Screenwriting 101: Don’t Sweat the Dry Spells

Remember my screenwriting articles?

Well, the problem with any sort of creative work (screenwriting included) is you can’t force yourself to produce, despite how much you might want or need to. Sometimes you just don’t know what to do next, or how to do what you want to do something, and inspiration is being fickly silent.

Do not sweat it. This does not mean you’re a bad writer. This happens to everybody at times, and you can’t expect to produce material constantly or even eternally. Ideally, I’d write a page of a screenplay a day. And that would be a good habit for anyone to keep. But, in truth, it’s more erratic. You might write five pages in one day, ten the next, rewriting cuts that down to maybe 10, and then a few weeks of stubborn refusal to finish.

The invention of the internet makes this much more difficult. You can just sit on your computer and suddenly waste hours. And, of course, none of us are just screenwriting machines: there’s work (especially for those of us who remain unsigned,) school, family and friends and other loved ones. And, of course, there are the worries related to those things on top of that.

Acknowledge those feelings but don’t dwell on them. Here’s what I do when the creative juices stop flowing:

1) Work on another project

I try to keep busy, which possibly means working on other projects. I might revisit an old project that I had not thought about in a while, or start a new one. Given time and distance you can gain a different perspective on the work you’ve been staring in the face for the past few weeks.

The result doesn’t even have to be a screenplay. Right now, for example, I’ve started work on a children’s fantasy novel. And when I start having trouble on that I can move to another project.

The problem with this is you can just end up with a bunch of unfinished projects, so try to return to an old project more often than you start a new one.

2) Get off the computer

Every once in a while, it might be good to do something totally unrelated and fun, but not something that is an “obligation” or a “requirement.” Watch your favorite movie, read something totally unrelated to work or school, or go for a walk in the park. As much as I love wasting time on the internet (as many do,) it’s better for your creative functions sometimes to get away from it for just an hour or two to recalibrate your mind.

3) Skip Ahead and Fill in the Blanks

If all else fails, what I do is just drop wherever I am in the script and write a scene way ahead of what’s going on (a scene I knew was coming and wanted to write,) and then start working my way backwards and forwards to that event. Sometimes its easier to fill in the gap between A-Z instead of trying to figure out what happens after a problematic step.

Writer’s block happens to everybody. Just relax, don’t stress it, and it’ll come to you.

In fact, even after I finished this article, I’ve started reconsidering a page 1 rewrite of a project I finished last year. I might use this space as a free form discussion of that idea. More details, as they develop.

Good luck, and good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Diary of a Spec Script Part 1

For the next few weeks at least, I’m going to chronicle my own attempt to write a new spec screenplay. This will be my sixth feature I’ve written, although there are two, maybe three of those that are third or later drafts, and I would actually consider showing to an agent.

One thing worth noting is that these are the methods I’ve come up with after a lot of writing, and it’s primarily something that works for me. You’ll have to work on developing your own methods, but maybe what I do can give you an idea towards what to do.

First I need an idea. I’ve been thinking lately about the way the internet is, how people build entirely new and different lives in cyberspace, especially in those fan communities where people pretend to be something totally different from reality (like MMORPGs, or Second Life, or so on.) So I want to take that a step further: in the future, where virtual reality holds sway, people can live entirely different lives online, being whatever they want to be. That’s an idea.

An important question. How do I feel about this? That will help me figure out my tone and my theme. To be honest, while some elements of this can be fun, I think it’s really ridiculous. The tone I want to go for is absurd, ridiculous, and bizarre. I want to go for such audacious things in the online world (machine gun-wielding monkeys riding dinosaurs, etc.) and juxtapose that with very mundane things in the real world.

But where’s my story in this?

This is an important question to ask. You can’t go half-cocked into a screenplay not knowing what the story is or else you’ll meander and end up cutting a bunch of pages in rewriting. So, what is my “A” story, the main arc?

With this idea, of people being able to communicate across continents, a love story seems interesting: between two people who know each other well online, but might not even know they exist in the real world. I like that idea, but it doesn’t fit in with the audacity idea I had before, but I like it. I’ll keep that in mind for my “B” story. Subplots are nice, a few of them can help pad around another story and address your theme. And I can’t just have samurai fighting the entire Soviet army for the whole movie.

Now that I have a sense of my basic plot (absurd online action juxtaposed with mundane reality in a world where people waste countless hours in virtual reality) I have to ask: what is my theme. I seem to have a stance on technology here. The sentence in my head that jumped out to me was: “Technology is bringing us together even as it’s pulling us apart.” I like that. It’s a good theme. I put it on a sticky note on my laptop.

Now that that’s out of the way, I have a rough idea of what I want to do and my theme, I want to come up with a logline, which is good way to condense what you’re after. This is what I first wrote, which is a little long:

In the future, people live entire double lives online, lost in a virtual reality of their own making. Leroy Jenkins is one man who dedicates his life to the Virtual World, living in a realm of audacity and bizarreness even as his own life is full of boring mundaneness. Leroy wins a special competition in Virtual World, getting to playtest Virtual World 2.0. But when the process malfunctions, Leroy finds the virtual world and his virtual persona invading reality.

But I’m not using this as a pitch, it’s just for my own use. And you can see how the idea developed even in the last few minutes of me thinking about it. That sounds like a lot of fun to write and it’d be a great movie.

Next week, I outline and start coming up with my opening. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Good Idea, Bad Idea

Good ideas are never so clear-cut as bad ideas.

An idea might seem a lot better on the page or in your head or in an outline than it might actually be. Bad ideas do not immediately make for bad scripts, but they certainly do not help make a good script any easier to write. So why add another problem towards making a great script?

An idea isn’t like an orange or a Jedi, you can’t tell when it’s gone bad. (Hint: If a Jedi has gone bad, his eyes will look all yellow and glowy. The orange will look brown and decayed. Both, however, smell awful. Do you think Darth Vader can bathe with that thing on? Also, what is the deal with airline food?)

Here are some ideas about how to tell if you have a good idea:
1) Make a Movie You Would Want to Make

Really, this should be a no-brainer, but it bears mentioning. A good idea is one that you will be excited about writing yourself, and nothing makes you more excited than writing a movie you yourself would like to see. Pick a genre, your favorite genre, and write a movie in that style. Nothing is more painful to write or watch than something not even the writer is interested in. If you don’t want to write it, no matter if it’s a good idea for somebody else to write, you shouldn’t write it. Furthermore, this extends to your own personal interests. You like vintage cars, make a movie set in the 50s full of drag racing.

2) Make a Movie People Already Have Seen Before

At the risk of sounding positively reactionary, if worse comes to worse, safe sells. Although many of us claim to be discerning filmgoers, a great percentage of people, and I know this because I worked for video retail, rent Jean Claude Van Damme movies and want to hear Will Smith say “Oh hell no!” and movies you may think are god-awful ideas (cf. Over my Dead Body or The Hottie and the Nottie) are popular and oft-requested titles. A lot of bad movies get made because they’re based on a good idea that’s been done to death. But you don’t have to be so blatant. Take an idea that’s been done before and make it another genre, or add some other twist, something you’d be interested in writing about (see #1.)

3) Talk to People

This might seem scary. People, as anyone who went through junior high can tell you, can be very cruel. But, people will be watching your movie. So talk to some friends about an idea you have, people you trust (and people who won’t steal your idea.) If a vast majority of them think it’s a bad idea, odds are, it is actually a bad idea. That might mean your pitch needs some work, so in case that’s an issue, before you run it by people, just write up your logline and memorize it before you hang out with your friends. If they really don’t like the idea (Juno in Space with a Sassy Robot,) then maybe it’s time to retool the idea, or drop it entirely. This is the entire premise behind focus groups, which are what Hollywood uses to retool ideas for mass appeal. However, be warned: this kind of focus group approach is best if done sparingly, or else you end up making something that tries to please too many people, and thus fails in the process.

4) Write an Idea List

Don’t just start with one script idea and start fleshing it out. Come up with a list of 4 or 5 or 6 or more ideas for screenplays. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart said about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” And the same holds true for good ideas. Against a backdrop of mediocre or poor ideas, a good idea shines out like a beacon. But, what if you like all your ideas and think all of them are good ideas? After you’re done patting yourself on the back, go and ask this question: which one is your favorite idea? You have one, you know it. Start work on that one.

If you really can’t decide, go and use strategy number three and ask 10 or so people which of those ideas is their favorite. If 5 or more pick the same idea, odds are that’s the one to go with.

5) Read. Read. Read./Watch. Watch. Watch.

Take in media. Read a few novels, watch a few movies, besides being fun, it’s educational. Pick out some ideas you like, or retool a bad idea you think could be better. Let’s say, for example, I thought the idea behind Anonymous Rex (a Forgotten Filmography Friday title, go back and read my review ) was really clever, but it was lacking in some kind of aspect. I could use the idea of a group of secretive individuals living parallel to humanity in a bizarre undercover society as a backdrop for my own idea (werewolves? Nazi robots? Whatever.) The more familiar you are with what people like (in additional to what you yourself like) the better you can craft an idea and a screenplay.

6) Steal. Steal. Steal.

But steal discerningly. Don’t lift whole patches of dialogue (unless you’re looking for guild arbitration or are writing a very insightful [and in-cite-ful] parody.) But, if you like parts of an idea, mash them together, throw a bunch of ideas against a wall and see which ones stick.

That’s it for this time. Next week, I’ll be starting a special series, “Diary of Spec Script,” which will chronicle my attempt to write a new script from scratch. Keep writing!

Screenwriting 101: The A-Ha Moment!

This is a little more oblique than a lot of the stuff I’ve discussed before.

Inspiration is something that’s really important to any writer, because without it you’d have no idea what to write or where you’re going, and craftsmanship. Thomas Edison famously noted invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. What I’ve focused on here thusfar has been the “perspiration,” rolling up your sleeves and actually focusing your drive on the ambitions you’ve set before you, and the techniques to (the tools in the writer’s craftbench.) But, despite it’s small quantity in the process, inspiration is important.

I can’t say with any certainty where this inspiration comes from. It could just be the right two neurons connecting at the right time. It could be heaven sent, or the workings of the subconscious or the collective unconscious. It could be magic gnomes that live inside your head. In any event, it’s there and it happens, and the phenomenology thereof is really immaterial.

The more you write and the more you work, the easier it becomes, I feel, to get inspired. You will find that in certain situations you are more prone to be inspired than others. These are the “A-Ha!” moments, where everything falls into place and you know exactly what you have to do (or close enough to fake it.)

For example, most of my A-Ha moments happen late at night, around midnight or later, when I’m trying to sleep in bed. Suddenly, I’ll either know exactly what I want to write about, or I’ll have the perfect scene for my own script. I typically have to race to my computer to pound out a rough outline or a few pages or the scene in question, sometimes I’ll find myself rewriting a whole script this way (I did this just recently with one of my specs.)

For every person this is different. Ernest Hemingway usually started writing very early in the morning, although typically this is because he was so drunk by midday he couldn’t write any more. For me, I’m more of a night owl (and I also typically avoid the harder spirits, and drugs in general for that matter,) and I do my best writing sometime between eleven at night and the early morning hours. I’ve actually always been this way, before I could go to bed I’d have a million crazy ideas for stories or just things to imagine. It might be something intrinsic to myself and my own creative process, so yours might be entirely different. You might find the inspiration you seek in the bath, or upside down, or in the car, or at the office, or whatever. But, wherever you find your inspiration, you’ll find it becomes easier to get to it if you find yourself in a similar situation (maybe you’re brain knows this is a good situation to be creative and thus is more creative.)

What is key to being inspired is learning to tell a good idea from a bad idea. More on that next week. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Redrafting

Writing is fun. Rewriting though…is not fun. I have yet to meet somebody who legitimately enjoys redrafting their scripts, but it’s a necessary evil. Like flossing. And although some people might get away with not flossing and still have an awesome set of pearly whites. If you want your script to be the best and brightest out there (and who doesn’t?) you need to do not just one rewrite, but multiple ones.

But, you may think, why multiple rewrites? Isn’t one enough?

In a word, no.

You have multiple things to fix when you’re rewriting, and each thing is difficult enough to find as it is. The easiest way to do this is to do multiple “passes” of a script, looking for certain things, like characterization (dialogue continuity generally, but also actions, for each character,) story continuity, rephrasing (I go through the whole script and generally ask myself “can I explain this in less space while explaining it more thoroughly,”) look for extraneous scenes, look for missing scenes, and general spelling/grammar errors (or, the bane of any writer in the era of spellcheck, writing a totally different word than you mien. See what I did there? That’s what we call ‘comedy.’ Or what I do anyway.) It’s best to do this after some time has past so you can look fresh upon the material.

This may be arduous to do once on a 100+ page script, let alone over and over and over and over again as you look for each individual thing.

But why make the script the best it can be? Odds are, you’re going to be asked by whoever buys it to do a rewrite anyway? Well, the thing is, if you don’t do a good job with that rewrite, then you’re in real trouble, because the studio or the producer will bring in another writer to do your work for you, and before you know it you’re splitting your paycheck 15 ways to Tuesday. And nobody wants that, except for us other writers trying to get paid for a lot of work you already started. So polish your script as brightly as you can before you try and sell it, that way you’ll have to do less editing when that moment arises.

Next week’s topic is going to be the “a-ha!” moment. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Keeping the Pace

Pacing.

Is.

Important.

It really is.

You can tell any story in any amount of time, in either 5 seconds, or 30 seconds, or over hours and hours. But a screenplay is a limited format. You can’t make 6 hour epics or 30 second mini-films (but you can do that online.) Well, you can, but most people aren’t going to sit through the whole thing. Most movies are between 90-120 movies (1.5-2 hours,) with some larger films rarely pushing to 3 hours. This gives you a limited space to tell the story you want to tell.

On the other hand, you have more than adequate time to tell a story, and you need to put all the information in such a way that it’s not just one massive infodump (“…and then, and then, and then…”)

The audience will not want to receive the whole of the story immediately (or else, why watch it?) but they also expect some kind of narrative to tie itself together eventually.

Thus, pacing is important. This fits in with the act structure I discussed earlier, but, in simpler terms, you can’t feed the audience all the information immediately. You need to dose it out in small amounts over the course of 90 or more pages.

This is the core of pacing your story. You need to make sure that every scene provides some piece of information that is crucial to the story, even if the audience is not immediately aware of the importance. At the same time, you cannot provide too much information in one scene, or else the audience will be overwhelmed, and also will feel more like they’re being bombarded.

To properly pace out a story starts when you’re outlining. Keep in mind what the audience needs to know and when they need to know it for the most dramatic efect.

This is crucial to the “surprise twist” of suspense films. By withholding and pacing out when you deal information, you can have your surprise twist 75 minutes in (or whenever.)

On the same note, you must be careful to the volume of information you need to tell. If you need to present too much information, a film might become less a narrative and more a series of facts.

A handy trick I use in these instances is, if I know I’m transmitting some piece of information, I make a note of it, either immediately above the scene itself (later deleted) or in a separate document I’m looking at. That way I know I need to provide this piece of information.

Next week, we’ll be discussing the redrafting process. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: That Damned Shotgun

I admittedly apologize for all the quotes, metaphors, and analogies, but it’s the best way to explain set-ups and pay-offs.

Vladmir Propp described narrative as: lack, lack liquidated. Or, alternatively, Kurt Vonnegut described the idea of “the hole”: somebody’s in trouble and keeps digging themselves in deeper. Joseph Campbell built a huge flowchart describing this process in stories ranging (with some stretching) to the “narratives arcs” of Jesus Christ and Cinderella, and were used as the template for the heroic epic adventures of Luke Skywalker, Neo, and Harry Potter.

We filmgoers go to the movies (as readers read, or theatergoers go to plays) with an expectation: we want to get something out of it. What is that something, exactly? It can vary. A fright, a laugh, a tear, whatever. In any event, it is something, and, whether you are immediately aware of it or not (and if you plan to write, you’d best get aware of it real fast) a successful film makes a narrative contract between viewer and media: you are going to receive X, and you are going to receive X in a way you do not expect. And who’s job is it to make sure X is received and it remains unseen? That falls to you, the ever-suffering writer.

Russian playwright Anton Chekov said, “If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act." What Chekov is describing is what screenwriters call set-ups and pay-offs.

Set-ups and pay-offs are lack and the liquidation of lack. They are jokes and punchlines. They are tragic bits of foreshadowing. They are what is expected and what is given in an unexpected way.

Unexpected is important here. If your viewer gets what he is expected in an expected way, he is bored. Despite having been given what he is promised, he is disappointed. How you wrap your present is just as important as what you’re presenting.

Think of a magician, who you expect to do something magical. While you are watching his performance, he performs a bit of unexpected legerdemain that . You are the magician here. And what magicians do to do their tricks is not just sleight of hand, but misdirection. You draw the audience’s eye to something else, so you they aren’t paying close attention to your hands. Maybe a flourish with your arms, or brushing your sleeves, or whatever.

One of the best examples of set-ups and pay-offs I can think of is the first Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985.) My favorite example of a good set-up and pay-off is the business with the clock tower. In the set-up scene, Marty and Jennifer are trying to set up their date in the cabin. There’s a woman handing out flyers regarding saving the clock tower, which Jennifer uses to write her number on. We aren’t interested in the old lady or the clock tower, we’re interested in Marty and Jennifer’s interactions (watching where we’re supposed to.) Later, as Marty’s trying to figure out a way to fix his time machine so he can return to 1985, he looks at the other side of the flyer Jennifer wrote her number on, and suddenly we all remember about the clock tower.

The movie has a lot of other great set-up’s and pay-off’s as well, but that’s an excellent example. Another is Marty’s love of rock and roll, he’s first denied at the battle of the bands audition (which also shows he’s a pretty smokin’ guitarist,) but then when he travels back in time, he gets to play on that same stage, wow the audience, and influence Chuck Berry (via his cousin, Marvin Berry.) There are plenty more, too.

So, how do you make set-up’s and pay-off’s? Two ways. While I’m writing, I usually come up with the pay-off first, and then figure out how to do the set-up, which is kind of a backwards way of doing it, but effective. Say, for example, to use the Chekov gun analogy, if somebody’s supposed to get shot, I’ll go back and set up a gun earlier in the script (as far apart as I can feasibly allow so the audience isn’t thinking about that gun.)

A set-up or pay-off can come out of nowhere without the other, but this is jarring and can alternatively shock and confuse your audience or produce a comedic effect. For example, although I love this movie, in the campy Adam West Batman film (dir. Neil Hefti, 1966,) Batman produces his infamous Bat Shark Repellant Spray. This is absurd (and within the show’s goals of high camp,) but had this been one of the more recent Chris Nolan Batman films, he should have had a scene where Batman was studying animal repellants (and Alfred chiding him for him paranoid and overly prepared.) When he runs into a shark in the end of the second act…boom. Bat Shark Repellant. And then it’s alright. We as the audience got a set-up, and a pay-off, instead of just a pay-off.

Having just a set-up can create a sense of lack that remains unfulfilled. You expectedly await the gag to come, and you wait, and wait, and wait... It’s like those cartoons with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck where Daffy rigs the xylophone to explode when a certain note is paid. Bugs keeps missing that one note. We as the audience, although not necessarily desiring Bugs Bunny to explode, want to see a KABOOM. Daffy gets just as frustrated and shows him how to play it, and we get our earth-shattering kaboom.

Or, alternatively, the “shave and a haircut” knock from Who Framed Roger Rabbit we, like Roger, are dying to hear the last two notes. Dun dunna dun dun… “Shave and a haircut…”

So, make sure to include set-ups and pay-offs in your film, regardless of genre, and you’ll have you audience laughing, crying, screaming, or whatever they asked for.

Next week, we’ll discuss pacing. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Outlying Outlines

Outlines are boring, so much so that I barely want to write about them.

The main point of outlining lies in the fact that you should know what happens next, so you can allude to it in future scenes and not have to worry about dropping your set-up in earlier (more on set-ups and pay-offs in a later entry.)

Now, I have mixed feelings about outlines. Sometimes, the best surprises are the one you the screenwriter yourself don’t see coming. But, for the above reasons, and also for the sheer sanity of trying to write a work of the size and scope of a screenplay (comparable to a novel or other work in certain elements, or to some plays,) outlining is a must.

So this is my outlining method. Some people might need to outline more. Some less. But, this is the amount of outlining that works for me:

I write a description of each scene, what the major “thrust” of that scene is for me in terms of narrative. This is usually two sentences, sometimes less, followed by an expected page length (which I use to keep in mind towards those act lengths I discussed earlier.)

If I think of a scene that fits in somewhere in between previously written scenes, I just put it in. This is usually after I get farther beyond. Scenes can always be removed during the rewriting process.

So, let’s pretend I’m making a movie called “It Came From Monster Island” about a rag tag group of misfits stranded on an island hunted by a geneticist’s rogue creation. (This is not actually a script I’m working on. I just made that up.)

Part of an outline might look something like this (this is my individual format, you can get as involved or uninvolved in your format as you like:)

Act I
1. Spinning newspaper: “Mysterious Disappearances Baffle Police” (2 lines.) [This is a minor point, but I like if I have an idea for a device like this to write it down with its own point. Typically they are few and far between as it is, or should be.]
2. Newsroom. Ball-busting female reporter Linda Larsen is furious she’s been reassigned off the story. Her manager tells her he’s putting his grandstanding nephew Percy on the case. (3 pages)
3. Larsen confronts Percy in the parking lot outside their office. He tells her she should be happy to avoid this, but she’s adamant. He leaves, and she follows him. (2 pages.)
4. Interview with the police. Capt. Kroger says they have no new leads, but proceeds to lead a SWAT team on boats out to a small island. Percy follows them, Linda stows aboard. (3 pages.)
5. Three gnarly surfer dudes get caught up in a riptide and nearly drown, Percy saves them. (2 pages.)
6. A rogue storm seems to come out of nowhere, crashing both boats on Monster Island. (1 pages.) [note it’s about 11 pages in. It is my sincere belief that if a film is called “It Came From Monster Island” one should get to Monster Island as close to the first 10 pages as possible. This might not even be how I write it, but it’s a guideline for how long I’m shooting for my scenes to be.]
7. The police boat crew is trying to contact the mainland to no avail when they spot Percy, Linda, and the surfers. There’s a brief standoff, but they need to work together to survive. The police want to make camp. But Linda and the surfers think it would be better to ask for help in that creepy laboratory on the island. [3 pages.]
8. The police and Percy talk about the mysterious disappearances possibly being linked to the activities of Dr. Gene Splicer. [2 pages.]
9. FLASHBACK: Dr. Splicer’s creepy experiments. [1 page.]
10. Linda and the surfers explore the lab, finding creepy dead experiments and a very live monster! Linda escapes while the surfers seem to be at the monster’s mercy. [5 pages.]
[Also, note the appearance of monsters by around page 20, near or on the end of the first act]
ACT 2

And so on.

So, that’s one way to outline. Next week, I’ll discuss Set-Ups and Pay-Offs. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Act and Scene Construction

Strap on your hardhats! This week, we’re going to talk about two different kinds of construction in screenwriting.

The Act structure is a throwback to theater and to Aristotle. Shakespearean plays had five acts, but most films are said to have three acts, Act 1 being about 20-30 pages (the beginning,) Act 2 being the bulk of the script (60 or so pages, the middle) and Act 3 winding up within 15-20 pages, depending on who you ask (the end.) More accurately, I think, all scripts have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Why the Beginning of Your Story is Important

You have to get your audience interested. If they lose interest in the beginning there’s little chance of winning them back later on. So, you need to construct a solid hook to draw your audience in, get them fast and hold on to them as long as possible.

Why the Middle of Your Story is Important

Middles have a tendency to be ignored in favor of wrapping up a good ending or setting up a good beginning, but if you can’t maintain the levels of excitement throughout, you’re going to end up losing your audience. This is generally important because the bulk of your story happens here.

Why the End of Your Story is Important

Your story has to end. Eventually. No matter how great your beginning and your middle are, an audience will not forgive a bad ending the way they might a bad middle (even then, a middle that just drags on and on won’t be winning friends and influencing people either.)

Why Scene Construction is Thus So Important

Each part of your story is made up of these smaller segments called scenes. A scene is typically consigned to one location, although things a montage (an interconnected series of very small scenes,) might take place in multiple locations (like, for example, a shopping spree in multiple stores.)

This is my scene construction checklist of things I think about when writing scenes:

MY SCENE CONSTRUCTION CHECKLIST
* What is the theme again?
* What’s the plot? What needs to happen right now in the story?
* How long is this scene supposed to be? (1 page? Half a page? 2 pages? 3 pages? More? How much more? I usually ask myself this while outlining [which also gives me a rough idea about my acts. I can always adjust this later, especially when rewriting.])
* Where are the characters?
* When does this take place (in the narrative and in chronological time. Is it a flashback? A flashforward?)
* Now what needs to happen and how can the characters make that happen?
* Check your dialogue, make sure your characters seem the same from the last scene (or the last scene they appeared in.)

Next week, we’ll discuss outlining. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: It Gives You Character

In a portion of Tom Shales’ book Live from New York that I’m too lazy to properly cite, one of the writers in the shows’ early period recounts working with Jim Henson’s Muppets for a recurring segment, and, when proposing a bit of dialogue for one of them, the puppeteer said that the character “wouldn’t say that,” much to the writer’s mockery and chagrin. However, in this instance, I really have to agree with the puppeteer. That’s the core of what makes a character a character, knowing what that character would say or do, and what they wouldn’t.

Creating characters can be a really difficult process if you take it the wrong way. If you don’t define your characters enough, your script can seem bland or boring, or worse, the individual characters will blend together. If you define them too much…in all actuality, you can’t overdefine a character, however, you need to know when to focus on the task at hand (writing the screenplay) and not the character biography.

1) Research

Yeah, that sounds boring, but it’ll help. If you’re working on an adaptation, it helps to explore multiple versions or surrounding literature related to the character, to see what’s been done prior. If you’re Chris Nolan, for example, and adapting Batman: The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008,) and the Joker is your villain, it would help to read multiple authors previous takes on the character, and to use them to produce a composite that might start to create your particular take for that character. Even if you’re not adapting, it helps to know what kind of character you’re making, and how it’s been done before, so you can effectively steal or subvert the audience’s expectations. If you’re making a seductive femme fatale, for example, if you know what’s been done in terms of such a character (perhaps watching a handful of classic noir, for example.)

2) On the Virtues and Limitations of Writing Backgrounds

Some writers I know live by these things, personally I can’t stand writing backgrounds for my characters. As long as it’s relevant to the story at hand, I will make some notes about who they are. Besides, leaving me openings to be creative can be part of the fun. And the audience is not really going to see your background except through how the character acts, so if you know how the character would act in a series of vastly different situations, and anything that’s immediately relevant to the plot (John McClane’s trouble with his ex-wife in Die Hard for example,) that’s really all you need to know ahead of time. The rest I personally fudge on the way, making sure I keep those fudges in mind as I’m writing so they don’t cancel each other out.

How to Make Your Character Stand Out:

Defining a character might seem easy: you might write something like:

JOHN Everyman, 29, valiant, daring, noble of bearing, courageous and gallant, a fountain of talent.

That is just frustrating for the director. How do you represent that visually? The audience is not reading the script, nor are they telepathic. So, provide only details the audience would have (sights and sounds.)

JOHN Everyman, 29, blonde hair, tall, broad shoulders, winning smile. You get a picture of John Everyman immediately, which is what any director or casting director really needs. Now, how do you make him valiant and daring and noble of bearing, courageous and gallant, a fountain of talent?

1) Diction and Syntax

In particular:
Diction: the accent, inflection, intonation, and speech-sound quality manifested by an individual speaker, usually judged in terms of prevailing standards of acceptability; enunciation.
Syntax: the study of the patterns of formation of sentences and phrases from words.

How does your character talk? Do they ask a lot of pointless rhetorical questions? Or are they just so blustering and full of hot air they just employ this same parallel sentence structure? Everyone likes to talk a certain way, it’s an element of how they grew up, how they were raised, and their own personal preferences. They phrase things differently, or choose how they say it differently. Each person has a unique diction and syntax, and part of making a character is realizing that particular diction and that particular syntax.

These things can say a lot about a character. Let’s say two characters, A, and B, are asking a girl out, and both are nervous.

A
Um, well, um, I mean, if you aren’t doing anything on Saturday, well, um, I’ve got this extra movie ticket and I’d love you, er, I mean, I’d like it, yeah, I’d like it very much if you would come, um, um, I mean, go and see it with me. It’s an, um, er, um, um, Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

As opposed to:
B
(Long Drawn Breath, talking rapidly)
So, yeah, I was wondering if you’d like to go with me to this movie thing. It’ll be a lot of fun, it’s a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, full of explosions, y’know, that sort of thing. So I’ll pick you up around eight? No eight’s too late. Six? Six’s too early. Seven and that’s my final offer.
(Deep panting breath)

These two guys are both asking out a girl, and both nervous, but their characters are totally different and recognizable because of syntax and diction.

Dialogue can be as natural or stylized as you feel the situation calls for. I personally try to strike a happy middle between the two, not striving for a 100% accurate version of how people speak (because, let’s be honest, some people can’t talk) or the clipped witty banter of a 40’s romantic comedy (with all respect due to the genius that was Billy Wilder.)

2) It’s the little things

It’s the little details that make us all human. Not having little details makes a character seem flat and lifeless. Give your character some kind of nuance, give them limits or lines they won’t cross, or other minor details that would surprise the viewer or compliment or conflict with what we know. Say, for example, you have a character who’s a total jerk, but in one scene you show him being nice to somebody. (This specific kind of characterization is often called “petting the dog.” If you want to see an extremely heavy-handed version, watch the scenes with Matt Dillon and his father in Crash [Haggis, 2004, not Cronenberg, 1996.])

3) Actions Speak Louder Than Words

It’s one thing to have someone say “So and so is like this or that,” or “So and so wouldn’t do that.” It’s what is generally referred to as “show, not tell.” So, if you have the option of talking about how a character is, but could instead demonstrate through the script’s actions that same trait, it’s more powerful to show how the character is, rather than just describing it.

4) Words Speak Pretty Loudly Too

You may notice, in a lot of movies, the main character will be talking to his friend, and the friend will say: “You know what your problem is Protagonist? You…” and then states the problem the protagonist needs to overcome over the course of the story. It’s cheap, but it works. Especially when backed up by action.

How I Build Characters

This is my personal method for building characters, and it might not work perfectly for everybody, but it works well for me. I utilize all the stuff above, but I do two things to help me.

1) Take It Personal and Make It Personal

I can relate to all of my characters. Every one of them. Not 100%, definitely not, then every character would be me (and a little boring.) But there’s one part of them, at least, that I can identify with, it’s kind of a hook or a latch for me to get into the character’s head, to understand them.

2) The Characters Drive the Action and Not the Other Way Around

When I’m constructing a scene with my characters (next week,) I ask this question: “How would this character respond to this situation? I want this to happen later, but how would he get to that.”

Next week, we get into issues of act and scene structure. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Points on Loglines

Loglines aren’t terribly exciting, but they’re crucial to the process of refining your script, refining your pitch, and generally refining your craft. People generally don’t have time to read 100 or more pages. Most people don’t even have time to write that much. So, when you’re meeting with a producer, agent, director, or whoever, for a pitch session the question you’re going to be asked is: “what’s your logline.”

Then would not be the time to stammer, look at your feet, and go “um…” (more about pitching at a much later date. It’s not as much about writing.)

Now, after that whole spiel, you might be asking what is a logline? A logline is 1 or 2 sentences describing the plot of your film. This is different from themes like we discussed last week. Themes are the grand scope of what your story is about, the logline is more an overview of the actual plot. In Neo-Formalist terms (borrowing heavy from those Russian Structuralism,) the theme is the fabula, whereas the plot and the logline are more like the syuzhet. Although I have never used those words outside of discussing Neo-Formalist Film Theory, and it’s much easier to say this: the theme is the story, the logline is the (condensed) plot.

The logline has to be even more economical, even than script format itself is. You have to, in one or two sentences, describe the following: the protagonists, their primary conflict (your “A” story, more on structure next week,) and any major details. In short, it’s like a really, really, summed up version of your story. You don’t have to capture everything (because that’s almost impossible to do unless you use two very long sentences) but you need to capture enough to make the person who hears your logline interested to hear more.

It’s also important to consider genre, and try your best to capture that in the logline as well. If you want someone to think it’s a comedy, try to make the pitch a little funny; if it’s a thriller, make it suspenseful or scary, and so on, and so forth. After your pitch, you should have the person having the same reaction after hearing it the script would give them.

Writing loglines, besides holding a vital function in pitch sessions, are a useful tool for a writer to focus on. Once you write your logline, you can look at it, and go, “That is what, in a nutshell, my story is about.” Whenever you feel yourself straying away from the theme and the logline, you can use them as tools to go back to wherever you’re going (and perhaps excising those scenes that help neither.)

Instead of looking through a script this week, I’m going to try and do five quick loglines of some popular movies. Can you guess the titles?

1. Three bumbling psychology professors in New York City design a system to catch ghosts, using the devices to go into business for themselves as professional paranormal investigators and eliminators. Although they initially aren’t very good at it, their business starts to boom, and they realize the massive influx of paranormal activity has to do with the return of a Babylonian god and the end of the world.

2. A young girl, Sarah, is obsessed with magic and very immature, and is very upset when she’s forced to babysit her little brother. After angrily wishing her brother would be kidnapped by goblins, she finds the Goblin King has kidnapped him, and in order to save her brother, she needs to go into his magical Labyrinth.

3. Robert Parr is an old, out-of-shape, super-hero, brought into retirement due to bureaucratic interference. He has to come out of retirement, along with his super-powered family, to defeat an disgruntled fan from his past.

4. Charles Foster Kane is a complicated man whose life has been full of corruption, compromise, and tragedy. After his death, more questions exist than answers, which are up to a journalist named Thompson to unravel, especially of his last words: “Rosebud.”

5. Jack Burton is a macho truck driver whose truck is stolen by Chinese demons. Although he’s a complete outsider, he has to delve, along with his friend Wang, into the murky mysterious depths of Chinatown’s demonic underworld.

In case you couldn’t guess, the answers are, in order: Ghostbusters (Reitman, 1984,) Labyrinth (Henson, 1986), The Incredibles (Bird, 2004), Citizen Kane (Welles, 1943,) and, of course, Big Trouble in Little China (Carpenter, 1983).

Next week, I’ll be talking about characterization. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: Theme is the Thing

This is a question you should be asking yourself every day when you sit down to write, when you’re outlining, when you’re writing scenes, and when you’re editing:

What exactly are you getting at?

The earliest screenplays I’ve read by people, and the first feature I wrote shares this as well, typically have a weakness in thematic strength. They’re all over the place. Every scene and every theme doesn’t necessarily strongly support your theme.

What is a theme? The theme is like the topic sentence of an essay: it is what your script is arguing, what it is about. It’s different from loglines (we’ll get into those next week,) in that while a logline describes the major narrative arc of the story for a reader in a concise manner, the theme is more complex. The theme should be weaved throughout the narrative that the logline describes. Every scene should contain the theme in one way or another.

You, as the writer, are trying to communicate a meaning to the audience, and the theme is that meaning. If you want to say “true love conquers all” (like in The Princess Bride [Reiner, 84] or any many other romances,) you should have that meaning explicit in the scenes, possibly even in the dialogue if you can help it. Consider it an exercise in rhetoric: regardless of the theme, every scene you write, every line of dialogue, every single element of your script should contribute to that theme. Your script is essentially an extended argument for and against that theme. To continue with the past example, does true love conquer all? When won’t it? Will it always? If you, as a screenwriter, are doing your job, you should ask many such questions, and they should be answered in such a way that if the audience were asked afterwards, they should know what the answers to those type of questions would be.

That isn’t to say films are purely pedantic. If movies were that way, when people left a movie they’d see things like: “Gee, I really learned a lot in that movie,” or “I really liked the way he proved his argument.” Movies are not like this, and people do not go to movies to learn things. People go to movies for action, excitement, romance, comedy or any number of things (if you believe Aristotle in his Poetics, we’re watching “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”) So, it’s up to you to hide the theme in action, comedy, or whatever, to entertain in addition to educate. The theme is like the delicious coating that contains the medicine (which can be equally delicious, but is often meant to help you more than please you.)

Don’t be afraid to spell it out clearly. You don’t need to be subtle when discussing your theme. Many films include their films very explicitly spelled out.



Death to Smoochy

I’m going to be examining the script to Death to Smoochy (De Vito, 2003.) Before I do though, this is the best advice I can give to anyone: read screenplays. The more screenplays you read, the more you’ll form an innate sense of the forms and conventions thereof. A lot of places online will post drafts of screenplays for free.

Read a lot of screenplays. I can’t stress that enough. The more screenplays you read, the better you understand the forms and functions of screenwriting. Pick up screenplays from movies you like, and pick up ones you hate, and figure out what it is about them that you like and that you hate.

Death to Smoochy, for those who haven’t seen it, involves a look into the dark and seedy underbelly of children’s programming. Sheldon Mopes (played by Edward Norton) is an optimistic bright-eyed performer as Smoochy the Rhino, whose clean-cut and amiable ways are threatened by his disposed rival Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) and the corrupt underworld of kid’s show executives. It’s a dark comedy to be sure. The draft I found is an early one and definitely not the shooting script (you can spot a bunch of minor differences, including Smoochy being orange.) However, you can still catch a lot of the same elements of theme.

A first thing to look at is the length here, almost 120 pages. Most comedy scripts shouldn’t push too far past 100. But this is a draft and things are cut or changed.

The big theme is about integrity, about living up to expectations (or failing to.) So, how is that theme expressed? Let’s look at the first act (the first 30 pages or so) and see how that is.

Page 1: We begin with the scene of a man in a foam rhino suit beaten to death and shot (we’re believed to this point that it’s Smoochy until the beginning of the third act.) This gives us that juxtaposition of innocent material (the children’s TV show) and the corruption (mob violence.)

Page 1-2: Rainbow Randolph’s “Friend Comes in All Sizes” number. It catches the right mix of filth and innocence (“one might says ‘grasp’ while the other says ‘snatch.’)

Page 2-3: Immediately we have a scene of Rainbow Randolph taking a bribe. Remember that theme?

Page 4: “Corruption in Krinkleland.” Remember what I said about it being spelled out?

Page 5-7: Here’s our set-up. We, the audience, are joining the executive Stokes (played by Jon Stewart in the film) for a kid’s show host who’s clean. We then get a list of hosts who are less than clean (abusers, illegal immigrants, mail fraud… no integrity in the whole bunch.) We are then introduced to Sheldon Mopes, who is presented as their only option with ethics.

Page 9: This isn’t a theme device as a personal problem. Never say “We see” anything, or describe camera movements unless you plan on directing the script yourself.

Page 10: Sheldon “I tell 'em, it's not about the old handshake and back slap game. It's not about adding fuel to the
shlock machine. It's about doing good work. Having integrity.” Remember what I said about spelling it out?

Page 11: “This is concrete! This is integrity!” Speaking of spelling it out…

Page 12: Sheldon’s story about his grandfather is about integrity, Nora says Sheldon has integrity.

Page 14-17: Randolph’s meeting with Stokes talks about how much Randolph’s corruption has cost him. Why must we keep our integrity? Those with integrity prosper (Mopes,) those who don’t suffer (Randolph.)

Page 18: Sheldon argues against commercialism in children’s programming. His integrity is the point that it disrupts the goings-on at the studio. Good for dramatic tension. “Can you have too much integrity for a situation? Is this character too good for his own good?” The answer appears to be yes.

Pages 21-23: Seeing the Burke character interact with both Mopes and Randolph shows their levels of integrity (because, of course, being an agent, he has none.)

Pages 23-28: The phallic-shaped cookie sequence, besides being entertaining and hilarious, shows theme and character. Randolph, as a character with no integrity, tries to ruin Smoochy by surprising him with these cookies, and Smoochy is arguing with Nora about changing his lyrics in favor of shilling out sugar and plastic, and singing a song favoring his ideology relating to organic food (remember: integrity.) The final film shows Smoochy being slightly more away of the phallic nature of the cookie than the script shows (“Smoochy gets a big grin” doesn’t capture the nervousness Edward Norton gets in that moment.)

Bottom of Page 30-Halfway Down Page 32: Burke gives Sheldon a gun (morally shady,) and has given him greater power and control in his show. He also gives him access to the corporate penthouse, which Rainbow Randolph has been complaining about losing sine Page 17. So with that transfer, we begin to ask, can someone as integrity-ridden as Sheldon remain uncorrupted by the forces that exercise control in his life?

So, in about 30 pages, we have 13 references to a theme of integrity. Almost every scene touches on this theme (one scene isn’t as strongly about integrity, the scene between Nora and Sheldon where he tries to discuss the future of his show with her and is shot down.) In any script I could look at (I chose Death to Smoochy arbitrarily) you will find a theme waiting to come out. All you have to do is look. And all you have to do as a writer is to decide what your theme is and to write to that theme.

Next week I’ll talk about writing a good logline. Good writing!

Screenwriting 101: The Big Secret of Screenwriting...

...It’s just like regular writing.

Unbelievable? Perhaps. There is a lot of arcane secrecy regarding the nature of screenwriting. Other than the screenplay format itself and the media itself being represented, the narrative structures and formats itself are no different than any narrative. Guys like Syd Field and Chris Voggler want to sell you a book. And I’m not going to knock their methods, because I’ve seen them work in the past for my friends and for myself, but they aren’t the only game in town. As a matter of fact, there’re so many different games, and ways and forms, you’ll be hard pressed to not find a way to write. You just need to know the basic rules, and from there it’s a matter of cherry-picking the devices or methods. If you can write at all, you can write a screenplay.

Writing a great screenplay (or even a good one,) however, may be another matter. I’ve been refining my craft for just 5 years now, which really is nothing. I’ve made a lot of leaps and bounds in just that time, and I hope I’ll get even better from here. To that end, I’d like to help you learn from my mistakes (and my successes) to expedite that process for yourself. If you can get through the awkward years one through three in less time than I could, you should really consider yourself blessed.

But, also, don’t be afraid to fail! Odds are you’ll be drafting, redrafting, or re-redrafting any script before it’s even close to good. Odds are you’ll find yourself sucking. And sucking hard. But do not give up. No matter how bad you think it is, you can make it better. Sometimes it just takes the right moment, the right perspective, or just realizing you can tell what you’re trying to a better way. But you can do it.

The screenplay format in and of itself is not that difficult to master. And even if you can’t get it right away, Final Draft or any other screenwriting software you care to use will automatically do the correct formatting for you. Before we get to the big problems of screenwriting, though, we need a very basic understanding of screenplay format.

Screenplay format is designed with a very utilitarian purpose: like a theatrical script, it’s a blueprint that shows the director and the rest of the production crew what they’re supposed to be doing for the next nine or more months. This might make it sound like screenwriting is very dry and technical. In a way it is. Given the space conventions I’ll explain in the next paragraph, you need to try your best to fit the action and the dialogue in a clear and concise way. But that doesn’t totally eliminate literary flourishes, it merely means you have to be creative about getting creative.

The standard convention is one page of script is approximately one page of screen time. So most feature length scripts are somewhere between 90 and 180 pages. Keep that in mind when you’re writing! A question I often ask myself while writing resolves the most important thing in comedy, and the most important thing in general. Timing. It’s everything. You want to engross your audience in the story you’re telling, and you want to hook them fast and hook them hard. (More on that in a later column.)

So, to review: 1) if you can write at all, you can be a screenwriter, 2) it’s hard, so do not get discouraged or give up, 3) formatting is important (1 page = 1 minute.)

Next week I’ll be discussing theme. Or rather, the theme of the column will be about themes. Good writing!