How I Recovered My Screenwriting Voice and Storytelling Instincts

With three producers asking to read one of my screenplays last week, I've been madly rewriting. And what's amazing is that writing my screenwriting books has had the most extraordinary effect on my own writing.

I went back to this script after quite a while away from it and discovered a miracle had occurred. I was approaching the story with a boldness and adventurousness I hadn't had before. I had made a quantum leap in my cinematic powers, in my dialogue, in pace, tension, subtext, exposition - the lot!

But you know what else I discovered? As well as working on this draft  I went right back to a much earlier draft.  And the most staggering revelation hit me.

Most of the stuff from the very early version which I would later cut out was really good. The recent draft didn't have a distinctive voice, mood and tone had become tamed, the pace was needlessly fast or just not right because I was following the '3-act structure' and so on. In short, everything that had made the very early version alive and interesting had evaporated.

I wrote the much earlier draft before I bought all the screenwriting guru books and attended courses and masterclasses. I've always known that following the so-called rules had damaged my screenwriting, but I simply had no idea how catastrophic that damage was.

So, having been on a mission to help writers break away from the rigid templates and useless guidance from the gurus, I now have an even more passionate desire to do everything I can to make sure screenwriters are given the confidence to trust their own voice, be daring, be bold, and resist all attempts by the 'experts' to turn them into timid, bland writers producing scripts that no one will want to buy.

I'm now hoping that my series of screenwriting books that give real hands-on guidance for creating screenplays of originality and cinematic power will have the same  amazing quantum leap effect for my readers.

So here's to exciting, innovative screenwriting!

Trust the Actor

It's one of the hardest things a screenwriter has to avoid and it's something which usually marks out a writer's inexperience:

Punching the line for the actor.

Typically, it looks like this:
                                         CHARACTER
                                                (angrily)


                                          CHARACTER
                                         (head in her hands)


                                         CHARACTER
                                          (looking soulful)


Actors hate this. They're often referred to as 'wrylies' as in:


                                        CHARACTER
                                             (wryly)

If your script is good, there's no need to put these in anyway. But most of all, it shows that the writer lacks confidence in their own ability to express meaning and subtlety of emotion.

Next time you feel tempted to tell the act how to play a line, stop. Imagine the moment or scene as it will play on the screen. The valuable lesson to be learnt is:

Trust the actor.

 




                                               

Yes, Writing is Rewriting, But...

I've gone back to a screenplay after being away from it for a while. And as always I'm struck at how differently I feel about it.

But why should that be unexpected? In the time I've been away from the script, things in my life have changed. I'm not the same person I was when I wrote that earlier draft. The world around me has changed. So it isn't strange that I now come back to it and find how some of it screams No! This is awful, and how some of it tells me, Yes, this is really quite good. Or Yes, that bit's brilliant. Or, the most painful of all: I might as well forget the whole thing and start a new script.

I'm also a writer who talks to my writing. I ask it questions. I'm forever having conversations with my characters. Trying to find out what's going on inside them, why they do what they do, why they feel what they feel.

With this script I've gone back to, I'm cutting back on many scenes because the whole story needs a new and different rhythm. What I hadn't seen before I now see with glaring clarity. And that's the thing I find both maddening and exhilarating about rewriting. It's no good saying to myself 'My didn't I see that before?'

I could not have seen it before because that was then and this is now.

In other words, I've changed. The world's changed. Now the screenplay must change.

Charlie Kaufman Articles

By the way, re: my last post. I've written articles about Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation on my site here:

 http://www.unique-screenwriting.com/adaptation-screenwriting.html

http://www.unique-screenwriting.com/adaptation-screenwriting-2.html

Hollywood Execs Read Aristotle!

Did you know that Hollywood execs assess screenplays using  'exactly' the same criteria found in Aristotle?  Or that Rocky can be analysed following the 'story structure' of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which the Daddy of Lit.Crit examined to demonstrate 'timeless universal truths' about drama?

And did you know that Aristotle talked about 'the three unities of dramatic action: time, place, and action'?

Neither did I!

Poor Aristotle, and poor us! Crumpling under this veritable barrage of howlingly wrong interpretations of an ancient fragment of literary criticism by a terrific guy who was writing a work-in-progress, always looking out for new ideas, testing out his theories and modifying them as he went along.

To treat his Poetics as a completed and revised treatise of the art and craft of drama is an insult. He wasn't interested in setting the Ten Commandments on How To Write a Play in stone. And, my God, he'd be furious if he could see how perversely his work has been mangled and torn and chewed over (and spat out on poor aspiring screenwriters' scripts).

Let's for once give this man the courtesy and respect of reading what he actually wrote, and put a stop, once and for all, to putting words into his mouth.

The Big One: 
'A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessaity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.

A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.'

Let's look at the definition of 'middle'. It seems like tautology, but the context shows that the word 'follows' here marks a causal sequence, not a mere temporal sequence. So the 'middle'  unlike the 'beginning' stands in casual relation to what goes before, and unlike the 'end' is causally linked to what follows.

THERE IS NO ATTEMPT TO MARK AT WHICH POINT THE 'MIDDLE' IS TO BE PLACED

What's absolutely crucial about Aristotle's ideas about the unity of tragic action is that it is an organic unity, an inward principle which reveals itself in the form of an outward whole. And what he's stressing is that the incidents of the play must be connected together by an inward and causal bond. Also, he makes a point of  not laying down any precise rules about the length of a play.

Related to this is a brilliant parenthesis in his Simple and Complex Plot section which has been hijacked, uncredited, by many unoriginal minds as if they're thought it up all by themselves!

'(There is a crucial difference between one thing happening merely after something else, and the same thing happening because of it)'


 There's a whole lot more I could add, but haven't got time now. But for now I'll just go back to those quotes I gave at the start.

1. I don't know how any criteria of assessment can be 'exactly' the same as those used by Aristotle on Greek Tragedies when there are quite a few times when his remarks are at complete variance to what the plays are actually like. And anyway, which criteria are these guys using? Much of Aristotle's work has been so profoundly misinterpreted by others, most people go by 'interpretations' (usually wrong ones) written later.

This is a whole new topic - maybe I'll get back to this one.

2. No, Aristotle never talked about 'Unity of Place'. Like so many Renaissance scholars and writers, the Italian theorist Lodovico Castelvetro wildly misunderstood the ancient philosopher's words, and made up 'The Three Unities' (of time, place and action). Unfortunately, everyone assumed this was a prescriptive from Aristotle himself.


I 'm definitely coming back to Hollywood and Aristotle in another blog.

Why The So-Called '3-Act Structure' Should Carry a Mental Health Warning

So there I am, staring into this abyss right out of Dante's inferno. Or a huge gaping hole in the Earth's structure and a booming, terror-striking Voice behind me is screaming 'Jump! There's something like 60 miles between me and the place I've got to get to. But it's OK, the Voice says, you've made it this far. You've managed to get 30 miles here with no problem, and when you get you to the other side of that hole, it's a piece of piss. Home and dry because you've got the right directions to get you to the end of the journey. I have?

I look down, my heart beating like crazy into my parched mouth. Two fragile looking crutches suddenly land at my feet. The Voice, getting very tetchy now, is telling me to use the crutches, and I know for certain now this expedition is doomed. It is crazy. I must stick one crutch right where I'm standing now, to mark the end of the first leg of my journey, then 'all I have to do' is get through the next 60 miles and put the second crutch where I land.

I've even got a nice perfectly drawn diagram in my sweating palm. It's so simple. A horizontal line traversed by two vertical lines. What could be easier?  I've even managed to follow that funny little symbol when I'd travelled twenty five miles and changed direction.

But before I get to the other side of this gigantic chasm, now in my imagination, grown into the size of the universe, I'll have to make sure I stop at exactly the 85 mile point and change direction again.  The Voice says, 'Well, it could be at 90 miles'. Oh, right, thanks. Nice to know I'm allowed to use my own instincts, although I seem to have lost them.

Better go with the 85 mile option. Should I go left, or right, or...turn back? No, the Voice has told me this must be a linear journey (apart from the two directional changes) but even they have to be really in a straight line. But I'd like to loop back to where I started.  The Voice is screeching with pitying disdain now. Can a voice give a withering look and make you feel like a shrivelled worm? 'No-one but a fool would do that!'

OK, so here I am. Here. I've made it so far, only double what I've travelled so far and I can be over there.

Does anyone have a plane I could borrow? Second thoughts, don't bother. I'll stick to the day job.