Be The Best Writer You Can

The list started as a response to a rash of questions I received that all went along the following lines:

Dear Phil,

I have an absolutely brilliant idea for a screenplay, but I just don’t know how to take that idea and get it into 110
pages of well written script. Please tell me everything I need to do.

All best,

Writer.

This was, and still is, my answer:

Dear Writer,

Believe, me, I understand what you mean, and I understand how daunting it can seem. The problem is that is way too big a question for me to answer in a single email, or even a series of emails. It’s actually the subject of the entire Screenwriting Goldmine, the books and booklets I sell on there, many of the audio interviews I’ve uploaded, and probably thousands of other websites besides.

It took me a long time to work out how write a script reliably, and, though like all things you can get pretty good at it if you just keep working at it, building a good story is a fairly complicated process.

So it’s not surprising that you might be feeling a little lost. But don’t worry. There’s a lot you can do about that. I’ve come up with these key areas to work on:

1. READ AS MANY BOOKS ON SCREENWRITING AS YOU CAN

There are hundreds of them out there, and there are some absolutely brilliant accounts of just about everything you need to do, from brainstorming your idea through to launching your get-a-greenlight schmoozing blitz. Just google, or check on Amazon, or ask your writer friends, or ask on the Screenwriting
Goldmine Forum. There’s actually a thread here with quite a few suggestions and comments:

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1005

2. TAKE CONSISTENT ACTION, AND FOLLOW IT THROUGH

If you do get one of the books that contains a method for writing a screenplay, then actually FOLLOW THAT METHOD and FOLLOW IT THROUGH TO THE END and see what happens.

Would you learn to drive a car by taking a few lessons here, and a bit of anecdote here, and evolving your own system for handling traffic lights? It’s a bit like thinking you’re going to lose 15Kg by reading a diet book cover to cover, but not actually changing what you eat.

If you find a book with a system you like, then take action on that system! What have you got to lose, bar a couple of weeks of writing time? (And time spent trying things out is never wasted. Even if that particular system doesn’t work for you, then you’ll still learn a hundred priceless lessons in the process of finding that out.)

3. READ AS MANY SCREENPLAYS AS YOU CAN

It always surprises me how many people think they can write a screenplay without ever having read a real one. (Is that because somehow it feels like cheating, or a diversion from the real work of getting words on paper? It’s neither, trust me.)

If you’re going to compete in a highly competitive professional market you MUST read as many professional screenplays as you can find, and keep on reading them throughout your career. It’s cumulative. The more you read, the more the whole thing sinks in. The more you will find your basic formatting and layout
questions are answered. And the more you will start to understand the more subtle things, like rhythm, and pacing, and what an action sequence looks like on the page, and how much directing of actors the best screenwriters actually do. (More than you might believe, but in a very subtle way!)

There is a page here which gives you some suggestions on where you can find screenplays – and what you do when you download them. (Clue – you don’t just sit and read them!)

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/free-screenplays-its-a-mistake-to-just-read-them

4. DON’T BE SCARED OF THE BLANK PAGE

Real writing is actually very, very hard, for most writers I know. (That’s why it’s so rewarding, I believe.) Don’t spend a couple of hours not being able to think of something, then give up and say ‘oh, I’m obviously not a writer.’ It can take days to get going sometimes. Days to solve specific problems. Days and days when you just stare at the screen, hating what’s coming out of your mind, but unable to see the way forward. I don’t say it’s much fun, but it does seem to be normal.

5. WRITE DAILY

Better a half hour a day for seven days a week than one three and a half hour splurge. There is something about the brain. Once it knows you’re going to be doing this on a daily basis it resists at first, kicks, yells, tries to distract you by watching Modern Family, then finally shrugs, says ‘OK’ and slowly opens the flood gates of your creativity. This too is a cumulative process. If you’ve managed to write daily for three or four days, and stuck at
it through the desert of no ideas, then you’ll be amazed how much easier it gets after that – until after a week or so of daily writing, you are really flying. (Oh, and shut down your internet while you are doing this. Just allow yourself to truly concentrate for that rare, precious time. Here’s a tool that will do that for you.)

http://macfreedom.com/

6. USE STRUCTURE

Please, please, please at least make it your business to find out about, and understand – and put into practice at least once before you junk it! – all the current thought about screenplay structure. When you watch movies on screen, or read screenplays at home, you need to be able to spot three and five act systems, act breaks, midpoints. You should know what an inciting incident is, and where the climax should be, and what a character arc is. You may decide
not to consciously use this stuff in the end, but learning about these very well established tools of the trade really does help most people. (Bar the natural genius – who knows it all and uses it all instinctively anyway.)

7. USE STRUCTURE! I MEAN IT!

It’s that important. Understand what roles an antagonist and a protagonist play; and that characters can have internal and external desires, and both are essential for powering an emotionally resonant screenplay. Understand that a screenplay needs a spine, and an escalating chain of conflict, and once you start adding scenes that don’t hang off this spine you’ve stopped writing a screenplay and started making rice pudding. This is where reading all those screenplay books comes in.

And in particular, reading this one:

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/how-to-write-a-screenplay

8. USE YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND

Finally, at some point step back from the structure, step back from the theory, and just let whatever is inside you about this story spill out onto the page. You can always give it a damn good structuring later. If you don’t let those bolts of subconscious lightning in when they present themselves; if you don’t go off-piste with your structure occasionally, you WILL end up with a very dull script.

9. KEEP TO LENGTH – DON’T THINK “MINE IS SPECIAL”

Never submit a spec script of more than 120 pages. Aim for 100-110 pages of standard format.(And find out the bald truth about standard format at

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/blog/screenplay-format-and-layout/2007/06/05/

When you’re Steve Zaillian you can do what you want, but while you’re trying to get a script reader to pick yours out of the drab and dreary pile weighing down their desk, excess page count is murderous.

10. EMBRACE THE HAPPY ENDING

Script readers love it. Audiences love it. The universe loves it. Yes, yes, I know. Of all my pieces of screenwriting advice this is the most contentious. But have a read of these two linked articles, and then decide…

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/blog/happy-endings-just-do-it/2007/09/26/

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The really great thing about running this site is the contact I have with people literally all over the world. When I look at the site analytics there are only a very small handful of countries left who have never sent a visitor or three to the Goldmine.

That’s meant that I’ve heard things, and ‘met’ people online I would simply have never encountered any other way.

One of these was a man called Bryan McDonald. He was a writer who emailed me a few years back to say hi, and we got chatting. It turns out he had had a dream job – working for David Milch on a couple of series of Deadwood.

Sally Brockway ended up doing a great audio interview with him for the site, in which, among a lot of fascinating stuff, Brian talked about what it was like working with such a gigantic talent as David Milch.

I listened to that interview when it came out – probably 2008/9 – thought how very interesting it was, and how I’d really like to try out some of these methods one day but, when you’re working flat out, sometimes you don’t have time to step away from methods you know work, so I get to put any of it into practise there and then, and I moved on.

But one idea Bryan mentioned has kept on nagging at me all this time.

Apparently when he got working on his first episode, David said to him that the first thing he should do is get the characters talking to each other. Spend, literally, a couple of days writing page after page of conversation, just getting the characters to converse with each other.

Don’t worry about story, don’t worry about whether it makes sense. Just get them talking to each other.

According to Mr Milch, that’s how you get to know our characters. That’s how you make them real. THAT’s how you make them jump off the page.

That was a very interesting thought to me.

I normally write dialogue by working out the story function of the scene, working out what each character wants, and making them take physical steps to get it. If physical steps are inappropriate, then that, as a last resort, is when I write dialogue – always as lean and as laconic and oblique as possible.

It’s worked pretty well till now.

But, of course, that’s screenwriting. And when you’re writing some other forms, such as radio, you don’t get the pictures. So when I wrote a radio play last autumn that was a very big deal for me. (If you’re a reader of the blog you’ll remember that time – I wrote a play in three weeks, keeping up a running commentary of the ups and downs most days. You can find it here:

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/blog/category/script-in-3-weeks/

If you did read the blog you’ll remember that I got into trouble writing the play. My long honed method of using as many pictures as possible just simply didn’t apply. I had to do it ALL with dialogue!

What’s more, the play was about a lost weekend in the life of a psychotic teenage girl who is cranked up on the wrong medication, and what happens to her when she meets a similarly psychotic mid-20 year old woman – who then falls in love with her.

‘Write what you know.’

And that’s where the trouble started. I’m nearly fifty, male, straight, with absolutely no history of psychosis. I couldn’t lean back and rely on a director to make them real with costumes and great visual casting. However was I going to find their voices? Truly I had nowhere to hide. For a day or two I just blanked.

Then, casting around for new ways in I remembered the advice from Brian/David Milch. I listened to the interview again, and tried the technique. I went off script, just spent a couple of days writing the characters chatting to each other, telling jokes, arguing, went back to the script.

It seemed to get me through.

Actually, much more than that. Just recently I met the director of the play to get my notes on the first draft. (Radio can have a LONG lead time sometimes!)

It was one of the first sunny days we’ve had this year, so she took me down from BBC Bush House to the Somerset House terraces. We had coffee overlooking the Thames, felt the sun on our faces, and talked about the script.

Which, I was SO relieved to hear, she thought really worked.

She gave me a few light notes – mainly to lose one minor character in the middle of the script – but the most important thing for me was that she found the two main characters, what they said, and what they did, ‘totally believable, very convincing’.

“Happy”. “Relieved”. “Delighted”. Are all words I would use to describe my state of mind at that point.

Thanks Bryan, for that, and thanks to David Milch himself,indirectly.

I want to suggest to you, if you’re writing about people you don’t know personally, and you have nagging doubts as to whether your characters ring true, then maybe it would be worth trying an experiment like the Milch Chat technique?

I’ve reposted the interview with Brian so you can hear the details, and I strongly recommend that you listen to it when you have time.

Find it here:

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/category/interviews

Bryan had the most amazing launch to his career. The stuff of which dreams are made. Seriously. It’s a very entertaining half hour.

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