Here are 10 lessons born out of the mistakes I’ve seen in the last 10 scripts I consulted on.
TAKE AT LEAST ONE BIG CHANCE – The most common script I read is the by-the-book script. It’s set in a familiar genre – horror, thriller, western – and it stays very comfortably within the rules of that genre. It never strives to do anything unique. There’s a fear of coloring outside the lines. These scripts can be decent. But they can never be great. Take one big chance. We know how I felt about Hereditary, but they definitely took a huge chance (spoiler) by killing off the daughter the way they did in that film. And people in The Matrix only fight via… Kung-Fu? I don’t think the average writer realizes how big of a risk that choice was.
PUT SOME BAD IN YOUR GOOD CHARACTERS AND SOME GOOD IN YOUR BAD CHARACTERS – When you hear the words, “on the nose,” in reference to one of your characters, you know you’ve failed. Here’s how to prevent that. For your heroes, give them shades of darkness. And for your villains, give them shades of goodness. “Good” character in The Looming Tower, Jeff Daniels, was determined to rip through red tape to take out terrorists and protect America. In the meantime, he was sleeping with several women besides his wife. That’s how you write a complex character.
FIGURE OUT A WAY TO MAKE YOUR HERO ACTIVE – One of the hardest things for a script to overcome is a passive hero. Audiences don’t like passive people. Active people drive stories. So whatever you can do to make your hero active, do it. I just read a military script where the main character was a soldier. And throughout the story, he was passively doing as told. Technically, this makes sense. Soldiers have to follow orders. But it doesn’t work for the story cause the hero is forced into the background. Chris Kyle was a soldier in American Sniper. But I’d never call him passive. Figure something out so that your hero is active. Cause it’s too hard to make a script work otherwise.
DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHANGE THE GOAL DURING THE SCRIPT – Movies can become boring if we know the goal from the first page to the last. There’s ways around this (namely, writing great characters). But if you want to hack the problem, change the hero’s goal at some point during the story. This keeps the reader on their toes, as it keeps the story fresh. For example, Star Wars starts out with the goal of delivering R2-D2 to Princess Leia’s home planet. But later, the goal switches to destroying the Death Star.
LAZY FIRST SCENES – This one drives me nuts because it’s one of the first things they teach you when you get into screenwriting. Write a killer first scene. Hook the reader immediately. And yet, in 9 out of the last 10 consulting scripts I’ve read, the writer didn’t follow this advice. I’m not saying all the scenes were bad. Some were pretty good, actually. But only one gave me the impression that the writer understood just how important the first scene is. He really went for it. I would implore you to think of your first scene as its own separate screenplay. Because it basically is. It’s the resume that lets the employer know that you’re worth knowing more about. You should be treating your first scene like it’s a life or death scenario. If you don’t hook the reader, you die.
DON’T OVERREACH – Be realistic about what you’re capable of. One of the problems writers make is they pick a really complex script or really complex subject matter, and they either don’t have the chops to nail it yet, or they don’t want to do the research required to make something like that work. For example, if I came up with an awesome idea about black market Russian nuclear warhead sales during the Cold War, I would never write it in a million years because I know I would have to do so much research to make that story feel even remotely authentic. I literally know three words in Russian. I couldn’t point out Moscow on a map of Russia if you gave me five guesses. And I’m going to write an intricate story about nuclear espionage in Russia 40 years ago? Part of being a good screenwriter is understanding your limitations. Yes, you want to be pushing yourself. But don’t be unrealistic. The best scripts are often scripts where the writer is insanely comfortable in the genre and story they’re telling.
CLARITY ISSUES – Clarity should be a given. I should never be confused about how two people know each other, where we are, what’s going on in a scene, what the basic geography is. I find that the writers who have the biggest problems with clarity are the ones who don’t read a lot of scripts. Make sure you’re reading scripts! And read AMATEUR SCRIPTS too. That’s where you’ll be confused yourself. You’ll then be less likely to make those mistakes in your own script.
HALF-BAKED MYTHOLOGY – There’s a huge difference between extensively built mythology and half-baked mythology. Watch The Matrix. Then go watch Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. Notice how carefully woven together the mythology of The Matrix is. You know that there are zero holes. It’s been broken down then built back up a hundred times (the first film, not the sequels). The Mummy, meanwhile, is all over the place. Nothing really makes sense. We’re not quite sure what the rules are. So if you’re writing a fantasy or sci-fi or horror script, do the work on the mythology. If you half-ass it, believe me, the reader will know.
NOT ENOUGH CONFLICT IN SCENES – The scripts that I have to fight to stay awake during are the ones where there’s little conflict going on. There’s no major conflict between the characters. There’s not a lot of conflict in the dialogue. There’s not a lot of conflict in the plot. Things tend to go easily for the characters. They don’t have to overcome major obstacles. Or, if they do, the obstacles are easy to defeat. Look to add conflict in every single scene. Remember that the reader feels a need to keep reading as long as there’s something unresolved. So if there’s conflict (an unresolved issue) in every scene, there’s always a need to keep reading.
EXPLOIT YOUR CONCEPT – Whatever your concept is, exploit the hell out of it. That’s what’s unique about your script. So you shouldn’t be focusing on other stuff. Every ten scripts or so, I’ll read a script with a really high-concept premise, but it reads like every other script I’ve read, namely because the writer’s inserting generic copy scenes from similar movies as opposed to exploiting the premise. Watch the trailer for the new film “Isn’t It Romantic.” The idea is that a woman wakes up in a romantic comedy world. You can see here that every scene of the trailer highlights that. Whether you like the idea or not, you can’t deny that the writer is mining it for everything its got. That’s what you need to be doing with your idea.
