do it. There’s nothing for catching typos like sending it to someone. The second you send it for some reason you open it back up and you’ll find six typos.

But anything that makes it look fresh to your eyes is great. And then I would say reading it aloud with or to someone is a great way to go. And Simon Kinberg and I wrote a script together and when we were revising it would read it aloud. And it was really fun. That seems like one of the fun reasons to have a partner, to read it and scribble on it.

**John:** Craig, are you a printer? Do you print your scripts?

**Craig:** Yeah. I do. Usually by that point I have gone through them quite a bit, but my basic process once I get to that stage, I really am mostly looking for typos or things that jump out as reading a little weirdly. So I’m reading it aloud a lot as I’m going through and I don’t do the double-sided print thing because I want the blank back of a page on the left side to be there for notes or things that I need to remark on.

And when I do that I just dog ear it so I have a reference. Then I go back through and I make those changes. But, you know, I don’t think I would get too freaked out about this. Everybody has their own speed and their own way of doing things. I’m pretty sure that there are some wonderful writers that don’t print it out. Whatever works for you, Mack. Honestly. Whatever works for you.

**Aline:** One thing I really thought a lot about with writing in a TV environment as opposed to a film environment is sometimes I found, as a screenwriter, I would overly machine things because I had so much time with it. And so I would tinker with things to make them scan perfectly when actually they play better just the way they splurted out of you.

And in TV, especially when you’re writing comedy, if a room pitches a joke and it works, you don’t change a syllable. So it may not scan perfectly, it may not make sense perfectly, but that’s the comedy milieu in there. And so I find that screenwriters way more than TV writers, just because of time, just tend to overly machine their dialogue and sand off all the rough edges. And I like the idea of sometimes it’s the imperfect perfect thing. So, there’s a lot of like dithering and busy work that is really tempting to do when you’re getting ready to send a script out. And I think sometimes you can ruin things that are lovely because you’re trying to make them perfect.

**John:** Yeah. I would stress that if you’re going through to read, make sure you’re really reading. And that’s why I think printing is so helpful because you can’t actually fix things while you’re reading it. So, I like to print the script and I go to someplace new. I go outside. I sit at the table. And I’m flipping through the pages because I will see things I don’t see other places and things will occur to me that haven’t occurred while I’m cutting whole little short scenes because I just don’t need them anymore.

And if I were trying to do that on the screen, I feel like I might go through and like make a few little corrections right at that moment, then I wouldn’t be reading anymore. I’d really be writing. And that’s not what your goal is.

**Aline:** It’s a different mode.

**John:** Yeah, different mode. All right. Let’s change modes ourselves. It’s time for One Cool Thing. Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** Oh, I got a good one today if you like puzzles. Do you love puzzles, folks?

**John:** We all love puzzles.

**Aline:** Yeah, we’re all puzzlers.

**John:** After this podcast we’re going off to play games at Aline’s house.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll tell you, these are brutal but amazing. So there’s a gentleman named Mark Halpin and every Labor Day he puts out a puzzle pack. The puzzle pack consists of many, many individual puzzles. You solve all those individual puzzles, and then there is a meta puzzle that encompasses all of the answers you’ve pulled from the many, many puzzles. And so this Labor Day weekend, David Kwong and I eagerly downloaded this year’s puzzle package from Mark Halpin called When First We Practice to Deceive.

We have completed all of the individual puzzles except for the last one. We’re halfway through that one. They are really, really hard. And they are really, really good. They are super well done. Very complicated. Really, really just tricky. One of them has — one of them looks like it’s a word search. No it isn’t. I mean, it kind of is, but mostly it isn’t. And there’s about five different levels just to that puzzle alone to get to the answer of that puzzle.

So, Mark Halpin offers these for free, but there is a tip jar link on his page. If you do download these, I strongly urge you to chuck him some remuneration. He worked clearly extraordinarily hard on these. And we will put a link in the show notes for you. So, again, that’s Mark Halpin. And his puzzle pack this year is called When First We Practice to Deceive.

**John:** Very nice.

**Aline:** Very cool. My One Cool Thing — my favorite TV show right now is Insecure on HBO. And I’m obsessed with Issa and I’m obsessed with the show. And I watch it as it airs, or soon after. It’s the best romantic comedy I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s so much more than that. And I just love it. And it’s so great to have a TV show that I’m excited to watch. And so I think — and I have an ax to grind — but I think sometimes things that are created and written by women and deal with love and relationships don’t quite get the due that like a somber crime drama will get.

And I think Insecure is just an excellent show. And belongs up there in any critical appreciation of the best shows out there right now. So, I highly recommend that, and go to HBO to find it.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is a book by Jessica Abel called Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio. And so it’s done in a graphic novel format, or an illustrated book thing. It’s not fiction. It’s all real interviews that she did with the people behind This American Life, The Moth, Radio Lab, Planet Money, Snap Judgments, Serial, Invisibilia.

**Aline:** Whoa.

**John:** And so what’s clever is she recorded all these interviews, but then she built it out sort of in a graphic novel format. So she’s having these conversations with people, she’s inserting herself into it. And it’s a brilliant look at sort of how this kind of radio is made. And sort of both how reporters go out to find and really cast the people that they’re going to be interviewing, but then how the stories are found in the edit. And what the edit process is like, which is much more like really like your writer’s room than you would think.

So, they’re reading their scripts, they’re playing their tape, and they’re just digging in on story for hours and hours at a time.

**Aline:** Wow, that’s so cool.

**John:** It’s really great. So, I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in radio, but I also I thought there were interesting lessons about how storytelling works for the radio that I think most screenwriters would find fascinating.

Like one of the things about how they pitch these stories is it’s about blank, but what’s interesting is blank.

**Aline:** Right.

**John:** And so–

**Aline:** That’s almost a podcast cliché. It’s about bananas. Everything you didn’t know about bananas. Yeah.

**John:** So, you know, you have your topic, but then your actual hook is something that is not the topic.

**Aline:** Your take on it.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s–

**Aline:** Hey, before we go, I’m going to sign my book at Barnes & Noble at The Grove.

**John:** Fantastic, what day?

**Aline:** And also at Chevalier Bookstore on Larchmont. And the book signing at The Grove is on Sunday, September 24 at 5pm at Barnes & Noble at The Grove.

**John:** Fantastic. I will be in London so I won’t be attending that one, but I’m so excited to see you and–

**Aline:** Well then perhaps you can go to the book signing at Chevalier’s on October 1 at 5:30.

**John:** That sounds great. Hooray! So we’ll have links to–

**Aline:** Plug. Plug. Plug. Plug.

**John:** We will have links to Aline’s book and the events which you can go visit Aline and have her sign your book. Also in the show notes you’ll find a link to the song I wrote and we’ll put that on the outro for this week’s episode. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

If you have an outro, a traditional outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today.

For short questions, we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Aline is–?

**Aline:** @alinebmckenna.

**John:** Fantastic. She’s on Twitter finally.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. Just look for Scriptnotes and while you’re there leave us a comment or a review. That helps a lot.

You can find all the show notes at johnaugust.com. If you have a Three Page Challenge for Austin, remember that’s johnaugust.com/threepage.

Transcripts go up about a week after the episode airs. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Aline, thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Craig:** Thanks Aline.

**Aline:** Cheers, you all. Cheers.

**John:** Cool. See you soon. Bye.

Links:

* [Submit](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) to the Three Page Challenge and check the box if you’ll be in Austin for the Austin Film Festival
* The [new season](http://www.cwtv.com/shows/crazy-ex-girlfriend) of [Crazy Ex Girlfriend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Ex-Girlfriend_(TV_series)) premieres Friday October 13th
* John Gatins’ [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/)
* Order Aline Brosh McKenna’s new graphic novel, [Jane](https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Aline-McKenna/dp/1608869814)
* Ramón K. Pérez’s [website](http://www.ramonperez.com/v4/), [twitter](https://twitter.com/theramonperez?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) and [graphic novel, Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1936393093/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* “Rise” composer Sam Davis’ [website](http://www.samdavismusic.com/)
* The [Original Melody](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Rise_sam_original_piano_melody.m4a), John’s [Snap Track](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Rise_john_snap_trim.m4a), and the [demo track](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Rise_demo.wav) with vocalist [Curt Hansen](https://twitter.com/curt_hansen?lang=en) for “Rise”
* Or you can check out this [post](http://johnaugust.com/rise) for more details about “Rise”
* [Mark Halpin Puzzles](http://www.markhalpin.com/puzzles/puzzles.html)
* [Insecure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insecure_(TV_series)) on [HBO](http://www.hbo.com/insecure)
* [Out on the Wire](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385348436/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Jessica Abel
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](https://twitter.com/alinebmckenna?lang=en) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by John August (lyrics) and Sam Davis (music) ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_318.mp3).