So… you want to write a screenplay! (reposted from 2012)

If you’re here on my site, chances are you’ve figured out by now that I’m a graphic designer/illustrator by trade who writes screenplays in his off-time and is currently turning his latest script into a graphic novel. If you haven’t figured that out yet, I’ll just tell you outright – I’m a graphic designer/illustrator by trade who writes screenplays in his off-time and is currently turning his latest script into a graphic novel.

Anyway…  This isn’t a how-to manual. There are plenty of books out there that handle the nuts and bolts of writing a script. This is more of a sharing of my thirteen and climbing years of experience delving into this particular craft, and some of the lessons I’ve learned (and haven’t learned) along the way that may be of some help to you in your own travels (and travails).

I should point out… I’m not a produced screenwriter. I’m just a guy who’s been doing it in his spare time for a while and has read a lot and learned a lot on his own (and will occasionally speak of himself in third person). There’s real experienced wisdom out there by produced folks that’s worth searching out if you want to learn from some true authorities on the craft. The following are just a number of things I’ve picked up over the years…

NOTE: I’m a member of a peer review screenwriting site called Talentville. When I wrote the blog, I wasn’t, but since then, I’ve become one of the top reviewers of the site. I can’t recommend joining enough: www.talentville.com

1. Be ready to spend years(!) toiling away at projects that may get no more attention than your friends and family are willing to throw your way.
   • Not to dampen your enthusiam, if you have it, but for the most part, this isn’t an “instant-glory” craft. You’ll have to have a certain amount of dedication and love of what you’re doing if you want to chart down the writing path.
2. Read.
   • Just about every writer stresses this. Stephen King certainly does. Read. A lot. Books. Magazines. Whatever. I, personally, don’t read as much as I should, not in any kind of “sit down and read a work of fiction from cover to cover” way. I’d probably be a better writer if I did. Natural talent certainly fills in some of the gaps, but I’d probably be even better if I read more. I always figured watching lots of movies counted…
3. Watch lots of movies.
   • If you want to write movies, you certainly should watch them. And not just watch them, but really watch them.  What should you be watching out FOR though? Well…
4. Buy some screenwriting books.
   • I have a lot of screenwriting books. Really. A lot. Most of the time I don’t bother looking at the screenwriting section at Chapters because everything in that section, I already have. But take the plunge. If you want to learn a craft, learn from the people who know.
   • Every book is different. Every book comes at the craft from different angles and brings something to the table that the other books don’t. That’s not to say that every book is equally valuable. They’re not. I have a lot of books on my shelf that weren’t worth the movie tickets and bags of popcorn I could have purchased with the money, but I probably got a little bit of something out of them anyways.
   • But, off the top of my head, here are some worth checking out…
     • Screenplay, by Syd Field.
       One of the original screenwriting gurus, this book’s a veritable primer on the craft. As a starting point, I can’t recommend it enough.
     • Save The Cat!, by Blake Snyder (R.I.P.)
       This book advocates a very strong structure approach, to the point of being a paint-by-numbers formula instruction manual. However, screenplay structure is incredibly important, and if you want to write Hollywood screenplays, you really should understand these steps. He also has two other books, Save The Cat! Goes To The Movies, a step-by-step structural analysis of many movies, and Save The Cat! Strikes Back, more information, and published posthumously. I’d recommend Save The Cat and Goes To The Movies first. They’re far more practical. BTW… “save the cat” refers to a recommended moment early in the script where you have your hero “save a cat”… do some sort of action to endear him/her to the audience. It’s the opposite of the old “kick the dog” moment writers used to have villains do, that would let you know they were the bad guys.
     • The Screenwiter’s Bible, by David Trottier
       This one’s all about formatting and goodies like that. About the physical construction of a script. I’m sure it covers a lot of the same ground as the others, but it’s the most practical of the set.
     •  The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, Christopher Vogler
       Largely based on “Hero With A Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell (who in turn based that book largely on the writing on archetypes by Carl Jung), this book delves (very) deeply into the archetypal structures and characters that make up fiction (and life, really, to some degree) going back through the ages. The adventures of Luke Skywalker aren’t all that different than the adventures of many of the old Greek heroes (and further back)… this book takes a close look at “why”, and understanding that will help you structure your own adventures (all stories, even dramas or romantic comedies, should be “adventures” of some kinds… stories where we vicariously delve into unknown situations with the characters we’re reading about). I can’t recommend this enough to anyone who wants more than just to have storytelling formulae codified, but rather to understand why the underlying storytelling form actually exists…
     • There are other books, but these are the ones I keep coming back to the most.
5. Take a course.
   • I’ve taken several courses through Gotham Writers’ Workshop, several times. At four to five hundred bucks a pop, they get expensive, but all the reading about screenwriting in the world doesn’t compare with those little ten-week experiences that force you to do weekly assignments, interact with other writers and read/critique their work… and have the same done to yours. It will open up the field to you in ways you can’t imagine.
6. Read screenplays.
   • I don’t lump this in with “read”. Reading screenplays is a whole different beast, and I recommend you start with that after you’ve spent a little bit of time learning about the craft. Or at least start reading scrips concurrently with the learning. It will all make more sense to you after you’ve spent more time exploring the form. Mea culpa… I don’t read a lot of scripts either. I’d probably be a better writer if I did. You can find them anywhere online (try the Google on the internet) but a couple places to start are SimplyScripts and Drew’s Script-O-Rama
7. Get some screenwriting software.
   • I personally use Final Draft. It’s not free… it’s actually rather expensive, but it touts itself as the #1 selling industry standard. There’s also Movie Magic Screenwriter, which I think I tried early on. I remember it being good enough, but I can’t recommend one over the other with any real authority. If you want to pay less, there’s Celtx – it’s free. I’ve never tried it, though it seems to get good reviews. If you’re not sure how far you want to delve into the screenwriting world, this might be a good place to start.
8. Learn the skill.
   • That means the formatting. The programs will nudge you along, that’s what they’re designed to do, but you still have to learn a basic understanding of what makes a script a script. You learn that by reading actual scripts, and books like The Screenwriter’s Bible.
9. Watch movies and read scripts again.
   • Once you’ve spent some time learning about the craft, do that. Watch and read. And take notes. Learn about scenes and sequences (scenes are moments in a script that take place in one particular place and cover one general event, sequences are several scenes in succession that all build towards one general movement within the story) and watch how the story is paced. I once watched Raiders Of The Lost Ark, keeping an eye on the DVD player timer. I noticed that every single sequence (set of scenes built around a singular story point) was between four and five minutes; closer to four. It was quite a moment, seeing the structure of the movie unfold before my eyes like that. It will also have the effect of ruining movies for you, as time goes by. Just so you know.
10. Identify Your Genre.
    • I grew up reading comic books and watching Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I got my start writing when I had some downtime and ended up contributing to fan fiction on a Star Wars fansite (50 Shades Of Grey got its start on a Twilight fansite… don’t knock fan fiction, everyone starts somewhere). Yet, when I decided to start writing scripts, did I start with action stories or comic book adventures? No, I started with these awful “human dramas” that I never would have paid money to see. Horribly pretentious things that I still remember, but will not talk about. It made sense at the time, but in hindsight, both scripts were incredible mistakes.
    • Why? Because I didn’t identify my genre. I didn’t recognize my own interests (sci-fi, adventure, action, horror) and write something I felt passionate about. I wrote a set of scripts that I thought that I “should” write, about “real” people. ZZZZZZZZZ.
    • Write what you love. Write what you’d spend money to see. Don’t write what you think is “important” or some kind of “movie with a message that people need to hear”. If you’re not actually passionate about what you’re writing about, any “importance” will simply be pretentious and won’t appeal to anyone.
    • Funny thing though. If you write about what you love, and feel passionate about, there will be room for those “important” ideas to creep in. They’ll often creep in without you even realizing it. And they’ll be organic parts of the story that feel right, instead of some ham-fisted “message” that makes people want to turn the DVD player off.
    • “Atlantic” is my “love letter to my teenage self”. I’m writing the story I’ve always wanted to see onscreen, and have never enjoyed a writing experience more.
11. Learn the tropes of your genre.
    • I’ve spent many, many hours on a website called TVtropes.org. It’s one of those websites that will see you end up with about twenty tabs open in your browser, because each page has links to more interesting things that you want to get to reading later, after you’ve finished this page, but this page also has more links, and each of those other pages has more links… it goes on and on.
    • As the website puts it: Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. Tropes are little conventions that appear in fiction (and in real life) over and over again. The more you read about them, the more you’ll recognize them, and the more you’ll be able to use the, avoid them, or subvert them.
    • They’re not cliches, though they can be used as such if used lazily.
    • Some examples from my beloved Raiders of the Lost Ark (though you’ll find these characters showing up all over the place elsewhere too… they become very apparent once you know to look for them):
      • The Brute: The shirtless Nazi who fights Indy by the plane.
      • Evil Laugh: Belloq, after sending the Hovitos to kill an escaping Indiana.
      • Look, a Distraction!: Indy does it to the Giant Mook mechanic he fights near the plane.
      • Not so Different (you and I): Belloq tries to make Indy think this.
      • Wicked Cultured: Belloq is a brilliant archeologist, fluent in many languages, and enjoys fine wine and food.
    • These are, of course, just a small sampling from just the Raiders page. Spend some time on the site, look up movies, books, comics similar to the project that you’re looking to write. Learn the tropes, and either use them as presented, find ways to cleverly twist them for your own uses.
12. Heighten your concept.
    • There are a couple terms out there: “high concept” and “low concept”.
    • High concept stories are the ones that are easy to sum up in a few words and kind of fill you with excitement with just those few words: “An adventurous archaeologist has to find the Ark of the Covenant (which holds the Ten Commandments and the Power Of God) before the Nazis do”… high concept films tend to be the ones that do well at the box office and get made easier. They tend to be much more plot driven.
    • Low concept films are a little more nebulous in their concept, not nearly as exciting to even imagine and much more commonly written. “A man juggles his wife, his dog and his family while trying to launch a writing career”. Less exciting in concept, however, they sometimes offer greater chances to write character interactions.
    • That’s not to say that one is better than the other, but by all indications, high-concept has a better chance of getting made. Most writers, myself included, will often start out writing fairly low concept scripts. It’s a learned skill, to figure out over time whether your concept is really all that strong.
    • You may think you’re writing a high concept film that isn’t as high as you think. That’s okay. Just look at it as a learning experience, finish it and move on.
13. Do a little research (but not too much).
    • Once you have that germ of an idea that excites you, use the Google on the interweb to find a few details out about it. But don’t get bogged down in details. That’ll just serve to freeze you up. Learn enough to fake it, and focus on the story itself.
14. Populate your story (to bio, or not to bio?).
    • Once you’ve begun your story, you’ll be filling it with people… your characters. You’ll be spending a lot of time with them, so they should be interesting.
    • There are several schools of thought on developing characters. Some people write massively extensive bios on their characters, and advocate knowing every little detail down to their shoe size, favourite candy and toothpaste flavour and reams of data about their backstory and family history. I personally couldn’t be bothered with that.
    • When I write a story, and I introduce a character, that character is generally in the story because I need him/her to fill a role within the story. I tend to get a vague idea of what the character’s about, based on the actions that I need the character to take within the story. The actions the character will take inform the question – “who is he, and what brought him to the point in his life where he’d do that?”. Because each character in question has to be the person he is in order to be in that story, I personally have to fashion the backstory in that way… as opposed to trying to construct a big backstory ahead of time and then rationalize why the character would behave in certain ways. It’s really all a matter of choice.
15. Visually populate your story.
    • When characters only exist as nebulous creations in your head, it can limit the connection you feel for them and how deeply you can imagine them; not definitively, but potentially. Personally, I have come to appreciate the value of having visual images in front of me – as I’ve begun illustrating the characters, their personalities become much more distinct and words of dialogue that seemed fine on the page before start to feel less real coming out of mouths that I can now picture trying to say them. Not everyone’s an illustrator as I am, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make visuals of your characters.
    • I personally don’t recommend using your favourite actors and actresses as models for your characters. They come with too much baggage and have the potential to infect your script with the characters they’ve already played. This comes from experience – I once visualized Michael Douglas as my hard-boiled, trenchcoat wearing cliched cynical cop… and sure enough, every line of dialogue started to sound like it came out of Black Rain or Basic Instinct. That was not a good situation in trying to write my own script… so I stopped envisioning Michael Douglas… and the character started taking on his own voice.
    • Personally, I’d recommend finding clothing websites that use the same models for a lot of different outfits. You can find a model that looks like you envision the character, and save some pics of that model to look at from time to time as you write, but said model won’t have a voice of any kind tainting your writing process. Just a “look”, one which you already decided worked for your character conception. Give it a shot… see if it works at all for you.
16. Learn to draw.
    • Not everyone’s a visual artist like me. I understand that. But most people can handle a pencil and paper to some degree. In my experience, seeing my screenplay coming to life in graphic novel form, and at this point, concept art and promotional poster form, has been a tremendously educational thing. By forcing myself to visualize any given scene, and truly populate it with people, things, and scale, it’s opened up the story in ways that no rewriting in the past ever has.
    • This page in my blog details the beginning steps of bringing my story to life; you can see the earliest “concept art” that I threw together in Illustrator (at the bottom of the page… more recent images at the top) and the development of a 3D model of one of the story sets, going from the barest of block shapes at the beginning to a textured and detailed set by the end, and honestly, bringing that 3D set to life in Google SketchUp has done wonderful things for my imagining of the story. It’s one thing to visualize a floating platform as “a floating platform on pontoons with a structure at one end”… but when you start to build it in “reality”, you realize that you need more than that, and you start to think about the functions of everything. And that itself can spark even more in the story.
    • So, like I said… draw. Even if they’re crude sketches… you’ll be surprised what having these visuals in front of you will do for your imagination.
17. Do a little (more) research.
    • Once you’re deeper into your story, maybe after finishing your first draft, then go back and really start researching the world you’re writing about. Once you’ve gotten the story itself told in first draft form, spend more time learning about the subject matter, to help you populate that story more realistically in further drafts. You may find, in your research, that the reality of a situation may invalidate parts of your story. Deal with that as you see fit. Sometimes stories couldn’t possibly happen in real life… some stories just leave the experts shaking their heads (see Bay, Michael) but you don’t want to freeze yourself up in the initial stage with too much reality.
18. Rewrite.
    • Lather. Rinse. Repeat. You’ll be doing this a lot.
    • Sometimes you’ll want to engage in some of the earlier steps between writes. When I was writing “Carlingwood“, my fourth script, I did some “posters” between drafts. What ended up happening was seeing chunks of the world taking form in one of the posters sparked some ideas that went into the next draft. It’s certainly happening now, with “Atlantic”. As I develop the concept art and character designs, it is sparking many, many ideas that will be going into the next draft of the script.
19. Be ready to kill your babies.
    • Not literally. But figuratively. It’s a phrase that exists in the industry. It exists for those precious little scenes and moments that you had so much fun writing. A turn of phrase. A scene. A description. Quite possibly the best thing you’ve ever written… and you need to cut it. Because it doesn’t fit the story. The sheer preciousness of it is what draws attention to itself and it stops the story cold.
    • I once read a script. The writer loved writing dialogue, and you could tell. Unfortunately, in this particular script, that love of dialogue shone like a beacon. In a bad way. Conversations would go on and on for pages, each character saying something well crafted and fun… and ultimately pointless. The story would stop dead for pages at a time while the writer indulged in this wonderful banter. Babies… that needed to die. Be ready for it.
20. Be ready to kill your script itself.
    • There’s a rather vulgar phrase out there about polishing a turd. At the end of the day, it’s still a turd. Sadly, you’ll find that sometimes you have a turd on your hands. And you won’t realize it till after you’ve spent a year on it. For whatever reason, you’re pouring tons of energy into trying to polish a script that just won’t work. Maybe the underlying concept was weak, who knows. Just be ready to accept that any script you write may not be as good, and may not ever live up to that wonderful potential you saw in your head when you conceived it… and you may just have to let it go.
    • This happened with my third script. I played with it for years, on and off. Took it through several writing classes. It had an interesting premise, but there was something about it that just wasn’t working. Ever. And I was about to start another course, and I had to figure out if I was going to rewrite the third, again, or do something new. And I got the idea for something new. I abandoned the third script, jumped on the fourth, and wrote something  much better. Ultimately, I had reached the  point where I was a writer with eight years of experience trying to rework a script conceived of by a writer with only four years of experience… and there were underlying issues in the very concept of the script that were insurmoutable. Even earlier this year, I began reapproaching the script, thinking that I’d finally get it right… and I found myself butting up against the same problems. It’s quite possible that I will never, ever be able to write this script in a way that lives up to my original grand vision… and that’s okay. I have more stories to tell.
21. Get it out there.
    • Not out there to the industry. God no. Start with your friends. Or maybe former classmates if you’ve taken any online classes, like the Gotham courses. Indulge their goodwill. Get them to read it. Get them to give you honest notes on it. Real notes, not “yep, read good”. That may be great for your short term ego, but absolutely useless for your overall development. Ask your reader specific questions and try to get out of them solid answers. Be ready for an ego bruising…
    • Try a balance between educated readers and laymen. Giving a script to a person who knows about scripts will get you feedback on many aspects of the script, but quite often an educated person, by the very virtue of their education, will not see things or not respond to things that an “uneducated” person will. A guitarist hearing your guitar solo may appreciate the technical skill that an uneducated listener just hears as “wanking”; which one’s right? Same thing here. You may find great value in the opinions of someone who knows nothing of scripts, but knows how your story made them feel. Seek them both out.
22. Get professional feedback.
    • There are services out there that will read your script and give you notes on it. This can be a very, very humbling process. They will pull no punches and won’t bother to sugarcoat your story’s flaws and shortcomings (and certainly won’t just say “yep, reads good”). They’ll lay out very cold and sometimes daunting roadmaps to making your script better (and more marketable… remember, at the end of the day, you’re writing your script in the hopes of being able to sell it to someone… unless you’re just writing it for self-expression, in which case, you might as well just write poetry).
    • By the way… these services aren’t free. They cost five hundred bucks or more. Or less. Depending. You save these services until you’ve worked and reworked your script dozens of times and are sure it’s ironclad and you can’t possibly rework it any further.
23. Enter contests.
    • These aren’t free either, usually between forty and seventy bucks a pop. There are a few major contests, like Scriptapalooza, Austin, Final Draft Big Break and Bluecat; there are a few more, but they escape me at the moment. Some of these contests will offer you script notes as part of the entry fee, or for an extra sum; I think I paid Scriptapalooza fifty or sixty more for notes on my first twenty pages; I’m still waiting for them with baited breath.
24. Go back and do it all again.
    • You’ll rewrite every script many, many times. Sometimes they’ll be ground-up rewrites where you challenge the fundamental structure upon which your story is written. Others will be dialogue polishes. Some will be action polishes. Some will be description polishes. Some will be general phrasing polishes. During this process, you may want to go back and take another screenwriting course. Or read a new screenwriting book. Or re-read an old one. Every day you spend writing makes you a new writer, and what you read into a book in the first year of your screenwriting career will mean something completely different to you when you come back after five or ten years of doing it. Just because you read “Save The Cat” once when you started, doesn’t mean it won’t make any more sense to you now; it probably will. Go read it again.
25. Expand Your Mind.
    • I’ve been purchasing Psychology Today for years now. I visit the website daily. There are fresh articles and blog posts put up every day. Writing isn’t just stringing together words to make a story as fun and interesting as possible. Quite often, writing is a study of the human beast and what makes us do the (usually stupid) things we do. I say usually stupid, because stories about people doing smart things tend to be short and not all that interesting; it’s the stories about people doing things they know (or don’t realize) they shouldn’t be doing that are truly the most interesting. So learn to understand people more.
    • This also means study the people in your life. Base characters on them, if you really want to, but disguise them well unless you want to lose friends and alienate people. But everyone is functioning on a set of paradigms that drives them, whether they realize it or not. Everyone functions on a core programming that, like Google Chrome, functions fairly smoothly day-in, day-out, or, like MS Internet Explorer, crashes constantly. Take honest looks at what makes the people in your life stumble and crash. You’ll find a minefield of human behaviour in your own life, and a goldmine of character development and motivations that you can layer into your character creations.
    • And you can also take an honest look at yourself too. Your strengths and your faults and everything in between. Most of the characters you write will have aspects of yourself in them, whether you realize it or not, and whether or not you intend them to… being aware of this can help you either avoid this, or make the best of it. But by all that’s holy…
26. Don’t write a Mary-Sue (or Gary-Stu).
    • Mary Sue is the archetypal example of a writer writing herself (or himself) into their story in an idealized form. Mary Sue characters tend to be a wish-fulfillment character on the part of the writer, where they’re imagining an idealized version of themselves that everyone loves, adores and even worships.
    • Twilight’s Bella Swan is a Mary-Sue of author Stephenie Meyer (I haven’t read Twilight, but I loathe the movies); apparently, in the series itself, Meyer never once actually describes Bella and what she looks like. Realizing this oversight, Meyer later posted a physical description of Bella so that people would know what she looked like. Check out this snark-filled Cracked article with the descriptions overlaid on a photo of Meyer herself. Nuff said.
    • To be fair, Gene Wesley Roddenberry, of my own beloved Star Trek fame, was a noted Gary Stu creator with Wesley Crusher… an idealized “boy wonder” version of Roddenberry himself. I couldn’t stand Wesley either.
27. Be ready to accept that your screenplay may be better suited being something else.
    • Maybe the script you’re working right now would be better off as a novel. Or as a television pilot. Or as a blog. Or maybe as a… comic book?
    • Years ago, one of my fellow classmates was trying to adapt the epic Latin poem, the Aeneid, into a screenplay. As the writer was still fairly green, I recognized the hurdle he was facing (Hollywood has little interest in producing epics by first-time writers… they’re too risky), so I made a very unwelcome piece of advice… “Hey, why don’t you find yourself an up-and-coming comic artist, see if he wants to take a chance on your script, self-produce and make your script into a graphic novel. Hollywood loves buying comics, and you might get noticed this way… and you’d have the script already ready for them”. I was ignored, but the advice was good.
    • I took that advice myself, this year, when I decided to take “Atlantic” and make a graphic novel out of it. I got my start drawing and reading with comics, it’s paced like a comic book and full of grand visuals and set pieces, like a comic book. As a writer, just a writer, I’m one voice in millions trying to get noticed… but I have talents beyond writing, and I can produce this script myself as a graphic novel. Self-publish if necessary. Be a lot easier getting noticed that way than as just a writer. And hey, Hollywood loves buying comics… I’ll already have the script ready!

I could go on. Really, I could, but I’ve probably said enough for now. The world of writing is expansive and wondrous with loads of potential to eat up decades of your life. If it’s one that you’re looking forward to delving into, I hope I’ve given you a glimpse at the process and mindset that goes into creating one story.

There’s a quote. It’s made its way around Hollywood and I’ve read it a few times. It’s by Gene Fowler, writer of a lot of screenplays in the (nineteen) thirties and forties…

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Good luck! 🙂