Some notes for the beginning writer on “feelings”: 

Not every good idea makes it.

Let’s talk for a moment about the worst part of screenwriting – when the time comes to put a script in a drawer. It’s hard. It’s like you’ve had someone close to you die. This thing that you’ve spent days, weeks, maybe even years with…has lost its ability to breathe and to live. There isn’t anything you can do for it; there’s no CPR for a good idea that’s gotten off track. There comes a point when you have to put it away and move on. You want to believe you could have made it work, but you know in your heart it just failed and there was nothing you could do. You want to mourn, and you want to spend some time second-guessing yourself. My advice is: don’t.

What you have to do at a time like this is get out of the house. Watch some movies, visit (if you’re in the L.A. area) the Huntingdon Gardens. Spend some time with family and friends. Read. Go to the zoo. Tell everyone you’re working on a novel, but don’t be.

You’re going to need some time to not write. What you really need is some time spent living your life as it is at present, not after the next script or the one after that. The truth is that there are only two reasons good ideas die on the vine, and both require the same prescription afterwards. Reason #1 is because you didn’t get it to the right person. It didn’t click in the way it needed to click with them. Screenwriting is unavoidably collaborative. Reason# 2 is because you’ve gotten so wrapped up in writing, you’ve forgotten to live. Since your script is just an extension of yourself, if you stop living your life so does your script.

At some point when this happens, the thought will occur to you that it will take you longer to get this script right then it will to write a new and better one. When this happens, you need to have the sense to let it go. And then take some time to go back to being yourself. Find the person that has felt pushed and pulled and generally manic. Get them normal again.

And when you are once again of sound mind and body, and when the grieving process has passed, start writing.

Write about life.

At the end of a long form project like a screenplay, there’s always a point at which I consider giving up. From the writers I’ve worked with and am friends with, I’ve gathered that it’s a common feeling: right when you think you’ve finally succeeded in beating down self-doubt, it comes back with a vengeance.

The problem is always the same. No matter how good you are, as you get close to the end of your first draft, it’s usually craptastic. And once you realize that (for me the thought always begins to creep in when its cloudy or I’ve had a bad day), you start to think “Why am I even bothering to finish this crap? It’s not worth it! I should give this crap up and start over on something that isn’t crap!”

Consider this your intervention for that moment.

First, lie down on the floor, and take some time to stare at the ceiling and breathe while you think about this. It is always crap. The first draft is always crap, and will always be crap, and that is the nature of the first draft. (Cough, that’s also an aside for those delusional enough to believe that their first draft is not crap. It is. Deal.)

Writing a first draft is an entirely different process than writing a second, third, or umpteenth draft. All you have to do in writing a first draft is finish. The process of writing a first draft is like giving birth to a lump of clay. Sure, it’s shapeless and gooey, and quite frankly, disgusting. But you need that first draft to shape. If you have no clay, there’s nothing for you to work with.

In the second draft, you can carve and mold and stick it on a wheel to perfect. You may mush it up and start over a couple times. That’s okay. You have the clay to work with. From here on out, it’s a hundred times easier than the first time. From here, you don’t have to make anything from scratch. It’s all refinement.

Now, I won’t lie to you: you’ll have problems and difficulties in your next draft. But the key to moving forwards is finishing the first one.

Then, hand a friend your manuscript to guard from you for a few weeks and do nothing. When you’re ready, take it up again, and it won’t seem as impossible a task to conquer.

Just remember to finish. I can’t tell you how many half-written scripts I’ve read that would have been really great if their authors hadn’t been quite so aware of how bad they were.

Screenwriting is a performative act; that is to say that it is a matter of performance, and not of intent.  There are a lot of screenwriters that think of themselves as artists.  What becomes important to them as a product of this belief is focusing on artistic sensibilities and inspiration.  Horse twaddle.

Whether you’re a screenwriter cannot be decided by whether you write a screenplay, sell a screenplay, or loftily pursue the elevation of the art.  Being a screenwriter is about one thing, and that’s what you’ve got to prioritize over absolutely everything else: communicating with the audience.

“Oh, I knew that,” you’re thinking.

Well, hold on to your fancy leather pants, because I’m about to throw you for a loop. Communicating with the audience is SO vital to real screenwriting that it is more important to focus on whether and how you’re communicating with the audience than what you’re communicating to the audience.  The method is more important than the message.
“What?” You grab your chest – don’t think I can’t see the heart attack from here.

That’s right, I said it.  Stop being an Academy snob.  It doesn’t matter what you write.  It only matters how you write it.  A screenwriter ought to be able to write any story.  If you just “feel certain stories more than others,” is it wrong to write them?  No, absolutely not.  I would never discourage someone from writing something they’re passionate about.  I would, however, warn them that if they want it to sell, what they have to keep in mind AT ALL TIMES is that they cannot leave the audience behind.  Does the genre, in the end, really matter?  Only to the extent that some genres are easier than others to master.

Sometimes, when you’re writing a passion project, there’s a desire to take the audience somewhere they wouldn’t normally go.  You want to take them to the world you inhabit.  When properly done, this can be beautiful and moving.  But if you’re not paying attention to what you’re making the audience think and feel, it can be disastrous – they can simply refuse to go there with you.

Let’s take “Hound Dog” as an example.  I haven’t seen it.  I don’t want to see it.  I am solely going to judge this movie based on what I’ve heard about it (Referee says, “Fair play, since audiences do this, too”). The audience didn’t want to go see Dakota Fanning get raped.  They didn’t want to go there.  Why?  Because they had an intimation that it would make them feel party to child pornography.  The audience doesn’t want to feel like child pornographers.  Even child pornographers don’t want to feel like child pornographers.

What’s the problem? Graphic scenes, the kind that get Oscars for actors, have to have a certain element of nobility to them.  That’s all.  The audience is perfectly willing to go down in the gutter with you, but only if they’ll come up smelling like a rose.  “Crash” exemplifies this: it contains scenes of violent racism, but the point of the picture is that we cannot pretend racism no longer exists, thus it is an act of art to force us to confront them head on, and we can revel in our superiority for participating in such an act.

My point here is in saying, “Pay attention!” If you want to create a moving script, you must absolutely know it to be moving.  There can be no part which you are uncertain about whether it might be boring or not possess the effect you intended it to.  It is easy to know this in say, a horror movie; it is more difficult in a drama or a comedy. But it’s absolutely impossible to know if you’re only concerned about the idea of screenplay as Art.

Writing groups are something every screenwriter will be tempted to become a part of, since they promise a sense that you are not alone in your struggle.  However, they are also something to be wary of, since they can significantly alter your path without your knowledge.

There are professional, amateur and semi-professional groups.  And there are classes that are basically just groups but you’re getting graded.

I think there is really thing that really matters: is the situation toxic or non-toxic?

You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.  There are groups where your desire to write will slowly be drained out of you.  There are groups where your desire to LIVE will slowly be drained out of you.  There are groups where every single point of your style will slowly be eroded.  It’s possible to learn in these groups, but it’s not pleasant, or even very likely.

How do you identify the toxic? (Which, by the way, includes producers and development types as well as writing groups).  It’s simple.  Toxic people will tell you that it’s important to identify what is wrong, and will disallow the words “I like” or “it’s interesting.”  It sounds like a solid philosophy that cuts out all the crap that usually ends up being difficult and confusing.  In practice, it becomes an exercise in humility.  You will feel like you are learning a lot.  But the quality of your writing won’t get any better.

What screenwriters (and occasionally producers and D-girls) don’t realize is that it’s important to acknowledge what IS working, and what is close to working, as well as what is not working.  You have to ground your criticism, because the person who’s hearing it has no idea what the problem is (if they did, they’d fix it).  You have to suggest methods by which something can be fixed, and not just point out what is wrong.

It’s tempting to say that a script has nothing good about it; that it can’t be fixed.  This is untrue.  For one thing, even one hundred and twenty pages of dreck is words on a page in approximately the correct amount.  For another, all scripts can be fixed–it’s just a matter of time and energy.  You might recommend that a writer abandon a script, but even that should be out of the idea that they’ve learned enough from writing it that the next will be significantly better and give them a better place to start from.

If you find yourself in a scenario where there is nothing positive to be said about your script…RUN. I’m not saying a toxic group could never help you get your script to where you want it to be, but it’s going to take more time and psychologists visits to get your script perfected that way than it would if you stayed on your own and waited to meet some non-toxic people.

(Note: Toxic can also be identified as people who tell you nothing but good stuff.  Actually, those people are beyond toxic.  They’re setting you up for something).

Writers are always wondering why someone can love their script and then turn around and demand changes to it. It’s nonsensical, right? If you read the script and loved it enough to option it, it’s probably good as it is.

But that’s not always true, and the reason for that is because a producer reads a script differently before and after he options or buy it.

There are two ways to read a script, which means that you’re never really writing one script. It’s always two, because in order to work as a film, you as the screenwriter need to have prepared it for both reads. You can be completely prepared for the first kind of read and not for the second (or on occasion, prepared for the second kind, and not the first). The first kinds of reads you encounter are usually development reads – that analyze for your talent and skill. No script can be considered unfixable or unworkable when written by someone whose talent is detectable, unless it’s going to take too much time or money to fix it.

These reads look to locate a solid structure and character development, but on top of that, these are the only people who are really going to pay attention to the description you write. Why? Because it’s an indicator. If your description reads like a description of a series of images, and not like mere stage instructions, usually the plot will hold up – because much of the plot will be in those descriptions. If the description starts off okay in the first few pages and peters out, the plot will usually go quickly too. If the description is not more than stage instructions from the beginning, then it’s not really worth reading the script, because the plot is never really going to show up.

But that’s when you’re reading for a producer or production company.

When someone reads for an actor, the read is entirely different. The focus is on the character the actor might play, and is definitely off the description, because what the viewer sees is not as important as how the character can be played. This means that your plot should also exist in your dialogue – so that if one were to read only the dialogue (if you were only to listen, as though it was a radio show) than you could get most of the plot that way. The dialogue has to be interesting to say and act – which is one of the reasons writers are always being encouraged to take an acting class.

The dialogue is also a key part to getting your script made into a movie, but for different reasons: it’s not about your talent; it’s about the relative amount of talented actors your script can attract.

So, to sum up: 1) Description, despite that its usually seen as a way to describe the actors that will eventually play the characters, is actually all about you and your ability to write. Don’t write weak stage instructions or mimic some of the gimmicky things you’ve read before. The description is your one shot to be seen for the talented person you are; and 2) Dialogue is all about the actors. You’re not writing for you, you’re writing for them. These are the parts where, if you aren’t writing well, either the film won’t get made or a critic will review it and say “Who’s writing this crap?”

I’m a really judgmental person.  I’m not proud of it.  But it happens to be one of the things that make me very effective at telling good writing from bad.

If you’re a decent writer, you’re probably this way too.  I sympathize.  It’s rotten being hard on yourself.

But the absolutely worst thing is that sometimes being judgmental stops me in my tracks, and I can’t write, can’t read, and can’t research.  It’s the Ninth Circle of Hell, maybe even the Twelfth. (Just kidding, I know there’s only nine.)

I can’t look at someone else’s writing, and I can’t look at my own writing, because just contemplating the act of writing makes me paranoid and jumpy, and I start looking around to see if anyone’s figured out that I’m a complete fraud and have no idea what I’m talking about.  (Note: I’m in the process of getting a master’s degree in English Lit, so the odds are that I have a clue about storytelling.  At least that’s what everyone tells me.)

If I’ve done a really good number on myself, I can work my way up to anxiety attacks where I start coughing and clutching at my chest (I’m 24, guys, so I’m pretty sure these aren’t heart attacks, but by golly do they make me wonder.)  I have a whole host of psychosomatic
symptoms that make an appearance from time to time – they’re truly delightful.  I know some of you are out there nodding your heads…

Aha!  Okay, you recognize the problem.  And the usual solution to writer’s block: read more research, doesn’t apply in this scenario.

But here’s what I’ve found… when I feel like a fraud, usually the problem is that I AM ONE!  I’ll find that I’m talking about something I don’t know, or can’t know, and can’t legitimately make up and get away with.  The problem is that sometimes you’re trying to write from a point of view you don’t have and don’t understand – and everyone can sense it.  Frequently, I find this problem with writers who really want to prove how smart they are, and as a result, abandon the stuff of their everyday lives.  Guys who write detailed scenes about space exploration when they couldn’t care less about it, just because they want to write a sci-fi action thriller.

It’s not that you can’t write about things you’re not an expert on, it’s that you should be writing about them without pretending to be an expert!  Your characters don’t have to be perfect stereotypes, they have to be believable.

In a perfect world, we’d all be able to read about a topic and write knowledgably on it.  But this isn’t a perfect world.  You’re not perfect, and I’m not perfect.  Sometimes we have opinions that are flawed, and sometimes we think we know more than we do, and sometimes we even deserve to be taken down a rung (like I find myself doing to myself so often).

So take a big bite of humble pie and get back to writing.

(Hey, this tastes sorta chocolaty.  I hope it’s not fattening.)

I love trash. I don’t love bad movies. I love trash. By which I mean that I have a predilection for certain kinds of stories and certain emotional journeys. On a cynical level, you might say that what I love is what sells, but it’s not just what sells to me, it’s what sells to a large number of people. This is what makes me instinctively good at what I do.
On the most basic level, I love well-written stories.

But one step of complexity above that, I love things like horror, physical comedy, romantic comedy, sports drama, and action adventure. I identify with both the mainstream audience that evaluates films based on a trailer, and the film geek audience that evaluates films based on franchise, actors, source material, writer, director, and sneak reviews.

My definition of trash is literal: it is a movie experience that you can basically throw away afterwards. It may change your mood, but it doesn’t seek to change your mind. It spends slot of time telling you things you either already know or don’t care about. In short, a trash film is one that reaffirms your sense of who you are, and your ideas of right and wrong.

I’ve probably ticked a lot of writers off by revealing that sensibility (though to be honest, it’s pretty prevalent, so you might as well know that a lot of people feel that way). Why don’t I like thoughtful character dramas or intensely personal psychological dramas? It’s not because they don’t sell, it’s because they’re generally intellectual message movies.

I’m not by any means against intellectuals, but intellectuals have the tendency to believe that thought, logic, and (ew) symbolism are a viable way to change how people behave – and that by putting these elements into a film instead of a novel, they will be able to change the behavior of more people.

Having seen a large number of “smart films,” I know that without a doubt, this policy is pretty ineffective. I would love for it to work, but it generally affects only a small number of people in a profound way.

The truth is twofold: 1) the emotional journey is the most important aspect of any film – in that you must arouse your audiences’ emotions and mess them about in order to affect their behavior, 2) the most effective intellectual changes that can be wrought through film are those that go entirely unremarked upon. (This is a form of brainwashing in which you replace the assumptions of an argument with your brainwashing material instead of the conclusion, forcing people to accept the material in order to argue the correctness of the conclusion.)

Let’s look at some big “message movies,” like, for example, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” It made scads of money and had lots of people talking about it – but it contained many “trashy” elements – for one, its message was not one that anyone who enjoyed the film disagreed with going in. So it was telling the audience what it already knew. For another thing, it grabbed the audiences’ emotions more than their intellect – the fact that Moore fabricated or used out of context many of the films “moments,” does not affect the audience the way a more intellectual film would.

Another example is a film like “Crash,” which is a trash film masquerading as a serious drama. Its main message is that racism is all around us, even if you try not to see it – not something many people wouldn’t have already agreed with. But rather than following the sporadic effects of racism on one person, it showed us dozens, so that it could pack the film with emotional moments to make us feel something. Despite having numerous characters, it wasn’t a serious character study – its whole goal was to make us feel.

What most people starting out in Hollywood assume is that if they have a drive to succeed, talent, luck, and a complete lack of ethics they can get their screenplay in any door, no matter how firmly wedged shut, and once they do, their script is on its way to being produced.

Now, those things are very important, and I would advise anyone who lacks those qualities not to bother with Hollywood, but there is one thing more important:

Who you know.

Let me clarify my intentions:  it is not hard to meet with a studio executive, or an agent, or a manager, or a producer.   Directors… maybe.  But as a writer, you may never actually get to meet with the director in the process of having your film made, so it’s a moot point.

“Who?” you ask me, “Who is it that I’m supposed to know?  Is there some near-divine figure of filmmaking that I am not aware of?”

Well, I suppose you might put it that way.  The most important person in the film industry to know is: You.

You’re the writer… if you don’t know yourself in a coherent and cohesive way, if you don’t understand your journey or your choices or how your actions cause reactions, then you don’t know the stuff that would allow you to write a good script.   And if you don’t have a good script – I can’t stress this enough – it doesn’t matter who reads it.

I’m sympathetic to your problems in this regard: 1) If you know what’s wrong with you, you are going to like yourself less, and 2) If you know what’s wrong with you, you’ll probably also start to figure out what’s wrong with your writing, and you’re going to like IT less.

Tough cookies. 

The world doesn’t need writers because writers are so much smarter than the rest of us.  Having ideas is not the reason you get to be a writer.   The world needs writers because it needs explorers of the human psyche.  It needs people who are willing to figure themselves out – willing to dive into those parts of us we don’t particularly like, and learn to accept and understand them, and then tell the rest of us about that.   We need to be told about ourselves, and the only way to tell anyone about themselves is to realize they’re just like you, under a different set of circumstances and attitudes.

And before I leave you – I’m not saying be serious or be gritty.  Those things are great, but what really gets people are the unexpected things you learn about yourself – the real revelations that you resisted.

For me, I spent a long time resisting the idea that I was funny, because most of the time I’m not.  I spent a long time resisting the idea that I could sing, because I’ll never be really good at it.   But the truth is that I’m very funny when I’m in the right mood, and even worse, I’m a pretty reliable singer in my church choir. 

And now that I know, my scripts know it, too.

Today’s pet peeve: people who think that just because they’re the writer, they can make their characters do whatever they want.

I know that a lot of people start writing because they have a God complex.  There’s no other way to explain how people create plots that their characters are completely unmotivated to push forwards.

Here’s the thing about characters: You don’t have the power to push them around.  You’re not God, you can’t suddenly transmute water into wine, and you can’t insert thoughts into their heads.  You have two things that you can affect in order to get them to act in a particular way – what happened to them in the past, and what is happening to them in the present.

That’s it.  You control the situation.  Once you’ve defined their temperament – how they normally react to situations – you can only make them react in that way.  If they always think about their child first in the event of an emergency, you can’t suddenly have them forget or ignore their child to help someone else.

If you want to push them into helping someone else, you might have someone comment negatively on the fact that they don’t feel the need to help anyone else once their child is safe.  Put in the situation of their child’s safety having been ensured, the character might then later attempt to help someone else.  But the child has to be safe first.  Because you’ve defined the way they react.  You can challenge their limits, but you can’t ignore them. 

That’s the entire point of creating “rules” in your character’s world.

“But why do I need rules?” you ask.  Because rules are the number one way we make sense out of this world.  We observe what usually happens, and ask “why is that the exception?”  If your character were to abandon her child’s safety completely, you’d better have a pretty goddamn compelling reason why – and even then, it ought to be something they had to think about, something they learned in the course of the story.

“You’re just the Man, trying to keep me down,” you say.  “True rebels don’t pay any attention to the rules!”

I’m glad you mentioned that.  There are always rules.  Even when it doesn’t look like there are rules, there are rules.  There’s a certain kind of writing with that reputation.  Let’s use it as an example.  Beat writing.  Famous writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy. 

Beat writing was all about immediacy.  It broke with the need for rhyme or meter or complete thoughts or grammatical rules.  But it had rules of its own.  Jack Kerouac wrote them down.  There was to be, for example, no self-editing.  Everything was to be written down at once, in the moment of passion.  That’s a rule.  It may be arbitrary, but it helps us make sense of what the Beats were doing, and why their work looks the way it does.

The audience similarly needs you to define the characters and let them react consistently.  Otherwise, we never get to ask “Why is he doing that?” because there’s no broken consistency to make it worth asking.