Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 538 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is something new for us. One of our listeners, Jake Kelley, he wrote in to say that, “Many of my favorite episodes are the ones focused on craft, yet I find myself drawn to those discussions on being a screenwriter, which offer so much insight.” I put this show together to be somewhat the antithesis of a craft compendium. It won’t help you on your script right now, but offers a way to becoming a rounded and mature creative thinker. Jake provided the episodes and time codes for his vision of what this episode could be. Megana and Matthew took those suggestions and a few other bits to come up with this compendium of our conversations, not about screenwriting per se, but being a screenwriter.

If you’re Premium member, you of course have access to the backup episodes, all 537 of them. Today, Premium members should stick around for my conversation with Jake about why he picked these clips and how Scriptnotes has influenced his work as a visual artist, so enjoy. This first clip comes from Episode 6: How kids becoming screenwriters.

What we might talk about today is how people become screenwriters. I don’t mean how to become a screenwriter, because there’s countless books you can buy on any shelf in a Borders to tell you how to be–

Craig Mazin: I would take my microphone off and leave this podcast.

John: Another podcast we’ll talk about the so-called experts and our fury about some of the screenwriting books out there. Rather than talking about how to become a screenwriter, I want to talk about how a person becomes a screenwriter and the paths to that, because if you talk to a professional tennis player and say like, “Hey, how did you become a professional tennis player?” they’ll say something like, “Oh, when I was eight I started playing tennis, and I just played tennis for forever, and now I’m a professional tennis player.” It’s not that they were 21 and they picked up a racket for the first time and became a professional tennis player. That just doesn’t happen. Or if you talk to a doctor and you say like, “Hey, how did you become a doctor?” maybe they were interested in medicine growing up or maybe thought, “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,” but they didn’t really do anything serious about becoming a doctor until they went to college, and really until they went to medical school. They might’ve studied the sciences they needed, they got prerequisites they needed, but they didn’t do anything serious to become a doctor until quite late in the game.

Screenwriting is not really either one of those paths. There’s not a thing you could point to where you say, “I’m an eight-year-old who wants to become a screenwriter.” Not only does that not really happen, there’s not even a meaningful way to think about that.

Craig: True, true. It’s the difference between the word “career” and the word “vocation.” “Vocation,” the “voc” root is designed to imply a calling, that you’re called to this somehow by–

John: An evocation.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. Screenwriting falls into that area. You have this innate desire to tell stories, but when does that come, where does that come from, and how do you know you have it, and all that?

John: Malcolm Gladwell famously has been trumpeting this idea of 10,000 hours, that if you look at people who are very successful in any field, you can track back and they’ve put in 10,000 hours of practice to get up to that point. It applies particularly well to sports figures, but even other professions, like musicians and other artists. You can really see that they’ve put in the 10,000 hours of time to get up to their mastery of something. No screenwriter I know, at least no screenwriter I know that’s ever getting started, has put in 10,000 hours of writing screenplays. That just doesn’t happen. You don’t start writing screenplays when you’re six.

Craig: That’s right. If you’ve put in 10,000 hours of screenwriting and you’re still not a professional screenwriter, you suck.

John: That is true. You’re sad, and you probably suck.

Craig: You’re sad and you suck.

John: It’s just a tragedy that’s happened there, because 10,000 hours is a lot of time.

Craig: That’s a huge chunk of your life.

John: I’m not gonna open my little Solver program and tell you exactly how many days and weeks and moments of Seasons of Love that is, but it’s a lot of Seasons of Love to get to 10,000 hours. As I’ve thought more about how did I become a screenwriter, where did I get that experience… The first thing I wrote wasn’t great, but it wasn’t, like I said, I put 10,000 hours in between my first screenplay and Go. Go was a pretty good screenplay. It’s that I think I can make a good argument that I actually had my 10,000 words of experience and exposure in there. It wasn’t all writing, and it certainly didn’t look like screenwriting.

My first memory of this storytelling kind of stuff that I do now is, as a boy I would often… First off, I always woke up really early, and my parents wouldn’t let me come out of my room, so I had to stay in my room and play with all my toys. I would always line up my little toys. There’d be two rival faction armies. Actually, not really armies. They were sort of like Battle of the Network Stars. They’d be on the other side of the river and they’d have to come some competitions and things. I’d always have my favorites, but my favorites wouldn’t always win, because that’s the way the narrative should play.

I’d always have this ongoing narrative of the battle of the network toys, that later progressed once I was allowed to stay up to watch the James Bond movies on Monday nights right before school started in the fall. Again, James Bond and new fall TV shows coinciding in the fall, it was an important season for me. Once I was allowed to watch the James Bond movies on ABC, a lot of my imagination play became James Bond. I was on the speedboat. It was really my bed. I would build myself a graveling hook out of a hanger and some string and do James Bondy kind of things. I think that my early narrative development in the sense of figuring out how this action sequence worked was really as a six or seven-year-old playing James Bond in my room.

Craig: I know exactly what you mean. There’s a way to practice the art of storytelling without actually writing. My experience was around the same time as you, six, seven years old. First of all, I saw Star Wars, which blew my brain open. Then I had a clear memory that almost every night when I would go to bed, I would stay up for about 30, 40 minutes, with the lights out, in my bed, just I guess you’d call it daydreaming, although it was evening, just imagining scenarios. Just imagining. Just envisioning little movies in my head. I would make little sound effects to go along with things. My dad would come in and say, “Stop making rocket noises.” I remember that was the phrase, “rocket noises,” because everything was blowing up all the time. I would do that every night. I don’t know what it was. I was just compelled to tell stories in my head.

John: There’s an assumption that it’s all about how much you read as a kid. I was certainly a big reader, but I wasn’t a bigger reader than many of my peers, most of whom aren’t involved in any sort of narrative writing capability. I read a lot. I read the same kinds of things. I read a lot of the Encyclopedia Browns and the Three Investigators and the things that people read, but it was the imagining my own stories constantly that was more important. I did write. I did some creative writing. I probably wrote stories earlier than other kids might have done that. I was rewarded with teacher praise for doing a good job with it. I can’t chart that writing, my ability to put some words together, with my interest in telling movie style stories later on.

Craig: I’m with you. I remember always having a sense of narrative structure. I read a lot when I was a kid. I would say movies certainly inspired more of my visual sense. In my mind I would tell stories in a very visual way. The books that I did love would inspire those things. The Three Investigators, I remember the thing about them I loved the most was that Jupiter Jones had his headquarters underneath the dump.

John: Uncle Titus’s dump, which is –

Craig: There you go. Thank you. That was awesome to me. I desperately wanted my own headquarters under a dump, because it was so visual and it was so cool.

John: I tried to put on weight in 3rd grade so I could be more like Jupiter Jones.

Craig: I was always more of a Pete guy. Pete seemed like the cool one. I think he broke his arm at one point though.

John: Yeah, and therefore was slightly handicapped, and therefore–

Craig: Yeah, and thus an object of pity.

John: Pity/lust, I get it.

Craig: You feel me on that one. I love those. I remember in 5th grade I had a facility for language. I found reading and writing just came easily to me. Words came easily to me. In 5th grade they asked me to deliver the graduation speech. I remember that I wrote a speech that was rather mockish and infantile, in the way that a 5th grader would. It was a lot of bad metaphors about going through doors, opening doors and closing doors behind you and nonsense like that. It had a structure. I remember that I just innately understood that there should be an introduction where you establish this metaphor of doors opening and closing in your life and then three examples and then a final conclusion where the door closes behind you and you step out and you begin again.

John: That sounds very Toastmasters.

Craig: It was as paint by numbers as you can be, but the interesting thing was there were no numbers. I just had that. I was born with formula. I don’t know, maybe you need to start there. It’s a weird thing. Instead of having to learn it, it’s already in your DNA or something.

John: I think what I can also chart as probably the biggest influence on my development that way, and where I logged a lot of my 10,000 hours, was in Dungeons and Dragons, because D and D is one of those things where on the surface of it, it just seems like you’re pretending to play with swords, and it’s a bunch of people rolling dice and sitting around and table and drinking too much Coke.

Ultimately, when you’re playing a lot of D and D, especially when you’re playing at that age, you recognize that there’s two distinct phases to Dungeons and Dragons. There’s the social aspect where you and your friends are sitting around with your parents at a card table, and you’re playing a game, and one of you is the dungeon master. The other two or three of you are playing. He’s the fighter, he’s the thief, and that’s the wizard over there, the magic user over there. You’re trying to get through this dungeon. It’s very graph papery. You’re looking at a bunch of charts. That’s the part that feels baseball statistics-y, where there’s math involved and you’re trying to win a game. As you play more of it, you get a little bit more sophisticated, you start to really focus on the story and the role-playing aspect of it where you’re pretending to be… You’re this character. You’re this character in this situation. What does this character want? You start to think about your characters independent of this dungeon that you’re going through.

My friend Jason and I had, he had his character Garrett Darkhorse, who was a ranger. We started to build out these elaborate mythologies for the Darkhorse clan and who all the people were in the different generations. Suddenly it was about your character who would have a kid, and that kid would marry the other girl from over there. You started to look at the death of your character being part of the overall arc of the thing. It’s this sophistication that came only as you got to be more sophisticated, thinking about the narrative beyond this one specific game, this one specific dungeon that you were playing.

Craig: I didn’t quite get that massively nerdy, although I did play the… Marvel had a role-playing game.

John: I remember that.

Craig: A few of my friends and I played that. I remember not caring so much for the game, which I thought was just a little odd. I never quite got into the actual game part of it, but I loved making the characters. Everybody had a character and they had a name, and then I typed up backstories for all them, sort of like what you were describing, and actually tried to make sense of their… What happens is you roll dice, and they’re like, he’s really strong and he’s really fast, but he’s stupid. That’s interesting. Now, how can I create a narrative that explains that? I remember doing that and typing it up and printing it out on my daisy wheel printer.

John: You would print out these character backstories for the people who were playing your Marvel role-playing game.

Craig: It was interesting, because what they had were like, he’s got a power and he’s this old and he’s blond. Then I would try and explain where he was from and is he a human and how did he get this way and is he related to anybody and what does he fear, and come up with… The idea I guess was that there was a narrative puzzle presented. I always thinking of screenwriting as just endless puzzle solving. The puzzle is how do you make logical sense of this, some sort of dramatic, compelling theory that makes sense of the character you just created with dice. That was fun. I don’t know so much that I spent a lot of time practicing that is why I do what I do today. It’s that I felt the need to do it in the first place that explains why I do what I do today.

John: You felt a compelling need to create narrative meaning out of this thing that actually didn’t have a lot of meaning because it was rolled by dice. You wanted it to make sense and to exist in a way. It was probably one of the earliest occasions for you to see that the decisions you were making about who the characters were would influence the kind of stories you’d want to tell with those characters. Were you being the equivalent of the dungeon master for this, where you were leading the games?

Craig: No, my friend Dave Rogers was usually the dungeon master. Interestingly, he is a Emmy award-winning director now. He’s a very, very well-regarded director in television, directs a lot of episodes of The Office.

John: I’ve noticed several people who are involved with big TV shows right now come from D and D background. John Rogers, who does Leverage, who’s done a lot of other great shows, still writes for… I guess it’s not TSR now, it’s Wizards of the Coast, who bought out the D and D franchise. I first noticed, oh, there’s this… I was looking through one of the new manuals. I noticed his name. I was like, “I wonder if that’s the same person.” I Googled, like, oh, that’s just so strange that he still is doing that. In fact, he’s doing the new Dungeons and Dragons comic book, which is great. It’s like Firefly, but with swords. If we were to have him on the show, I suspect he had a similar experience where that experience of developing characters and developing a world for characters to run around in is really similar to developing the world of a movie, or even more so, developing the world of a TV show, is that you have a sustainable world that goes beyond the adventures of this one week’s play but has an overall narrative, an overall arc. I haven’t talked to David Benioff to see whether he played much D and D, but I’ve got the feeling that it’s probably true.

Craig: Knowing David, I would guess that he did. Knowing Dan Weiss, I would guess that he did as well.

John: It’s a pretty safe bet. I’ll also stump for the new D and D manuals. I don’t actually play D and D anymore. I wouldn’t have time to. I feel like so much of what I do and get paid to do is so similar that I would be burning out that part of my brain to try to DM a session. I’d still buy the new manuals. The new manuals are fantastic. Anybody who’s listening to this who played in the past and has seen those manuals, and like, “Eh, I wouldn’t go into them,” they’re remarkably well done. It’s Gary Gygax’s sort of legacy but sort of brought through to make a lot more sense. They made very smart choices in the new books. I have a ton of them that are all sitting on shelves and I read them as leisure time books.

Craig: That’s where I would fall apart. That’s why I can’t do that sort of part of the game because I don’t understand all the rules and my mind could not wrap around on that stuff.

John: One of the things I think is interesting about where we are right now is the online games, Diablo and World of Warcraft, that seem to be very similar, where they’re doing a lot… You’re running around and you’re killing things. They don’t develop that same instinct, really, because in those games you are optimizing, because ou are trying to figure out the best kind of character to make, but the character is really just a collection of statistics. The character has no backstory. The character has no motivations beyond the quests that are assigned through the game. You have goals as a person, but that character, individually, has no goals.

Craig: I like the Bethesda games. The main quests, at least, give you some sense of identity and sense of purpose.

John: In terms of choices you make?

Craig: Even in terms of your goal. In Oblivion you are tasked with a job by the dying king. In Fallout 3 you’re actually murdered in the beginning of the… Isn’t that right, in Fallout 3? No, no. That’s not Fallout 3. That was the other one.

John: Fallout 3 is an example of a tremendous–

Craig: Oh, it was in New Vegas you’re murdered.

John: New Vegas, yeah.

Craig: In Fallout 3 you’re actually born and you’re raised by a father and then he disappears and you have to go find him. There’s some sense of character.

John: There’s a sense of character, but you’re not generating that sense of character.

Craig: No. You’re right.

John: You are essentially an audience to that character development. While you might learn a lot by observing it, you’re not responsible for the making of it. You’re not making choices about how that narrative is going to be shaped.

Craig: That’s correct. That is the difference between the passive act of playing a video game that’s presented to you and scripted for you, and the idea that you’re going to make your own story as you go along. No question. No question.

John: Our next clip is from Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing.
Craig wanted to talk about positive moviegoing, which I’m not even sure what it means, so Craig start us out. What is positive moviegoing?

Craig: It’s this thing I’ve been thinking about lately because this is the time of year when all the so-called good movies come out. A lot of them are actually good movies. I think it’s just we live in a time of snarkiness and suspicion and nobody seems to want to like anything. People a lot of times go into theaters with their arms crossed, especially in Los Angeles. We’re all in the business. I think people go to movies and they’re demanding to hate them and they’re prejudging them. You name any movie and I could just sort of come up with some pretext for hating it.

What I really have been trying to do is when I go to movie to go wanting to love it and accepting everything about it for at least 20 minutes. I don’t care what happens in the first 20 minutes, I am on board. I will accept it and I will attempt to enjoy it as best I can. I will give myself to the movie. Then at some point, okay, listen, sometimes you just don’t like movies. Sometimes they disappoint. Sometimes they anger you because you hate them so much, and that’s okay. I’m not denying that that can happen. I’ve really been trying to just give myself over to movies.

I went and I saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I went in, just gave myself to the movie, and I loved it. I think I would have loved it anyway, but I think it helped that I wasn’t judging. I just decided nobody else goes to movies to judge. Why do we go to movies to judge? Can’t we just enjoy them? Anyway, that’s my thing, positive moviegoing.

John: What you’re describing is almost like… I can picture the body language of it. It’s like you’re sitting down in your seat. You’re not crossing your arms in front of you saying like, “Okay, impress me.” You’re saying, “I’m here. I’m eager to be entertained. I will follow you wherever you go. Take me on a journey.” That’s the message you’re trying to send to this movie.

Craig: That’s right, sort of like meeting somebody at a party and they start to tell you a story. You’re standing there, so be nice. Listen to it. Give it a shot. I get so depressed when I see people ripping movies apart before they even see them.

Aline Brosh McKenna: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s easy to hate things and to bag on things. I think it’s just, it makes people feel fashionable and intellectual. It’s harder. It takes more effort to go out there and say, “You know what? Even if it wasn’t perfect, even if things aren’t prefect, sometimes things that you love are the imperfect perfect thing.” Going in there with an attitude of like, “I’m going to enjoy this. I paid my money to enjoy this, not to find something that I can sit down with my friends later and pick to shreds.”

Craig: Yeah. It will happen that we will encounter movies that infuriate us. And we will pick them to shreds and we will pick them to shreds. If you’ve earned that experience, so you’ve earned it, but there is something to be said for letting yourself be entertained and not attempt to make yourself feel better by pushing a movie away. Frankly even the feeling that, okay, it’s not perfect. How often does that happen? Movies win Oscars and people go, “Oh my god, that piece of crap won an Oscar.” Perfection is irrelevant. I almost think, okay, mistakes aren’t really mistakes. It’s just no more than I got from here to there on a road and it was a really enjoyable journey and there was a pothole. It’s just part of it.

Aline: I like it. I also think it’s very Christmas-y.

John: It’s very Christmas-y. Now, on some level are we talking about expectation? I find that a lot of times the movies that I enjoy most were the ones where my expectations were not set too high going into them. That’s why I love to see a movie during its opening weekend before everyone has sort of told me what I’m supposed to think and feel about it, because when I come into a theater with a set of expectations, nothing can surprise me. I’m sort of preconditioned to think this is how I’m supposed to feel about this particular entertainment.

Aline: Yeah. I miss the days of just going to see a movie and knowing nothing about it. My parents would drive us to the Paramus Park. We used to call it the Millionplex. It had 14 theaters. They would just drop us off there and we would see the 7:30, whatever it was, and just be happy. That’s how I saw Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which pleasantly surprised us. We laughed, fell out of our chairs laughing. We also saw Yor, The Hunter From the Future that way.

Craig: Good one.

Aline: You don’t have that surprise anymore. You’ve been so inundated with media before you go to see a movie now, that I miss the days of just thinking like, “I just want to see a movie. Let’s see what’s out there.” I miss that.

John: Yeah, I remember seeing 9 to 5 that way. I was a kid dropped off at the theater, and the theater we were supposed to go to… They just dropped us off at the wrong movie, essentially, so we saw 9 to 5. I was far too young to see 9 to 5, which is the best way to see 9 to 5, because they’re smoking pot and having sex and all these things.

Aline: Stringing people up.

John: I also remember in college going to see… We ended up seeing The Handmaid’s Tale because the other movie that we wanted to see was completely sold out. We had no idea what the movie was. That’s so incredibly rewarding when you sit in, the only information you have is what the filmmakers are giving you frame-by-frame as the story unfolds. You had that experience of positive moviegoing because you weren’t preconceived with what we were supposed to feel. There was no expectation about what to —

Aline: You haven’t checked a review aggregator that’s given you 60 opinions before you even set foot there.

Craig: Yeah, or your Twitter feed, or comedians teeing up, or whatever, anything, or even articles that are insisting that it’s the most important thing of all time. It’s funny. 9 to 5 was the first movie I think I was dropped off to see on my own. I remember it was like a weird triple date, like a weird triple fifth-grade date. What were our parents thinking? I really make an effort now when I sit in the movie theater before the movie starts to blank my mind completely. I just say, go ahead movie, write all over me and let’s see where this goes.

John: Some of my favorite experiences are actually like when you see the three trailers, or the four trailers, and then the real movie starts and you’ve forgotten what the movie was that you [unclear 00:25:40] what movie is this. Oh right, it’s the Muppets. It is very exciting.

Now, let’s talk for a second as filmmakers, as screenwriters. Is there anything we can do in those opening pages or in the opening minutes of a movie to get people in the positive moviegoing experienced? What is that like from our side as writers to hopefully foster that good spirit?

Craig: I do have one thing that lately I’ve been tending to do, and that is write a credit sequence. It became out of fashion. Originally movies used to have these opening credit sequences that includes even the credits that we now call end credits, where there are logos and rosters of people. Then there were the standard opening credit sequences. That became out of fashion. For a long time, all the credits went in the back of the movie, so you just started the movie. I really like credit sequences. I like opening credit sequences. The opening credits for Mitty are beautiful. I think that that helps kind of get everybody situated and in the mood, so I’ve been doing that lately.

John: I will also write credit sequences in movies where I feel it’s appropriate. More than anything I try to make sure that the reader and therefore the viewer feels confident, like, trust me, this is going to be a ride that you will enjoy taking with me. You’re going to feel rewarded and smart on this journey. We know what we’re doing. Everything is going to be okay. That shows up in your word selection on those first pages, but also just making sure no one is confused in a bad way in those first pages. If it’s a funny movie, you need to have something funny happen really quickly, so everyone sort of gets what the world of your movie is.

Aline: My husband has a thing where we’ll go to see a movie, and sometimes movies take forever just to get going, and he’ll turn to me at some point and say, “When does the movie start?” 20 minutes into the movie, because sometimes it just seems like, especially because we do know what movies we’re going to see, it does seem like if you’re taking 15 minutes to get us acquainted with what we’ve seen on the poster, that makes me a little itchy. I think our attention span for that has probably changed a bunch, too. I think it’s great to see if you can get to the heart of the matter so the audience knows what movie they are seeing.

John: Let’s segue to our next topic, which you brought up also, which is why it’s important to be friends with writers. My recollection, and my early days in Hollywood, I was friends with a bunch of people who were starting out in Hollywood, but they weren’t necessarily writers. I went through a graduate film program, so everyone was trying to become a producer, a film executive. Some people became writers. I didn’t necessarily seek out other writers. What was your history going to–

Aline: I feel really strongly about that. I think that people sometimes misunderstand what the idea is. The idea is not to be friends with writers who are going to network for you, or who are cool, or who are writing, or who are employed. That’s not really the critical thing. The critical thing is to have friends who do what you do and are engaged in the same kind of work that you are.

A couple of my writer friends are from the very, very, very beginning of our career before we had any success or barely any work. We don’t have workplaces in the way that… My husband works at a mutual fund. He has a workplace. He has coworkers. We don’t have that. Even when we do for a specific project, they’re just for that specific project. My ongoing workplace, my Cheers, my group of people that I check in with, are my other writer friends that I talk to on the phone periodically, or have lunch with.

John: Aline, you talk on the phone?

Aline: I talk on the phone.

John: Wow.

Craig: Who talks on the phone?

Aline: I do.

John: Wow.

Aline: We can check in on what we’re doing and say, “Hey, I was working on that. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea? What do you think of this person?” That network is invaluable. You will grow with these people. It’s less important to seek out people who you think are going to connect you with a job and more important to seek out people whose process you find productive. Gatins refers to it as lab partners. Finding a lab partner who does their homework and has a neat notebook is important.

John: I don’t think Gatins has a neat notebook. I think Gatins’s notebook is one of those PT folders that he’s like sort of half colored in as he fell asleep.

Craig: Gatins’s notebook, it’s like a folder that you open up and it looks like it’s full of stuff, and you open it up and there’s nothing in there.

Aline: It’s so brilliant.

Craig: It’s all in his head.

Aline: It’s like a workbook where he didn’t do any of the math, but around the margins are those amazing drawings and thoughts. He’s a good example. He’s a great lab partner. Also, something another friend of mine said, which is easier said than done, we were talking about having your friends read stuff. I said, “Who do you go to for that?” He said, “It’s very simple. Send it to someone who roots for you.”

Craig: Perfect. He’s exactly right.

Aline: I don’t know, it was something I hadn’t really thought of in quite that way, because I think we all have friends that we love, but maybe we have other friends who we think root a little harder.

Craig: You mean to say, “Maybe some of them are rooting against us.” That’s what you mean to say, which I think is real, by the way. Listen, it’s human. It bums me out, but I sometimes sense it.

Aline: It’s funny, I have the opposite.

Craig: Same thing about the positive moviegoing.

Aline: I have the opposite of that, which is I really like everyone around me to be really successful because I think it makes me look better.

Craig: Exactly.

Aline: It gives me more names to drop. Sometimes it’s even on a specific project. Sometimes you can have a friend who is really supportive but they don’t like an idea that you have. There was just a friend that I had that I pitched him a few things I was working on, and one of them he just thought was a terrible idea. That’s not somebody who I would ever go to and say, “Do you want to read this?” It’s just find somebody who really wants to see you do well, or find someone who really roots for that specific project, because that’s positive moviegoing. You want to share your work and share your career with people who are going in with the best possible intentions.

We generate enough of our own schadenfreude towards ourselves in this process. You don’t really need it from other people. I have lots of friends who are producers and executives and agents, and actors too, but your writer friends understand your struggles and your travails and they can really be there for you. I think if you look around, you can find people to link arms with, and you will all come up together.

John: My friend, Andrew Lippa, who did the music for Big Fish, he has this group of composers, lyricist composers, and they get together once a month and they have to show the work that they’ve been working on. As a group they have to perform the thing and they talk about it, which just seems amazing. There are obviously screenwriter groups that can do the same kind of thing, but it’s different to show your written pages versus actually performing something. It’s that trust element that kicks in.

You were talking about how you might have directors or producers or other people who can read your stuff, agents, but all of them have some vested interest in maybe how they’re going to associate with this project. The great thing about another writer is the writer is just the writer. They’re not trying to take your project. They’re not trying to do anything.

While there’s still sometimes that, it’s not even schadenfreude, but that realization of there’s only so many musical chairs, and that sometimes you’re competing for the same spots, in general we can be very supportive of each other because we’re not trying to do the same thing. We’re all working on our own projects.

Aline: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I know you guys have talked about this too, but the three of us all met at different phases in our careers.

John: We should talk about how you and I met, because that’s a strange version of how you and I met. Let me tell my recollection of it, because I’m really curious to hear your version of it. Aline and I met on the phone because I was coming in to rewrite a project that she had written as a spec, correct?

Aline: No, I wrote it on assignment for New Line. Then John rewrote it and he cold called me and said, “I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I’m rewriting this.” I said, “Sure.” Then John did a draft of it, and never to be heard from again, that thing.

Craig: John, you killed her movie.

John: I probably killed her movie.

Aline: They were bringing in the big guns, and I got pushed down the stairs. John was the first person, I think might have been the first person ever to call me and do the gracious thing. I was outside on my deck and I remember he said, “Is it okay with you if I do this?”

John: I remember you also saying like, “Somebody is going to do it, and I’d rather you do it than somebody else,” which is honestly the reality of most of these situations. The answer is not going to be they’re going to go back to you, the original writer. If they’re looking for another writer, they’re going to hire another writer, so you want the writer who actually has the ability to make the movie be good and not ruin the movie. Those are the situations you want to have. That was a strange project, because the reason why I was able to get a hold of you is because we both had John Gatins as a friend. I called Gatins to get your number and said like, “Is it going to be cool if I call?”

Aline: Oh, that’s nice.

John: It was this movie that you wrote that I really liked. It was just a really good idea. Suddenly Dustin Hoffman was attached, and so I went to this lunch, this crazy lunch with Dustin Hoffman. Suddenly, this is a movie, and then it just disappeared.

Aline: Yeah, it got complicated in that way those things do. We already knew each other, and I knew Craig already when the strike happened. The strike was really the thing where writers really connected in a different way. I think it was sort of the convergence of the strike plus the internet. All of a sudden people really got to know each other in a way that I had not experienced previously in my career where people really know each other now in a different way than they ever had before. I really think it’s for the good. I always find it funny when you’re talking to an agent or an executive or a producer and you say, “Oh yeah, I talked to so-and-so about that project. Oh, yeah, she did a draft on that. So-and-so is directing it.” They’re like, “How do you know that?” It’s because, I think, we know each other more now than we did.

Craig: We know more than they know sometimes. We know so much more than they think we know. We talk to each other. I have a lot of writer friends. I like writers. It’s been a wonderful thing for me for the last, I don’t know, six or seven years to get this coterie of writers around me that I admire and that I trust and that I can learn from. We share and talk about everything. I think we do so in a way that is informed by our experience of being safe with each other, that over time we haven’t screwed each other over, that the narrative that we just feed off of each other and compete with each other and undercut each other is essentially bullshit, and that, in fact, we are supportive of each other because the pain that we feel is the most salient thing about the job we do. When we see somebody else feeling it, naturally we just want to help them. There have been a couple people here and there, but for the most part I have found screenwriters to be incredibly generous and incredibly empathetic, and sweet and encouraging, to me at least.

Aline: I’ll tell you a good story. On this spec that I was working on, I wanted to give it to somebody who didn’t know me and didn’t know the situation and didn’t know anything about it that I could give to cold, who I really respected. I gave it to a writer who I really, really respect but don’t know super well. I maybe hung out with him a dozen, no, half a dozen times. I sent him the script, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while which is always the thing where you’re like, “Oh god, he hates it and he can’t figure out how to tell me.” Then I get an email from him that says, “Look, my dad was sick, he was in the hospital. I’m just about to read the script,” whatever. I was like, oh no. Then a couple days go by and I get a set of notes, seven pages of notes–

John: Wow.

Aline: That are the most amazing thoughtful, heartfelt–

Craig: You’re welcome. You’re welcome.

Aline: Well thought out. Including like, “Page 26, you could be doing this. Page 43, you could be doing this.” Sometimes you get notes from people and it’s like they’re fighting what the movie is. This was just a writer understanding like, oh, this is what she’s trying to do. You are trying to do this. Let me help you. You’re trying to get to such and such a place in five hours. Let me give you the best directions on how to get there.
I was so moved when I got that notes document that I was in my office and tears sprang to my eyes. I know how hard it is as a writer to turn your attention from your own imagination and delve into another person’s script. That he would do seven pages of these incredible notes really blew me away. It’s professional camaraderie. Man, the more of that you can find the better. It doesn’t have to be somebody famous. If you’re 23 years old, it can be somebody else that you know who wants to do this, who will read your stuff and put their heart into it.

John: It’s also back to the issue of as writers we want movies to be better. When I’m advising on projects at Sundance or other places, everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a tremendous amount of your time that you’re spending.” It’s like, yes, but it’s a chance to make movies better. It’s a way to sort of see what a person is attempting to try to do and help them get to that place that they’re trying to get to.
Seven pages of notes is above and beyond the call. That’s terrific. Really only a writer could do that, because only a writer could understand what you were trying to do and provide specific ways that you could get to that place.

Craig: I would also say that only a writer can convince you that you’re any good.

Aline: That’s interesting.

Craig: I had a very nice experience. I started writing a novel a couple of years ago. Honestly, I wrote two chapters and then stopped, mostly just out of fear that it wasn’t going to be any good and that I wasn’t any good and I’m no good and blah, blah, blah, rotten tomatoes.

John: Dennis Palumbo?

Craig: No, it’s not Dennis Palumbo. I gave it to Kelly Marcel because she asked to see it. She’s a really good writer. She loved it. I have to believe that. When we give screenplays, or we give our work to people that are employing us, they’re just as overly optimistic as we are. Everybody is rooting, rooting, rooting, but you always wonder. Or you give it to somebody, some producer or agents or coverage. Who’s doing coverage? I don’t know who they are. If a writer reads something of yours and says, “This is good,” then you need to believe it. We can’t get that from anybody else.

John: Yeah. You want that response of, “I’m so happy for you and also a little bit jealous.” That’s the best feeling you can get as a writer is when another writer says, “This is great and I wish I had written it.”

Craig: You know what’s so funny? That’s exactly what she said. She said, I actually think she used the words, “I’m a bit jealous.” Now, I have this other task master that’s making me write this book, which is terrific, terrific, because we also need that. We need somebody. We need a lab partner. We need a lab partner.

John: As we wrap up this segment on the importance of writers being friends, we also need to credit Aline, because during the strike – I agree that the 2008 strike was a big game-changer in terms of especially feature writers knowing who each other are – you organized these events that would happen during the strike, these drink events where we would all get together and mingle. It was my first chance of actually getting to know faces with names of some of these people.

During the strike you were assigned to different studios where you were supposed to be doing picketing. Because I am the palest person on earth, I would picket at Paramount Studios from 5:30 in the morning until 8:30 in the morning, so it would be dark and so I wouldn’t get sunburned. I loved that group of people I was hanging out with. Everyone else was at different studios.

The events that you organized, and there were three or four of them, were terrifically helpful,
because just suddenly all these names that I’d seen in the trades are suddenly in front of you
and you’re talking about the things you’re talking about. A lot of what we were talking about was the strike, but you’re also talking about the work, and you’re talking about how to make things better.

Aline: It came at a critical point. If you try to do those mixers sometimes, it’s hard to get people to go, but people were really wanting to be with other writers then and talk about what’s going on and what are we going to do, and nobody was working.

You were able to organize them over the internet really quickly, send out an e-vite to hundreds of people. There were a lot of people who I knew their names but had never met them. We all really got to know each other during that experience. People had really varying opinions was the other thing. A thing that always amazed me was people were really all over the map about what they believed about this, but by and large people were able to… The camaraderie of being screenwriters overcame people’s different point of views on the strike.

John: I would say there were different point of views on the strike and what we should be doing on the strike and how long it should go and what we should be fighting for. It made a common point of focus in terms of what our profession is and what it is our job is and what our craft is. By focusing on the feature writers who are usually completely in isolation, bringing thing together, it was a way for us to identify ourselves as a group, because usually we’re not a group the way that TV writers are often in rooms together and know each other. It was a way for us to actually know who these people were.

Craig: There’s a certain kind of way that screenwriters interact with each other that is unique. I love it. It is a very talky, chatty, low-tech, low-fancy environment, almost always. We don’t do it the way other people do it. There are few screenwriters I know that love to glam it up and throw parties at nightclubs and stuff like that, but for the most part it seems to me we’re at our happiest when we’re talking somewhere where we can hear each other. That’s fun. It’s a nice, real way to be in Los Angeles, a town where just around the corner there’s some place that has convinced you is important and you have to go inside, and if you can’t get inside, and who do you know inside, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There we are with our jeans and our sweaters and our cigars and our wine. We’re able to be real with each other.

Aline: I will tackle people. It’s funny, because I won’t do this with actors or directors really, but if I see a writer whose work I admire… I did a panel with Peter Morgan in 2006, and I was so excited he was going to be there. The video of me is like a running back approaching, of me literally taking guys and grabbing them by the nape of the neck and chucking them out of the way to get to Pete. I was so excited to meet him. I got to him and I was like, “Oh my god, I just came to this thing so I could meet you.” That moment someone said, “Let me take your picture.” There’s a picture like 30 seconds after Pete and I meet, and I look like I’m standing next to Santa Claus. I’m so excited to be meeting Peter.

Craig: John, who was my Peter Morgan in Austin?

John: Oh, it was Breaking Bad. It was Vince Gilligan.

Aline: Vince.

Craig: Vince Gilligan.

Aline: That thing, when you meet somebody whose work you so admire.

Craig: It’s everything. It’s everything.

Aline: It’s so amazing. I will tackle people. Kelly Marcel just moved to town.

Craig: Did you tackle Kelly Marcel?

Aline: I tackled her at the Mr. Banks thing. She’s new to town so she doesn’t know a lot of writers. I was like, oh, there’s people for you to meet.

John: There’s a mixer in your future.

Aline: She went to Austin, which is a really good way. One thing I would say is go to an event like Austin if you’re somebody who is starting out. Again, we just did not have stuff like this when we were starting out. I would have been there tackling people. Go to these events where there is going to be other aspiring people and you will find people that you connect to, that you can pitch your movies to, that you can talk about what they’re working on. You don’t have to be connecting to the fancy people. You can be connecting to people who are exactly in the same stage that you’re in.

John: Everyone grows up together, so there’s lateral things where you’re reading their script, and if you love their script, keep reading their scripts, and keep helping them out, and they will reciprocate. You will find your people, but you have to look for your people because it’s not you’re a professional football player where you’re just going to be around professional football players.

Aline: That’s right.

John: You are always going to be isolation unless you choose to make yourself not in isolation.

Craig: Don’t be judgey. Don’t be judgey. Don’t think that your friends have to be the fanciest writers in the world, or the most successful writers in the world. Don’t let that get in the way. When you fall in love with another writer, you’re falling in love with a kindred spirit and a fellow mind who understands you, who can help you and you can help them. There is no better feeling. The only better feeling than being helped is helping. How is that for Christmas?

John: This clip is from Episode 425: Tough Love versus Self-Care.

This is inspired by a Chuck Wendig blog post over this past week where he talks through the dueling notions of do you buckle down and sit in that chair and get all those words written when you’re hurting, or do you take a step back and practice some self-care. He’s really looking at the trap you can fall into where you’re just self-caring all the time and you’re not actually doing the hard work. As we head into NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which is where I started Arlo Finch, I thought it was a good time to look at the dueling instincts to you’ve got tough it out versus relax and be easy on yourself.

Craig: Yeah. I loved this. I thought it was really smart. The reason I really appreciated it is because there are two positive ways of thinking about things, and one positive way is I need to take care of myself and be gentle with myself and not beat myself up, because that’s going to be counterproductive. There’s another positive thing that says I need to apply myself and motivate myself and push through difficult things and be resilient in order to get things done.
The problem with both of those things is that bad sentiments can easily masquerade as those things.

That’s the part that I thought he really put his finger on brilliantly is that the two things I just said are correct and good, but here’s something that can masquerade as tough love: a kind of brutal self-loathing and self-denial. Here’s something that can masquerade as self-care: just fear and withdrawal and a sense that engaging isn’t worth it. I thought it was really important that especially now because we do concentrate so heavily on self-care ,that somebody said, just watch out, there are these two imposters that will wear the clothing of these two things and neither one is going to help you.

John: Yeah. Let’s go back to that tough love, because someone who is advocating tough love will say, “Yeah, so what? Writing is often hard. You’re not digging a ditch.” To some degree, writing is exercise and it’s just like working out. You get stronger sometimes by pushing through the pain. You’ve got to rip those muscles a little bit so that they can get stronger. I don’t know if physical science would hold that up to be true.

Craig: You did it.

John: I get that. Writing, for all of us, actually sitting down in the button chair and getting to that 1,000 words or those 3 pages can be really tough sometimes. It’s hard to string the words together. We’ve talked about this a lot on the show. What Craig describes as that imposter is a real thing where sometimes it’s your romantic notion that art must be suffering. That writing must be hard and so therefore if writing is hard then I’m doing the right thing because that’s what writing is supposed to be like, that it’s supposed to hurt and it’s supposed to be torture every time you do it. That’s probably not true. That’s not a healthy way to be approaching the craft that you’ve chosen for yourself.

Craig: You can easily get into a trap where you think of yourself as stupid or lazy because it just didn’t happen that day. You can try and try and try. There are days where it’s not going to happen. The healthy thing is to say that that is normal. I am not perfect. Not every day is going to be optimum. That imposter dressed in the clothing of tough love will say, “You suck. You’re weak and lazy and dumb, and a real writer would have gotten it done. You just failed.” That’s not helpful at all.

John: Let’s look at self-care, because you and I are both dealing with shoulder pain. Part of the recommendation for that is, take it easy on your shoulder. Don’t do things that are going to hurt your shoulder. That really is a form of self-care. If you are encountering a lot of mental anguish and other things in your life that makes it hard for you to write, possibly pushing through and forcing yourself to write is going to make that mental anguish worse. Be mindful that there could be a good reason why you should step off the accelerator and give yourself a little bit of a break and not be pushing yourself so hard.

Chuck was writing from the perspective of he’s a guy in a shack who is writing books. I’m reading his book right now. His book is really good. He wrote a big giant tome called Wanderers. It’s sort of like The Stand. It’s as long as The Stand. It’s a big tome that drops down. Chuck is a guy writing by himself out in the woods. He is not in a writing room. I’m going to keep using that word as much as I can.

Craig: Good for you.

John: He’s not in a writing room in a social environment with other people, and so therefore he only has himself to turn to. Some of his advice can be a little bit different about self-care when you are surrounded by a group who can be pushing you or also be supporting you.

Craig: The self-care thing is interesting because we didn’t really have it until a few years ago. Of course, it existed and people would come up with different names, but the notion of self-care and the popularity of it is a relatively modern phenomenon. What happens is there’s this backlash where people say, “Problem is all these snowflakes with their self-care, ergo self-care is stupid.” By the way, the people that say that never use the term ergo, but whatever. That’s not correct. Self-care is actually crucial.

What is correct is that self-care can be used as a name for something that isn’t self-care at all, but a different kind of self-abuse, which is hiding. We can, when we are afraid, sometimes put on the clothing of somebody that is trying to take care of themselves, when really we’re just scared. People might think, how exactly is writing scary? When you don’t know what to say, it’s terrifying. It really is. It’s as scary as a dream where you have to go on stage and give a speech but you haven’t prepared one. That’s what it kind of feels like.

John: Yeah. There’s a natural anxiety that happens, like, am I going to be able to do it? If I can’t do it, then it’s going to suck and I’m going to be embarrassed. Even if I’m the only person who is going to see that I can’t do it, it’ll going to be embarrassing. Yes, there’s a whole cycle that can start about should I sit down and actually start writing today?

Craig: Correct. You can wear the clothing of modern parlance and say, no, today is a self-care day. It is worth taking a real clear moment when you say today is a self-care day to say, “Or is it?” It doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It just means let’s really ask and evaluate first. Then if everything checks out, then yes, it’s a self-care day.

John: I put together a list of five questions that I thought would be a starting place for looking at is this a time for self-care or is this a time for some tough love with myself. et me read through here. Craig, I suspect you’ll have other things to add to this checklist.

First I would say is check the facts. Basically that’s a chance to sort of step outside yourself and just look at the situation you’re in. Is this a situation where you’re dealing with some big stuff that anyone in your situation would say like, okay, given what you’re going through, like the loss of a family member, a big breakup, you’re moving, there are some real reasons why you are not equipped at this moment to be doing this stuff. Just check the facts. Independent of your emotions, what are the actual facts about this situation?

I would ask, are you taking care of the basics? Are you actually eating properly? Are you sleeping enough? Is there some basic survival function that you’re not doing a good enough job at, and is that the thing you really need to fix rather than worrying about how much you’re writing on a day? I would ask, can you take smaller bites? By that I mean rather than committing to 3 hours of sitting writing, can you just write for 20 minutes, or an hour? Can you do a little sprint to get you through some stuff? Can you write 100 words rather than forcing yourself to write 1,000 words at a sitting?

Can you lower the stakes? And this is where I come back to Aline Brosh McKenna’s method of getting in the ocean. I don’t know if you remember her describing this at some point. This is how Aline describes starting to swim in the ocean, is that you sort of step on the sand and you get your toes wet, and then you get your ankles wet, then you splash a little water up on your shins, and then your knees. Eventually you’re in the ocean and you’re swimming and you don’t even realize that you started swimming. I always loved Aline’s visual for how she gets into the ocean, because it’s true. It’s scary to jump into the ocean, but if you just wander in there, you’re like, oh hey, I’m in the ocean and I’m swimming.

Craig: It’s literally how every Jewish woman I’ve ever seen gets into a pool. It’s like every Jewish woman slowly wets the arms, wets the legs. It’s so careful. Maybe it’s just my family. Maybe it’s just the women in my family. I don’t know. It’s such a weird stereotypical thing, and I guess as far as stereotypes go, fairly harmless, because it is a smart way of acclimating to a new environment. I think lowering the stakes is a brilliant point of view on this, because there are times where you may say, “Listen, I think today is a self-care day. You know what? Today is a self-care day. That said, what if I did some writing on a self-care day? It doesn’t even count. It’s like free calories. Because it’s a self-care day. If it happens it happens. If it doesn’t it doesn’t. I’ll just try it now with zero stakes attached because it’s a self-care day. I don’t have to sit there grinding my teeth because it’s not happening.” I think that’s really smart.

John: Katie Silberman when she was on the show recently, she talked about how when she starts a project she’ll write scenes and scenes and scenes that aren’t going to be in the movie that are just the characters talking. Perfect. Those are throwaway scenes. It doesn’t matter. You’re just getting a sense of the voices. There’s no demand that those actually have to be the real scenes in the movie. Try writing those. You’ll be surprised. Some of those will end up in the movie. It’s lowering the stakes. The world isn’t going to come crashing down if those scenes are not perfect.

Craig: There you go. Yeah.

John: Last I would say, can you define what you’ll need to be able to do in order to get back to work as normal? If you say, okay, this is a self-care day, I can’t do it, great. What are the criteria you need to meet for you to be able to get back to work? If you can be just a little bit more concrete about that, like, “Okay, I need to be able to sit for 10 minutes without bursting into tears,” great. That’s a thing, if you can do that, then you’re on your way to being able to do the next thing. “I need to be able to focus on one thing for 20 minutes.” Give yourself some real criteria, benchmarks that you need to hit, so that you can actually say, okay, I’m in this state or I’m not in this state. There’s a sense that there’s an end date to it, that it’s not going to be a permanent condition for you.

Craig: Those are five great questions to ask yourself. I really only have one other one to suggest. It is simply, is the biggest problem on this particular day your writing? Because if the biggest problem, the thing that is taking the most wind out of your sails, the thing that is making you the sickest in your gut is the work itself, it may not be a self-care day. It may be a day where you just have to kind of re-approach your writing and think about what’s not working, because otherwise you could hide forever from that.

John: Yeah. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, so the third book is in and done, so I’m essentially done with them, it was a lot more regular writing than I’d ever had to do. It’s been four years of really regular writing to get those books done. The word counts were just so much higher and the workload was so much higher than before. I did have to be little tougher on myself in terms of like, yeah, I don’t necessarily really want to do it today but I kind of need to do it today and I’m going to do it today. Even family vacations, I would say, okay, I need an hour this morning to write. I’m not being selfish. It’s what needs to happen. We would plan for I’m writing during this time. then once I got that writing done, I was just free in a way that was great. It wasn’t looming over me because I knew I’d gotten that work done.

I bring this up because sometimes writing actually is what you need to do. Sometimes writing is a really important way to get healthy again because it lets you step outside of yourself, outside of your own internal narrative into a different narrative and really focus on that for a time. It can get you out of your head with the right project.

Craig: That’s such a great point. I’ve got to tell you, that’s me. There are times where I needed a day off or even a week off because of extant circumstances, things that are going on in my family. My son has surgery. You got to deal with life as it comes and there are days where you just can’t do your work. In all honesty, 90% of the time when I am feeling miserable it’s because something is wrong with what I’m writing. The only way to fix that is to solve that problem. It doesn’t mean I have to write the solution. Sometimes I just have to take a long walk or a long shower. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer and I have to sit in that discomfort. That is still a work day to me. My fingers may not be moving on the keys, but I am thinking. I’m trying. I know exactly what you said is correct. When I do solve it and when I write that solution, the pain that I’m feeling will go away. Therefore I can’t self-care that. That can’t be self-cared away. That has to just be worked away. It’s a really smart distinction that you’ve made there.

John: Cool. We will link to Chuck Wendig’s original blog post which we thought was terrific. Chuck Wendig also writes a lot about writing and the writing process, so if you’ve not read any of his books on writing you should do that as well, because he’s a very smart, clever guy and talks really honestly about the frustration of writing but also what’s cool about writing, and has a very good voice. I would encourage you to check out his books as well.

This clip is from Episode 539: How to Grow Old as a Writer.

We have two big topics this week. This one you proposed, so I’m going to let you take leadership on this topic of growing old as a writer.

Craig: I was just thinking about because we’ve been doing this for a while, you and I, and when we started, there was actually quite a lot of concern about ageism in our business. The general idea was that somewhere after 50 the business started kicking people out. In fact, when you look at what the Writers Guild considers a protected class, writers over the age of 40 are considered a protected class. The world has changed drastically since the mid-’90s. I was talking to some people the other day who were pointing out that the writers who are being employed as showrunners, and we’ll call them sort of major feature film writers, generally are older than they’ve ever been before.

I thought, this is interesting. There must be some sort of lessons that we can learn, since you and I are among the people that are still here, about how to keep yourself fresh and motivated and relevant as the years go on, because we are not kids no more.

John: No. Craig, do we want to talk about how to have a long career, or how to be comfortable with aging in your career? Are we talking both? What are the edges of this conversation?

Craig: I feel like they’re intertwined. So, rather than talk in a very practical way about something that is applicable to about 80 people, I want to talk about something that’s applicable to everybody. Everybody who pursues any kind of creative concern, whether you are a visual artist or an actor or a writer or a producer-director, whatever it is that you do, as you get older your relationship to your own art and your own creative process does need to change, or you’re going to suffer. A reflection of that may be in terms of the industry around you and people’s interest in you, or an audience’s response to you. Rather than view it through the lens of industry, I just want to talk about how to keep ourselves in a kind of good place with our own creative minds.

John: Great. The artistic side of growing older and how that relates to the craft and the thing that you’re trying to make on a daily basis.

Craig: Ideally that would be reflected back at you with some sort of industrial success, if that’s what you’re looking for as the years go on. First let’s just consider it all in terms of strategies, because I do think like anything else there’s just practical things that you can apply to yourself as time goes on. These are good thoughts and questions to just, even every birthday, take a 10-minute walk and think about it.

First, you have to think about what your task actually is. Because it changes over time. You may start as someone who for instance in the mid-’90s, you are, “I want to write sitcoms. I’m going to be a sitcom guy that works on network sitcoms.” There are hundreds of them. Over time, that changes. The tasks that are available that match what you think you do can change. Also, formats can change. We think of television as a certain thing now. It’s all over the place. When we started, it was something else. Chernobyl, for instance, couldn’t have been really done until a certain format change occurred. That meant paying attention to what was going on with formats.

There are two kinds of challenges that you can make to yourself. The first is, is the thing that I’m doing the only thing I can be doing, or could I be writing a different kind of thing, like a short story, or like you did, a novel, or like we’ve both done, some songs, or nonfiction work? Also, are we working within a format that is maybe dying out or just getting boring to us? What other formats might expand our own personal expression? If we don’t rotate the crops, as it were, then we will end up with a field that isn’t doing too well.

John: Let’s talk about rotating the crops, because I think that ties into a thing that happens with age, which is this burnout, which is that you’ve done one thing for so long that it’s boring to you. It’s just not interesting to you. It’s hard to work up the enthusiasm to do it again.

I was talking with a writer recently. She was just starting on a new script. She’s like, oh wow, wait, I’m back doing this again. I’m having to start a whole new script again. She was ready to. She knew how to write a script. It was also she didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it that she would have had 5 years, 10 years earlier in her career.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I was attracted to writing the Arlo Finch books or to writing the Big Fish musical is it gave me a chance to be a beginner again, to be someone who is brand new to things and be curious and eager to explore and willing to make mistakes as I’m figuring out this new art form. When you have mastery over something, it’s nice, it’s helpful, things are easier for you, but they’re also less exciting. Picking a new thing to try to do… Just challenge yourself on a regular basis to try something that you haven’t done before as a writer, so that you get that experience of being new at things.

Craig: Yeah. Getting yourself in that rut is the function of a good thing, I think. We know that you need to focus and you need to practice and perfect. That’s part of how you get good at any creative pursuit. There is a point where, and a little bit like when you get in a video game you’ve maxed out your level, you’re now just walking around all the areas of Skyrim and beating everyone’s brains in with ease.

John: Yeah. You’re just doing a little side quest.

Craig: There’s no challenge because you are perfection, and it gets boring. You’re absolutely right. Being a beginner again is a wonderful thing. It’s a little scary, so it’s also a function of fear. Trying new things is scary. The thing that I’m scared of the most is actually, at this point now in my life, being bored. Challenge yourself to reconsider the nature of the formats you do work in, that you’re willing to work in, that you’re willing to try. Take a look at some formats that you didn’t maybe know even existed before, because there are new ones all the time. Challenge yourself to even break out of a genre and into another genre.

John: You’re really saying just stay curious and really look at the world around you and see, what is out there, what is a thing I could make out there that is interesting to me? It doesn’t mean you have to pursue everything. You don’t have to become a social media influencer. You don’t have to master TikTok. It’s okay to leave some stuff by the side, but also recognize that if these things are coming online, they’re serving some need. What is it you can bring to this need, and what can you do that could fit into this bigger universe of new content that’s being made?

Craig: You’ve mentioned the key to all of this, which is stay curious and be connected with the world. The biggest complaint people will make about, we’ll call them aging artists, is that they’re out of touch. How do we get out of touch? We get out of touch by essentially ignoring the world around us because we feel like we figured it out in a moment, and then we stay there. The world will move past that moment. If you don’t, you will be out of touch.

Sometimes people engage with the world simply in opposition. “Kids these days.” Let me just boil it down to that. “I don’t understand the world today. Everyone is on their phones.” Anybody who ever says, “You know what the problem is with the world today? Look around you man. Everyone is staring at their phones. They’re not looking at each other,” you go ahead and tell that person they’re an idiot, because the world changes. They are interacting in fact with more people faster than you could have ever done in your life. Is it true that sometimes uninterrupted eye-to-eye contact is wonderful? Absolutely. Is it a cliché, out-of-touch thing to say, “They’re all looking at their phones?” Absolutely out of touch.

Rather than instinctively saying, “In my day everything was perfect and now it stinks,” listen. Just listen to the world. Even if you disagree with it, listen to it, because perhaps in your experience of the world around you and your differences of opinions with it, you may find grist for the creative mill. Defensiveness isn’t going to get you anywhere.

John: Yeah. Being defensive is never a good look. When you say no to something, people stop engaging with you. I would say over this last 20 years, one of the most helpful ways I’ve been able to stay caught up with how things are for screenwriters and just for general people making creative things, I’ve always had an assistant. My assistants have always been younger than me. They’ve always been at the start of their careers and doing stuff that people at the start of their careers do. It’s been fascinating to see how the starts of careers have changed over the last 20 years because just the industry has changed around them.

Also, just engaging with the people who originally were writing into the website who are now Scriptnotes listeners. You see what they’re doing and what the challenges they’re facing, but also what is exciting to them. I may not be excited about the same things, but what they’re into is valid. Listening to what it is that they are going after is great. I always try to remember that the people I’m interacting with are the people who are going to be running this town in 10, 20, 30 years. It’s worth hearing what’s sparking for them because those are the kinds of movies and TV shows that we will be making the next couple decades.

Craig: Inherently, you are not jealous of the young, nor am I. I think a lot of older people get quietly, subconsciously jealous of young people. My feeling is that when we judge them, remember what it was like when we were judged by older people, because in my memory my feelings were not hurt at all. I just kind of rolled my eyes and made fun of them, because soon they were going to be dead and I was not. They were old and out of it and not vital. My feeling is, judging people who are younger and thinking that all they do, they’re obsessed with their influencers and their TikTok and blah blah blah, you’re not having any impact on them. They’re laughing at you. Maybe just listen to them and observe them. What’s wrong with that?

John: You can also ask advice, which I think a lot of times older people have a hard time asking advice of younger people because it reveals something that they don’t know. The fact is you just don’t know some things, so again, be curious. Ask the questions. Don’t ask the questions in a way that feels judgmental like, “Why are you doing it this crazy, stupid way?” What is it that’s interesting to you about this thing, or why did you decide to make that choice? Again, when you get to move into new fields, that’s very natural because you just actually just don’t know. You’re in a much better position to ask naïve questions because you don’t know what that thing is, versus us as screenwriters we have a good sense of how all the stuff fits together.

That said, when I talked with a writer, Liz Hannah, who just did a movie for Netflix, I am genuinely curious about what the experience is like making a movie for Netflix. What are the deliverables like on that movie? Are they expecting the same things that we’d expect in a theatrical feature delivery system where they want… Are they cutting negative? Are they doing all the stuff that we used to do for normal, traditional features, or is it more like a TV delivery system? Ask those questions and realize that the different kinds of things people are making these days are more likely the future than what we knew.

Craig: The things around us that happen that we can lose touch with in a dangerous way are not just I guess the different experiences that younger people are having, but also the general viewpoint of the world. Attitudes change. It’s very hard for us to keep up with it. It really is. I understand that.

I remember a friend once told me, he was like, “I’m going to keep listening to whatever the pop music station is, the current hits station, because I never want to be one of the old people that doesn’t know current music.” Inevitably, you will be. It’s not possible. There are some things that are going to leave you behind.

General attitudes and vibes and feelings are things you need to be in touch with, because what was once funny may not be anymore. Things like funny and dramatic and scary and shocking are not absolute values. They are relative to the time in which you live. If you’re not paying attention to the kinds of things that are shocking people or making them laugh, you’re going to flop, because you’re out of touch and out of time.

John: Let’s talk about authenticity, because one of the things I see which can be kind of embarrassing is when an older person is trying to seem younger than they are and is not acknowledging the fact that they are in a different generation than people they’re talking to.

Craig: Hello, fellow kids.

John: Language is one where they’re trying to use slang and they’re using it improperly. That’s sort of a tell. It’s not just that it’s embarrassing that they’re using it wrong. It’s that it’s clear that they’re not being authentic to who they are. I think one of the reasons why young people spark so clearly to Bernie Sanders is he feels very much himself. That is true of any generation. When we were in our 20s, we didn’t want the old person who was trying to be like us. We wanted the old person who felt like themselves. Don’t reach too far in terms of your own voice trying to sound young.

In terms of your writing voice, though, you are going to be writing characters of all different ages, all different backgrounds. You have to be listening for how those things sound so that your character’s voices don’t drift away.

Our example in last week’s episode, where we were listening to how people speak, that’s I think even more important as you age into your career, because your assumptions, your memory of what 20-somethings sounded like is not going to match how 20-somethings sound right now.

Craig: Yeah. Then we come to our last point, which is just language, just the realities of language, because you’re right. There is something terribly inauthentic about someone that is chasing language. They will always be five steps behind anyway. They will always be your dad walking in saying, “Oh, chill out. Oh wow, this is fresh.” Shut up, dad. That’s so old and lame. It’s faster now. Whatever is cool five seconds will not be cool five seconds from now, because that’s what youth is. It’s a churn.

Don’t chase it, but do let yourself be carried along by it. Be aware of it. Let yourself be old authentically without either chasing something, which is inauthentic, or denying the reality of it, which is just as terrible. Just be aware of the way that the world is changing and be aware of the way you’re changing. If you are those things and you are willing and open to evolving, then it doesn’t really matter how old you get. You’ll just be cool. Dr. Ruth Westheimer is 4,000 years old.

John: Good lord, yes.

Craig: She’s cool.

John: Yeah, she’s a lich, but she’s really cool.

Craig: She is a lich.

John: There’s a [unclear 01:17:21] hidden away someplace.

Craig: Yeah, she’s a lawful good lich. Very rare. Very rare.

John: Special when you find them.

Craig: She’s a lich.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with segments produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan McDonnell. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Chris John Mince [ph]. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin and I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. You should get them. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record with Jake, who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Thanks, and we’ll see you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, I’m here with Jake Kelley, who is the listener who wrote in with the suggestion for this episode. Jake, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Jake Kelley: Hello. Thank you for having me.

John: Tell me about the inspiration for this episode. What got you thinking about, “Oh, I should put together a compendium episode.”

Jake: It started because I think as listeners what we appreciate about you and Craig is your expertise on the craft of screenwriting. If you listen to enough episodes, it becomes evident that you’re both very wise and experienced guys in other manners. I wanted to put this episode together to showcase some of that wisdom that’s not necessarily craft-specific, but that can still help screenwriters.

John: Stuff that’s not about the words on the page, but the actual experience of being a screenwriter. Are you a screenwriter? Do you write yourself?

Jake: I do write. I am not a professional screenwriter.

John: I see by the little bit of Googling that you’re actually a visual artist. That’s your background?

Jake: That is correct.

John: How do you find the relationship between the creative process, writing, trying to write a script, versus the work you’re doing, painting or doing other visual arts?

Jake: I find the process to be pretty similar. I would say the biggest difference, and it’s a very surface-level difference, but I can only write for about two or three hours a day max, and usually not even that, whereas if I’m doing visual art, it’s pretty easy for me to do five, six, or seven hours straight.

John: They’re similar disciplines, but different in the way that doing physical art, you’re physically doing stuff, you’re in a space, you’re moving around, versus writing, you’re at a desk and you’re making a thousand decisions about this word or that word, this moment or that moment. Even Craig and I, we’re writing two or three hours maximum a day also. It’s not realistic to assume that you’re going to be able to crank out that number of hours.

Jake: There still is a lot of those decisions in creative art. Every time I mix a color, it’s like, is this the right color or the wrong color? Every line, I’m questioning it. It really is a process of thousands of micro decisions you’re making through the course of that working session.

John: Craig, of course, if he were on this podcast, he would say [unclear 01:20:48] drop out of film school. Did you go to art school? Did you learn how to do this in an academic setting?

Jake: Yes. I did go to the University of Wisconsin, where I studied fine art.

John: What are those classes like? I know a writing class, because I went through a journalism program. Those metrics were like, are you able to do the job or not do the job, versus it would seem to be harder to figure out, is this student in my visual arts class actually progressing? Are they doing the work that deserves an A or a B or a pass or a fail?

Jake: I think that was the trouble for some of my educators, some of them being grad students. I would say overall it is measured by progress. These classes were open to non-artists a lot of times. We did try to foster a healthy atmosphere if somebody wanted to come in from a science field and just try to do a life drawing. It was based on progress and effort and attempt. You’d just blow it off, but that was the starting place.

John: Now, coming from a visual background, were you always also writing? Did you write even back in those days or was it a later thing that you got into?

Jake: We can say I was doing some writing, but where they really came together was I was doing comics and comic strips, which is really both writing and drawing at the same time.

John: Talk to me about the comic strips, because that’s absolutely true that you were both having to figure out what the stories, what the words are, what the actual point is, yet you have to have a strong visual representation of how that works. As you were doing comics, were you scripting them out first and then figuring out the panels? What was your process?

Jake: For that, if it was a simple four-panel comic, generally I would just have a vague idea of one I wanted to do. I would fill in the visual information, and then do the text last. Other people did it the other way. If it’s longer form, then I would probably start with some sort of words on a page to help guide me, break up the storytelling information that way.

John: I’m writing a graphic novel right now. I’m loving it. It’s a great process, but I’m finding it is actually exhausting to really have to visualize the page and think, okay, how is this going to be presented on the page, what’s actually happening panel by panel to get me through it, what is the top-of-page to bottom-of-page experience? I love it, but it’s just, even after 20 years doing this as a job, it is still different than the normal screenwriting I’m doing.

Jake: When you’re screenwriting and you’re using only words, what is the engagement of the visual process there for you?

John: Screenwriting with just words, I am envisioning the space, envisioning who the people are and where they are in the space and basically what they’re doing. I just create the loop of this is the moment, this is the scene, this is happening. I don’t think shot by shot. I don’t think what the coverage is going to be. I don’t think necessarily who’s big in frame, who’s small in frame, usually. I just have to put the people there and get them in motion, as opposed to doing this writing now for this graphic novel, I really have to think about who’s in that frame and who am I focused on in that moment. It feels a lot more like the directing from the page has always been okay, but it feels like calling out those closeups, calling out what it is moment by moment I’m going to be seeing. That is a little exhausting for me.

Jake: Of course.

John: I want to talk to you about, you pulled for this episode way back to Episode 6. When did you start listening to this show? When did you find all these little moments? Were you always listening from the beginning or did you go back through the archives? How did you find all these moments?

Jake: I believe I discovered your podcast, I want to say around Episode 390 or so. I’m not actually sure what date that lines up with, maybe three years ago or so. At first I was just listening to the new episode every week it came out. Then I did start to become more interested in the past episodes, because there is a wealth of information there. What I did was I would go reverse chronological by… You break it up into 50-episode chunks. I would go backwards a chunk, but then within that chunk, go forward. I’d jump to Episode 250, then go 251, 252. Then when I reached 300, I would jump backwards to 200 and then 201.

John: I’ve never listened to the back-catalogs. I have a memory of recording them, but I can’t remember who I was at that time or what the show was like.

Jake: Of course.

John: How much has the show changed when you listen back to those early episodes versus what’s happening now on the show?

Jake: I don’t think it actually changed all that much. I know that some people say that the earlier episodes are a little bit rough around the edges. I think that’s only true maybe in terms of microphone quality. Very, very early on, I think you and Craig maybe don’t have quite the same rapport. Honestly, it’s not that noticeable. It really is you could jump to those back-episodes that far back and really truly have the same experience. You guys are as wise and smart as always.

John: Aw. Jake, thank you so much for this. Thank you very much again for writing with this suggestion, because it really was a great pitch for putting together the kind of episodes that we’ve been doing more of as Megana’s come online, to really pick stuff up from this big catalog and make episodes that make sense. We some rerun old episodes, and that can be great, but so much of that information gets weirdly out of date, and our wonderful things don’t match up to anything. A suggestion like this for a special compendium episode is great. Jake, thank you so much again for this.

Jake: Of course. Thanks for having me.

John: Absolutely.

Links:

• Episode 6: How Kids Become Screenwriters
• Episode 119: Positive Moviegoing
• Episode 425: Tough Love vs. Self Care
• Episode 439: How to Grow Old as a Writer
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium to listen to all the episodes in our back catalogue, including the ones sampled here.
• Thanks to Jake Kelley for the episode suggestion!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Christiaan Mentz (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (with segments by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, and Megan Mcdonnell!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/do-muppets-bleed).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 585 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what are the unique characteristics that allow you to distinguish one writer’s writing from another’s. We’ll talk about writer fingerprints, voice, and situations where you may need to mimic someone else’s style. Plus, we have a lot of listener follow-up.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we often answer writer questions about producers, but here we have one from a producer asking about how to best handle a writer who can’t seem to finish or deliver on a script. If you want to know what advice Craig, Megana, and I have for this producer, you can find out as a Premium Member in about one hour when we get to that segment.

**Craig:** That’s worth the five bucks right there.

**John:** Right there. Right there.

**Craig:** Right there.

**John:** You know what’s worth more than $5?

**Craig:** What, Segue Man?

**John:** A spot on Scriptnotes if you are a writer, because we are the number one podcast for getting Oscar nominees to happen. That’s what I’ve decided.

**Craig:** I think you might be right about this.

**John:** Our track record this year, pretty darn good. Sarah Polley, Oscar nominee. Rian Johnson, Oscar nominee, Daniels, Oscar nominees. You count them as one or two people?

**Craig:** I count them as one bi-person duology.

**John:** Absolutely. Although she wasn’t on the podcast this year, she’s a previous guest, Pamela Ribon, and she was a One Cool Thing, so I think that counts for her animation nomination for My Year of Dicks.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s so funny, Year of Dicks triggered something in me.

**John:** The title or the film itself?

**Craig:** The title. I’m so glad I got to say that and it’s preserved eternally. Have you watched Poker Face yet?

**John:** I haven’t watched it yet. I’m excited too.

**Craig:** I saw the first episode of Poker Face last night, which is the new show from Rian Johnson and the great Natasha Lyonne, who by the way, have we had Natasha on the show?

**John:** No, she was never on the show.

**Craig:** We’re going to change that momentarily. It was a delight. There was a line that was said not once, but twice, possibly thrice. “Cloud of dicks.” It made me happy. I think we have entered the dicks phase of language.

**John:** Yeah, 100%. Now, I worry though that the success of these writers who came on the Scriptnotes podcast is only going to make it worse for Megana. I don’t know if you know this, Craig, but publicists are flooding her inbox.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** We need to stop that.

**Craig:** There’s nothing we can do about that really. They’re going to find whoever they can find, and I don’t blame them. I honestly don’t. The thing about these awards seasons is… You’ve been involved in one. I’ve been involved in one. The publicists are constantly looking for these angles. The ones that they love the most are the inside baseball ones, where they know you can go and talk to people for an hour, it’s actually a fun conversation, it’s not brutal, and it’s going to be over-sampled by the people voting in the Guild Awards and for the Academies.

I get it, but also, dear publicists, we’re not a talk show really. This is my favorite kind of show, me and you alone with Megana. Alone with Megana. That’s a great song title. Didn’t Air Supply do that one?

**John:** I do want to acknowledge that most of the people we’ve had on the show who are writers who get awards were people we just knew independently of publicists. There have been a couple cases where the only place that we could find these people were because of publicists, and some of those have turned out great too. The Greta Gerwig episode is a fantastic episode. I don’t know Greta Gerwig from anybody, but because of publicists, we were able to be connected together. I’m not digging publicists. They serve a great function. I just want to make sure that we are true to our goals of not becoming just a talk show.

**Craig:** I think we really do try and limit it, even among our friends. We have friends that still bug me, like, “Why haven’t I been on your show?” Because that’s not what we do. It’s not our thing. Then every time we do have a guest, I’m like, “I’m going to hear from people.” It’s honestly not our focus. We are not a come on and plug your thing. The reason that we talk to people almost always, not always, but almost always, is because there is a personal connection. Even the Daniels was just down to, I’d had a nice chat with one of the Daniels on Twitter. There was some connection there.

**John:** I met them up on the mountain at Sundance.

**Craig:** There you go. There you go.

**John:** There was some connection. The person we’ve not been able to get on the show, and we’ve kind of tried, we haven’t tried that hard, but James Cameron is a get that we’d love to get, because not only his most recent work, but how incredibly influential his writing style for films like Terminator and Aliens. Action writing is different because of him. It would be great to have him on the show.

**Craig:** I am a huge, huge fan of the script for Titanic. I just love it. I love it. It would be great to talk to him for my own interest. I’m that selfish. If other people want to listen, fine, but I want to talk to him.

**John:** We’ve been trying to make that happen. At some point, maybe we can make that happen. In the meantime, if you want to read any of these scripts that are nominated, you can now, thanks to Megana Rao, read them on the Weekend Read beta. Weekend Read is the app my company makes for reading scripts on your iPhone. We have a beta for the new version. It’s really good. It’s really fun. We now have all the For Your Consideration scripts up in there if you want to read them. The new version has notes. It has a read aloud feature, which is fun.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** If you would like to try the beta on that, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s just a simple test flight. There’s still kinks that we’re working out, so if you want to try it out and tell us what’s working and what’s not working, that would help us out a lot.

**Craig:** Don’t kink-shame.

**John:** No. Kinks are good. Kink-celebrate.

**Craig:** I’m giddy today. I’m clearly giddy.

**John:** You are giddy. Let’s talk about why you’re giddy, because you had a rough start to your day. Do you want to tell us what happened this morning?

**Craig:** It was an up and down sort of day.

**John:** Literally.

**Craig:** Exactly. Upside, The Last of Us has been renewed for another season.

**John:** Hooray!

**Megana Rao:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Thank you. I was very happy about that. Then on the downside, there’s some businessy, contracty nonsense. Every now and then, you just get a call from your lawyer where you’re like, “Wait, what? What?! What?!” I just got grouchy about that. It’ll all be resolved. Nobody freak out. Then I went and took a shower, and I was moving quickly, because I didn’t want to be late for this show.

**John:** You don’t want to break your perfect streak of being on time.

**Craig:** Exactly, because I’m always so punctual, and I really felt like it’s important to not blow it. That’s obviously really important to me, and so I raced. Coming out of the shower, I slipped and I fell in the bathroom. As I was falling, I did a pretty good job of… Time slows down, and you basically get spidey senses. Your body knows somehow, something terrible is about to happen, so your brain goes into a mega state. Everything got slower. I was able to get my hand out to slow things down. I was also able to turn. I took all of the brunt of the fall on my hip, which as you know, is something that old people break all the time. Now I know why. I did not break my hip. I was on the floor, and for a second I was like, “Did I just… No, I think I’m okay.”

There’s a comedian, Alonzo Bodden, who does this bit about how when you’re in your 20s and you fall, you just pop back up and your only concern is, “Did anybody see me? Because I looked really stupid.” When you’re in your 50s and you fall, people tell you, “Whoa, don’t get up. Stay down.” Then he said when you’re in your 80s and you fall, people fly in from out of state. I decided to stay down for a bit, and then I was like, “Everything’s fine.” Then I got back up, and I was just like, “Oh, for God’s sakes, what a start to the day.”

**John:** I’m so sorry, Craig. I had a fall at the end of last year. We were skiing. Skiing is inherently kind of dangerous. You’re going to fall while you’re skiing.

**Craig:** At least you fall on snow.

**John:** I was going in to change my gloves or something. I’m walking in ski boots, which are perilous anyway. I hit some wet concrete, slip, and start to fall. Yes, again, time starts to go more slowly. In fact, they think what’s actually happening is that time isn’t moving more slowly but your memory of it is moving more slowly. It takes more slices. That’s why it seems like-

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** That’s why you remember it happening slowly.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** I start to fall. I end up falling and hitting my ribs against this row of seats. I bruise my ribs. They’re still now recovering.

**Craig:** Are you sure you just bruised them?

**John:** If I’d broken them, it would’ve been harder to breathe.

**Craig:** It’s probably true.

**John:** Also, there’s not a lot they can do for broken ribs [crosstalk 00:09:12].

**Craig:** There really isn’t. You can’t cast them. You just basically tell people don’t take deep breaths.

**John:** The rib I bruised the most is one of the ribs in back that’s not actually connected to anything. It free floats, which is kind of great, but also they could just remove it like they removed Cher’s ribs. I was thinking, “Maybe they can just remove the rib.”

**Craig:** Did they really remove Cher’s ribs?

**John:** I think that is not just a Snopesy thing. We’re going to look it up right now, because I don’t want to put false information out. Snopes Cher rib.

**Craig:** I’m doing it too, Snopes Cher rib. “Did Cher have ribs removed to make her waist smaller?” False.

**John:** False.

**Craig:** False. The claim was Cher had her lowest pair of ribs surgically removed to achieve an ultra-small waist. That is apparently false. In fact, it doesn’t seem that really anyone has done that.

**John:** I’m looking up Marilyn Manson too, the other thing I’ve heard.

**Craig:** For a totally different purpose. We could say auto-fellatio on the show. I don’t think that that violates any… Marilyn Manson, who apparently is a horrible person, from everything I’ve read… Am I allowed to say that on the show?

**John:** Yeah. I think we avoid libel by saying you’ve heard people say that he’s not a good person.

**Craig:** I don’t mean to slander anybody. I’m just saying I’ve read things online. It sounds like he’s a horrible person. Some terrible claims have been made against him by people that I have no reason to doubt. The rumor that had been out there is that he had ribs removed so that he could perform auto-fellatio, which it can’t possibly be true.

**John:** No, it doesn’t seem like it’s true. People apparently are asking him, and he’s giving vague non-answers, probably because he wants the story to continue. Anyway, circling back to-

**Craig:** Boy, have we gone off… Wow.

**John:** Craig and I both fell down and hurt ourselves, and we’re older, but we’re okay.

****Megana:**** Aw.

**Craig:** I like that Megana’s like, “Oh, you guys are so cute, falling down.” Megana, you’re the one that’s going to have to take care of us.

**John:** Megana has a sore throat.

**Craig:** Oh, you have a sore throat?

****Megana:**** I have a sore throat, yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, dear. Oh boy.

****Megana:**** It’s normal. It’s a cool thing to have.

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** It’s a very useful sore throat.

**Craig:** Megana, I gotta push back on that. I don’t think it’s cool at all.

****Megana:**** It’s not cool, but I got it from being social and fun, not from the two stories we just heard.

**John:** At a party.

****Megana:**** I got it at a party.

**Craig:** Not from some pathetic old man lost his balance thing. Cool. Cool cool.

**John:** We actually have a PSA, not really a question or a follow-up, but from James, which is also about medical-related things. Megana, would you help us out with that?

****Megana:**** James says, “This isn’t a question. It’s a reminder for all writers to look after their tools. For the last couple of years, I’ve been struggling to write. I would feel mentally drained whenever I started writing. Depression and writing became synonymous in my mind. I wasn’t looking at things clearly, literally. I got my eyes checked a few weeks ago, and it turns out that I needed reading glasses. That’s all. The effort required to read was causing me stress and fatigue. These glasses have given me a new surge of creativity, and it’s a joy to write again. If we’re sighted, our eyes are a key tool for our job. Please look after them.”

**Craig:** That’s fantastic, James.

**John:** That’s fantastic. I feel very seen by James, because a thing I’ve noticed over the past last few months is some days I wake up and my eyes are just not working quite right. It’s not that I need my reading glasses on or need them off. Just my monitor is hard to read. I actually have an eye appointment to go in and see if I need some sort of medium distance glasses. Right now, as we’re recording, eyes are crystal clear, everything is so sharp, but there’s times where it’s hard just to read, and writing’s tougher.

**Craig:** You don’t wear reading glasses?

**John:** I wear reading glasses only for very close distance things.

**Craig:** I see. John, alas, that is changing. John, your body is going through changes. Have a seat. Let’s talk about what’s happening with your body. Your eye muscles are dying, and so are mine. I will say the more you use reading glasses, the-

**John:** More you depend on them.

**Craig:** Oh my god, because your eye muscles are like, “Thank you. We’re done. Everybody go home. We retire.” I think it’s fun actually. I am enjoying this part of being old. I feel like this is the best old time. What follows this is not good old time. This is fun old time, like, “Oh, I need glasses. Oh, I slipped and fell, but really nothing happened, lol.” The 20-something that I work with on my show laughs about it, and that’s funny. In 10 years it’s going to be sad.

****Megana:**** Also, just because most people on the podcast don’t get to see this, you do have quite a flourish when you put your reading glasses on.

**Craig:** I do?

****Megana:**** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like to snap them open and slap them on. Everybody knows when the reading glasses go on-

****Megana:**** It’s business time.

**Craig:** It’s business time. Decisions are about to be made.

**John:** A trick for people is that if you are starting to use reading glasses, like I am, get on Amazon. You can get packs of 10 that are basically all the same. You just leave them around places in your house, so you don’t have to worry about, “Where are my reading glasses?” Your reading glasses are everywhere, and that’s a really helpful thing you can do, just like pens. Just have a pen everywhere you need a pen.

**Craig:** Try and make as many friends as you can in their 50s and 60s, because they’ll always have reading glasses with them also. I used to look at people 10 years ago in a restaurant with their glasses and their phones with the lights on, looking at menus. I’m like, “What is wrong with these people?” It me.

**John:** You’re the problem.

**Craig:** I’m the problem.

**John:** We have another question that I think we can actually maybe answer, about Apple Podcasts and Siri. Megana, help us out.

****Megana:**** Anthony writes, “I had a weird change in my normal listening habit when I upgraded to a new OS on my phone. I’m using an iPhone 12 Mini and I just upgraded to iOS 16.2. I’m subscribed to the show via Apple Podcasts, and when driving, I used to be able to press a talk button and say, ‘Play Scriptnotes podcast,’ and it just started playing the latest episode or wherever I left off. Now after this update, if I say, ‘Play Scriptnotes podcast,’ it says you have to blah blah blah Apple Music to do that. I tried changing it to say, ‘Play Apple Podcast Scriptnotes,’ and it didn’t work, starts playing Apple Podcasts but other shows. Without boring you to tears, I’ve managed to verbally get it to play a couple of times, but I can’t remember the exact phrasing that worked.”

**John:** This is a form of prompt engineering. It’s almost like what ChatGPT is, like what am I going to say to this device to get them to do what I want. We have the same kind of problem occasionally. In the morning, we ask Siri to play us the news. We say, “Play the news from NPR,” or just, “Tell us the news.” Sometimes it works like that, and sometimes it doesn’t.

What I think Anthony needs to do is be a little bit more specific. I think the real trick here is that the podcast we’re listening to is not Scriptnotes, it is Scriptnotes Podcast. For whatever reason, when we first set it up, we called it Scriptnotes Podcast. If he says, “Play Scriptnotes Podcast in Podcasts,” it should work. I listen to Overcast, and I’d test it, that, “Play Scriptnotes Podcast in Overcast,” will pull up Overcast and it’ll play in there.

**Craig:** Is there a way to change that, so that just saying Scriptnotes would work? Is there somebody we could talk to?

**John:** I think we would probably break… It’s too risky. There’s too many things that could break because of it.

**Craig:** What if I talk to Tim Apple? Would that help?

**John:** Tim Apple could fix all of it.

**Craig:** I’m telling you, this is going to… John, hang on. Just hang on, because this is going to be a show. It’s going to be a show, buddy. It’s going to be a show. We’re going to have a great time.

**John:** Also, what’s important for people to understand is that we think about Apple controlling podcasts, but they really don’t. It’s just an RSS feed, like your old website, Craig. That RSS feed has really nothing to do with Apple. It’s just people tend to use their iPhones to listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** I just wanted to say Tim Apple.

**John:** Tim Apple. Craig, we have talked before about IP-based movies. I think one of the things we got to was there was going to be a Pet Rock movie at some ponit. The moment has come. I was talking with a writer who’s going to pitch on the Pet Rock movie. We had a great conversation about what the Pet Rock movie should be.

**Craig:** I don’t hate it. Did you have a Pet Rock by the way?

**John:** I didn’t have an official Pet Rock bought at the store. I got a rock out of the garden and drew some eyes on it.

**Craig:** Oh my god, that’s the saddest thing in the world.

**John:** I don’t know what to tell you.

**Craig:** You were too poor to have the $4 Pet Rock?

**John:** Yeah, it’s true.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Basically, my parents said no.

**Craig:** That is the most Eagle Scout thing I’ve ever heard from you, and you have quite a bit of Eagle Scoutness as an Eagle Scout. I had the actual branded Pet Rock, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s superior to your homemade faux rock.

**John:** Tell me why it was better.

**Craig:** No, it wasn’t.

**John:** What are the characteristics of a real Pet Rock? Are their googly eyes glued to it?

**Craig:** Yes, there are googly eyes glued to it. That is essentially what it was. Megana, have you even heard of Pet Rock?

****Megana:**** I’ve heard of Pet Rock. I’ve never actually seen one. I haven’t held one.

**Craig:** There’s probably a few out there still in the wild. The joke of it was I think it was invented as a novelty to make fun of consumerism. It was like, “Look how stupid everyone is.” People would buy a Pet Rock. It’s a gag gift you’d give to somebody on their birthday, “Ha ha ha, I bought you a Pet Rock.” Then it just became a fad, a real fad. In the ‘70s, fads happened in the weirdest ways. We watch fads happening now live on Twitter or Instagram.

These things would just emerge in these crazy, organic ways until eventually they filtered down to people on Staten Island. Then it subverted the whole point. The whole point was look how ridiculous it is. Then actually people were like, “We want Pet Rocks.”

What we have now are a lot of people running Hollywood who are in their 50s and 60s who are remembering Pet Rock. This to me is the epitome of pointless in that nobody who’s going to… They’re not making the Pet Rock movie for people in their 50s and 60s. They’re making it for kids. Kids don’t know about Pet Rocks. Zero cache for them. It could be good though. It could be.

**John:** It could be good. It could be good, just because there’s literally a blank slate, as the writer said. There’s many rock puns you can get to.

**Craig:** I get it. Slate.

**John:** Here’s what I’ll say. I think the idea of this thing that should be completely inanimate being the central character of a story is interesting in the wake of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and the moments in Everything Everywhere All At Once which are about two rocks just sitting and watching the end of time. I kind of get it, but they’re going to want it to be a big, four-quadrant movie. They’re going to want it to be Minions, and that’s going to be challenging, but somebody’s up for it.

**Craig:** If you made a movie called Rocks and it was about animated rocks, that would be perfectly… We know that you can make a wonderful animated movie based on almost anything. It’s just the fact that they think Pet Rock has some kind of value.

**John:** I’m curious whether Pet Rock is a trademark, whether they held onto a trademark for that or if it’s just [inaudible 00:20:40].

**Craig:** That’s a great question. I don’t know, although now I’m seeing that apparently there is a Pet Rock that is introduced in Minions: The Rise of Gru. Perhaps this is why. It may be that the Pet Rock has been revived via Minions.

**John:** The other revival of the Pet Rock of course is Elmo’s longstanding beef with Zoe on Sesame Street about her pet rock. Zoe wants to save a piece of pie or a piece of pizza for her pet rock. Elmo’s like, “It’s just a stupid rock.”

****Megana:**** His name’s Rocco.

**John:** His name’s Rocco, the pet rock.

**Craig:** Does Elmo physically fight Zoe? Do they fight? Is there blood? Do muppets bleed?

**John:** Do muppets bleed? We’ve got a title for the episode.

**Craig:** Hey, Siri, do muppets bleed? I just triggered a lot of phones out there.

**John:** We will follow the development of the Pet Rock movie. The other thing, which I don’t know if we talked about on the show before, is I was curious why is there not a General Mills cereal movie. Why is there not a Franken Berry movie? Why is there not a Count Chocula?

**Craig:** Why isn’t there?

**John:** I looked it up, and there was a whole plan to make them, and it all fell apart.

**Craig:** Things do tend to fall apart a lot in Hollywood.

**John:** Things fall apart.

**Craig:** That is true. Hold on a second. I just had a cool idea for a movie.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** It’s an animated movie. It’s basically a battle royale between all of the cereal mascots.

**John:** The mascots, yeah.

**Craig:** All of them. There’s so many. Right off the top of my head, there’s Cap’n Crunch, there’s the Trix are for kids rabbit, there is the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Snap, Crackle, and Pop. There’s the Honey Smacks Dig ‘Em Frog. Was it Honey Smacks?

**John:** Dig ‘Em Frog, yeah.

**Craig:** There’s the Dig ‘Em Frog. There’s the wizard from Cookie Crunch or Cookie Crisp. It was a wizard.

**John:** Cookie Crisp wizard. We obviously have Boo Berry.

**Craig:** Franken Berry, Boo Berry, Count Chocula, the bee from Honey Nut Cheerios. What else do we need to say?

**John:** It’s IP-alooza. It feels like it could be Laff-A-Lympics, which is great.

**Craig:** Or Space Jam.

**John:** Space Jam is really the comp for it, although those were all within one studio. Getting them all together would be a little bit tough, but completely doable.

**Craig:** You just have to settle the great Kellogg’s/Post war. That’d be fun. Somebody get to work on that.

**John:** Easy done. Craig, we’ve talked before about the preface page or whatever we want to call that page after the title page, before the script itself starts. Thanks for Adrianne Cespedes who wrote in with this preface page Tár. Craig, would you mind reading the preface page from Tár?

**Craig:** Sure. Here’s what it says. “Based on this script’s page count, it would be reasonable to assume that the total running time for Tár will be well under two hours. However, this will not be a reasonable film. There will be tempo changes and soundscapes that require more time than is represented on the page, and of course a great deal of music performed on screen. All this to say, if you are mad enough to greenlight this film, be prepared for one whose necessary length represents these practical accommodations.” That’s great.

**John:** I really like this. I like it because here we have Todd Field warning the studio distributor that the film is going to be long, but also it feels very Tár-like. It feels like it’s in keeping with the spirit of the film, which is going to be like, “I am going to set impossible standards that are going to make you a little uncomfortable. Let’s get started.”

**Craig:** You can feel the intelligence radiating off of this. The formality of the language is setting you up for Tár. It’s wonderful and I think probably wasn’t necessary, but additive. If Todd hadn’t put this there, the people would’ve read it and said, “Wow, this movie’s great.” Then you would’ve said, “Terrific. Now, if you want to make it, I gotta tell you, blah blah blah blah blah.” I like that he put it in anyway, because it sets the table.

**John:** That’s what a preface page does is gets you ready for the read. We have a question from Lorenz in Vienna here.

**Craig:** Should I read it?

**John:** Megana, do you want to read this?

**Craig:** I don’t want to take Megana’s job.

****Megana:**** I appreciate that, Craig.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

****Megana:**** Lorenz from Vienna writes, “In Episode 582, Craig briefly mentioned paid script consultants and what he thought about them. I then went back to the transcript of Episode 71 and was surprised to read that essentially you seemed to consider them a waste of money at best and dangerous quacks at worst. I’m an early career writer-director in Europe, and over here, script consultants are an integral part of the industry, with dedicated state funding for them during script development.

“My own experience with consultants has been very positive, and judging from what I’ve learned about writers’ rooms on your show, the relationship feels a bit like a mini room, with the consultant acting as a conversation partner and providing outsider’s perspective on the script. Most of the consultants I know are screenwriters themselves, but the relationship between the quality of their feedback and the measurable success of what they have written is not necessarily linear, similar to how someone might be a successful artist but a terrible arts teacher and vice versa. I’d be curious to hear if this is a completely different kind of consultancy to what you were talking about, what you think about it, and if this kind of relationship exists at all within the Hollywood system.”

**John:** This ties in actually really well to the Bonus Segment we’re going to be talking about, because that is a British writer and producer, and they have a whole thing called a script editor, which is not a thing we have at all here. Craig, let’s open our minds and think about, what if there were a person who came in to sit down with a writer to help them get their script better? What do we think about that person?

**Craig:** It sounds like things work quite a bit differently there. I’m trying to dig under the hood of this comment from Lorenz, because it almost feels like script consultants with state funding are operating the way our development executives operate over here. It’s quite a different thing. We’re talking about people that other people pay, like the government, to help develop screenplay and art in Europe.

Lorenz, here in the United States, these people that I’m talking about, writers pay them directly. They are out there saying, “Hey, hire me on a private basis. You pay me this much per hour or this much per read, and I will give you notes,” and things like that. Writers are essentially paying for the thing that in your country the government is funding. To that extent, there’s the problem. You end up with a lot of… When you drive down a city street and you see, I don’t know, store fronts for psychics, you can go in there and pay them if you want. It’s probably not going to work.

**John:** I agree with you that I think the real corollary here is probably development executives, which is a little bit different than producers, so we should talk about what the difference there is. A producer is a person who’s trying to get your film made.

Craig has talked a lot about working with Lindsay Doran, who is a great producer and has also worked as a development executive in times. She is a person who you can really have very in-depth conversations about your script and what you’re trying to do and how this scene’s working and how that ties into the next. She’s not a writer. She’s a person who works really well with writers. If that is what the script consultant is for someone like Lorenz, that’s great.

Really though, we’re getting back to what is the paid relationship, and is the person really any good. I think so often we’ve just encountered terrible, terrible people who are billing themselves as script consultants, who really have no business doing that at all. That’s I think the reason why we’re so gun-shy about recommending any script consultant is because we’ve had so many bad experiences or people coming in to us with terrible advice, terrible notes. People are just taking their money.

**Craig:** People are just taking their money. Our operating principle here is that there are perfectly good positions in Hollywood where people are paid, and often quite handsomely, to do the job of helping writers develop a screenplay. The executives who work at the studio are paid by the studio to obviously help the studio, but in doing so, try and give the writer advice and feedback. Then there are producers who are more entrepreneurial, but they too are being paid by someone else, certainly not the writer. That’s fine.

If your goal is to give writers notes and shepherd and develop, then you should be trying to be a studio executive or a producer. If you can’t, because say you’re not good enough, then perhaps you decide instead, “Oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll just go out there on my own and just start making writers pay me for this. In order to convince them, I will talk about how brilliant I am and what wonderful insight I have.” Eugh.

**John:** Thinking back to my time up at the mount in Sundance, the Sundance Institute works a lot like this. The consultants, the advisors they’re called for Sundance, they’re not paid. They’re volunteering their time to come up there to sit and work with these writers about their projects. It is not a governmental thing, but it has an organizational integrity quality to it. People are doing it for the best possible reasons and trying to make the best possible films.

Hopefully, that’s what you’re finding there in Austria, Lorenz, is someone who’s doing that. I want to make sure that when we are talking about script consultants negatively, we’re really talking about our experience of Hollywood hucksters who are taking writers’ money and making things worse.

**Craig:** Hollywood hucksters, that’s a great way of describing them.

**John:** Great. One last bit of follow-up here. Megana, we have Jake from Dallas.

****Megana:**** “I was listening to John and Craig talk to Sarah Polley, and it reminded me of how supportive and nice the three of you are.”

**Craig:** Aw.

****Megana:**** “Each of you are very smart and insightful people, which probably means you could be the ‘actually’ person to always correct others, who always tries to one-up those around you or the one who’s just waiting for their next opportunity to shower the conversation with their magnificent oration instead of listening to the people we’re sharing our time with. The Sarah Polley conversation was another example of you behaving in a supportive, constructive, and nice manner. Have you learned this anti-‘actually’ trait over your careers or do you think you always had the capacity to listen and contribute?”

**John:** It was very nice of Jake to write in with that. I thought it was a great episode too. A lot of people [inaudible 00:31:18] how much they enjoyed the Sarah Polley episode. Craig, what do you think? Actually, what’s going on here?

**Craig:** Actually…

**John:** It’s all Matthew cutting out all of our actuallys. That’s really what it is.

**Craig:** He has a filter now that just automatically strips everything of actually. I think that you and I learned this as we were starting out, because in a way, I think we were forced to, because of the way we were doing the podcast. This was obviously well before Zoom. We generally don’t look at each other when we’re having these things anyway. It’s all audio and certainly was at the start. When you are having a phone conversation with someone, which is what this essentially is, you need to give that person space. Also, I have to say I have occasionally sampled podcasts. I admit it. One of the reasons I struggle with podcasts is because people are constantly talking over each other, and it makes me crazy. What about you?

**John:** There are podcasts where that’s just the nature of how they work. It’s a tacit agreement between the host that that’s how it all works. It’s oneupmanship and who’s louder. That’s just never been us. My One Cool Thing actually ties into this.

**Craig:** Actually.

**John:** Actually. It’s basically how you set affordances so that people can say what they need to say or what they want to say, how do you ask questions that lead to interesting answers and continuing discussion. There’s some prep work there, but it’s also just mostly listening to what the person wants to tell you.

**Craig:** I think being interested in the people you have on your show is probably a good idea. I will also say that in a personal growth sort of way, it’s been made clear over the last few years by a lot of women that men in particular talk over them. You and I, I don’t think we ever talked over anybody when we had them on the air. I am certainly aware of just the general concept of not mowing people down when they’re talking. I like a nice, slow discussion.

The first scene of this season of The Last of Us is basically a Dick Cavett talk show. I am obsessed with Dick Cavett. I watch these videos of old Dick Cavett interviews, and it’s almost like from another planet of people talking and listening. They’re talking at length. It’s not about constantly entertaining the crowd. You can tell that the discussions haven’t been pre-organized and curated the way they are on talk shows now. I miss that, and to the extent that we can contribute to that sort of culture, I think that’s great.

**John:** I think also our guest selection is crucial. Sarah was a great example of that. Taffy Brodesser-Akner could take over Craig’s spot tomorrow.

**Craig:** Good. Please.

**John:** She definitely has that ability to just keep it all going. There have been times where a publicist has been insistent and gotten somebody onto the show, have been more of the frustrating times, where it’s like, I don’t have a thing to get to next. There have been a couple interviews, actually not that have been on Scriptnotes, but some live things, where the person was not interested in hitting the ball back. Man, it’s just tough.

**Craig:** It’s brutal. It is almost worse when people aren’t listening to each other. Turn on any news channel now. It’s just people yelling at each other constantly. Aren’t you amused when… It’s always two guys. Two guys are talking, and they’re angry at each other and they’re arguing, and neither one of them is willing to stop talking to let the other one talk, so they just keep going, like a game of chicken where the cars keep smashing into each other over and over. It’s remarkable.

**John:** They’re encouraged to do it because it generates conflict and it seems exciting. I hate it. A podcast I’ll recommend to everybody, and I think I talked about this on the show before, the Attitudes podcast with Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi is terrific and a great example of people who can talk over each other and yet they’re clearly listening at the same time, because their brains are synced in a way, and they’re improv people, so they can just keep building and building and building in ways that are delightful. I love it when I see people who are doing that really well. Cool.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Craig, our main topic here, this came from a recent issue of Inneresting. It was a recap of an old post of mine where I was talking about the things you do that make your writing unique, that you aren’t even aware that makes your writing unique. I also include a quote from Dara Resnick, where she was talking about how sometimes on a writing staff, one of your real goals is to lose your style and just mimic the showrunner style.

I thought I would talk for a few minutes about the kinds of things that are unique to one writer, where if a script dropped on your desk, Craig, and it didn’t have a title page on it, you could sometimes tell, “Oh, this was written by this person.”

**Craig:** Some of that stuff is magic and hard to parse out. Sometimes it’s almost scary to parse it out. I certainly don’t want to do that to my own stuff. Have you ever seen the Aaron Sorkin supercut?

**John:** I think I know what you’re talking about, which is basically just the dialog thing that does always happen in Sorkin dialog.

**Craig:** Exactly. There’s this collection that they’ve pulled from, all the years of West Wing and whatever the SNL show was and Sports Night and A Few Good Men and all the movies. There are these phrases and comments and styles and things that just keep coming up over and over and over. It’s not really self-plagiarism as much as it is just the fingerprint. It’s the style. Now, he’s a very stylistic writer. Part of knowing that it’s Aaron Sorkin is the hyper-literacy and the speed and all the rest of it. Everybody I think who’s good has a signature to them. Figuring out what comprises that is really interesting.

**John:** With Sorkin, there are words that you can cut together in a supercut. In other cases, it’s actually a little bit hard to parse. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this story about how they figured out how that Robert Galbraith, the writer, was actually JK Rowling. It was just basically forensic linguistics.

**Craig:** That was her nom de plume.

**John:** Nom de plume, her pen name. It was a secret that she was Robert Galbraith. There had been some rumors that it could be her. What they did is they went through and they compared the texts and they looked for sequences of adjacent words, sequences of characters, and a third test was on the most common words, and a fourth was about the author’s preference for long or short words. Basically, that’s what builds up that fingerprint. It’s like, “Oh, we are 90% certain that this is actually the same person writing these two things.” These were not deliberate choices that Rowling was making. It’s just that that’s just what happens. It’s just like you do things just because that’s how your brain works.

**Craig:** We can hear each other in our rhythm. Sometimes people will do an impression of me. When they do, I go, “Oh yeah, that does sound familiar,” but I’m not sure that if somebody had done that and not told me ahead of time that it was me, that I would’ve known it was me. Can you do an impression of me?

**John:** Not at all. I can’t do impressions of anything. That’s actually one of my biggest frustrations. You’re actually quite good at hearing and being able to do impressions or do accents. It’s just not a thing I’m good at. I can do it in my head. Can you do an impression of me?

**Craig:** Yeah, I can do an impression of you.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of stuff that comes out quickly, but yeah. Okay, moving on. It’s a rhythm thing. My impression of you, it’s not a great impression, because most of what makes you idiosyncratic is the speed of your speech and the rhythm of it. What people always do when they do an impression of me is they’re like, “So. Everything’s huge. Then when you talk you’re big.” I’m like, I guess. Maybe. I don’t know. Megana, can you do an impression of me?

****Megana:**** I think an impression of you would be difficult to do, because you do take these pauses, but then in order to do the impression of you, I’d have to also replicate the eloquence that comes after the pause, and that would be very difficult to do.

**Craig:** You know what? You’ve won my heart.

**John:** Just that was a very Craig, like da da, da da da da. You also pitch up. I think you have a much more tonal range than I do or that a lot of speakers do.

**Craig:** I’m a singer.

**John:** You’re a singer.

**Craig:** I like to sing.

**John:** You’re a natural singer.

**Craig:** I guess my point bringing all this up and having fun with it is I don’t make those choices and you don’t make those choices and Megana doesn’t make those choices, why we talk the way we talk and why we have the patterns we have. All of that then I think is translatable or at least analogous to the weirdness of the way we write, but I don’t think I necessarily write the way I talk. I don’t think you write the way you talk. It’s this whole other thing.

**John:** Honestly, we write more similar than you would guess, because as we were working on the Scriptnotes book, one of the big jobs is to take the Scriptnotes transcripts, as we’re having a conversation about scene length or something, and so you and I are having a back-and-forth conversation. When we try to just turn it into a chapter with just prose, literally our sentences do fit together pretty well. We don’t read that different on the page, which is useful.

**Craig:** We’re like an old married couple that starts looking like each other.

**John:** Let’s talk about things that are different between-

**Craig:** I just want to keep upsetting Megana, like, “Aw. Aw.”

**John:** Let’s talk about some of the things that are different that you can notice on a screenplay page about one writer versus another writer. This is a list I had in my blog post, but we may add to this. How you handle unfinished end-of-line punctuation. Are you two dashes? Are you an ellipses? What are the situations where you’d use an ellipsis versus two dashes. It’s personal style. There’s not one precise right answer.

**Craig:** You want to try and be consistent within your screenplay. What do you do, by the way?

**John:** I have two dashes if it’s literally cut off and ellipsis if it’s trailing off.

**Craig:** Same. I probably use ellipses more than most writers. I know I do. I’m a big fan.

**John:** I use ellipses less than I used to. I used to use ellipses for everything, but I now do a lot of two dashes.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** How much uppercase do you use within scene description? Some people just will uppercase a lot more for emphasis. Some people are really spare with the uppercase.

**Craig:** One of the things I’ve found over time is that my uppercasing tends to increase when I’m writing either… Usually when I’m writing action or something that maybe you wouldn’t define as action but is very physical, like physical humor or something like that.t

**John:** Absolutely. It’s sometimes that uppercasing can be a way to indicate, this is a shot, this is a shot, this is a shot, or there’s other reasons why you’re using it there. Parentheticals. Are you using parentheticals as say to mean a beat, for clarity, like joking, or how to play this in quotes, “Please die in a fire.” Basically, are you using it for all line things? Those are all valid choices, just different ways to use the parenthetical.

**Craig:** Some people never use them.

**John:** Never. Commas and comma usage, very distinctive. You can use them sensibly. You can use them in an Oxford way. You can use them in any way that makes sense.

**Craig:** The Oxford way is sensible.

**John:** Often using commas and whether you use them to break off any kind of phrase. If I’m going through and editing someone else’s script, I will move commas all the time and realize that’s just pointless, because they’re just using commas the way they use commas.

**Craig:** We aren’t writing articles for the New Yorker where there’s a style guide, although I will say that Mrs. Gilligan’s comma lessons in high school have stayed with me. I think about the proper, correct, and orthodox use of commas all the time.

**John:** Profanity. Is it a spaceship or a giant effing spaceship? Just how often are you using the F word and other words in your script is very distinctive. In the JJ Abrams universe, all those Lost scripts, they will use a lot of that. They’re very punchy and loud and take you by the shoulders and shake you. That’s just the style. If you’re writing in one of those shows, you should write in that style, because otherwise, it’s going to feel wrong for the show.

**Craig:** That must be really difficult to do. I’ve never had to do that to write in someone else’s actual on-the-page style. I can see how that would be very tricky to do. Then it also implies one reason why showrunners have to then run everything through their own typewriter, even if it’s minimally about let’s say improving things. Sometimes you just need to conform it.

**John:** That was the point that Dara was making there and what I’ll link to, is that especially that first script you turn in as a staff writer on a show needs to look as much like the showrunner’s script as possible, so they read this and they can actually read it without having to just immediately go, “This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.” They can actually read it like it’s their own script. That’s tough, but you gotta do it.

**Craig:** I’m imagining me reading a script for my show that wasn’t at all like my scripts, and I’m starting to sweat. It’s bad.

**John:** How characters see events within a scene. Do they clock them, spot them, notice them, spy them? There’s various choices you can make. Nothing’s wrong.

**Craig:** It’s okay to be repetitive or, I don’t know, self-copying there, because that stuff’s not going to be on screen literally. If it helps you to fall back on some phrases that work for you and help define for the reader what you see, that’s great. Try and avoid repeating them within the same script, but if you have some go-tos, there’s nothing wrong with that.

**John:** Transitions, is it a cut-to for every new scene or do cut-tos mostly go away? Just style. Also, I think cut-tos tend to vanish because we want to get pages shorter, but it’s really whatever you need to do.

Paragraph length. What is the upper limit in terms of numbers of lines? On this podcast, often in our Three Page Challenges, we’re urging people to keep those paragraphs short. Three lines or less is great for a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean they all have to be that way. David Koepp writes giant blocks of text.

**Craig:** He does.

**John:** It happens. It works.

**Craig:** He’s great. He’s great. I think we’ve probably said it so many times that it is maybe finally sinking in, although I doubt it, among all the people out there. All these things, there are I wouldn’t call best practices as much as better practices. Nothing that we do can make bad good, and nothing that we do can make good bad. That’s the deal. If it’s good, it’s okay to have that long paragraph if that’s the way you vibe.

Going back to the paragraph that Todd Field puts on the preface page of Tár, that is how many… It is a brick of text. One, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Ten-line paragraph. That’s not three lines or fewer. I loved reading that paragraph, because it was good.

**John:** Good paragraph. Finally, and this is probably I think a thing I can definitely notice from one writer to another, is how to handle simultaneous or overlapping dialog. Are they doing side-by-sides a lot, or are they doing a parenthetical for overlapping? Are they just making it clear that stuff is overlapping in the scene description around it?

There’s not one precise, right way to do it. Writers can get incredibly granular. When Greta Gerwig was on, she puts a slash in the first character’s dialog where the next character is going to be overlapping them. It’s incredibly precise. A lot of times, I’ll just say “overlapping” and I won’t worry about doing side-by-sides. It’s going to work in the moment.

**Craig:** I use the side-by-side, but I rarely, very rarely do simultaneous dialog. That’s not because I think it’s wrong. It’s basically stylistically, and perhaps this reflects the way you and I have these discussions, I like when people aren’t talking over each other, and other writers love when people are talking over each other. That’s okay. It’s a tonal thing. Similarly, how many words per sentence do characters say?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Some people really love having characters talk at length. Tarantino will have characters talk at length at times. Other people listen quietly. They do not interrupt. Go to Samuel Beckett and read Waiting for Godot. There are just strips of pages where Vladimir and Estragon are saying two lines two words each, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That’s part of the fingerprint.

**John:** We had Taffy Brodesser-Akner on the show. The dialog for Fleishman Is in Trouble, those are long lines. It’s not just that people have a lot of lines together. One of their lines could be much, much, much longer of a sentence than I would ever feel comfortable doing. It works because it works and because she has really good actors who can pull it off. There’s no right or wrong. You could recognize Taffy’s writing from someone else’s writing. It’d be hard to write in Taffy’s style.

**Craig:** It should be. That’s part of the sign that your style is unique, and therefore you are expressing your voice, is that other people… You can maybe do a goof version of it, a satire, but you can’t do it. If anyone could do it, then anyone would do it.

**John:** Let’s talk about situations where we have had to rewrite somebody or choose not to rewrite somebody and actually just blend in, because a lot of times, as feature writers, we would get scripts, and sometimes we are doing a massive overhaul on something. I’m like, “Okay, I see these scenes here. I’m the showrunner. Everything’s going through my typewriter. I’m going to put out a new thing that is in my voice. I’m going to clean it up and make things consistent.”

In some cases, I think that was helpful, because I wasn’t the second writer, I was the seventh writer, and there was a bunch of little pace jobs [inaudible 00:49:52] it wasn’t reading like one document. It was sometimes just me running through the whole thing. It just was a much better read for me having done that. In other cases, I’m just doing two scenes here. It’s doing no one any favors for me to try to change things or make this feel different.

I’ve had to adapt to people’s styles. I’ve done more things in caps than I would’ve put in uppercase, because that’s the rest of the script. What’s been your experience?

**Craig:** All over the place.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Honestly, all over the place. Sometimes, more often than not, when I’m doing the kind of work you’re describing, there’s also some preexisting work. A lot of these things, most movies that come out have either a preexisting film because they’re a sequel or they’re based on something, and so there’s other work that you can look back on and investigate.

I don’t really get too worked up over how I do the things that aren’t spoken or aren’t on screen. The things that are spoken and are on screen, I try and stay consistent within the character. Sometimes, the reason that you’re there is because people aren’t happy with the voice, or you can also come and say…

As you’re saying, there’s this patchwork quilt, and someone has to make it all seem like it was from one mind. That is a challenge. It’s a challenge to do something like that without… The phrase I use is, sometimes you have to pull permits, it’s that kind of work, and sometimes you don’t. When you have to pull permits, that means we’re going to be doing quite a bit here. Then you have to undo a lot. It depends on the situation. The spectrum is rather broad for those jobs.

**John:** I’m thinking of once doing a job where the first half of the script was really great. I really did not want to touch any of it. There were some real significant things that needed to change in the second half. I had to make a choice, like am I going to go back and rewrite all this first half so it’s going to match what I’m doing for the second half, or am I just going to write this new stuff in the style of the first one?

It was a challenge to do, but it actually made sense. Hopefully, the characters’ voices I was able to be consistent, which is great, because we didn’t want to touch those. Even just the scene description making it just feel like it was one thing, that there wasn’t a sudden change in how the whole thing read and felt. Even examples of keeping whatever, their INT period versus INT not period style, sure, I’ll do that. I wanted it to feel like it was the same writer the whole way through.

**Craig:** If there’s a very idiosyncratic, clear style going on, I’m not going to be a jerk and just start doing… I’m not going to go through and be like, “Okay, first things first, all these two spaces after the period have to turn into one space.” That’s just evil, so I try not to do those things.

**John:** Obviously, the last thing is if you’re in a situation where you’re generating changed pages with stars in the margins, you’re going to be much more conservative about making that kind of stuff, because you’re not going to release a new page just because you’ve changed two dashes into a long hyphen. No one wants that.

**Craig:** No one.

**John:** No one wants that. What people do want are One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** It’s time for that. I referenced this earlier. This is an article by Adam Mastroianni on his Substack, called Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs. He’s really talking about how in a conversation, you tend to have givers and takers. Givers are people who put a lot of stuff out. Takers are people who are just receiving stuff in.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** There’s an improv quality to a conversation, where you’re yes, and-ing and you’re keeping the ball up in the air. When you have two givers, that can be sometimes a little bit frustrating, because it can feel like no one’s actually receiving. If you have two takers, no one is actually throwing a ball out there to get things going.

What I liked about his discussion is, it’s not just diagnosing the problem but offering some solutions, which is basically affordances, which are the big, easily graspable doorknobs of the conversation. His example of an affordance, if you ask the question, “Why do you think you and your brother turned out so differently?” There’s a lot of possible answers to that. You would have to see how it goes on.

No affordance would be, “How many of your grandparents are still alive?” That’s a number. It doesn’t invite a further discussion. You can take that, “How many of your grandparents are still alive?” and do some judo on it to send it back through, to say, “Both my grandparents are still alive, which has really been remarkable because of this, because I can do these things, and I have these insights,” but it’s tougher.

Just always be thinking in a conversation, next time you’re at a party or whatever, Megana, as you’re getting another virus, think about how do you say things in a way that invites the person to build upon that, rather than just letting it drop there.

**Craig:** I love just this drive-by shooting of Megana, like that’s her problem.

**John:** All the parties she goes to.

**Craig:** I really like this a lot. What it’s prompting for me is how useful this concept is for people who are on the autism spectrum, because this is exactly the kind of… We lump these things into so-called social skills. Social skills is such a broad term it’s almost useless. There’s also this weird judgey-ness to that phrase that I don’t love. What I love about this is, if somebody has a hyper-analytical mind, this is a way for them to understand why certain things are more engaging and more interesting for other people, because that’s something that sometimes people on the spectrum have trouble with. I’m definitely giving this to my kid. I think she’ll be really interested in this. I think she’ll like this.

**John:** The other thing I would say is that everything that applies to real-life dialog applies to movie dialog as well. As you’re writing dialog scenes, be thinking about naturally you are doing this as a writer anyway. It may be helpful to think about how you are letting this character get to the next thing out of that character, the next thing out of this character, and by the same token, are they deliberately not doing that, and is that part of the frustration and conflict of the scene.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. This is really useful for thinking about characters, because we don’t want our characters to be fully actualized. All the foibles are what make them interesting. If somebody is trying to chat up a girl at the bar and he asks a dead-end question or as Adam calls it, no affordance, then it’s interesting. You can see the other person struggling with that. I love this. It’s very insightful.

**John:** Craig, in the second episode of your show, there’s a moment early on where Joel is having a conversation. They’re in that-

**Craig:** Salon.

**John:** … salon, and they’re having a conversation. He gives up on the conversation. I really liked that moment, because it felt true to conversations that I don’t see very often, where a person just buries their last line, like, “I guess I’m done talking, but nothing’s really resolved for me.” That felt like a situation that I just hadn’t seen so often on film.

**Craig:** I’m glad you liked it. Joel is a really interesting character to write, because how much he decides to say… He mostly doesn’t talk. It’ll be interesting for people I think if the season goes on, if they’re watching. He’s not going to always not talk. Let’s put it that way. It’s impactful when he does. When he starts talking, it’s impactful.

**John:** What do you have for us?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is The Case of the Golden Idol. Now this is a game that normally I wouldn’t be playing, because it’s not on iOS. It is currently on Steam. Neil Druckmann, my partner in crime over at The Last of Us, urged me to get the Steam Deck. Are you familiar with the Steam Deck?

**John:** Tell me what the Steam Deck is.

**Craig:** Steam Deck is a handheld game console, not dissimilar from say the handheld Switch, that is designed to tie into your Steam account and play Steam games. You can play them handheld. It’s got a touchscreen. The touchscreen isn’t iPad quality. It doesn’t need to be. It’s got multiple joysticks and buttons and other buttons and trigger buttons. It can basically cover the control system of any game. It’s very portable.

I bought it and played this game that Neil loves, called The Case of the Golden Idol, and now I love it. It’s fascinating. It’s one of those retro style games that’s very much about the pixel art, which generally I hate, because I’m like, I grew up with that crap.

**John:** We’ve moved on.

**Craig:** I want good graphics. It’s this very strange concept. Each chapter, there are 12 of them, is a murder has taken place. They’re all loosely connected by the story of this golden idol, which is cursed, clearly. Typically, each murder situation has two or three screens of stuff. On each one of them, there are clickable areas where you can just start collecting information. What you have to do is piece together what happened based on all the clues and bits of information that are there. You have to figure out who is this person, what’s his name, what’s her name, and what have they done and what is this and blah blah blah.

It gets increasingly challenging, to the point where sometimes I’m just sitting there just staring at this thing for 40 minutes, going, “What am I missing?” Then when you finally get it, you’re like, “Ah!” It’s a lot of fun. If you have Steam, check out The Case of the Golden Idol. If you have a Steam Deck, certainly do. I think it plays very nicely on that device.

**John:** Cool. Nice. Exciting.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Don’t know him.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered this in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers. What we’re playing is actually a clip from the score to Coming to America, but it actually has the Scriptnotes theme in it. We have time-traveled back to put it into existing movie scores.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on advice to a producer. Craig, Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.

****Megana:**** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, here’s what I have. A friend of a friend is a producer in the UK and has a project for which he’s brought on a writer. The project is based on a true story. It’s required a lot of research. This is a relatively new writer but a really good writer who’s from the region, been doing the research, and everything’s very promising. The problem is the producer’s just not getting a draft out of this writer. He’s waiting. There’s whole machineries that it really looks like this movie could happen, but he needs a script.

The producer emailed me just to say, “Hey, do you have any advice for how I should not be an asshole but get the writer to deliver this script? The writer has had a lot of personal issues and things going on in their life that’s made it incredibly difficult. How do we do this?” I wrote back with some of my advice. I’m curious what your advice might be for this producer on how to get this draft out of this writer and what you think might be going on.

**Craig:** There could be all sorts of things going on. At the end of the day, is the writer being paid?

**John:** The writer’s being paid.

**Craig:** No matter what’s going on in our lives, if we are being paid, we are professional by definition, which means we have to behave professionally, which means we either hit our deadlines or we sit down with the employer and we say, “Here’s what’s going on in my life. Here’s why I can’t go through that deadline. I’m giving you the choice now of what to do. I would like to continue. I would like extra time so I can do my job. I need to let you know that this is what’s going on, because it changes the arrangement.” That’s how a professional handles things. It doesn’t sound like this writer is necessarily handling these things professionally. That doesn’t mean that I’m not incredibly sympathetic to whatever problems they’re having. I am, but it’s a job.

The question that I would ask the producer is, do you think that this writer is changeable or not, because there are some writers that it doesn’t matter what you do, they have a rhythm and a process that is unaffectable by you, the moon, anything. Nothing will ever change it. They are as they are. The only question that you have to ask yourself as a producer is, is it worth it or not, because that’s nothing I can do about this. It’s like I’m yelling at clouds.

If it seems like they are the kind of writer that would respond to change, then I think it’s fair to say, “Okay, because this is a professional relationship, I have to create boundaries. The boundary is I need a script by this date, which is already beyond the date that we agreed on. If it doesn’t come in by that date, I’m going to have to talk to another writer.”

**John:** I think ultimately you need to get to that ultimatum and to that point where it makes it clear. I think there are some steps before you get to that point that could be useful. That’s what I urged the producer to start at.

First off, to understand from the writer’s perspective, the writer feels shitty. I think the writer is aware that they’re late and that they’re holding things up, and they feel bad about it. Feeling bad about it is not helping them write the scripts. They’re not a writer who it seems that that bad feeling is motivating. It seems maybe it’s the opposite. Being late is not helping them get it written.

I think they may also be having a problem that they’re not willing to tell you about, which is that they may be struggling with a script with a story in ways that they are embarrassed about. They just cannot figure it out. They could probably use someone, either you or somebody else, to just talk to about what’s going on, because they may have lost hope or faith or any joy in writing it. That may be really the issue here.

Going back earlier in the episode, we talked about script consultants or that kind of thing. I think you may need to find some other writer who can sit down with them to talk to them about what it is that they’re writing, what’s exciting about it to them, where the problems are, and see if you can get a little of that shaken out.

There could also just be some actual… You’re saying this writer has some struggles in their life. You may need to help provide some structure for their writing time, which basically is like, “Would it help if I got you an office for a month? That way you could just come in on a daily basis and sit down and do your work, because maybe something’s going on at home that is making it really tough for you to write in your normal space.”

Just be aware that there could be some other way you’re going to be able to get them to do the thing. I would try those things first before bringing out the stick of, “If I don’t have it by this date, I’m going to have to cut you off.”

**Craig:** Certainly, it’s nothing anybody wants, but there are people that just need the structure of consequence. It’s not evil consequence. It’s not unjustified consequence. They just need to know that this is there. There are situations, again, where you may say to yourself, “I have a madman genius on my hands, and I need to just let him go through this insanity, and what’s going to happen on the other end is something great.”

One of the things that I’ve always tried to stress to people I worked with is, if I say I need eight weeks, and you’re telling me you really want it in six weeks, what you’re saying is two weeks of time is more important than you getting it right.

My response is always, those two weeks are going to cost you so much more time than two weeks, because if you get something that’s unworkable, unsellable, unproducable, unshootable, guess what? You’re back to square one. You’re going to have to start all over again anyway. First, you’re going to have to find another writer. That takes time. Then they’re going to have to do it. Then they’re going to run into trouble. You have to do the math in your head. One of the most frustrating parts of being a producer is how you are accountable to the outcome, but you are not in control of the outcome.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** That’s tricky.

**John:** Craig, you’re talking about estimating the time it’s going to take you to do a thing. You’re an experienced screenwriter who’s been through this. You’ve written 50 scripts. This writer probably hasn’t and probably has a very limited ability to estimate how long it’s going to take them to do that work. That may be a situation too.

It looks like the producer has actually been able to read some stuff that the writer has done on the project, which is why the producer’s so excited to have the writer finish it, because it’s apparently really good.

I think one of the things that may be important in this conversation is to really stress to the writer how much you love what they’ve delivered so far, because sometimes writing feels hopeless. Just putting that hope back in there can really do it.

I definitely can remember meetings where I’ve been really bummed about a project, I go into it, and then in that discussion something comes up that’s like, “Oh yeah, now I’m actually genuinely excited to write this thing that I was dreading this morning.” That does turn around.

**Craig:** One bit of practical advice that I would suggest is to maybe, since currently most days I suspect the writer is writing zero pages, say to the writer, “Okay, here’s the plan we’re putting you on, and you must do it. Every day, Monday through Friday, you must write one page. That’s it.” You’ve now reduced the burden and the expectation, which can be crushing sometimes, down to something that seems very achievable. One page. One.

What will happen, almost always, is that once the writer starts writing their one page, they will end up three or four pages later. It’s how our minds work. It’s the starting that is so hard. If you can just give them this, because even if they write one page a day, five pages a week, in a couple of months, you’re going to be doing just fine, and certainly better than you’re doing now anyway. Maybe just smallifying things might help.

**John:** Megana, what perspectives are we missing here? Anything that is striking you as you listen to this?

**Craig:** Actually…

****Megana:**** No. I think you’re right. I love the advice that you gave about encouraging this writer, because I just remember when I was in college, I had a roommate who was a real perfectionist and was not sending their thesis advisor the chapters or whatever that they needed to be doing and was just getting herself into such a hole of perfection and misery and doubt. I was like, “You’re smart. I’m sure that the work is fine and good enough.” I think sometimes with a screenplay, it’s this big thing to figure out. I worry that this person is just in a shame spiral. I love the tactics that you offer this producer to help them out of that.

**John:** On the second Arlo Finch book, I fell behind. I was running late to deliver my first draft. Again, as a professional, I did reach out to my editor and say, “Hey, I’m running behind. Let me talk to you about what the problem is.” She’s like, “Okay, I get this. Let’s make a plan for how you’re going to finish it. Basically, why don’t you take two or three days to just outline the rest of this, figure out what those problems are going to be, and how you’re going to be able to deliver this on time. We’ll reset all the rest of the deadlines to make this work.” Starting that conversation was incredibly stressful, but at the end of it, I just felt such a relief, because I didn’t feel so trapped.

It’s possible this screenwriter feels trapped and stuck. They worry they’re not going to be able to deliver anything that’s going to nearly good enough or to do the job whatsoever. Having that conversation, being that editor in that situation, could be the way out.

**Craig:** That’s good advice.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

****Megana:**** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes episodes with 2023 Oscar Nominees [Sarah Polley](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-one-with-sarah-polley), [Rian Johnson](https://johnaugust.com/2022/rian-johnson-returns), [Daniels](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-daniels), [Pamela Ribon](https://johnaugust.com/2018/holiday-live-show-2018)
* [Weekend Read Beta](https://testflight.apple.com/join/zDf4Fw9c) Try it out — now updated with all FYC scripts!
* [Writing in another writer’s style](https://johnaugust.com/2014/writing-in-another-writers-style) on John’s blog with advice from [Dara Resnick Creasey](https://twitter.com/BadassMomWriter)
* [Algorithms were able to figure out that Robert Galbraith was JK Rowling](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-computers-uncover-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-180949824/)
* [Good Conversations Have Lots of Doorknobs](https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/good-conversations-have-lots-of-doorknobs) by Adam Mastroianni
* [The Case of The Golden Idol](https://www.thegoldenidol.com) game
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Yoquinto, who discovered it in the score to Coming to America by Nile Rodgers ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/585standard.mp3).