by Jeff Kitchen
Explosive creativity is a must for a screenwriter. Always explore the extremes. You can always ratchet it back down to what fits the context of your story, but you might hit on something brilliant that works wonderfully in an unexpected way. Don’t be afraid of chaos—you can always use your tools to establish order no matter where you end up. Try to violate your own storytelling patterns. Observe your tendencies and throw a monkey wrench into them once in a while. Always, always start with a great premise; building on a lousy idea is known inside the film industry as “polishing a turd.” Notice what you crave when you go out to the movies on a Saturday night, and bring that back to your own writing. Be bold. Get crazy. Remember that the keyword in the entertainment industry is outrageousness. Don’t let anybody tell you to think small. Cultivate a sense of adventure. It’s the movies, damn it!
Think about why you became a writer in the first place. What hunger does it satisfy? How does it tap into your deepest passions? Think about what people are fascinated with in life—what people are drawn to like moths to a flame. The creation and destruction of life, major transitions, control, danger, breaking points, dynamic characters, incredible stories, love, loneliness, energy, and tales with great heart—these are some of the issues that draw people. Write about them—and live them, too! Don’t get stuck writing to the exclusion of everything else. Get out there and live a real life with everything you’ve got, because that’s where you’ll find the best stories. And if you’re getting into the screenwriting business for the money, then do yourself a huge favor and try real estate or something sensible instead. The film industry is a brutal arena, and unless you love movies more than anything, then find another way—any other way—to make a living.
MANAGE YOUR REWRITE PROCESS
When rewriting, let some time elapse before you go back a script—at least a few weeks. You want to forget it as much as possible by the time you return to it. Always read a script in one sitting. That’s the way you see a movie, and it’s the only possible way to evaluate a screenplay properly. I read about a playwright who, when he was going to read a script, would take a hot bath and dress up in a tuxedo as though he were going out for a night at the theater. He would then read the play in that frame of mind.
Don’t give much weight to the opinions of people who must tell you that your script is good (your mother, for instance). Get feedback from people who aren’t afraid to tell you the truth, because it’s very hard to have any objectivity about a script by the time you’re done with it. Be brutally tough on yourself, too, because everybody else in the film industry is certainly going to be.
Be willing to slash and burn your own material. Tossing your darlings is notoriously hard to do, but sometimes it can do the trick. Your job as a screenwriter demands that you visualize the story clearly and then work hard to communicate that in writing—but this can lead to overwriting. Know how to prune your script back to the necessities. Continue separating the Necessary from the Unnecessary by stripping out every single word that doesn’t absolutely need to be in the script. Keep it simple and clear, and keep it moving forward. Read the best screenwriters and you’ll see how minimal most scripts are. Search for “free movie scripts” on Google (www.google.com) or another search engine. You can download thousands of them.
If your screenplay is running long and you don’t know what to cut, print an extra copy and do a “throwaway cut.” Go through this additional copy and cut like a maniac, tossing anything and everything, telling yourself you can literally throw this copy away when you’re done with it. In the throwaway cut, nothing is precious; you can skip the endless internal debate and hairsplitting that accompanies so much of the editing process. If something strikes you as a possible cut, just chuck it overboard and move on. When you get to end, start another pass on the real script. Now you’re in the zone and will be more able to cut your own work because the throwaway cut got you loosened up. It’s a great trick, and on many occasions I’ve seen 20 sacrosanct pages vanish from a fat script.
However, be careful about a screenplay getting away from you in the rewrite process. The story can lose its original spark as it gradually morphs into another identity. Check in occasionally with the original idea for your plot, because that’s what grabbed you by the throat and made you write this script in the first place. Sometimes that first draft has a raw, living energy—an unbridled freedom—which can easily get lost in the rewrites as it slowly becomes domesticated and homogenized.
SOME HELPFUL HINTS FOR THE PROFESSIONAL SCREENWRITER
Mastering your craft and becoming a great writer is just part of the game in the film industry. In order to make it, you also have to be good at the business end. Learn who’s who. Subscribe to the Hollywood Reporter or Variety and read it every day. Don’t write for what you think the market wants, but write the movie that you want to see—the movie that you’re unstoppably passionate about. This business already has all the standard rehashings of the normal film stories. What it lacks is original, creative storytelling with a distinctive voice.
Make sure that your script submissions are very clean, with excellent spelling and a crisp appearance. You want to come across as a professional writer, and scripts laden with typos send the wrong message right away, even at a subconscious level. If you can’t spell (and I know geniuses who can’t spell to save their lives), then hire a proofreader to give your script a read. You can get one for $10 an hour, and it’s worth it to clean up the typos. Make sure that every aspect of your script is in tip-top shape before you show it to industry professionals, because they won’t look at it twice. I do script analysis for a fee and you can contact me through my Web site, www.DevelopmentHeaven.com.
One of the most crucial things to do as a professional writer is to back up your material on several different mediums every single time you change anything. People who are new to computers don’t know how utterly life and death this is because they haven’t yet lost six months of work. The rule of thumb in computers is: Never trust a hard drive, and the bigger they are, the harder they crash. Backing up is not difficult. Zip disks are cheap, data sticks are awesome, and a number of spots provide free memory storage. Google’s Gmail gives you 2 gigabytes of free memory, so you can store your screenplays there safely. You have to be invited to Gmail, but anyone can send you an invitation. Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) gives you 30 megabytes of free, password-protected memory in their section called “Briefcase.” When I’m done working for the day, I send the current version into Yahoo! Every few days I put my work onto a data stick, too. The rule is to back your stuff up in three different places, and always make sure that one of them is out of the house, in case of a fire. Don’t take backing up lightly, and never be lazy about it. You could be cut off at the knees in a flash.
Invest in a proper high-end surge protector ($30–$50) so that your computer doesn’t get zapped—a great way to lose everything on your hard drive. Also, always print out what you’ve written. Otherwise it’s just electrons stored in silicone, and that ain’t much if things get squirrelly—and believe me they can, and they will. A hard copy is real and you can hold it in your hands.
A FINAL ASSIGNMENT
Here’s a hardcore assignment for you. Buy the movie Hostage, starring Bruce Willis, and take it apart—right down to the last nut and bolt—using everything you’ve learned in this book. It’s a thriller with a brutally intense dilemma. Figure it out and write about it. Write about every aspect of Bruce Willis’s dilemma until you have nothing left to say. What’s his Crisis? His Decision & Action? His Resolution? What’s the Theme? Which of the 36 Dramatic Situations are most active in this film? Define all the characters using the Enneagram. Lay out the Central Proposition. Apply Sequence, Proposition, Plot to the whole script. Divide it into acts, and do Sequence, Proposition, Plot for each act. Then break the acts down into sequences, and the sequences into scenes, doing Sequence, Proposition, Plot for each of them as you go.
This is a professional-level assignment
, but even if you’re a beginner, go for it. You can absolutely do it. The training you’ve received in this book will help you through the process. If you’re having trouble with a specific tool, then go back and review the chapter on it. You may have to read and digest Writing a Great Movie several times to acquire true facility with these tools, but it’s doable. Refuse to be intimidated. It’s just movie structure, not brain surgery. Taking Hostage apart will give you hands-on experience in breaking down a script. All my tools work equally well for both script construction and script analysis, and you use them the same way for each process. If you’re stumped, then get together with others who’ve read this book and figure it out as a team. Don’t be afraid to spend several months on it. How long do you think it took me to acquire world-class expertise on the six films that I dissect in this book? It means you’re going to have to watch the movie many, many times. Here’s a hint: Watch it backward at different speeds to figure out the reverse cause and effect. It will be ferocious hard work, but the film is worthy of repeated viewings and it will give you some practical work with these tools. And have fun—you’re in the movie business, baby!
NOW GET OUT THERE AND WRITE A GREAT MOVIE!
The entire film industry is starving for outstanding screenplays. I was in a major producer’s office when she pointed at huge floor-to-ceiling shelves full of screenplays and asked (or more accurately, begged), “Have you seen anything good? Any good scripts? None of those are worth a nickel.” Being surrounded by bad screenplays is equivalent to being out in a life raft on the ocean, with trillions of gallons of water everywhere but none of it drinkable. If you combine great storytelling with substantial craft as a dramatist, then you have a good shot at becoming a hot screenwriter. So go for it. Take everything you’ve got and put up there on the big screen. Write a great movie!