They don’t go to the police because it’s dull
The sheriff’s intervention comes under the heading of what we have discussed many times before: “Why don’t they go to the police?” I’ve always replied, “They don’t go to the police because it’s dull.”
– Alfred Hitchcock in Hitchcock/Truffaut
God I loved this book.
Screenplay feedback and accepting that something is broken
I did a staged reading of Begin, a screenplay I recently wrote. It went very well, with lots of laughs in the right places and the audience stayed tuned in throughout the 90 or so minutes of the reading, in large part because the actors nailed it so well. There are two reasons why I love doing a reading like this: feedback from the audience and feedback from the actors.
From the audience you learn where it’s working and where it stalls and where it’s funny and where the jokes land flat. And from the actors you learn if you’ve written roles that are fun or interesting to play. And you can see if the characters come to life when the words are spoken out loud, or does it just feel like someone’s reading some lines? It helps to have actors that prepare and commit to it.
Afterwords, we did a Q&A, where I was asking questions of the audience to get their feedback on some of the story and theme issues that I’ve been struggling with — mostly things that were pointed out as weaknesses by Blcklst readers.
I asked the audience: “I’ve gotten some feedback that said that the reader was not clear about what the theme or the point of the story is. Do you agree with that comment and why” And I saw many heads shyly nodding.1.
A lot of the feedback was related to the main character, about why he was making the choices he was making and how it seemed like things were happening to him, very funny things, but things that didn’t necessarily relate to his larger arc or the theme of the film. This type of feedback is invaluable because it provides another data point, more evidence that this is in fact a problem, not just something one reader had an issue with. But it’s also a bit strange to me, because I know exactly what the theme is, and in my head it’s so obvious that I was worried that it would be too obvious.
But when 20 people nod their heads in unison, it’s hard to ignore. I tried to communicate something and I failed, as much as I wanted to believe that everything was working well. And now that I’ve accepted that, I can begin the work of addressing those issues and with some luck, take it from “a funny movie” to “a really good movie that’s also funny.”
I used to have this feeling, like a fear of putting stuff out into the world because I wanted everyone (or the people I care about) to just say “this is great, I love it, it’s perfect,” so I wouldn’t have to change a thing. But I’ve been braver lately and try to seek out critiques from people that will be honest about the issues in what I write, so that I can make my work better.
It’s really hard to do that and admit that something I love is broken, but I don’t know if there’s another way to improve as a writer (along with practicing a whole lot). And getting there required changing my mindset from “making something good” to “continuously improve as a writer.”
After receiving zero response to my first question, I remembered that I had to tell them that they had permission to say negative things, which opened things up quite a bit ↩
Doing two important things at once improves the quality of procrastination
Doing two important things at once improves the quality of procrastination. I don’t mean actually doing two important things at the same time, but having two important things you’re working on.1
This is what I’ve noticed. Usually I have a few projects going on. I’m writing something, editing something else, and maybe doing something that would fall under the realm of ‘producing’, i.e. booking a location and scheduling actors. So when I wake up in the morning to work on something or when it’s late at night and I can’t sleep because I didn’t work on anything that day, I have to pick one of the three to tackle.
If I’m feeling brave, I tackle the most difficult one (usually producing, which is not my favorite thing to do). If I’m not feeling brave or if I’m just not in a good mood, I’ll procrastinate on the difficult thing and write or edit instead. So I’m procrastinating but I’m still working on something important. If I get blocked on one thing, I have something else I can work on, which to me is the big advantage of working on multiple things at once. The disadvantage is that I’m splitting my subconscious free space among several things.
I don’t know which way of working is ultimately better, but I suspect that the marginal value of another project depends on whether or not it utilizes a mental state not already engaged by one of the existing projects. So if you’re writing one screenplay, starting a second one before the first is finished will hurt you more than it helps you.2
Why not just procrastinate by doing the dishes or surfing the web? I think I don’t because I trained myself through brute force (willpower) into working on something important every morning.
And I’ve convinced myself that I will go insane if I don’t at least write a page or two per day. This guilt comes in handy when I can’t sleep. It’s the type of anxiety that moves you forward rather than holding you back, so in a way I found a way to harness my anxiety for good.
I hope that writing all this down will allow me to stop thinking about it so much.
BEGIN: a staged reading of my screenplay at the Annoyance Theatre
Well the four month screenwriting class I took with Michael McCarthy has just wrapped up and as part of the class, we’re doing staged readings of our screenplays at The Annoyance. I finished the latest draft a few weeks ago and this is a chance to get some feedback and see how real people respond to it.
I put together a solid cast of actors to read the roles and it should be a fun event. Plus it’s free. When I finished this latest draft, I uploaded it to The Blcklst, which is a site that allows you to purchase evaluations of screenplays from readers that work in the actual film industry and I already got some great feedback:
The appropriately titled BEGIN is a rather fascinating dervish that excels at delivering great absurd humor to its reader. Tonally the screenplay is firing on all cylinders and it appears as though it will work well in the low-budget indie space. While a number of directors in this genre generally write their own fare, this script alleviates that burden and a filmmaker that enjoys working with comedic talent in the independent world will delight in this piece.
It has to be said that the writer really embraces absurd and hilarious comedy. He approaches the material with a brash and brave angle that assures the reader right from the get-go that Tim will be confronted by any number of astonishingly bizarre scenarios. The comedy set pieces in this script are especially well meted out in the third act. The showdown between Jay and Tim against Karl and Jerry is probably the best beat in the whole piece and the writer is encouraged to continue to build out these action moments as far as he is able.
The build among the strange occurrences works well and the reader can easily understand the fact that Tim first starts to question those around him, before confronting his own dwindling sanity. The writer is great at piling on the chaos and assuring that these strange beats bleed collectively into one another.
Here’s a link to the Facebook event if you’d like to attend. Contact me if you’d like to read the script.
What I accomplished by writing an hour a day for most of a year
My goal for the past few years has been to write for an hour a day, every day. If I write for an hour and want to keep going, then I can–there’s no upper limit aside from what the day demands in other obligations.
I was hit or miss for much of that time. Writing in the evening was hard after a long day of work and often there would be a rehearsal or a show or a social event that would sabotage me. For a while I tried waking up early and writing for an hour before my nine to five. I loved this because it liberated me for the rest of the day–my real work was done, the rest was easy. But waking up at 6am was not easy for me, mostly because I have trouble going to sleep before midnight.
But in July I quit my job to do freelance consulting instead and this freed up my schedule. So since then I’ve written almost every morning for 1-3 hours. I probably miss it once a week, maybe two if I’m traveling or have the flu.
I can’t recommend this method highly enough, if you can swing it. It trains your brain to be ready to write every day and the sheer force of habit means that I just sort of show up at the cafe near my house every morning, no matter what my mental state is (half-asleep, hungover, feeling good, hungry, whatever).
And at the end of the year, I like to look back at my writing folder on my laptop to see what I did, because at any given moment there’s a 75% chance that I feel like I haven’t accomplished much lately. This is what I produced this year (quality varies, of course):
- A full-length play (later adapted to a one-act play)
- Another short play
- A 20-page treatment for a screenplay
- A 20-page outline for a screenplay
- A 117-page screenplay (on the 2nd draft now, not quite complete)
- A 12-page short film
- A dozen or so sketches, plus many one-line jokes for The Radio Television Theater Hour
- A six-episode treatment for a web series (around 15 pages)
- Four short treatments for feature films
- Five or six short satirical pieces
- A hundred or so headlines for my (rejected) Onion News Network submission packet
- Assorted brainstorming, journal entries, and other ideas that went nowhere
I’m not putting this out there to show off. It’s not special, it’s just what happens when you show up every day. Give it a try.
A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity
This quote from Harold Pinter’s 2008 Nobel Prize lecture was quoted by Charlie Kaufman in the screenwriting speech I mentioned yesterday:
A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
But it is the thing that wants to live
Via Four Eyes, a tumblr that I really enjoy, comes this lecture from Charlie Kaufman. I really liked this bit:
I now step into this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least unable to be articulable.
I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.
It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay is born. If you don’t acknowledge this you will come up here when it is your time and you will give your speech and you will talk about the business of screenwriting. You will say that as a screenwriter you are a cog in a business machine, you will say it is not an art form. You will say, ‘Here, this is what a screenplay looks like.’ You will discuss character arcs, how to make likeable characters. You will talk about box office. This is what you will do, this is who you will be and after you are done I will feel lonely and empty and hopeless. And I will ask you for my two hours back. I will do this to indicate my lack of love for you.
I will do this to communicate that you are a waste of time as a human being. It will be an ugly thing for me to say. It will be intended to hurt you. It will be wrong for me to say. It will lack compassion. And it will hurt you. And you will either dismiss it or take it in, but in either case you will hear it and it will affect you. And you will think about what you can do next time so you can be more lovable, and with that your wound will be buried further. Or you will think about how hateful people are and how your armour needs to be thicker so that you can proceed as planned with your ideas. With that, your wound will be buried further.
Beautiful.
Can data help you write a better screenplay?
I saw this article linked from the Scriptnotes Episode 171 blog post but I haven’t listened to the episode yet. I wanted to read it beforehand before Craig goes full-bore umbrage-taking on it, which I think I’m safe in saying that he will.
The post is titled “How Data Can Help You Write a Better Screenplay” and I see a lot of data but not a lot of actionable recommendations (sorry, my day job is marketing analyst).
My first thought was, “what the hell is Sword & Sandal? That’s an actual genre???” I guess that would be like 300 or Rome? I didn’t see 300 but everyone wore sandals in Rome (I know, it was a TV show, not a movie) and they used a lot of swords and large knives and I learned that there were two average Roman-type guys that were pivotal in many major events in Roman history and that is all true because it was on HBO.
My second thought, as a novice screenwriter, was this: “what the hell would I do with this?” So let’s say I scrap what I’m working on now (a weird comedy) and use this data to write something with a higher chance of success.
One approach would be to look at the genres that get the highest average scores and pick one of those. One problem is that we don’t know anything about the people writing in that (or any other) genre. Film Noir gets high average scores but maybe better writers are attracted to that genre. Or maybe that genre draws an older crowd of writers who have more experience. Higher scores in the genre might just mean that you’re going up against stiffer competition, not that the genre is actually easier to work in.
But even if it was easier on average, that wouldn’t really help. Because to sell the screenplay (or to land an agent), you would have to not write just an average screenplay, but a very excellent screenplay. Scoring a 6 doesn’t guarantee anything. No score guarantees anything but it’s my understanding that it takes an 8 or above to really get noticed on The Black List.
Another issue is that the average here is a bit misleading. If scores were assigned randomly, then your expected outcome would be higher if you chose a genre with a higher average. But scores are not assigned randomly, they are given by a qualified reader that reads and rates spec screenplays for (at least part of) a living. OK, maybe that’s not completely fair. Maybe the averages do indicate something about the ease of writing in a certain genre.
But even if a Film Noir is slightly easier to write, it still doesn’t help you. Because the thing is you have to stand out. If the average Film Noir is pretty good, then the bar for writing a remarkable Film Noir, i.e. one that someone will be compelled to pass on to their boss, is even higher than say a Musical Comedy, which on average scores the lowest during the survey period.
So. Another strategy is to pick a genre that has a low average score. Again, you don’t know anything about the writers in that genre. Maybe in Musical Comedy you’re competing against accomplished veterans of Broadway. OK, that’s almost certainly not true. But maybe the Musical Comedy people are very well equipped and still fail to write good screenplays, and so your average attempt will fare even worse. Either way, the big loser is the person who has to read all those bad musical comedies.
The other problem with any of these strategies is that it assumes that you decide to start writing a screenplay one day and then choose what genre to work in, as if picking the genre was something to be decided by big data.
I personally write comedy or some subgenre of comedy, or maybe dramatic stuff that makes much use of comedy.
And I’m 100% certain that the comedy I write will be better than the Sword & Sandal that I’m not going to write, mainly because my main source of knowledge about the particulars of men wearing sandals and wielding swords comes from Rome, Gladiator, a college class on Greek Philosophy and whatever else I’ve pulled out of the ether related to ancient Rome/Greece. So it would be pretty derivative and halfway through I’d realize that it would be much better as a parody, which is to say not that great anyway because parody requires deep knowledge that I don’t have.
I think most people are going to write in the genre that they know and love. Or love and think they know. Not that you can’t write in more than one genre, but I think you get the point. But pushing someone out of a genre they love into a genre they neither love nor know isn’t going to help them write something better. So this doesn’t look like a winning strategy either.
The other data in the article pertains to the flaws most commonly found in scripts. Here are the top five:
- Underdeveloped plot
- Underdeveloped characters
- Lack of escalation
- Poor structure
- Unnatural dialogue
Let’s rephrase these flaws as advice for novices like myself: make sure you have a developed plot, developed characters, action that rises at a suitable pace and to a suitable level, good structure, and natural dialogue.
In other words, the problem with your screenplay is that it’s not good at the things that good screenplays are good at. Be more good. That’s snarky, I know. This list does have some use–I looked at it and it made me think about where the weaknesses in my current script might be.
But it doesn’t really help me improve upon the weaknesses. It just shows where others have struggled. But I think those issues are sort of obvious and that writers struggle with them because they’re all really hard to do really well.
This note I did find helpful, or at least it could be helpful for the first-time writer:
First-time writers tend to go one of two ways, said Kate Hagen, a former reader who now oversees the hundred or so readers at The Black List. They write a deeply personal, pseudo-autobiographical screenplay about nothing in particular. “Everybody basically writes that script at first,” Hagen said. “You have to get it out of your system.” Or they swing for the fences and go in the opposite direction, thinking, “I’m going to write a $200 million science fiction movie,” and plan an entire universe and mythology. Those scripts, Hagen said, tend to fail for entirely different reasons.
In other words, avoid the major pitfalls that most first-time writers fall into.1
One takeaway from the whole thing might just be that writing a great screenplay is really really hard. This insight could help you decide whether or not you want to embark on writing a screenplay or not, or to be less surprised when you write something that sucks, but I don’t think it will help you write a better one.
What might help is knowing that it’s really hard to do well, so if you have the work ethic and commitment to work many hours and improve over the years, you have a good shot of standing out from the pack when you finally do write something remarkable.
Which I think probably goes against the gist of what this sort of article is all about, namely that you can hack your way to success with the help of data.
OK, back to work now.
Should this be phrased as “avoid the major pits that most first-time writers fall into?” Can you fall into a pitfall? ↩
Happy New Year. You’re running out of time.
I’ve been re-reading the archives of The Last Psychiatrist as I work on a screenplay about a man that struggles and procrastinates with something important in his life (writing a play). No, it’s not autobiographical; I write every day for an hour.
Anyway, I rediscovered this quote. The bold is mine, and it ties in with the theme of the film:
Self-loathing is the defense against change, self-loathing is preferable to <mental work.> You choose misery so that nothing changes, and the Ambien and the drinking and the therapy placate the misery so that you can go on not changing. That’s why when you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, you don’t immediately crank out 30 pushups, you open a bag of chips. You don’t even try, you only plan to try. The appearance of mental work, aka masturbation. The goal of your ego is not to change, but what you don’t realize is that time is moving on regardless.
A common piece of advice is “just start!”/don’t procrastinate, etc.
Let me explain, however, why this is a cognitive necessity.
No matter how carefully you plan something in your mind– work through details, procure materials, etc– it can’t take into account everything that happens. Try imagining having sex with Paz de la Huerta; and then try actually having sex with her. The first is masturbation, the second is very tricky, although rewarding, business.
Every creative idea is a dialogue between you and yourself (masturbation); every creative act is a dialogue between you and reality (sex.) You can’t account for that other half of the dialogue until you begin it.
Reality takes many forms: the light of a computer screen, the need for the “great phrase” to be surrounded by words that are less inspired; hunger, the need to pee, fatigue, caffeine headaches, hangovers; relentless, crippling, blackening self-doubt. You can never account for these except through action. I don’t mean they are necessarily obstacles– they don’t necessarily hold you back– but the are real success of any creative act is that it transcended reality not by bypassing it, but by going through it.
Or you can just go back to masturbating.
…Happy New Year. You’re running out of time.
Rewriting on paper vs. screen
After I finish rewrites on my laptop, I like to do a 2nd (or 50th as it may be) pass on a printed-out version of a script. I’m not sure why, but I always seem to catch more errors and fixes when I read it on paper. I think it might have something to do with the way we read screens–we’re trained to scan more and scroll through things. On paper, we’re trained to read more carefully.