This book will ask you to work harder (not faster). It will help you find a way to write better, but not more. It will also ask that you come up with a personal way to actually anticipate the response to your work, both negative and positive. You will know what your script is, why you wrote it, and who the audience for it might be. You will know what’s right about it, but more important, you will know what’s wrong with it. And yes, there will be something wrong with it. After all, it’s a work of art. But that’s the whole deal with works of art. They perfectly express our human imperfection in a perfectly imperfect way.
There’s no one way to write a story. If you took a survey of every great writer’s methods and techniques, you’d get a list as different as each of their wardrobes. The person who tells you “This is the way to write a script” is like the person who tells you “My language is the only language to speak.”
Certainly, any language must have nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Same with screenwriting. There are certain principles in storytelling that you simply can’t do without, but somehow every script turns out differently.
When we write a story, whether it is prose, fact-based, or personal, we unconsciously observe many of the basic principles of storytelling. You do it every day.
A story is a carefully structured, sometimes spontaneously imagined piece of human craft. It’s an amazing thing. We do it naturally and intuitively and we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Yes, we understand in our hearts that the thoughtful and deliberate choices we make in the telling of a story are what make the story likable (or appealing or spellbinding or funny) — in short, entertaining.
These principles are simply natural to storytelling. We all know them, use them, and respect them. All of our favorite films, television series, and novels use these principles.
So you’ve been living with and using these principles all of your life. If you’re interested in writing scripts, then you’re probably even more conscious of these principles than you realize. You’re already “breathing” them.
The principles we’ll be working with in this book have all been extracted from the rich and long history of dramatic writing. Whenever we write a story we’re paying tribute to Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw. The great novelists like Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald also observed these ages-old principles.
But rather than impose a set of rules on our work, we will use what naturally occurs in the process of storytelling that has worked through the millennia. We will codify it and make it like a list of “things to do”; “what to pack” before we can claim that our story is finished.
These fundamental principles of screenwriting upon which we build successful dramatic stories have been collected and distilled from a few other experts on screenwriting whom I admire: Robert McKee, Syd Field, William Goldman, Michael Tierno, and several of my colleagues at NYU, like Paul Thompson, or from UCLA, including Hal Ackerman. You should read all of their work as well.
I also urge you to examine as many different approaches as you can tolerate. I’m not a mind reader, but I can tell that this isn’t your first and it won’t be your last exploration of perfecting your craft as a screenwriter. It’s not my last time either. No matter how long I’ve been doing this, I don’t ever feel like I’m done learning about it. Every new script is a new experience — a new character, a new world, and a new story.
Even when you’re working alone, screenwriting is collaboration. If it’s not collaboration with all the dozens of craftspeople involved, it’s collaboration with a part of your mind that thinks up the story. This is your silent partner who is in love with movies.
Using these fundamental principles, your story will finally achieve:
Unity — The story is always being told.
Clarity — The human value of your story is completely obvious.
Emotional impact — It will be moving or funny or both. It will entertain.
These are the qualities that attract performers and other professionals to your script. If these people like it, it stands a much better chance of reaching the screen and/or earning you some money.
Most pleasant of all, you will actually enjoy re-reading your script, you will be in a position to fight for what’s good in it, and you’ll be more open to what needs changing. Because you will have structured it clearly, others will see the human value in it and will work along the same ideas that you have constructed, helping you to strengthen it.
Unfortunately, dramatic writing is not like cabinetry. However, as in cabinetry, there are fundamental principles of craft that we must follow in order to create a dramatic story; a story that does what it needs to do — excite and engage the audience.
Screenplays are not movies. They are carefully, thoughtfully, and deliberately written documents that propose the final movie, but must also evoke the great values and actions in the story.
These very talented people who make your movie are not simply interested in putting on a show and making a lot of money. I believe they are truly committed to using their artistic talents to illuminate a small part of the human condition.
BTW, if your script is not exciting to read, it will not be exciting as a movie — and I don’t mean you’re going to use exciting language. Producers, actors, everybody knows what an exciting script is and it has little to do with the language (while in a novel, language is almost everything).
The two major questions:
• Is the story always being told?
• Are we intensely interested in what the protagonist is going to do next?
In the 1930s, George Bernard Shaw, the leading dramatist of his generation, was lunching with Louis B. Mayer, founder of MGM Studios and, at that time, easily the most powerful man in movies (especially according to himself ). Wanting to impress Shaw with his respect for aesthetics and high art Mayer expounded for some time on the subject of artistic values, showing off his knowledge while Shaw politely listened and chewed. When Mayer took a pause, Shaw was said to remark: “Mr. Mayer, that’s all very admirable. But you’re talking about art. I am here to talk about commerce.”
More shocking news: the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Somehow, a myth has developed that the two are worlds apart. Certainly, there is a long history of films that were not very artistic but were nonetheless commercially successful. But, by and large, the most successful movies of the last one hundred years were both commercially and artistically successful.
Your script can be artistic AND commercial. This runs the full spectrum from Dumb & Dumber to Chinatown to Breaking the Waves to The Sopranos and long-running sitcoms like Friends. Good stories are simply good and appeal to a wide audience and continue to do so for very long periods of time. If you can still look at Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” after 500 years, then let’s admit it, that’s some great work of art and, in its way, has been very commercially successful. The same thing applies to movies: if you can watch a film over and over again without getting sick of it (my minimum is ten times) then that movie is a damn good movie and goes on the permanent “art” shelf.
This Book . . .
The primary focus of this book is two-tiered.
My experience and my mentors have taught me a most important principle:
Story = Structure
That’s because screenplays do not depend on “the writing” (language, style, voice, poetic ideas, grammatical mechanics) but on the structure (acts, scenes, lines of action — what’s happening and what characters are doing).
Screenplays are like presenting your idea of a human being by only showing the skeleton except you’re going to tell me, through the story, what this person will do when faced with certain choices. That’s action. That’s the basic DNA of a story.