Deliberate Practice for Screenwriting
I’m a huge fan of Cal Newport and what he has to say about deliberate practice:
Similar findings have been replicated in a variety of fields. To become exceptional you have to put in a lot of hours, but of equal importance, these hours have to be dedicated to the right type of work. A decade of serious chess playing will earn you an intermediate tournament ranking. But a decade of serious study of chess games can make you a grandmaster.
Read the whole post, it’s good stuff. Actually, just read his whole damn book. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this past year and it’s more than just about how to get better at things, it’s a a treatise on “doing what you love” and why that is not very good advice — to paraphrase, you fall in love with what you get good at. There’s more but it’s late and I don’t have the brain power to paraphrase better. Just read it.
Anyway, so I had a thought last night while reading one of Newport’s blog posts. My thought was that while I’m fully on board with what he’s preaching, I haven’t really implemented it in a deliberate way. I do practice writing almost every day and I do read great screenplays and study films but when I write, I just set out to write something good with the goal of eventually writing something great.
But I haven’t taken the time to identify my weaknesses and deliberately work on them.
So. This morning I wrote out a list of what I think my weaknesses are. They’re based on feedback I’ve received from writer friends that have read my work, or from intelligent audience members at staged readings, or from industry script readers on the Blcklst. Plus some things that I just want to get better at, even if I’m already pretty good at them.
The goal is to stretch myself and also to generate a lot of new material that will eventually find its way into a film that I can shoot in 2016 on a low budget.
Here’s what I came up with:
- Writing stories with premises or ideas that are big enough to carry a movie but small enough to be shot with a micro-budget.
- Writing absurd comedy that also has character depth.
- Writing fascinating main characters (my supporting characters tend to be more interesting than the main character, which is not good).
- Writing unconventional but believable courtship/love scenes.
- Writing physical comedy.
- Writing suspense.
I’m going to tackle these in my weekday morning writing sessions (weekends are for other ongoing projects that need longer dedicated time periods to work through) by either brainstorming multiple ideas, scenes, or treatments for each item, depending on the nature of the skill.
Editing and Forwards
Episode 16 of Gimlet Media’s Startup podcast, titled “The Secret Formula” has a really interesting discussion about how Gimlet (and presumably This American Life and other highly-produced podcasts and radio shows) put together their shows.
The process is a lot like film editing, without the visual element of course. The episode basically turns out to be a how-to on how to edit a radio story and it’s comforting to know that it’s not an easy process. They start with a very rough cut, go through it and figure out where it “drifts,” and then making subsequent re-edits to improve the story until it’s working and interesting throughout.
It’s also comforting to know that this is more or less the approach I take when I edit video — whenever I get feedback (or give myself feedback), I look for the places in a script or the video where the action stalls. I really like the term drift though, because it’s more descriptive of the audience’s experience. Stalling is about the work, drifting is about the audience.
And they go into one technique that they use to keep people interested and moving forward, especially before a commercial break. They call it a “promote forward.”
The use of the term “forward” struck me because I just read a book called “Backward and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays” by David Ball. The book is fascinating on a lot of levels. As a reader, I learned that my understanding of Hamlet as a brooding man of inaction is entirely wrong and that he doesn’t actually contemplate suicide, he only feigns to be depressed and crazy in order to convince Polonius et al. that he is.
I don’t know if there’s a “right” interpretation, but I had never thought of that one.
The book is intended for theater creators, mainly directors, but it also serves as a technical guidebook for play-writing or screenwriting without falling prey to the “paint by numbers” approach of most of the dreck written about screenwriting.
One of the theses of the book is that a good play (or dramatic writing of any form) uses forwards throughout to keep the reader moving. Ball summarizes it:
A forward is any of a myriad of devices, techniques, tricks, maneuvers, manipulations, appetizers, tantalizers, teasers, that make an audience eager for what’s coming up. If you miss a script’s forwards, you miss the playwright’s most distinctive, gripping tool. What stripper does not know that the promise of nudity more excites an audience than does nudity itself?
Effective dramatic writing hinges on the ability to keep the audience wanting to know what happens next. Forwards eliminate drift. Suspense isn’t relegated to certain genres; it’s everywhere.
Timelessness in writing
If you shoot for timelessness in your writing, consciously orient yourself to the upper realm, the shining truths and the inexhaustible symbols etc., you will — by a kind of law — produce drivel. You will waft and drift and never get a toehold. If, on the other hand, you bet it all on the particular, really dive unreservedly into specificity, with no thought for higher things, you will find — inevitably, magnificently — that your novel about three plumbers in Milwaukee in 1987 becomes a singing blueprint of human significance.
– James Parker in Should Art Be Timeless or Should It Speak to Something More Current? (via)
Multiple projects at once
I always have at least two things that I’m writing. One is the primary thing, the thing I set out to work on every morning. The other one (or two or three) is a backup.
This morning was a good example of why I like working this way. Sometimes I wake up and my brain doesn’t want to edit. It can’t edit. To rewrite something (where I’m at now with my primary script), I need to be able to focus and think critically. No way that was happening this morning. I went off caffeine completely about 4 days ago and my brain is not happy about it. My brain is foggy. My brain wants to binge-watch Seinfeld and it does not want to think critically about anything.
This hazy state is bad for rewriting but it’s fine for brainstorming. It’s actually better I think. It’s less critical and more open to new ideas. So I opened up a secondary project, which is for a script that I haven’t started in earnest yet. It’s just a few pages of notes that I’ve collected as ideas come into my head. And I found that I was able to come to a completely awesome realization that I was going the wrong way with the script and I found a completely awesome and new way to go with it, which I sort of vomited out ideas for for about an hour, long enough to make me feel OK about my writing for the day.
Some very good tips on screenwriting
Some very good tips on screenwriting from @briankoppelman:
6. Of the many supposed rules of writing, the only one that’s legit is ‘write every day.’
and
60. Many of us have what gamblers call leak – a habit or enthusiasm that knocks us off course. Figure out what yours is and close it.
(via)
Process & production notes on the web series
I wrote up a series of blog posts on the writing, directing, and production process of my web series, Words Fail Me. You can find them individually on the site and I’ve assembled them all in one place here:
- Notes on Pre-production and Planning for a Web Series
- Notes on Directing for the First Time
- Notes on Directing Improvised Scenes (on camera)
- Notes on Soliciting and Interpreting Feedback on Videos (or other creative work)
- Notes on Editing Improvised Video Footage
- Exporting to ProRes from Adobe Premiere on PC
Creativity vs. imagination
Unlike creativity, imagination is an appreciative skill with an external locus, rather than an instrumental capacity with an internal locus. To notice a pattern in current events that could serve as a premise for a movie is imagination. To be able to develop that premise into an actual screenplay with compelling characters, fresh dialog and an engrossing plot is creativity. You feed creativity by making things. You feed imagination by being curious about things beyond your own shadow.
Write what you feel bad about
Budding writers are told write what you know. They should be told write what you feel bad about.
Notes on Soliciting and Interpreting Feedback on Videos (or other creative work)
I sent the rough cuts to a variety of friends and family. I chose people that I knew had a good sense of humor, but with some variation. I told them I was looking for feedback in general and I asked them these specific questions:
- What did you like about it?
- Where does it stall out or lose your attention?
I learned those questions from Andy Miara, a former sketch-writing teacher I had (also the best writing teacher I ever had!). When we performed our rough drafts in class, he often asked those questions to get things started (before moving on to some really brilliant and specific notes).
I love asking those questions for a few reasons:
- They are easy for anyone to answer. Anyone can point to the places that they enjoyed and the places that were boring. They might not know why they felt that way or what to do about it, but that’s OK, it’s up to you to figure that out.
- They are non-specific enough to elicit honest feedback. It’s a lot easier to say “this part was slow to me” than “this joke sucked.”
- They don’t put pressure on the feedback-giver to be “constructive” or give a solution. Many nice and decent people have learned to always offer a solution whenever giving criticism, which is probably a more civil way to offer criticism at work or in a relationship, but it’s not going to help you here unless they are also a writer/editor/director/etc. Again, it’s your job to figure out the solution, not theirs. If you are getting feedback from someone with a lot of experience doing what you’re doing – in that case they may offer more specific feedback, but there is no pressure to do so.
And the last thing I said was something along these lines: “you have permission to be honest and don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I’m looking for some feedback to make this project better, so please don’t hold back!”
This helped me get some really solid notes on early rough cuts, without feelings being hurt.
BTW, I tried using Wipster on one of the episodes but nobody except one person used it. Emailing a PW-protected Vimeo link was much more effective in getting responses, although I was kind of bummed because I liked the Wipster interface. I think it had something to do with the fact that Wipster didn’t hide one person’s response from the other people, which made people more hesitant to leave public feedback.
Interpreting Feedback
Once the feedback comes back, you’ll have a better idea of what’s working well and what’s not working well.
Figuring out why they answered a certain way is your job. If everyone says that a certain part stalls or loses their interest, it might mean that you need to cut it completely, or that it needs to be changed in some way, or perhaps you’re trying to deliver a payoff that hasn’t been set up enough in an earlier part of the video.
When I got the feedback for the first few episodes, the general feedback on each episode was that “it starts slow.” I wanted to set things up nicely and give it some room to breathe at the beginning, but everyone was saying “get to it quicker.” So I cut a lot of material from the beginning, leaving just enough to understand the basic facts of the situation before moving into the heart of the matter.
For positive feedback, i.e. “this part was really funny” or “I really liked that part and the way it was edited,” you have some valuable knowledge. For me, knowing what not to cut was just as important as knowing what to cut. If something was working well, then I could keep it and even add more of it to the edit.
A review of Words Fail Me + an interview with me
Elena Colás wrote a review of Words Fail Me for Chicago Literati and gave it 3 out of 4 stars:
Robert Bruce Carter takes us back to the storytelling basics with his web series Words Fail Me. With a jolly soundtrack and quick editing, each pair of characters find themselves in wacky situations under a simple premise: I know something you don’t know. From there, things get delightfully weird. Fans of improv will love it, and the casual addition of absurd plot points gives both the actors and the audience more to chew on than just a simple sketch.
Elena also interviewed me about how I come up with ideas, my writing process, balancing day jobs and artistic endeavors, and much more. Read the whole thing here.